A World of Its Own

The Artifact Spirit was moved to tears.

It believed her! It believed her completely!

This woman was too terrifying.

The tone she spoke in was absolutely serious!

"How could this be, how could this be... sob..." The Artifact Spirit said dejectedly, "I agree. I acknowledge you as my master..."

"Tsk."

Bai Lan frowned. "You seem very unwilling?"

"No, no."

"Forget it. I should seal you away instead. I don't like forcing people." Bai Lan gave a snort.

The Artifact Spirit was terrified, and the entire stone bounced hard on the table. "No! I'm willing, more than willing!"

"To be able to acknowledge a cultivator as intelligent, noble, and exceptionally gifted as you as my master! It is truly the fortune of three lifetimes. I am far too honored!" The Artifact Spirit spoke tremblingly, lavishing her with praise.

Only then did Bai Lan nod in satisfaction. "Since you put it that way... fine, I'll reluctantly accept you."

The Artifact Spirit: "..."

She gripped the black stone again, but unlike last time, she did not feel it repelling her.

A dizzy sensation surged from her heart, and Bai Lan's consciousness was instantly drawn into the black stone.

Everything went dark, and she closed her eyes.

When she opened them, before her...

Hm? Why was it still black?

Bai Lan blinked.

She must have opened her eyes the wrong way.

She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, then opened them again.

Before her remained an endless expanse of gray darkness.

???

Just as Bai Lan began to question her life, two figures drifted over from either side.

One was a fiery red youth—her system.

The other...

"Hi, Master!"

An indescribable object, pale and flickering like a ghostly flame, floated over.

Bai Lan silently took a step back. "You're the Artifact Spirit of this black stone's space?"

"That is correct, I am the Artifact Spirit!" The ghostly flame flickered.

Bai Lan: "..."

Her gaze shifted to the system floating beside her, and she suddenly felt... that the system's appearance, which she had never cared much about before, was actually quite nice.

At the very least, it was more pleasing to the eye than the ghostly flame before her.

"Well? This space is rather nice, isn't it?" The ghostly flame flickered.

Bai Lan fell silent for a moment, then suddenly smiled. "How long have you been here?"

The ghostly flame pondered for a long while before speaking. "I don't remember either. I was born alongside this object and have already fused into one with it. Wherever this black stone drifted, I followed it there. Counting carefully, it has probably been several hundred years."

"So for all those centuries, you never left this space? You never saw even a blade of grass or a tree outside?"

The ghostly flame flickered, its voice full of confusion. "Is the outside different from here?"

Bai Lan: "..."

It was far too different. This godforsaken place was pitch-black, so dark one could not see their own fingers. Everywhere she looked was nothingness.

Living in this godforsaken place for centuries would be like sitting in prison for centuries.

If she stayed here too long, she worried she would develop depression.

"Master should have felt it already. You have resonated with this piece of heaven and earth."

Bai Lan nodded. From the moment the black stone gave up resisting and accepted her consciousness, she had felt as though she had fused with it, able to control every blade of grass and tree within it as she pleased.

What shocked her most was that this black stone space seemed to have no boundaries.

She could not sense its edge at all. This place was like an infinite expanse, empty above and below, boundless and endless.

Clearly, after the Destined Female Lead used the black stone in the original plot, it had only doubled the size of her Space Jade Bracelet.

She had thought it was something like a computer patch, a system patch, or an item used to upgrade spatial artifacts.

How could the inside of this black stone space's True Body be so huge?!

"This space has no boundaries?" Bai Lan suppressed the shock in her heart and looked at the ghostly flame beside her.

The ghostly flame flickered. "The black stone Master speaks of is called a Void Stone. It can form a world of its own, or rather... this place is a space that forms a realm of its own. Though it has boundaries, the vastness of a realm is already incomparably immense."

"..."

The size... of a realm?

Her silence was deafening.

What was going on?!

She had thought she had merely obtained a storage space more advanced than a Storage Bag.

Only now did she realize that the black stone in her hand contained a world.

A world.

World.

She had read some miscellaneous books in the sect's Library Pavilion. They said that the earliest cultivation world had been created by ancient immortal gods who moved mountains and filled seas.

So did that mean... she could also create a world within this Void Stone?

Move mountains and fill seas...

Forget it. With her current abilities, she could carry cement at a construction site and do the work of three people. Moving mountains and filling seas was best forgotten.

Dreams were beautiful; reality was cruel.

She was only a minor cultivator at Qi Refining level one. She should stop thinking about such fanciful nonsense.

Closing her eyes, Bai Lan sent herself, the system, and the ghostly flame out of the Void Stone with a flicker of thought.

"Ugh! So bright!" The ghostly flame flickered.

"Where is this? Is this the cultivation world? There are so many strange things."

Bai Lan sighed, scooped up the system beside her, and spoke earnestly. "I'll leave it to you. Take this ghostly flame around to see the world and get familiar with the cultivation world."

The system scratched his head. "All right."

After switching the system from "visible only to one person" mode to "visible to everyone" mode, Bai Lan stopped bothering with the two of them.

The system's flaw was that he was a chatterbox; his strength was also that he was a chatterbox.

Since he liked talking so much, she could leave the task of showing the Artifact Spirit the world to him, while she went off to do other things.

This Void Stone had given her quite a pleasant surprise.

Perhaps Bai Ling had simply failed to discover the Void Stone's original use and secret, instead using it as material to strengthen the Space Jade Bracelet. In the unseen workings of fate, she had missed a golden opportunity and lost such an enormous space.

In an excellent mood, Bai Lan opened Long Aotian's Storage Bag and took out twenty Spirit Stones and a low-grade spirit artifact.

Besides those, there was also a damaged Formation Disk for a Teleportation Array inside. It was clearly no longer usable.

She tossed everything into the Void Stone in one go. Bai Lan closed her eyes, tightly gripped a Spirit Stone in her hand, and began absorbing the spiritual energy within it.

Her cultivation speed was slow, so she had to make up for it with external aid. Cultivating by absorbing the spiritual energy inside Spirit Stones would let her achieve twice the result with half the effort.

Time flew by. A month quickly passed, and the consumption of a full thirty Spirit Stones had only raised Bai Lan's cultivation from Qi Refining level one to Qi Refining level two.

Such speed, such consumption.

She was not cultivating immortality. She was cultivating a bottomless pit.

Bai Lan rose expressionlessly and looked toward the two little ones floating nearby.

"This system is your teacher. You should speak to this system with more respect!"

"As someone as noble as this Artifact Spirit, why should I curry favor with something neither human nor demon like you? You are merely Master's servant, hmph."

"Host! It said I'm your servant!" Seeing Bai Lan awaken, the system loudly complained.