As she looked at the woman before her, Di Luosha stood frozen for a long while, unable to come to her senses. For a moment, she could not even be sure she had recognized her correctly.
Aside from a hurried glimpse when they first met, this was the first time she and Shi Lan had ever interacted.
"Di Luosha..."
The instant she saw Di Luosha, Shi Lan's divine sense swept through space and time, digging up every thread of causality connected to her.
Causality threaded through space and time, linking past and future.
Through those invisible threads, Shi Lan saw many scenes. She saw Di Luosha's mother, Luo Ning; Di Beichen; Xue Qing; and even herself.
On Di Beichen, Shi Lan discovered a hidden thread of causality. It had split off into a tributary of the river of time. Di Beichen's cultivation had never reached the Sovereign realm before his death; he simply lacked the power to affect time and space.
Yet within that tributary, Di Beichen had made a different choice.
After the Heavenly Court's Grand Competition ended and he returned to Lingyang, Di Beichen had chosen not to marry and have children. Instead, he began hunting demigods relentlessly, nourishing himself with divine blood and cultivating the demonic markings within his body.
When the post-Primordial God War erupted, he found an opportunity to grievously wound Xia on the battlefield and seize some of the God King's blood essence. With it, he successfully entered the tenth rank. Afterward, he infiltrated the Gods' ancestral land, dug up graves and turned over the earth, devouring every last trace of essence from the divine corpses buried there.
At the end of that tributary of time, Di Beichen defied fate and became a False Sovereign. He even replaced Ye as the sword-bearer of Lingyang's