No one knew on what day it had begun, but by the time the Sky Palace had utterly collapsed, apart from a tiny handful still desperately holding it together, the Sky Palace powerhouses who had once suppressed era after era had almost all vanished without a trace.
Once the signs emerged, it became a case of the Sky Palace losing its deer, and all under heaven racing after it.
In merely a few decades, the Sky Palace that had ruled the Cultivation World for countless years completely collapsed.
What remained were layers upon layers of mysteries that countless years could scarcely explain.
And... a Cultivation World like a cage.
Over countless years, no matter how terrifyingly gifted one might be, one could only guard a lifespan of several thousand years and sit in withered stillness awaiting death.
Chu Mu surveyed the Star Sea, even reaching its deepest depths, yet he found not the slightest record concerning the Sky Palace's strange transformation.
"Could it be... my authority isn't sufficient?"
Chu Mu hesitated and looked around. At this moment, he was already deep within the deepest reaches of the Star Sea.
Beyond this lay only a void, without the slightest trace of any imprint's existence.
And the eras in which these imprints existed happened to end precisely with the collapse of the Sky Palace.
Imprints from still more ancient eras seemed not to exist within this Star Sea.
All kinds of speculation surfaced in his mind. Chu Mu lowered his head to look at the imprint in his palm, pondered for a moment, then stepped forward toward that seemingly boundless dark void.
The starry sky was neither real nor entirely illusory.
This dark void, however, seemed somewhat different.
Illusion and reality intertwined, yet it appeared to lean more toward reality.
Or rather...