At Last, They Found the Key: Numbers! All They Needed Were Numbers, and the Road With Its Back to All Living Beings

When the five Heavenly Dao Saints withdrew from the world of the Great Flood, the air in each of their dojos seemed heavier than usual.

Beyond the doors, Chaos still churned. Gray-white currents flowed slowly around the edges of the dojos, breaking into layers of fine spray whenever they struck the boundaries and were pushed back.

The lamps in Zixiao Palace had yet to reach full brightness. Light spread thinly across the hall, like a base color that had not fully unfurled.

This was not their first failure, but this time felt different.

Before, they had wondered whether this road could be traveled at all. This time, they knew the road was right. They simply had farther to go.

More than fifty billion people had laid out the formations and rules according to Venerable Yuanshi's plan. Every Formation Eye worked properly, and the flow of every Law matched.

Yet the Ark still cracked.

The location of the breach, the moment it appeared, the direction the cracks spread—everything was almost identical to the previous attempts. It was as though something invisible kept pressing a switch in the same place, wrenching open an ever-widening seam in the bottom of the hull!!

When they met this time, they said little to one another.

Taishang Laojun sat at the head of the hall.

He sat on a stone dais, his horsetail whisk resting across his knees. Its white hairs draped over his robe, motionless.

His expression was calm. His fingers rested on the whisk's handle, neither gripping it nor letting go. He looked as though he had sat in that place many times before and knew the calm was only skin-deep.

Venerable Yuanshi stood by the window with his back to the others.

The window was barely open. Outside lay a churning expanse of