"What do you mean, the situation's not too bad?" Shi Yan's strange behavior only made Qing Huan more suspicious. Could his teacher have been possessed in the core region of the Universe Boat?
Looking at his young disciple's expression, Shi Yan guessed what he was thinking. His face darkened. "All right, the situation's a little complicated. I can't really explain it. In any case, your teacher isn't in any immediate danger."
"Sure, sure."
Qing Huan still looked doubtful, but since his teacher had said as much, he didn't press further. The core region of the Universe Boat was mysterious and dangerous, and he didn't dare bother Shi Yan for long.
"If anything urgent comes up, just call me directly from inside my Miniature Universe." After reassuring Qing Huan, Shi Yan added a reminder, then his Divine Power Avatar faded away.
"Dangerous is dangerous, and safe is safe... What does 'complicated' even mean? What could be going on? Teacher's so strange." After Shi Yan left, Qing Huan couldn't help muttering to himself.
In truth, Shi Yan himself had little idea what was going on.
Let's turn back the clock to half a month ago.
After Shi Yan's escape, the Blood Orchid Ancestor and the Five True Lords of the God Eye Race had turned on one another.
Shi Yan knew nothing about any of it.
After entering the Void Wormhole, Shi Yan sensed something unusual about the surrounding space. It was clearly frozen solid, yet he could feel faint, terrifying fluctuations lurking behind it.
Like a long-dormant volcano: it might look no different from an extinct one, but once its energy erupted, it could bring mountains crashing down and split the earth apart.
"What strange spatial fluctuations. I wonder if I can try teleporting?" The faint spatial fluctuations tempted Shi Yan. At his level, he could try drawing out the latent fluctuations and teleporting out of the wormhole.
In the end, however, caution kept Shi Yan from acting rashly.
"This is a passage in the core region of the Universe Boat. How could it be so easy to leave?"
Shi Yan abandoned the fanciful idea and continued flying deeper into the wormhole, while constantly drawing on the divine power stored in his Miniature Universe through his True God Heart to recover.
In order to escape, he had left his Peak Palace Treasure, the Holy Sound Ship, in the hands of the God Eye Race. Now he had no Supreme Treasures on him that could protect him, so Shi Yan naturally wanted to make sure he was in the best possible condition.
The Universe Boat didn't seem particularly large—smaller even than a True God's Miniature Universe—but its interior was layered with space, with many vast regions hidden within tiny areas. Its manipulation of space was extraordinarily sophisticated.
For the same reason, the Void Wormhole was a long route, giving Shi Yan a chance to recover along the way.
About a day later, Shi Yan had brought himself into perfect condition. Then he sped up and flew deeper into the wormhole.
As he flew, Shi Yan also unfurled Chaotic Space-Time, keeping his Space-Time Domain extended to survey a range of ten billion kilometers as an early warning.
What he didn't know was that as soon as his Space-Time Domain unfolded, the Void Wormhole underwent a subtle change, as if a preset program had detected a special factor and diverted onto a different path.
"...I've been flying for three days already. Is this wormhole really that long?"
In the void, a platinum horned lizard streaked along at several thousand times the speed of light.
All around was the same unbroken darkness. A weak being here might not even be able to tell whether it was moving forward or backward.
But with Shi Yan's mastery of space, he could confirm that he was indeed flying forward at several thousand times the speed of light.
"Hmm?"
Shi Yan suddenly felt that his Space-Time Domain had reached beyond the wormhole.
It was a completely different kind of space, utterly frozen—not like the wormhole, where the calm was only on the surface.
At several thousand times the speed of light, a billion kilometers passed in an instant. Shi Yan saw faint starlight appear in his field of vision. It seemed to be an endless starry sky, somewhat like the Primal Universe.
"The Primal Universe?" Shi Yan marveled inwardly and tried to charge into that region. But the instant he reached the edge of the wormhole, a powerful spatial fluctuation enveloped him.
Then Shi Yan was forcibly displaced.
"Boom!"
The entire wormhole instantly erupted into chaos. In an instant, metal, wood, water, fire, earth, wind, light, thunder, time, and space—the Ten Great Laws—surged forth, as if to blast Shi Yan, who was trying to escape the wormhole, into dust. The terrifying power made him shudder.
Yet the spatial fluctuation carrying him away seemed to have merged with the surrounding "world." The rampaging laws, the dreadful power—no matter how powerful the attacks were, they could never harm the "world" that contained them.
For a moment, Shi Yan felt as if a door to a new world had opened before him.
"Space can be used like this?"
Shi Yan's eyes were opened to a new world, even as he was forcibly displaced out of the Void Wormhole.
He didn't know where he was headed, but at that moment, Shi Yan couldn't care less. The force could forcibly displace him and even ignore the Void Wormhole's attacks. It was beyond anything he could resist.
