Causality III

The carriage rolled onward. Lin Xin sat inside the cabin, and before long, he felt it tremble slightly and come to a stop.

Whoosh...

The carriage door slowly slid open, revealing a pristine landscape of green mountains and clear waters outside.

Lin Xin stepped out of the carriage and swept his gaze around.

Several strange people with heads growing from their hips were working in the terraced fields nearby.

The moment they saw him emerge from the carriage, they were all struck dumb with fright.

"&&#!%%&!!"

After a string of gibbering ghost cries, the three freaks threw down their hoes and fled.

Lin Xin did not know what country he had arrived in this time, but judging by those freaks' appearances, it seemed somewhat like the Headless Country.

He did not care what country it was. What he needed to do was find Hong Ye at once.

Standing amid the mountain forest, Lin Xin raised his head and looked toward the sky.

A flicker of red light flashed through his pupils.

At once, winds and clouds shifted. Black clouds rapidly spread across the sky in every direction, like ink dripping into clear water.

"This time, I'd like to see just how many layers the Nether Prefecture has."

Lin Xin raised a hand and lightly slashed upward.

Rip!!!

In an instant, the sky tore open as though a sharp blade had sliced a huge wound into it.

The inside of the wound was bright red, while bloody flesh on either side continually writhed and rolled.

Lin Xin stamped his foot, soaring into the air and charging into the enormous wound.

As he rushed onward, the wound continued to spread and split deeper within.

He did not know how long or how deep he had flown.

With a wet splat.

The view before Lin Xin suddenly opened up, and he had actually burst straight into another vast space.

It was a scorching crimson land covered in magma and black stone.

"Hong Ye, I'm here!"

Lin Xin called out loudly.

His voice formed ring after ring of shockwaves that echoed endlessly throughout the world.

The thunderous sound was immense. If Hong Ye truly could see him, he would surely come out to meet him as quickly as possible.

Unfortunately, there was not the slightest response.

Without pausing, Lin Xin shot toward the sky above this world.

Fresh black clouds appeared and blanketed the heavens once more, while another bloody wound split open at their center.

Roar...

A faint, violent roar drifted from the void, as though some utterly terrifying existence had been thoroughly enraged by Lin Xin.

Boom!

Countless black flames abruptly ignited around the wound in the clouds, spreading everywhere. Dense white eyes leaped within the firelight.

Countless white eyes all turned toward Lin Xin.

"Eee... eee..."

As though children were crying out together, every eye emitted a shrill, piercing noise.

Countless invisible soundwaves gathered together, forming an unseen, gigantic horse-headed humanoid giant in the air.

The giant gripped chains in his hands, with a white horse's head atop his body and powerful iron-cast muscles all over him.

He stood ten thousand meters tall. Concealed beneath the cover of the noise, he lightly flung the invisible chains in his hand toward Lin Xin.

The chains coiled toward Lin Xin's body.

"Courting death!"

Lin Xin grabbed backward with one hand. Countless rays of red light immediately burst forth, as if a blazing crimson sun had exploded in his palm.

The wound in the clouds was blasted even wider. Countless white eyes were injured and shattered.

The enormous horse-headed man formed from sound, chains and all, was instantly blown to pieces by the red light.

Roar!!!

Waves of pained howls, like those of an injured beast, faintly came from deep within the clouds.

Lin Xin accelerated and shot upward.

Nothing could stop him.

Everything before him split apart on its own, revealing a blood-red passage.

Black fire and white eyes screamed from both sides of the passage, trying to close in around him.

But it was futile.

The vast and mighty red radiance dissolved everything that dared approach into bloody water, devouring it and making it part of Lin Xin.

Rip!

Another layer of the world was torn open.

Lin Xin simply increased his speed.

Rip! Rip! Rip! Rip!!

In an instant, more than a hundred worlds flashed past him.

The blood-red passage before him also grew smaller and narrower.

With a slight tremor, his body accelerated once again.

One world after another swept past him. After an unknown length of time, he suddenly seemed to feel an incomparably thick elastic barrier blocking his path.

The first time he struck it, he actually failed to shatter it completely.

At the center of the blood-red passage, an invisible wall stood before him, and a gigantic black mouth emerged upon its surface.

A pitch-black crow also flew in from somewhere beside the mouth.

The crow was a thousand meters long, its eyes hollow sockets billowing black smoke.

"La Gu Mu! La Gu Mu!" the crow cried out in a strange voice.

"Move aside!"

Lin Xin stared at the black mouth and crow before him.

"La Gu Mu! La Gu Mu!!" the crow screamed.

Unfortunately, the Nether Prefecture still possessed no consciousness. It merely followed its instincts in stopping Lin Xin from entering its deepest core.

"Seeking your own doom." Lin Xin drew the first longsword from behind his back—the Sword of Joy.

He casually swept the blade forward.

Rip!

