When Jiang Ding decided to leave, heaven and earth shifted around him. Stars wheeled and changed, the rules of the Great Dao transformed, and matter, spiritual energy, and divine sense took on another, higher-dimensional form, one similar to the Nine Heavens.
Time changed.
It seemed like an instant, yet also like eternity.
Jiang Ding closed his eyes and opened them again. Before him stretched the night sky of the Heavenly Horse Star Domain. He was at the point in this star domain where changes in the Heavenly Dao's rules were greatest, the place best suited to observation and recording.
He sat cross-legged there, his black-and-white eyes flickering as he used his sword soul to record this region's Heavenly Dao data.
"...By morning, I roam Fallen Immortal Night; by dusk, I lodge in Blood Sea Heaven..."
Jiang Ding gazed into the starry sky, recalling those words.
They were recorded among the offerings of the Black Tortoise Heavenly Palace, a scrap left from an unknown age. Without a beginning or an end, they were difficult to understand.
In the past, he had thought nothing of them. The world held countless folk customs and songs, and every sapient species had its own. Not every verse could be traced to its source.
Now, though, he seemed able to make out a faint trace.
"If..."
"I mean, if..."
Jiang Ding murmured, "If, in the age when immortals walked the world, there was some kind of high-speed passage connected to the Nine Heavens—one that drastically shortened the distances across the endless stars and turned them into a village, with highly developed transport, communication, and immortal-Dao technology... Perhaps that verse came from such an advanced immortal-Dao society."
"After ages passed, that magnificent immortal-Dao miracle collapsed, leaving only this faint trace."
As he pondered, the Supreme Great Sun