Ghost Wall

"What do you mean, 'the situation is still manageable'?" Shi Yan's strange behavior made Qing Huan increasingly suspicious. Could his teacher have been possessed or something in the Universe Boat Core Region?

Seeing his young disciple's expression, Shi Yan guessed what he was thinking and immediately darkened his face. "Alright, it's just that the situation is a bit complicated. I can't explain it clearly either. In short, your teacher is not in danger for now."

"Fine, I guess."

Qing Huan still seemed unconvinced, but since his teacher had said so, he didn't press further. The Universe Boat Core Region was mysterious and dangerous, and he didn't dare disturb Shi Yan for long.

"If there's something urgent, just call me directly in my Miniature Universe." After soothing Qing Huan, Shi Yan added one more instruction, and then his divine power avatar dissipated into a phantom.

"Danger is danger, no danger is no danger... 'Complicated situation'? What situation could there be? Teacher is really strange." After Shi Yan left, Qing Huan couldn't help muttering to himself.

But in truth, Shi Yan himself was a bit unclear about the current state of affairs.

Let's rewind time to half a month ago.

As Shi Yan escaped, the Blood Orchid Ancestor and the Five True Lords of the God Eye Race began to tear into each other.

Yet Shi Yan was completely unaware of all this.

After entering the Void Wormhole, Shi Yan felt something unusual about the surrounding space. It was extremely condensed, yet he could sense that behind that condensation, there seemed to be terrifying fluctuations lurking.

Like a long-dormant volcano—though it appeared no different from an extinct one, once its energy erupted, it would bring mountains crumbling and earth splitting.

"Such strange spatial fluctuations. I wonder if I can try to teleport?" The faint spatial fluctuations stirred Shi Yan's interest. At his level, he could attempt to trigger the latent spatial waves and teleport out of the wormhole.

But in the end, caution won out, and Shi Yan didn't act rashly.

"After all, this is a passage in the Universe Boat Core Region. How could it let someone leave so easily?"

Shi Yan abandoned that whimsical thought and slowly flew deeper into the wormhole. At the same time, he continuously absorbed divine power from his Miniature Universe through his True God Heart to recover his state.

To escape this time, his Peak Palace Treasure, the Holy Sound Ship, had fallen into the hands of the God Eye Race. Now he had no protective treasures left, so Shi Yan naturally had to ensure he was as close to his peak condition as possible.

The Universe Boat didn't seem that large—smaller even than a True God's Miniature Universe—but its internal space was layered, with many vast regions hidden in extremely tiny parts. Its use of space was exquisitely refined.

Because of this, the Void Wormhole's path was also quite long, giving Shi Yan a chance to recover.

About a day later, Shi Yan adjusted his state to perfection and began accelerating deeper into the wormhole.

As he flew, he also unfolded his Chaotic Space-Time, maintaining his Space-Time Domain to probe a range of ten billion kilometers as a precaution.

But what he didn't know was that the moment his Space-Time Domain expanded, the Void Wormhole underwent a subtle change—as if a preset program, upon detecting a special factor, had veered onto a different path.

"...I've been flying for three days now. How is this wormhole this long?"

In the void, a Platinum Horned Lizard streaked by at thousands of times the speed of light.

All around was uniform darkness. If a weaker being were here, they might not even be able to tell if they were moving forward or backward.

But with Shi Yan's mastery of space, he could confirm that he was indeed advancing at thousands of times the speed of light.

"Hm?"

Shi Yan suddenly sensed that his Space-Time Domain had reached an area outside the wormhole.

It was an entirely different space—completely condensed, unlike the wormhole's surface calm.

At thousands of times the speed of light, a billion kilometers passed in an instant. Shi Yan saw faint starlight appear in his vision—a vast starry sky that seemed somewhat similar to the Primal Universe.

"The Primal Universe?" Shi Yan marveled inwardly, eager to charge into that region. But the moment he rushed to the edge of the wormhole, a powerful spatial fluctuation instantly enveloped him.

Then, Shi Yan was forcibly teleported.

"Boom!"

The entire wormhole erupted into chaos. In an instant, the Ten Great Laws—Metal, Wood, Water, Fire, Earth, Wind, Light, Thunder, Space, and Time—all burst forth, as if trying to blast Shi Yan, who was attempting to escape the wormhole, into ashes. The terrifying might made his heart tremble.

Yet the spatial fluctuation that had forcibly teleported him seemed to have merged with the surrounding "world." The violent laws, the dreadful power—no matter how fierce the attack, it could not harm the "world" that bore them.

In that moment, Shi Yan felt as if a new door to the world had opened.

"Space... can be used like this?"

