Chaos.
Ever-changing chaos filled his sight, boundless and indescribable. Every measure dissolved into nothing here. Greatness was no longer great, smallness no longer small, and all contradictions vanished.
The seven-apertured Divine Man trudged alone through it. How much time had passed? Ten thousand years? Or perhaps only an instant? Time was indistinct within chaos; he could sense it only through the Jianwu Horn.
At last, something changed within the chaos. Time flowed, illusory light shifted, and something resembling a beacon faintly emerged.
It was a Mystic Stele built from countless fragments of shattered space and mystic stone, containing silver-gray runes as numerous as the stars. "Void" alone could not explain its greatness. Elucidation, deduction, verification... all manner of mysteries concerning the essence of the Great Dao operated within it, like the mind and consciousness of heaven and earth given tangible form.
On its yang-facing side were four pieced-together characters, which read:
[Self-verification, self-elucidation]
On its yin-facing side were four characters added afterward, which read:
[Neither guilt nor merit]
Amid the flickering illusory light, he could faintly see a towering Divine Palace, a Heavenly Deity seated on high, scourging the mortal world with thunder; then a Dao Deity slain, calamities descending, and the authority of the Heavenly Dao changing hands; then Abolish the Old Year and Remove the Old, cutting away the primordial, with countless monsters and spirits executed; or blood staining the Nine Provinces, sinful karma manifesting, and one man confronting the Northern Palace alone. Finally came a blaze of golden greater yang light, burning everything away.
Though the divine mechanism within this object had been destroyed, Great Luminary had reforged it, restoring a trace of its supreme power to deduce heaven and earth and calculate the Great Dao.
An Immortal Lord's Dao Verification!
Holding the Book of Circulating Six