The Vast East Sea stretched in boundless azure waves, like an enormous blue gemstone set into the edge of the Primordial Continent. Water elemental power abounded here, utterly unlike the weighty presence of the earth that Zhenyuanzi knew so well.
He stood among the clouds, his divine sense spreading in every direction like an invisible web. He carefully scanned every inch of the sea, from its surging surface to its deep trenches, letting no unusual fluctuation of energy escape him.
Sunlight scattered countless golden scales across the sea, and the waves gently lapped against the void with a rhythmic swish.
Occasionally, an enormous Kun Fish leaped from the water, throwing up towering sprays;
In the distance, schools of Wanyao Fish spread their birdlike fins and glided over the crests, calling out in melodious cries.
Farther below, strange sea beasts swam leisurely among colorful coral thickets, giving off rich water spiritual qi.
Yet the Three Immortal Islands had formed from chaos fragments and possessed their own means of concealment. The heavenly mystery mist enveloping them made searching by ordinary means like looking for a needle in the ocean, even for a Peak Great Luo Golden Immortal such as Zhenyuanzi.
His divine sense swept over island after island brimming with spiritual qi. Some bore ancient trees that towered into the sky, others were covered in strange flowers and exotic herbs, and still others housed aquatic spirits and monsters of considerable cultivation. None, however, was what he sought.
Time slipped by. Over the East Sea, the sun rose, the moon set, and the tides turned. In the blink of an eye, several hundred years had passed. Throughout that long search, Zhenyuanzi witnessed countless wonders of the East Sea:
On full-moon nights, Shark People gathered on the reefs and wept pearls beneath the moon, their falling tears crystallizing; when storms came, lightning serpents darted through dark clouds, illuminating the silhouettes of enormous beasts in the depths; on calm days, the sea became a mirror reflecting a sky full of stars, like another heaven.
Zhenyuanzi's divine sense tirelessly swept across billions of miles of ocean. He explored countless islands lush with spiritual qi, sea eyes seething with hidden currents, and even settlements of aquatic spirits and monsters, yet he never caught the unique Dao resonance of the Three Immortal Islands.
Even with a Dao heart as firm as stone, he could not help feeling a faint, almost imperceptible trace of irritation and doubt.
Could my memories of later ages be wrong? Or has the time for the Three Immortal Islands to emerge not yet arrived, making any attempt to force it futile?
Hovering among the clouds, he gazed at the boundless blue waves beneath him, and for the first time, his resolve wavered. The East Sea was simply too vast. Even with the divine sense of a Great Luo Golden Immortal, finding three deliberately concealed immortal islands in such an immense expanse was no easy feat.
Just as his thoughts shifted, and he nearly decided to abandon the search for now and consider another approach, a wisp of foreign aura, so faint that it almost blended into the surrounding innate spiritual qi, suddenly slipped past the edge of his divine-sense web like a cunning fish!
That aura... ancient and obscure, carried a trace of indifference and deathly stillness akin to the return of all things to the void. It was utterly unlike the vibrant, life-filled innate spiritual qi of the Primordial World!
It was none other than the chaos energy stream that had pervaded the endless nothingness before the world was opened!
Faint though it was, that wisp carried an essential nobility and antiquity, as if it came from another age and had no place in the present Primordial Wilderness.
Found it! Joy abruptly surged through Zhenyuanzi's heart. The irritation born of his long search vanished in an instant, replaced by clarity and certainty.
The Three Immortal Islands formed from chaos fragments. Chaos aura leaking from their outskirts is their most unmistakable hallmark! Following this trail will surely lead somewhere!
His divine sense immediately locked onto the direction from which the aura had come. He became a barely perceptible streak of light and silently sped toward it.
With the slightest movement, he appeared like a phantom in the general area where that chaos energy stream had escaped.
The place looked no different from any ordinary stretch of sea. The waves were calm, with sunlight and cloud shadows drifting together.
Several gulls circled lazily above the water, occasionally diving to catch small, silver-flashing fish.
In the distance, a few modest reef islands dotted the blue waves, covered in salt-tolerant sea grass and low shrubs.
Sunlight filtered through the clouds, casting dappled light and shadows over the sea. Everything seemed peaceful and ordinary.
But Zhenyuanzi cleared his mind of all distractions and pushed his Peak Great Luo Golden Immortal divine sense to its utmost. Like the most precise probe, it scanned inch by inch, analyzing every spatial structure and every ripple of energy within ten thousand miles.
