The World as a Game, the Mortal Realm as a Chessboard

"Immortals... heroic souls..."

Li Xinri climbed to his feet and quickly accepted everything horrifying he had heard.

He had cultivated on Heavenly Mountain for over a century, originally intending to find a way to seek aid. Yet as he cultivated, Blood Moon had cut off the road home. Nor had he spent those hundred years oblivious to the outside world. The Central Plains had stationed troops along Blood Moon's border, yet Blood Moon had shown no interest whatsoever in the Central Plains, instead advancing toward the Southern Border.

The senior brothers and elders of Heavenly Mountain frequently left the mountain to slay demons and exorcise devils. If he had failed to notice Heavenly Mountain's strangeness over the past century, he might as well have gone back to the village in Merit City and become its village guardian. If not for his ancestor telling him to cultivate obediently, he would have run away long ago. Now it seemed his ancestor simply had not wanted to frighten him from the very beginning, instead letting him slowly accept the truth. And indeed, in the family, his ancestor was the only one who knew he was 'born for greatness.'

For more than a hundred years, everything in the world aside from the Southern Border had appeared unchanged. Yet in his eyes, all things had become increasingly bizarre. Every corner of the world was sinking, amid a peculiar stillness, into chaos beyond the sight of ordinary people. Even at his half-step Void Refinement cultivation, he could not see the whole picture.

"A few years ago, I saw an old acquaintance from home—Wu Neng of the Immortal Suppression Bureau. I knew him, but he didn't know me. He hurried through the Central Plains and acted together with our Heavenly Mountain elders. It was a great grassland.