Within Immortal City.
Decades of winter cold and summer heat had left no trace of the passing years upon this city.
A hundred years could encompass a person's entire life, yet also be no more than a brief nap for some passing powerhouse.
Time was fair, and merciless.
Beneath it all, the Red Dust Avatar opened his eyes. Wisps of red dust providence flowed around him, but the Dao Heart upon the Spirit Platform he had forged grew ever clearer, like translucent glass, even as it became as cold and indifferent as ice.
Each avatar possessed the distinct qualities of his own Great Dao, for the foundation upon which each had established his path had originally been one of the Great Daos cultivated by the original.
But now, every Great Dao was the original's Dao, yet the figures manifested as avatars each outwardly revealed subtle differences.
Their appearances might have been similar, but the differences in their bearing made them easy to tell apart.
Once the news from that Cosmic Heaven arrived, all of Lu Qing's avatars naturally learned of it.
"Upon the road ahead, the corpse of an ascended immortal."
The Red Dust Avatar opened his cold, indifferent eyes, as though he could see through this message to the giant corpse suffused with endlessly flowing Dao Rhyme.
Ordinarily, after reaching this stage, no corpse should have remained. With even the Great Dao erased, the fact that a physical shell, one of the Three Spirits, could still remain could only mean that those who achieved immortal ascension were even more powerful.
That was a transformation on some deeper level.
The original was walking this road. The avatars could not fully sense the progress of his cultivation, but they knew he had reached a critical moment.
Thus, even as avatars,