The three-day deadline had arrived. Xu Chunniang rose to her feet and headed toward the shore.
Just as she was about to step ashore, she suddenly realized something and stopped.
Everything she had experienced before had been an illusion—so what proved that what she was experiencing now was real?
If she had entered an illusion the instant she stepped onto the ice, then she must still be trapped within it now.
When falsehood was treated as truth, it could pass for the real thing; only the Dao Heart would not change with its surroundings.
Xu Chunniang calmed her mind and steadied her breath. Her intangible Dao Heart took form in an instant, then returned to formlessness.
As her Dao Heart shifted, the scene before her eyes gradually changed.
The ice and snow filling the sky dispersed, and she returned to that small pond from before.
So she had been trapped in the illusion from the very moment she stepped onto the ice.
The three days she had experienced within the illusion had amounted to only an instant in the real world.
Had she failed to awaken from the illusion in time, she would likely have already failed the challenge.
Xu Chunniang looked down at the pond beneath her feet. The ice upon it showed no sign of melting, enough to prove that everything before had been an illusion.
The three-day deadline had only just begun.
Xu Chunniang took a deep breath and sat cross-legged, using her Dao Heart to preserve the clarity of her mind and resist the illusion's erosion.
Over the following three days, she fell into illusions countless times, then struggled free from them again and again.
Amid truth and falsehood, her speed at seeing through the illusions grew ever faster.
Those three days stretched on like three