Chaos.
It was not empty, but a primordial amalgam where color, form, concepts, and even time itself had lost all meaning.
Light and darkness intertwined and perished here. Earth, Water, Fire, Wind surged and collided in their most violent forms, while shattered Law Fragments occasionally streaked past like meteors.
They brought fleeting, bizarre Order, only to be swallowed by deeper chaos moments later.
This was the state before heaven and earth had been separated, the source where all things returned to Return to Void.
A faint spark of consciousness drifted within the boundless chaos.
"Am I... Wanhua?"
A thought laboriously gathered, like a bubble rising from a thick swamp.
What followed was a torrent of fragmented images and information, battering this fragile existence.
A bustling modern city, flickering computer screens, shelves packed with books—from the weighty Tao Te Ching to the wildly imaginative Perfect World, Saint King, Eternal Life...
The clamor of colleagues discussing projects, the wind whipped up by a passing subway train, and then... in his final memory, the blinding high beams of a truck that had lost control and mounted the sidewalk!
The intense sensation of "pain" did not come from a physical body, but from the distortion of his consciousness being forcibly torn apart, then forcibly stuffed into some "container."
"I died? Then... where is this?"
Wanhua's consciousness tried to "open his eyes," only to discover that he had no eyes. He tried to "reach out," but he had no arms.
He was like a prisoner deprived of every sense, trapped in absolute inner darkness and silence. No, it was not absolute silence.
Gradually, he "heard" certain sounds—not through ears, but directly within the core of his consciousness.
They were the resonant chants of the Great Dao, deep and majestic, eternally singing the ultimate principles of heaven and earth;
They were the whispers of laws, subtle and intricate, interwoven into an invisible web that covered all existence.
At the same time, vast amounts of information surged uncontrollably into his "mind."
"Innate Supreme Treasure... Myriad Dao Celestial Tome... bearing the Great Dao, evolving all laws, recording every trajectory of principle within the Primordial Era..."
The information told him that, at the dawn of the Primordial Era's creation, he had been a supreme treasure conceived by the Great Dao—the sole one, never before seen—the Myriad Dao Celestial Tome.
His "body" was a scroll neither gold nor jade, neither stone nor wood, flowing with the colors of chaos.
Countless Dao patterns appeared and vanished upon its cover, as though it contained every secret from before the creation of heaven and earth.
Supreme, exalted, containing infinite possibilities.
However...
"I can't move... Why can't I move?"
Wanhua tried to control this "body," following the profound methods within his inherited knowledge to sense and circulate its power.
Yet every effort vanished without a trace. This shell called an "Innate Supreme Treasure" showed no response whatsoever to his conscious commands.
He was like an infant strapped into the pilot's seat of a space shuttle.
Before him was a complex console covered in buttons and screens, possessing the power to destroy heaven and earth, yet he could not even move a finger.
The inherited information continued to flow, telling him that the Myriad Dao Celestial Tome could deduce all things and record all laws.
It could analyze the origins of every divine ability... but it itself seemed to have been born for "recording" and "deduction," rather than "action" and "intervention."
It was an ultimate auxiliary tool, a treasury of knowledge, but it was anything but a weapon or magical treasure capable of acting on its own.
Empty! Hollow!
An unprecedented sense of frustration and despair began to eat away at Wanhua's consciousness.
He had transmigrated, yet he had not become an Innate god or demon capable of shaking the world, nor some Primordial Era aberration with profound roots. He had not even become the most ordinary Houtian Being... He had become an object!
An object that could not even control itself and could only passively record external information!
Through the Celestial Tome's hazy passive perception, as though he were looking through frosted glass, he could vaguely sense the vastness and savagery of the Primordial World.
The roars of gods and demons shook the void, the slaughter of giant beasts disrupted spiritual currents, the strong preyed upon the weak, laws manifested, and strength reigned supreme.
It was an incomparably wondrous, yet incomparably dangerous world.
And he, Wanhua, the Myriad Dao Celestial Tome, could only be like a ghost, a spectator, trapped within the folds of time and space, recording everything until eternity?
Or until one day, when some powerful being discovered him and refined and collected him as a curious artifact.
Or perhaps he would be shattered in some world-destroying Calamity in the future?
"No! Never!"
His fierce desire to survive and the unwillingness of a modern soul made his consciousness churn violently, causing the Myriad Dao Celestial Tome itself to tremble slightly.
The mysterious Dao patterns on its pages seemed to circulate a fraction faster.
And at that very moment, all the knowledge he had read in his previous life, all those fantasies, all those crystallizations of wisdom from another universe—
Like a lit fuse, they erupted with a bang, beginning a frenzied and unprecedented collision with the Primordial Era's Great Dao inheritance recorded by the Celestial Tome!
The Tao Te Ching's "The Dao that can be spoken is not the eternal Dao" resonated with the unseen rules of the Heavenly Dao;
The fantasy of Using oneself as the seed from Shrouding the Heavens, opening up a universe within the human body, challenged the Primordial Era's conventional path of absorbing spiritual energy;
The domineering creed from Saint King—"My words are law, my actions are rules"—was utterly unlike the path of gods and demons who crushed others with force;
The three thousand Great Dao divine abilities of Eternal Life, the will to strike against heaven from Grave of the Gods...
Countless thoughts, countless systems, countless possibilities churned, intertwined, and were tested within this wondrous "furnace."
The nature of the Myriad Dao Celestial Tome gave this deduction a foundation in reality.
It instinctively analyzed and simulated the feasibility of these "laws from other worlds" operating within the Primordial World.
His chaotic thoughts gradually settled somewhat.
After enduring the initial baptism of panic, despair, and a storm of thoughts, Wanhua's conscious core condensed a faint yet extraordinarily resilient realization.
"Knowledge... I possess the knowledge of two worlds... The Myriad Dao Celestial Tome can record, can deduce..."
"The methods of the Primordial Era borrow external power and align with the Heavenly Dao. In the end, they are bound by heaven..."
"And I... perhaps I can... forge a different path?"
This thought was like the first bolt of lightning across darkness. Though faint, it instantly illuminated the road ahead of him.
He was no longer merely a transmigrated soul despairingly trapped within the shell of a supreme treasure. He was Wanhua, the sole existence possessing an inexhaustible treasury of knowledge and a supreme instrument of deduction.
Where the path lay, he did not yet know.
But perhaps the existence of "I" itself was the beginning of the answer.
His consciousness began, from an entirely new perspective filled with a desire to explore,
to reexamine himself, reexamine this chaos, reexamine that vast and boundless... Primordial Era, where danger and Opportunity coexisted.
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