This was, of course, an Immortal Kingdom that existed only in poetry and legend. Everything carried an air of lofty, ethereal immortality. Pei Ye had seen it many times during their three confrontations, but only now, standing within it, did he discover that it was all an illusion.
Perhaps these things had once existed here, but that was untold thousands of years ago. Pei Ye slowly reached toward the towers and palaces. He touched nothing but cold wind.
The real world revealed its face to him: gold and jade had grown ancient and desolate, exquisite towers had been eroded by wind, and the once ethereal, transcendent immortal mountains and divine realm had long since fallen. For countless years, they had lain buried in snow, becoming old shadows no one visited.
Now they welcomed their first living visitor.
Pei Ye looked around. Vast, cold, silent, lonely. Like an old kingdom that had lost its sovereign, and at its very center stood a peak that reached the heavens.
It towered high above all the now-desolate palaces. Only by lifting his head could he see its lofty heights. It was the sole place that had not fallen into ruin.
Dimly, he could also make out wondrous immortal halls scattered around the peak, each within its own marvelous realm. There were seven in all, clustered in twos and threes around a higher tier closer to the sky, where three majestic great halls stood.
There were no stone waterfalls or winding paths there, only sky, wind, and snow, and perhaps, at night, the starlight of the Nine Heavens.
Those three great halls, in turn, guarded the singular grandeur at the summit.
It loomed faintly amid cloud and mist.
Yet this heaven-reaching peak, too, looked as though no one had set foot upon it for ages.