A World Was Growing Within Penglai Island

The golden sphere of light above Penglai was not a true sun.

At least, not yet.

It was merely a solar-polar node formed when vast amounts of pure yang spiritual qi gathered of their own accord as the laws of heaven and earth gradually improved.

The silvery moon-shadow on the other side was the corresponding lunar-polar node that had come into being.

Yet the appearance of these two nodes alone

already carried an entirely different meaning.

Ordinary blessed grotto-heavens had no need for sun or moon.

For they were inherently attached to the Great Wilderness.

The sun and moon outside shone upon them.

The laws of heaven and earth flowed into them.

They only needed to contain spiritual qi.

A truly independent world was different.

It needed its own yin and yang.

Its own cycle of heaven and earth.

Its own rising and falling spiritual qi.

In the future, it would even need its own seasons, stars, and order of the Great Dao.

And now,

Penglai had finally taken its first step.

Luxuan hovered beneath the vault of heaven.

His divine sense enveloped the entire immortal island.

After the Celestial Court's enormous resources had been integrated into it, Penglai's internal space had expanded several times over. Vast stretches of uninhabited mountains and rivers had even begun to appear along its outermost edges.

These places still looked exceptionally desolate for now.

But the spiritual veins beneath the earth had already connected.

Given time,

they would naturally nurture life on their own.

"Still not enough."

Luxuan murmured softly.

For a world to truly take shape, simple expansion of its area was far from sufficient.

It needed a stable cycle.

With a thought from him,

the Array Dao unfolded.

The great spiritual veins that had originally been scattered throughout Penglai began to be relinked. No longer did they grow haphazardly according to the abundance of resources; instead, they formed a truly complete cycle.

Spiritual qi rose in the east.

It entered the heavens.

After transforming high in the sky, it descended again in the west.

Yin and yang alternated between north and south.

The central earth veins were responsible for stability.

The entire process looked remarkably like an array formation.

But an array required someone to maintain it.

What Luxuan wanted

was for it to eventually break free of his control entirely and operate on its own.

Only that could be called a world.

Yunxiao had seen the mystery within it as well.

She stood atop Enlightenment Cliff.

Watching her master use nearly all of Penglai as an array disc, she could not help sinking into thought.

In the past, she had always believed that her Nine-Bend Cloud River Formation had already broken free from the constraints of fixed array flags and array discs.

But looking at it now,

her master used mountains and rivers as the array.

Spiritual veins as its patterns.

Heaven and earth as its disc.

The entirety of Penglai had become an array.

Such a level

was unfathomably higher than her own.

Yunxiao watched with rapt attention.

Her comprehension of the Array Dao within her Primordial Spirit also began to grow bit by bit.

Luxuan received the feedback at the same time.

The heaven-and-earth spiritual qi cycle he was constructing became increasingly perfect as a result.

The two sides unexpectedly formed another strange kind of mutual complement.

Luxuan taught Yunxiao.

Yunxiao comprehended it.

Luxuan then devoured the results back a hundredfold.

Then he continued improving it.

If the outside world learned of this cycle,

quite a few great powers would probably say that this was fighting without honor.

It was like a master doing practice problems alongside his disciple.

Every time the disciple solved one correctly,

the master directly gained a hundred sets of answer explanations.

How could he lose?

Several more decades passed.

Penglai's first complete spiritual qi cycle finally stabilized.

Buzz—

Boundless spiritual mist rose from the ground.

It condensed into immense clouds high in the sky.

Then it transformed into a spiritual rain that blanketed millions of li as it fell.

Wherever the rain passed,

grass and trees grew wildly.

Spiritual herbs sprouted buds.

Some Innate Spiritual Roots that had only recently been transplanted stretched out their branches and leaves, rapidly adapting to their new environment.

Bixiao spun around once in the rain.

She held out her hand and caught a handful of spiritual rain.

"Master."

"Does this mean we won't need to water the spiritual roots with Three Lights Divine Water anymore?"

Luxuan looked at her.

"When have you ever watered them?"

Bixiao's expression instantly froze.

Yunxiao chuckled softly beside her.

Among the Three Cloud Sisters,

Bixiao loved eating spiritual fruits the most.

Yet the number of times she had actually gone to the spiritual root garden to tend the spiritual plants could be counted on one hand.

A classic case of taking first place at mealtime

and vanishing when it was time to wash the dishes.

Luxuan did not continue teasing her.

Now that Penglai's spiritual qi cycle had stabilized,

it was the perfect time to readjust several of its old cultivation grounds.

The first place:

Enlightenment Cliff.

Luxuan took out the vast number of fragmented Great Dao texts, array diagrams, and cultivation insights from the Celestial Court's treasure vault.