Shi Yan's horizons expanded, even as he was forcibly teleported out of the Void Wormhole.

Where he was being sent was unknown, but Shi Yan didn't care at all. A force that could forcibly teleport him, even ignoring the Void Wormhole's attacks, was something he couldn't resist.

Since he couldn't resist, Shi Yan simply gave in. He even closed his eyes, beginning to carefully sense this power that was forcibly moving him.

Crisis—both danger and opportunity. The level of this spatial fluctuation far exceeded his own insights into space. Such a chance, Shi Yan absolutely could not let slip.

"Taking the void as a whole, turning oneself into the void—the void indestructible, oneself indestructible..." Shi Yan murmured, intently observing this spatial fluctuation. It was as if a teacher was personally demonstrating a higher level of 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 better at time than space. During his Universe Master period, he hadn't fully comprehended all five directions of the Beast God Path in space.

Later, when he broke through to True God, he advanced using time and space as a whole. But as he cultivated, his insights into space gradually began to hold him back.

Especially after breaking through to the Eighth Order, Shi Yan focused on the past, present, and future incarnations in the path of time. Though he had no guidance, he was confident he was walking a great road to the heavens.

But in space, Shi Yan felt somewhat lost. This was the norm for most True Gods in the Universe Ocean—without guidance, the road ahead had to be explored step by step.

Sometimes, spending a trillion epochs in contemplation only led to a dead end, with no progress in realm and wasted time.

But now, Shi Yan had glimpsed a corner of a higher level of the path of space.

This made him want to dance with joy. As the saying goes, "To hear the Dao in the morning is to die content in the evening." For a cultivator, a higher level of the Dao is the most beautiful thing in the world.

Any True God in the Universe Ocean, upon catching a glimpse of a higher Dao, would be ecstatic beyond control.

"Even this one gain alone makes this exploration worthwhile." Shi Yan was more excited by this than if he had obtained a Supreme True Treasure.

After all, realm was the foundation. Unless one possessed a soul-protecting treasure of extremely high level, such as the Star Tower, the only way to break through reincarnation was to reach the Void Level.

But just as Shi Yan was about to further investigate the mystery of this spatial fluctuation, space suddenly began to reject him. The next moment, he was expelled back to normal dimensions.

This was a vast Divine Temple, surrounded by thick mist that stretched endlessly beyond sight.

The temple interior was completely empty. Aside from gray floor tiles, the only thing visible was three massive statues standing side by side in the far distance.

The leftmost statue was of an extremely beautiful woman, with almond-shaped eyes and peach-blossom cheeks, a cicada-like forehead and moth-like eyebrows. Though carved from stone, her eyes seemed to shimmer with flowing light and radiant charm.

The rightmost statue was of a burly man with a curly beard, wearing an arm-baring battle armor. He was powerful and imposing, and wherever his gaze fell, it seemed all things would shatter.

As for the middle statue...

"Hm? No head?" Shi Yan was puzzled. The middle statue, judging by its form, appeared to be a normal man, but the part above the neck was missing. Moreover, the space-time around the statue seemed to be subtly distorted.

To be enshrined here, these figures must be beings of extreme reverence. A missing head on the statue could hardly be normal.

"What a strange place."

Shi Yan shifted his gaze from the three statues and looked around. The Thunder Punishment Prison had already been expanded to its limit, with electric light crackling across a range of over a hundred light-years.

The inexplicable forced relocation and the space-time distortion faintly visible on the headless statue made Shi Yan suspect that the space-time within this Divine Temple might be abnormal. Thus, instead of deploying his Space-Time Domain, he simply used his domain-type treasure to monitor his surroundings.

Yet aside from the extreme condensation of space, Shi Yan found nothing unusual. Even weak lifeforms at the apprentice level seemed able to live here normally.

But precisely because of this, the overly normal appearance struck Shi Yan as thoroughly abnormal from his perspective.

"This is the Universe Boat Core Region. There might be something sinister here. I must be careful."

After a moment, Shi Yan began to fly slowly toward the three statues in the distance.

After all, the entire temple was empty. He couldn't just sit in place doing nothing. The only unusual thing here was likely those three statues.

Still, as he flew, Shi Yan remained vigilant, the Thunder Punishment Prison probing the surroundings.

The distance from where Shi Yan had landed to the three statues was extremely far, but his speed was immense. Even what he considered a slow pace was hundreds of times the speed of light.

The three statues rapidly grew larger in Shi Yan's sight.

"About an hour to reach them?" Shi Yan squinted, calculating the distance.

But just then, the space-time around Shi Yan abruptly shifted. The next moment, the statues shrank back to the size they had been before he set out—he had returned to his starting point.

The change was so sudden that even Shi Yan didn't react in time.