Somewhere in Eternal Night, atop a barren mountain peak.
"Bitter End" sat cross-legged and slowly closed his eyes. Though this body had become an other-self aspect, it still retained everything belonging to its original self.
Including its connection to the root origin.
"Excellent. Everything is going as I wished."
Chu Mo smiled faintly, then began sensing it in detail.
At first, all he saw was a stretch of void.
Hazy and indistinct, obscure and fathomless.
Gradually, a faint, almost imperceptible tug came from the depths of the void.
That tug was exceedingly faint. Without Bitter End, he would never have detected it. It was like an invisible thread descending from the unseen, tethered to Bitter End's spirit platform.
Following that tug, Chu Mo slowly extended his consciousness inward.
In an instant, heaven and earth spun.
His consciousness left his body, and his perspective rose uncontrollably. Mountains and rivers shrank to specks, the sea of clouds became a thin mist, and even Eternal Night's great
sun grew more and more distant, smaller and smaller.
Higher, higher, and higher still.
Reality faded away. The Present World vanished.
He seemed to pass through barrier after barrier, crossing boundary after boundary, until he reached an impossibly lofty place. All at once, he felt the Dao's profound mysteries, wondrous beyond words.
The sensation was both familiar and strange. Once, in the Profound Li Treasure Realm, he had experienced something similar.
This was "above heaven," the upper realm, the great void, the spirit realm...
But unlike his last forced entry, this time he had followed Bitter End's connection to the root origin and entered of his own accord.
Chu Mo steadied his mind and looked up.
The spirit realm was boundless, encompassing the entire World Sea. Below, the faint lights and shadows of worlds flickered; above