Gu Yuena's shock and confusion lasted only for the briefest instant.
Almost at the very moment the nine-colored light blended into white, obscuring her entire vision,
the surrounding space suddenly shattered, turning into countless irregular fragments, large and small, that began moving chaotically, like a pot of mixed-up eight-treasure porridge.
Endless Chaos Power suffused the spaces between the fragments. It was the universe's most primal energy, the origin and final destination of all matter, energy, time, space, information, and order.
All things took shape in chaos, absorbed Chaos Power to grow and develop, and eventually were destroyed and returned to chaos, in an endless cycle.
Under the influence of Chaos Power, the timelines of these spatial fragments were utterly disordered, and they did not even share the same time and space.
One fragment might be set three years in the past, the next three thousand years ago.
In one fragment, Gu Yuena saw a scene from a savage era, before the Dragon God had been born and before civilization had been established.
"This is...
the Space-Time Turbulence?"
Gu Yuena knew many secrets. Just as understanding dawned in her heart, she saw that the only nine-colored crystal shard in the image that had not completely burst apart or exhausted its divine power
suddenly drew in its energy. Though it dimmed and shrank to a fragment no larger than a fingernail, it managed to survive.
The crystal shard cut through space and landed, one after another, beside the distant corpses. It paused briefly, as if collecting something,
then took aim at a particular fragment of space-time and released all its remaining energy, before crumbling into dust and vanishing completely.
At the sight of this, Gu Yuena's mind went blank with a boom.
The entire dragon hung motionless in midair, stunned. The shock in her heart was a thousand, ten thousand times greater than before, and it took a long time to subside.
She understood. She finally understood what those images meant.
They were memories from her previous life.
Before she died, driven by the death of her lover, she had self-destructed to take revenge on the Divine Realm, accidentally triggering the Space-Time Turbulence and utterly disrupting time and space.
With the time and power she had left, she had sent the most important parts of her memories back tens of thousands of years, to a time before she had met Xiao Tian.
That Silver Dragon King, consumed by hatred and willing to self-destruct, had wanted the Gu Yuena of this life to make up for every regret, and reclaim everything she had lost and missed.
"This..."
Even as a mighty God King who had seen so much, she still felt a tempest rise within her heart. She didn't even know when tears had begun streaming down her face.
It wasn't only the future memories she had gained, but also what they revealed.
She had died.
She had fallen in love.
Her lover had died, too.
This...
Along with her shock, endless questions rose in her mind.
Who is Xiao Tian?
Who are those corpses, and who is Xue'er, mentioned in their conversation?
What exactly happened in the future?
What did Xiao Tian and I do?
Was it an accident, or a conspiracy?
What role did the Divine Realm play in all of this?
The Lord died in battle, so why had she never seen any other powerful Soul Beasts fight?
After a long while, the images...which should now be called memories, continued to unfold.
This time, Gu Yuena didn't resist at all. She was eager, willing, and wholly immersed in them, unwilling to miss even the slightest detail.
One day, while she was sleeping, an unusual surge of energy suddenly jolted her awake.
Though she was in a separate dimension, she had maintained the barest minimum of awareness and attention toward the outside world, in case the Divine Realm tried to scheme against her.
She immediately realized that a Hundred-Thousand-Year Soul Beast was making a sacrifice.
She cautiously extended a few strands of her spiritual power and saw, from afar, a dashing young man with an extraordinarily strange Soul Ring Configuration. He was the very lover for whom she would later go mad, according to her memories.
Though much time had passed, his appearance had hardly changed. Only his aura had grown deeper, like an abyss, after he became a god.
Gu Yuena gazed intently at him, as if trying to see through him.
But at the time, all she noticed was that he had Twin Martial Souls, both exceptionally powerful. Someone capable of reaching Level 90 must surely have Innate Soul Power that was no low figure, either.
Yet his first five Soul Rings were white, yellow, yellow, purple, and black, and his Second Martial Soul even had several purple rings. She couldn't help but laugh in surprise for a moment.
She didn't pay him much more attention. Soon, she looked away and fell back into a deep sleep, using Gold of Life to recover her injuries, divine power, and body.
Time passed without a trace in her sleep. She didn't know how long it had been before she was roused again.
This was the fifth time she had been awakened recently. The previous four times had all been caused by someone becoming a god: the Rakshasa God, Angel God, Sea God, and Asura God, followed by the Martial God just now.
The difference was that the Rakshasa God, Angel God, Sea God, and Asura God had all become gods by inheriting existing godhoods. The Martial God alone had achieved the rare feat of creating his own.
The gap between the two was no less than the difference between a top-scoring student getting full marks in physics on the college entrance exam and Newton establishing classical mechanics or Einstein publishing his theory of relativity.
What was more, the laws represented by the Martial God differed from those of the people who had previously succeeded in creating their own godhoods. They actually supplemented, reformed, and developed the existing cultivation system.
The Sea God had become a god by ruling the sea. Though his godhood was called self-created, in truth he had merely split off a share of the Water God's authority. There was an element of taking a shortcut, and he had surely received substantial support from the Divine Realm.
He could be considered a counterfeit among self-created godhoods, barely qualifying by name.
The Angel God was a little better, but the Divine Realm already possessed the laws of order and justice she represented, so she could be classified under the God of Goodness's divine system.
But the Martial God had condensed a Godhead through an entirely new method of cultivation. His achievement was leagues beyond the other two.
The last person to accomplish something like this had been her Father God, the Dragon God.
Even the mighty Silver Dragon King couldn't take it in stride. She was deeply shaken.
After thinking it over again and again, she made a decision that would shape the rest of her life.
After observing him, Gu Yuena discovered that Huang Tian was a shameless lecher with countless beauties at his side.
So she expended some of her Life Divine Power to create an exceptionally beautiful clone and approach him, hoping to obtain that new method of cultivation.
She wanted to see whether it could speed up her recovery and help her nurture talented Soul Beasts, strengthening her people's foundations.
When two hearts meet in a golden breeze and jade dew, it surpasses countless encounters in the mortal world.
Gu Yuena had never imagined that the clone, who was only meant to be a spy, would actually fall for Huang Tian—deeply—and become fiercely resistant to being taken back.
The clone therefore revealed the existence of Gu Yuena's true body, and Huang Tian came to negotiate with her in person.
Huang Tian used the new cultivation system he had discovered as leverage, forcing her to promise that she would never take her clone back.
Though it pained her to lose some of her power, after weighing the pros and cons, her past self had ultimately agreed.
But what followed left her speechless and furious, feeling deceived.
The so-called new cultivation method first required a human body. Second, it required a man and a woman to cultivate separately and then combine their efforts to activate a part of it. The process was also almost too embarrassing to describe.
Gu Yuena, of course, refused to join in.
Fortunately, there were also some accompanying Martial Skills, along with a few cultivation methods that weren't as powerful as the strongest version but were still somewhat useful. She had managed to gain something, at least.
Still, for an existence at the God King level, it was barely better than nothing.
Before you continue