When Jiang Ding decided to leave, heaven and earth around him spun and shifted, the stars changed, Great Dao Rules changed, and matter, spiritual energy, and divine consciousness became another kind of hyperdimensional form, one similar to the Nine Heavens.
Time was changing.
It seemed like an instant, yet also like eternity.
Jiang Ding closed his eyes and opened them again. Before him was the night sky of the Tianma Star Domain, at a point within this star domain where the Heavenly Dao Rules data fluctuated most drastically and was most suitable for observation and recording.
He sat cross-legged there, his Black and White Eyes flickering as he used his sword soul to record the Heavenly Dao data of this place.
"...Roam the Fallen Immortal Night at dawn, lodge in Blood Sea Heaven at dusk..."
Jiang Ding gazed into the starry sky, recalling those words.
They were a line preserved within the incense offerings of the Black Tortoise Heavenly Palace, a surviving trace from an age unknown, headless and tailless, impossible to understand.
In the past, he had taken it as ordinary. There were too many folk customs and ballads in this world; every intelligent race had them, and not every song could be traced to its source.
But now, it seemed that he could find a faint trace.
"If,"
"I mean, if,"
Jiang Ding murmured, "in the era when immortals still existed, could there have been some sort of high-speed passage connected to the Nine Heavens? One that drastically shortened the distances of the Endless Starry Sky, turning it into a village, where transportation, communication, and Immortal Path Technology were all highly developed... Perhaps this ballad came from that highly developed Immortal Path society."
"After countless years passed, the magnificent Immortal Path miracle collapsed, leaving behind only this tiny