After leaving the Demon Court, Qing Yi and Nuwa stayed beside a nebula to catch up.
Qing Xuan and Fuxi walked farther away, stopping only when the palaces behind them gradually faded into the starlight.
Fuxi took out a blue stone and set it before him.
On its surface, eight trigram patterns crossed and connected, with some places repeatedly erased and carved anew.
Qing Xuan's gaze lingered on one spot, and he saw that the stroke there did not fit the surrounding Dao patterns.
Fuxi pointed to it.
"This part originally required the primordial spirit to carry it onward. I tried replacing it with a simpler method. More people could use it, but it still couldn't do without a foundation in cultivation."
He explained no further, merely pushing the blue stone forward a little.
Qing Xuan raised his hand, and a wisp of chaos settled onto its surface.
Before Fuxi's eyes, the carvings suddenly lost all distinction between deep and shallow.
The mountains and rivers, sun and moon hidden within the stone, and even the many transformations not yet connected between the trigram patterns, all unfolded at once.
They no longer followed a particular trigram sequence to deduce what lay ahead, but instead retreated deeper along the paths from which each had come.
The clear and the turbid mingled; yin and yang had yet to divide.
Fuxi instinctively condensed the Primordial Trigrams, only to see Qing Xuan's palm turn gently, returning all eight rays of trigram light, along with the myriad phenomena that had yet to take shape, to chaos.
His raised hand stopped in midair.
The Dao he had painstakingly cultivated for so many years lay before his eyes in its entirety.
Even the subtle connections he habitually set in motion without ever deliberately distinguishing them were illuminated one