Old Elers stared at the hazy gray cloud, and in his daze, it seemed as though he saw the sea.
Yes, he was back at sea again—still on a yacht's sun deck, still with a similar arrangement of lounge chairs, even the people conversing on either side were the same. Yet more than ten cruel years had passed.
The health Old Elers had worked so hard to project back then was something he could no longer even fake.
But Li Wei on the other side still looked like a young man, as though time had never left a mark on him... though that was not entirely true. At the very least, many unnatural cracks had appeared across his body. Even the vibrations of speaking would sometimes split open fresh wounds, deep enough to reach the bone.
Yet not a single drop of blood ever flowed.
Old Elers felt his scalp tingle, but an intense curiosity also clawed at his chest, forcing him to ask a string of questions that were destined to go unanswered:
"Have you stayed inside the Deep Blue World all these years to recover from your injuries? When you went missing in '59, were you fighting a powerful enemy? Was it that Liang Lu? That wheel... that Extreme Domain Light, was that something you people created?"
Sure enough, Li Wei ignored those questions, paid them no mind, and remained seated in his customary posture as he calmly said, "Your situation is unusual. Perhaps this is the will of God—if one wishes to become a god, even through a crude imitation, one is destined to receive this universe's 'special attention.' Mm, you needn't concern yourself with that. It is merely a habitual thought of mine.
"Since something went wrong with my plan, I ought to provide you with