Time was collapsing.
The universe was collapsing.
This fragment of the past, this harvested span of history, gradually faded away.
He did not know how long had passed.
Jiang Ding slowly opened his eyes.
Sunlight shone brightly around him, and a hundred flowers bloomed. Amid them stood ruins that had remained unchanged for years: the remnants of a battlefield he had created with his own hands.
"This is..."
"The Fallen Realm... the Spirit-Sealing Forbidden Domain!"
Jiang Ding spent a long time taking in everything around him.
This was the Fallen Immortal Realm, where he had first entered the Time Rift. He had chosen it because it was farthest from the Big Dipper Ancient Road, so any enemy tracking him would be less likely to pinpoint the Immortal Sect's coordinates and endanger it.
"How many years have passed?"
Jiang Ding began to think.
Time in the Time Rift did not run in step with the present. History offered many precedents: sometimes an eternity in a Time Rift amounted to an instant outside; sometimes tens of thousands of years passed, or more than a hundred thousand. The Dao of time was too mysterious and unpredictable, and the cultivation world's research into it remained shrouded in uncertainty.
If more than a hundred thousand years had passed—or several hundred thousand—that would be terrible.
Jiang Ding swept his divine sense across his surroundings and made a quick calculation using the constants of the Immortal-Dao Universe.
It was one of the most fundamental methods of measurement, impervious to ninety-nine percent of illusions and usable anywhere beneath the endless stars.
"Twenty-nine thousand, one hundred and twenty-seven years."
"Not bad."
Jiang Ding breathed a small sigh of relief.
Nearly thirty thousand years was not yet enough for everything to change beyond recognition.
Of course, that was only time