A terrifying red light surged forth like a tidal wave, mixed with countless ghastly pale smiling faces that shrieked with laughter as they pounced at the mouth and crow.

The crow and the mouth lunged madly at the red light. Countless white eyes spread across their bodies, making them look from afar like two enormous creatures formed entirely from white eyeballs.

"Everything you have is nothing but an illusion in my eyes," Lin Xin said casually.

The moment his words fell, the crow and the mouth's physical forms swiftly began to turn illusory and transparent.

The red light passed through their bodies and struck the wall behind them directly.

Boom!!!

For a moment, space seemed to shudder violently.

To the current Lin Xin, so long as something was not a Primordial One in essence, all power and attacks could be illusions in his eyes.

All factors detrimental to him could become illusions.

And all factors beneficial to him could become reality.

Enhanced and elevated by his own attributes, his Origin Realm was now expanding at an extremely terrifying rate.

Especially after Lin Xin inherited the throne, he directly declared the Origin Realm to be a newly discovered dimensional space of the two great empires.

With the awareness of countless billions throughout the galaxy lending it strength, the Origin Realm's rate of amplification and expansion grew faster by the day.

This world, which had originally existed only within the illusions of living beings, had now become a near-real world built from the thoughts and spirits of countless people.

As the Origin Realm developed, Lin Xin gradually began pondering a question.

"For thought, space and time can both be manipulated at will. Within one's own fantasies, everything can be controlled, increased, or reduced as one pleases.

"Then the Origin Realm, built from thought, was essentially a world determined by the will in people's hearts.

"If people firmly believed in something, and they could pass that belief on to the minds of more builders, it would form a storm capable of affecting the entire world, achieving the reality they desired."

Lin Xin watched as the ocean-like halo of red sword light broke through the invisible wall and destroyed the crow and the mouth.

Yet his mind had begun contemplating the mysteries of the mind and the world.

"In the material world, in the real world, if people could persist in believing in a conviction, they would pay greater attention to gathering and seizing every factor that could make that conviction come true.

"Then, through accumulation, that conviction might gradually become reality to a significant extent.

"Of course, that was only for beliefs that did not depart from reality."

Lin Xin took a slow step forward. He moved so quickly that even light could not catch him. In the blink of an eye, he crossed countless distances, passed through the invisible wall, and entered the small world beyond.

"Then where exactly lay the difference between the real world and the world of illusions? At the highest level, weren't people's control over their own actions and their influence on the laws of the world essentially similar?"

"Were the mysteries of cosmic space-time ultimately of the mind, or of matter?"

Lin Xin rapidly tore through the vast black mist before him and finally arrived at a place that had once been extremely familiar to him.

Lion Plain.

Lion Plain had now become an unbroken stretch of black mountain ranges.

On the highest mountain stood white ruins, within which faintly visible strange people knelt on the ground, kowtowing toward the sky.

These strange people did not have a single strand of hair on their bodies. Their eyes were vacant, and their faces bore numb expressions of despair and pain.

Lin Xin looked down. White ruins dotted the land everywhere, with clusters of bonfires burning inside them.

Beside the fires stood groups of strange people holding hands. Men and women alike wore no clothes, their naked bodies meaning nothing to them as they danced strange dances around the bonfires.

Without a word, Lin Xin flew straight toward the highest peak.

There, a gigantic humanoid shadow more than ten meters tall was bound amid the ruins atop the mountain. It seemed to have discovered Lin Xin's arrival long ago and quietly watched him approach.

"Welcome, esteemed Icebreaker."

The shadow's towering body bent slightly as it bowed to Lin Xin.

"Where is Hong Ye? Where are the other Sword Masters?"

Lin Xin could not be bothered with nonsense. He knew this shadow.

To him now, the other party's essence held no secrets whatsoever.

This shadow's true physical body had long since been devoured by something, leaving only this mass of shadow alive until now.

Yet because it had been imprisoned for too long, it had already become a madman with a broken mind.

"This is the Land of Despair. Other than Despairers, I have never seen anyone else," the shadow answered respectfully.

"Then this is the deepest core of the Nether Prefecture?"

Lin Xin continued asking.

"Yes. This is the heart of the Nether Prefecture, its most important place, and a dead land where one enters but never leaves," the shadow said, seeming perfectly normal at present.

"Is that so?"

Lin Xin stared at the shadow before him.

"Yes, my lord," the shadow replied respectfully.

"Since this is already the deepest core, then where does the door within your body lead?"

Lin Xin suddenly asked.

"!!!"

The shadow's entire body jolted, and it tried to disperse at once and vanish into hiding.

"Open it." Lin Xin pointed a finger.

The shadow immediately froze in the midst of dispersing. A battered bronze door slowly emerged at the center of its body.

Wisps of black smoke seeped through the cracks in the door.

The black smoke continuously merged into the shadow's body, seemingly the very reason it had survived for so long.