Rongyang's awakened consciousness had no effect on the current situation. Other than Bai Yan, none of the True Lords even came to visit, because everyone knew that the course of this starry sky was no longer in their hands.
For cultivators, time had no fixed measure, yet it also did. A hundred years passed soundlessly amid the revolutions of the stars.
The war on the Daluo Star front had stabilized under the tacit maintenance of all factions.
At the same time, many previously developed ecological regions beneath the starry sky had begun to flourish with a vitality utterly unlike the past. Relying on the new learning promoted by Shen Xiaozhu and the others, with flying vessel technology at its core and supplemented by precision mechanical forging and widespread energy applications, settlements with the rudiments of modernization had already taken shape in some suitable Ecological Zones.
Yet to those who truly stood at the pinnacle of the starry sky, all this surface prosperity and stability was no more than motes of dust upon a chessboard. It was precisely during these seemingly peaceful hundred years that the true variables were brewing.
Mercury.
At the deepest core of this vast, boundless azure world, a transformation was underway.
The Mystic Ice Palace where the Dragon Lord had entered Secluded Cultivation was now enveloped in tangible Water Spirit Qi, transformed into a pulsing azure cocoon. Countless profound natural runes emerged and vanished across its surface like flowing water, stirring the pulse of the entire Mercury.
Suddenly, the pulsing reached its peak before abruptly stopping. Then an ultimate silence descended, like the stillness before the universe first opened.
Immediately afterward, an indescribable majesty spread from the cocoon, as though a sleeping ancient deity had awakened. At that instant, all the seas of Mercury lost every ripple