Clear Spirit and Elegant Bones, Heavenly Dao Foundation Establishment!

The dream dissolved!

But the insight it left behind was as heavy as bedrock, solid and real, branded into his heart.

Perhaps he had immersed himself too deeply!

Yu Ke felt like duckweed drifting through the world. He had braved wind and rain, slept and eaten in the open, and lived through more than fifty years.

The resolve with which he had cultivated in his youth and the steadiness of his old age wove together, scene after scene, in his mind.

"Lu Chen!"

He could not help asking himself, "Is 'Lu Chen' me, or am I 'Lu Chen'?"

This confusion was no clear-eyed glimpse of another person's life flashing past. He had lived it himself, endured a lifetime's rises and falls, and felt every wound cut to the bone.

Zhuang Zhou dreamed he was a butterfly; the butterfly dreamed it was Zhuang Zhou!

The same question rose in Yu Ke's heart: Am I Lu Chen of Mount Zhongnan, or Yu Ke, searching so desperately in this great age of cultivation?

For a moment, identity and self were like the moon in water and flowers in a mirror, too illusory to distinguish.

Fifty years of Lu Chen's joy and anger, love and hatred, and hard-won understanding of cultivation surged over Yu Ke like a tide and swallowed him whole.

It was as though Lu Chen's figure had shoved him into a boundless sea. The surface receded, each breath grew harder, and he sank into the silent depths where no sunlight reached. Darkness surrounded him, and terror filled his chest.

Just as despair took hold!

The massive, ancient Great Cauldron rang out with a thunderous peal. Its deep, far-reaching sound seemed to cross time and space, waking Yu Ke.

Strands of gentle energy wrapped around him like warm spring sunshine, driving away