"What did it feel like?"
Jiang Lu immediately fell silent. The boundless desolation she had felt earlier welled up in her heart, and she slowly spoke:
"Loneliness, darkness, not a trace of life. Across ten thousand miles of darkness, there was only the tree of life, but it did nothing to soothe the loneliness in my heart. It only made me more uneasy."
At her words, tremors radiated through the entire space from the tree of life. Sound began to fill the silent void.
Jiang Lu was deeply puzzled, unsure what the tree of life intended. Surely it had not brought her here merely to make her experience this space's loneliness.
"Do you know?" The tree of life's voice drifted slowly toward her, steeped in desolation. "I have stayed here for over ten thousand years."
Over ten thousand years? The Hundred Blossoms Sacred Ground had existed for more than ten thousand years, and the tree of life had already existed before that. Did it mean it had only come here afterward?
"You guessed correctly."
Jiang Lu's eyes widened at its words. How did it know what she had just been thinking?
"I originally grew here, but after the Hundred Blossoms Sacred Ground arrived, I could no longer gather my source power. They set up a formation and trapped me within it. By chance, I sensed something extraordinary on the other side-the place where we now stand.
"My roots kept extending, kept spreading, until they finally reached this place. I thought I had found a new place to survive, but this turned out to be another space altogether.
"Do you know what it was like when I arrived? There was no less vitality here than in the Hundred Blossoms Sacred Ground. But as I cultivated, all that vitality dissipated, leaving only