Broadly speaking, the Nine Provinces World was a circle with a slight curve to it—perhaps. That was only a possibility.
This world stretched without end. Fly east, south, west, or north, and you would eventually enter a vast wasteland. To the west and north lay barren sands; to the east and south, desolate seas.
The wasteland had no apparent end. A Longevity Bearer had once flown through it for decades without reaching its edge. In the end, he had slunk back the way he came, spending decades more on the return trip and arriving as exhausted as a dog.
When people said the Nine Provinces World was roughly circular, they meant that if you treated the wasteland as its boundary, the resulting map was roughly a circle.
As for above and below, beneath lay endless earth—truly endless. You could keep digging forever and never reach the bottom. Above, you would pass through the clouds, the Astral Wind Layer, and the Heavenly Fire Layer before reaching the Extraterrestrial Void. The void was boundless, dotted with countless stars. Seen from there, the Nine Provinces World was merely one star among them.
Strangely, even from inside the Heavenly Fire Layer, you could still see the sun and moon. But the moment you entered the Extraterrestrial Void, they vanished, leaving only the stars.
And that was not all. Ordinarily, nearby things looked large and distant things looked small. From the Extraterrestrial Void, the stars ought to have looked tiny and the Nine Provinces World enormous. Yet that was not what happened. The Nine Provinces World looked like a modest-sized star, merely one so close you could almost touch it.
The Classic of Divine Wonders recorded these matters. Since it was an ancient book from the era of the Sky Hero Dynasty, Longevity Bearers had