Since he couldn't fight back, Shi Yan simply gave in. He even closed his eyes and began to carefully sense the force that was forcibly displacing him.
Every crisis held both danger and opportunity. This spatial fluctuation was on a level far beyond his own comprehension of space. Shi Yan couldn't possibly let such an opportunity pass him by.
"Taking the void as a whole, becoming one with the void... As long as the void remains, so do I..." Shi Yan murmured, carefully observing the spatial fluctuation. It was as if a teacher were personally demonstrating a higher level of the Space Law before him. Gradually, Shi Yan began to glimpse the direction of the path of space.
As the Light Beast God, Shi Yan had always been more skilled in time than in space. When he was a Universe Master, he hadn't fully grasped the five spatial paths of the Beast God Path.
Later, when he broke through to True God, Shi Yan had advanced by treating time and space as a whole. But as he continued cultivating, his comprehension of space gradually threatened to hold him back.
Especially after breaking through to the Eighth Order, Shi Yan had focused on the past, present, and future incarnations in his cultivation of time. Even without guidance, he was confident he was following a path to the heavens.
But when it came to space, Shi Yan was somewhat lost. This was also the usual state of most True Gods in the Universe Ocean: without guidance, they had to explore the road ahead one step at a time.
Sometimes they might spend a trillion eras comprehending the Dao, only to find they had taken a dead end. Their cultivation would make no progress, and they would have wasted their time as well.
Now, however, Shi Yan had glimpsed a fragment of a higher level of the path of space.
He was so excited he could hardly keep still. As the saying went, "If I hear the Dao in the morning, I can die content in the evening." For a cultivator, a higher level of the Dao was the most beautiful thing in the world.
Any True God in the Universe Ocean would find it hard to contain their excitement at glimpsing a higher level of the Dao.
"This insight alone makes the whole journey worthwhile." At that moment, Shi Yan was more excited than if he had obtained a Supreme True Treasure.
After all, one's cultivation was fundamental. Unless one possessed a soul-protecting Supreme Treasure of an exceptionally high level, such as the Star Tower, breaking through the cycle of reincarnation required reaching the Void Level.
But just as Shi Yan was about to continue probing the mysteries of the spatial fluctuation, space suddenly began to reject him. The next second, Shi Yan was forced back into the normal dimension.
He found himself in a gigantic Divine Temple, surrounded by vast, boundless mist.
The Divine Temple was empty, too. Aside from the gray floor tiles, the only thing in sight was three enormous statues standing side by side far ahead.
The statue on the far left was a stunning woman, with almond-shaped eyes, peach-like cheeks, delicate brows, and a graceful face. Though carved from stone, she seemed to have a lively gaze and radiated charm.
The statue on the far right was a burly, bearded man wearing armor that left his arms bare. He was powerful and imposing, and wherever his gaze fell, it seemed all things would shatter.
As for the statue in the middle...
"Hm? It has no head?" Shi Yan was puzzled. Judging by its build, the middle statue seemed to be an ordinary man, but everything above its neck was missing. The space-time around it also seemed to be twisting faintly.
Anyone honored with a statue had to be an immensely revered figure. There was no way the missing head was normal.
"What a strange place."
Shi Yan looked away from the three statues and surveyed his surroundings. The Thunder Punishment Prison had already spread to its limit, with lightning flashing across a radius of more than a hundred light-years.
The inexplicable forced displacement, along with the faint distortion of space-time around the headless statue, made Shi Yan suspect that the space-time in this Divine Temple was abnormal. So instead of unfolding his Space-Time Domain, he simply used his Domain Supreme Treasure to monitor his surroundings.
Apart from the space being extremely frozen, however, Shi Yan found nothing unusual. It even seemed that weak, apprentice-level lifeforms could live here normally.
But for that very reason, the situation seemed suspicious from every angle. It was just too normal.
"This is the core region of the Universe Boat. There could be something strange lurking here. I have to be careful."
After a while, Shi Yan began flying slowly toward the three statues in the distance.
The entire Divine Temple was empty, after all. He couldn't just sit there doing nothing. The only unusual things seemed to be the three statues.
Even so, Shi Yan stayed alert as he flew, using the Thunder Punishment Prison to probe his surroundings.
The statues were extremely far from where Shi Yan had arrived, but Shi Yan was incredibly fast. Even at what he considered a leisurely pace, he was still flying at hundreds of times the speed of light.
The three statues quickly grew larger in Shi Yan's sight.
"At this rate, I'll reach them in about an hour, right?" Shi Yan squinted as he estimated the distance.
But just then, the space-time around him abruptly shifted. The next second, the statues shrank back to the size they'd been before he set off—he had returned to the spot where he'd arrived.
The change came so suddenly that Shi Yan didn't even react at first.
Before you continue