After everyone crossed the place where souls dissolved into mist, they breathed a sigh of relief. It felt as if they had just slipped through the Ghost Gate Pass. This Heaven Burying Ground was terrifying. In the distance, they saw a towering, ten-thousand-zhang-tall ancient stele on the horizon, as if declaring that their hardship had not been in vain.
The towering stele was still broken and incomplete at the top, its surface riddled with cracks. No one knew how long it had existed or who had erected it.
The stone stele bore only a few indistinct divine patterns, their divine radiance restrained. When they examined them with Spiritual Sense, the words Heaven and Earth Xuanhuang, Universe Primordial Era appeared in each person's mind, written in different scripts. The eight characters were ancient and weathered, as if they could transport people to the boundless cosmos, where they could watch the stars shift and witness the evolution of Heaven and Earth.
Daoist Hunyuan stared blankly at the simple eight characters. Yet he felt a universe burst forth from nothingness with a blinding flash. Everything before his eyes grew clear; the endless darkness and boundless void were gone. A stream of primordial energy slowly formed, gathering into drifting clusters that bobbed up and down in the light.
The entire world seemed to undergo a long evolution. Clusters of gas transformed into a fantastical universe, with illusory stars and worlds, simple and monotonous. The universe evolved into chaos, chaos into yin and yang, and then all things came into being. A complete universe formed before his eyes.
Daoist Hunyuan's heart stirred. Could this be the process by which Wuji gave birth to Taiji, and from which all of Heaven and Earth evolved? The world's evolution had five stages: Taiyi, Taichu, Taishi, Taisu, and Taiji.