For the Cloth Robe Man, who treasured words as if they were gold, being able to murmur such a sentence to himself was absolutely a once-in-a-thousand-years occurrence.
This alone showed how seriously he regarded this matter.
Just as the Cloth Robe Man murmured to himself, the indistinct figure seated cross-legged beneath the great tree in that stretch of chaos seemed to have been startled awake and silently opened its eyes.
At that moment—
That expanse of chaos seemed to freeze without warning.
The two rivers intertwining beneath the great tree paused for an instant.
A Buddha gazes upon a bowl of water and sees four hundred million trillion living creatures.
And that "instant" suddenly slowed to the point where it was enough for oceans to turn into mulberry fields.
Within that endlessly prolonged instant, the blurred figure released boundless Divine Sense, spreading outward from the chaos.
It passed over the traces of fate, swept across the changes between the rise and fall of eras, and captured every minute disturbance throughout all time and space.
Yet in the end, it discovered nothing.
At last, that incomparably long instant passed.
The indistinct figure seated cross-legged beneath the tree quietly withdrew its boundless Divine Sense and returned to that murky, indescribable state.
Like a dead, motionless stone, it sank into silence within the chaos, no longer emitting the slightest trace of presence.
Everything returned to how it had been.
Yet almost no one in this world knew that, during that "instant" just now, the entire River of Destiny Origin had paused.
But the Cloth Robe Man had noticed.
Before that vanished "instant," he had already raised his hand and "fished" that azure fish out from the chaos.
Like a fish in a painting, it leaped free.
The golden lamplight emanating from the Fate