After severing the artificially grafted life-stealing channel, the Eternal Heavenly Palace did not pause. Following the lingering resonance of deathly stillness emanating from that pitch-black stone tablet, it plunged into the deepest reaches of the Origin River's fourth trial.
The deeper it sped, the more bizarre and dazzling the surrounding void became. The karma that had once surged like flowing water had solidified here into countless interlocking cliffs of profound ice. Yet anyone who strained their eyes to examine them would discover, to their horror, that those crystalline layers held not pure cold, but frozen ancient corpses of higher dimensions, so enormous they defied measurement. Some had twelve pairs of chaos wings; others had bodies like revolving nebulae. All were supreme powerhouses from ages past, slain by the Creator or killed by erosion from the source.
Chu Qing rubbed the broken pitch-black stone tablet with his fingertips. Its mottled markings faintly resonated with the ancient death intent frozen within the cliffs on either side.
"The deadlock at the source that the Creator fears is no groundless rumor." His eyes fathomless, Chu Qing murmured to himself. After the tempering of the first three trials, the "ultimate Way of Simplicity source" within him no longer merely reflected things outward and reduced them to zero. Like a bottomless vortex of return to void, it had begun spontaneously drawing in and releasing, assimilating the ancient deathly stillness of this bitterly cold land. Amid the interweaving of life turning toward death and complexity yielding to simplicity, his Daluo Dao Fruit quietly knocked upon the gate of the next ultimate realm.
Just as the Eternal Heavenly Palace broke completely through the end of the profound ice cliffs, the void ahead abruptly collapsed into a lightless abyss.
Without warning, two golden fissures that tore through dimensions slowly