Taken individually, these things varied wildly in quality.

There were Great Luo insights.

There were Taiyi divine abilities.

There were even many inheritances from the Dragon-Han Era that had long since become incomplete.

Luxuan did not have his disciples read through them one by one.

Instead, he directly extracted the truly valuable Great Dao traces within them and integrated them into the area surrounding Enlightenment Cliff.

Tens of thousands of different Dao traces were branded into the mountain walls.

Enlightenment Cliff, already mysterious beyond measure, underwent another transformation.

One stone stele after another rose from the mountain of its own accord.

Array.

Sword.

Fire.

Water.

Space.

Fleshly body.

Traces of all kinds of Great Dao were distributed among them.

Luxuan simply gave the place a more fitting new name.

"Myriad Laws Stele Forest."

When the Three Cloud Sisters comprehended the Dao within it in the future,

they would also leave behind traces belonging to themselves.

If new disciples entered Penglai later on,

they could directly contemplate the paths their predecessors had walked.

There would be no need for everyone to fumble their way forward from scratch.

The second place:

Valley of Years.

This was a special region that had naturally formed after Penglai's internal space expanded.

The laws of space within it were more active than those outside.

Luxuan also combined it with the World Great Dao feedback from Zhao Gongming and slightly adjusted the flow of time.

In the end, he created a fairly stable ratio.

One year outside.

Ten years within the valley.

The moment Bixiao learned of it, she took two steps back.

"Master."

"Does this place mean that once we enter, we'll have to cultivate nine times more?"

Luxuan looked at her.

"You could also understand it as having nine times more time than others."

Bixiao thought about it.

"The first way still sounds scarier."

Zhao Gongming could not hold back his laughter.

If such a sacred cultivation ground were placed outside in the Great Wilderness,

a crowd of Taiyi and Great Luo cultivators would fight until their heads bled for it.

But when it came to Bixiao,

her first reaction was actually overtime work.

For the first time, the thought process of the cultivation world carried the flavor of a wage slave.

The third place was Treasure Cliff.

Luxuan did not alter it much.

He merely placed the Celestial Court's large quantity of new spiritual treasures back within it according to their grades and attributes for nurturing.

The treasure light across Treasure Cliff was now even more outrageous than before.

Standing at the outskirts,

one could no longer make out how many items were hidden inside.

Zhao Gongming went in once.

After coming out, he did not speak for a long while.

He had originally thought that obtaining the twenty-four Sea-Calming Divine Pearls was already extravagant enough.

Only after taking a turn inside did they realize.

Their master truly was not playing favorites.

Penglai was simply that rich.

At this level,

giving disciples a few Innate Spirit Treasures was about the same as an ordinary person taking a couple of candies from a drawer.

The most terrifying part

was the change in the Penglai Origin itself.

As spiritual energy circulated, the yin-yang nodes and world-space stabilized one after another, and a thin World Fetal Membrane began to form on its own around the outermost edge of the immortal island.

It was still exceedingly fragile.

It could not even truly exist apart from the Great Wilderness.

But Luxuan knew

that so long as it continued to be completed,

one day,

Penglai would become an independent world in its entirety.

And when that time came,

even if the heavens and earth of the Great Wilderness changed,

Penglai would not be greatly affected.

Luxuan took a step and arrived at the highest point of the sky.

He looked down over the immortal island, which was still ceaselessly growing.

Yunxiao and the others followed soon after.

Bixiao looked at the newly born golden yang node and silver yin node in the distance, and the usual teasing look was rarely absent from her face.

"Master."

"Will this place truly become a world someday?"

Luxuan nodded.

"It will."

"How big?"

Luxuan glanced at Penglai beneath his feet.

"I do not know yet."

"But since we are doing this,"

"we naturally will not settle for a tiny grotto-heaven that can hold only a few mountains."

Zhao Gongming's heart trembled faintly at those words.

He cultivated the World Great Dao.

More than anyone, he understood the ambition behind those words.

Turning a top-tier immortal island into a true world

was already outrageous enough.

Yet from the sound of it,

this was only the beginning.

Luxuan did not continue painting any grand vision of the future.

Because at the very instant the World Fetal Membrane truly took shape,

deep within the Penglai Origin,

two faint ripples that had never appeared before suddenly crossed the boundless space of the Eastern Sea and entered his perception.

One to the east, one to the west.

Flickering in and out of existence,

yet bearing an aura astonishingly similar to Penglai's.

Luxuan's expression changed at once.

The same origin.

And they could not possibly be ordinary Innate Grotto-Heavens.

He closed his eyes and sensed them for a moment.

Two names slowly surfaced in his mind.

Fangzhang.

Yingzhou.