Like an Immortal

Ding! Congratulations, Host, on growing another year older. External Essence +1%. Current external Essence: 600,000 times.

The familiar notification rang out.

For the ninety-millionth time, it signified that your Essence had increased by more than nine hundred thousand times.

It was Year 1 of Era 1, Ancient 842 of the Yuantian Calendar.

You had been trapped in this chaos for ninety million years!

In your normal state, you were already close to half an immortal.

While maintaining that false world behind you, you endured the bitter crossing within the universe's membrane.

That world was far too vast. Maintaining it while dragging it along to force apart the matter of the universe's membrane meant that, as you were now, you could only travel tens of millions of li each day—merely the distance you could cover at full speed in a dozen or so seconds.

But they were the anchors of your personality.

They were your drunken life and dreamlike death, and also the safeguard that kept your humanity intact.

You did not dare imagine how terrifying the erosion and devastation to your mind would be if you had no such thing to pin your hopes on, if you had to travel alone through the universe for seven hundred thousand years.

What was more, it was probably not merely seven hundred thousand years.

Because you felt that you might have gone in the wrong direction.

Yet you did not dare turn back. You feared that your current direction was the correct one, and that turning back would only waste even more time.

It was difficult to distinguish directions within the chaos. You had slept for too long before; sometimes, with the slightest turn in your sleep, your position would drift off course, and you might have to travel several million additional light-years.