His divine sense penetrated the azure water and reached the seabed more than a thousand zhang below, where another world awaited:
Enormous seaweed swayed like forests, glowing schools of fish moved like rivers of stars, and bizarrely shaped sea beasts darted among the coral.
At first, everything remained "normal."
The chaos energy stream seemed to have drifted past by chance, leaving no further trace.
On the sandy seabed, several enormous giant clams slowly opened and closed, revealing lustrous pearls within;
A school of colorful butterfly fish played among the coral;
Farther down, an immense Whale Kun swam slowly, each sweep of its tail stirring powerful undercurrents.
Everything seemed so natural, so harmonious, as though that wisp of chaos aura had never appeared.
But Zhenyuanzi possessed extraordinary patience, and he firmly believed his perception could not have been mistaken.
He hovered in the air with his eyes half closed, his aura subtly harmonizing with the sea beneath him and the heavens above. No longer relying solely on divine sense, he used his profound understanding of heaven and earth law to "feel" what was different about this place.
He seemed to become part of that stretch of sea, feeling every turn of its currents, sensing every rise and fall of its tides, and experiencing every subtle change in its winds and clouds.
Time passed little by little, and the light and shadows on the sea shifted with the sun.
At noon, beneath the direct sunlight, the water took on a deep blue hue; toward evening, the setting sun dyed the sea gold; after nightfall, a bright moon rose and scattered silver radiance over the waves, as though a layer of shattered silver had been spread across the entire surface.
Through those cycles of rising sun and setting moon, Zhenyuanzi maintained that mysterious state, breathing and pulsing in unison with the sea.
Then, in a moment when his mind was utterly clear, just as a new moon rose and the shimmering sea grew most hazy, he "saw" it!
Within the seemingly seamless backdrop of the void lay an exceedingly subtle "crease," or perhaps a "fault," almost indistinguishable from space itself.
That fault was neither visible to the naked eye nor directly detectable through magical power. It was more like an ingenious "graft" and "disguise" woven into space law itself.
It was as though a seamstress of supreme skill had sewn another piece of fabric perfectly onto the original brocade, her stitches so fine that they were almost impossible to detect.
Without an exceptionally profound mastery of the way of space, or divine sense as keen as his coupled with prior knowledge that an anomaly might exist, there would have been no way to discover it.
And deeper within that spatial fault, he sensed a naturally formed, incomparably profound Innate Grand Formation!
This formation had not been laid out using external objects such as formation flags or disks. The Great Dao had generated it naturally. Rather than a simple structure for defense or attack, it displayed a stable triangular support, with three distinct yet kindred Dao resonances—the loftiness of heaven, the heaviness of earth, and the intelligence of man—interweaving in endless circulation to form a perfect, stable, independent system.
It tightly sealed, distorted, and concealed every aura and play of light within, even the workings of heavenly secrets.
The grand formation was like a small world unto itself, both connected to and isolated from the Primordial World outside. Its intricacy was breathtaking.
The Innate Three Talents Grand Formation! Zhenyuanzi understood at once. Heaven, earth, and man formed one of the fundamental frameworks of the Primordial World. An Innate Grand Formation founded upon them boasted supreme stability and concealment. No wonder it had been so difficult to find.
Drawing upon the power of heaven, earth, and man, this grand formation achieved a perfect balance, like a precisely functioning model of the cosmos. Any intrusion of outside force could disrupt that delicate equilibrium.
Faced with this mysterious grand formation, Zhenyuanzi entertained no thought of breaking it through brute force.
First, its foundations ran deep and were connected to the source of the chaos fragments. Forcing his way through would demand an enormous expenditure even with his heaven-reaching cultivation, and might even trigger a backlash from the formation, with unpredictable consequences.
Second, a disturbance of that magnitude could never be concealed. The East Sea lay within the Dragon Clan's sphere of influence. Though the Three Races currently seemed content to watch him, a Great Power Who Preaches the Dao, from the sidelines, if they learned that he had discovered immortal islands formed from chaos fragments here, trouble might well arise, creating needless complications.
Third, and most importantly, violently breaking the formation could damage the natural arrangement of the Three Immortal Islands within, or even harm the sources of any Innate Spiritual Treasures and spiritual roots that might be present. The losses would outweigh the gains.
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