Wu Pifu did not enter the battle immediately. Instead, he fell into deep thought.
There had been nothing much to note in the first round of arena battles, merely things like boar demons. But from the second round onward, the things that appeared were all those vaguely familiar things from Wu Pifu's memories...
Games, settings, anime, manga, films, television, and so on...
One or two would have been understandable. The Dream World already had similar derivatives, though not many, and most were lost or close to being lost. But three consecutive rounds of this type made the nature of this arena all but obvious.
Were all the civilizations dragged here lost civilizations?
Or rather, did all lost civilizations that had fallen into the Contamination Source no longer exist within a temporal state of past and future? Could the Contamination Source from countless years in the past manifest even civilizations that would only become lost in the future?
If that was the case, then the Contamination Source was very likely a True Rank—or perhaps even higher...
The Bodhi Fruit had roughly described the various traits of a True Rank. Setting aside the authority-related traits Wu Pifu could not comprehend, such as the self being real while external things were false, one of the most important traits was having neither beginning nor end.
Once one attained a True Rank, the past, present, and future would become completely intermingled.
This did not refer to being the sole anchor throughout all corners of the universe, nor did it mean all parallel selves across spacetime and causality becoming one. It meant truly transcending the constraints of every level of spacetime—past as one, present as one, future as one—the authority of supreme freedom.
So... the Contamination Source was at least a True Rank?
Wu Pifu's heart