"Too many years... too many years..."
Muddled oblivion was a way to flee pain. Perhaps it would feel better to clutch his head, weep bitterly, and say he had forgotten everything. But how could someone like Cui Yigeng—someone whose Golden Body and Jade Marrow had rotted beneath time's wash, yet who still stood stubbornly upright where he was, never bowing—possibly remain awake without pain?
So he said again, "It has been three hundred and thirty-two years, three months... and seven days since that upheaval."
No one disputed it—time as Cui Yigeng had experienced it was clearly etched upon his Dao body. His frosted hair and aged brows were scars left by the years.
Jiang Wang had only crossed hands with Cui Yigeng once, but the impression had run deep. He remembered that Cui Yigeng was someone who treasured time immensely.
Yet this man, who treasured time so dearly, had remained here counting it as it drained away, drop by drop.
It was truly cruel.
The lifespan limit of Divine Presence was five hundred and sixteen years. Given Cui Yigeng's strength and temperament, for him to decline before reaching that limit... the pain he bore in his heart far surpassed the suffering endured by his Dao body.
"What happened?" Jiang Wang asked.
With a casual motion, he handed the roll of green bamboo slips to Chongxuan Zun.
The moment he had obtained the bamboo slips, he had swept them once with his immortal sense. What they recorded was a passage of history—Dao Calendar 2531, when the Shao Kingdom destroyed Yan.
It seemed that the [Six-Line Mountains and Rivers Seal] arranged here to imprison Cui Yigeng had been founded upon Yan's mountains and rivers. Yan's territory overlapped considerably with that of the later Xia Kingdom, though that had been Yan's age of