"..." Feng Jiu's expression turned slightly odd.
Even great divine ability users had to rush to get somewhere?
And they arrived late, only to see a Demon Ancestor in the Heavenly Court solo-kill the Heavenly Emperor?
What was that about?
Had that Demon Ancestor invoked some mysterious power of spoken words and told a whole crowd of great divine ability users-you lot can't outrun me, believe it or not?
"The Heavenly Emperor was well-liked, right?" he suddenly asked out of the blue.
Admittedly, the system had screwed him over a little at the start, dumping him into a nest of assassins. He had spent decades amid bloody winds and rains, where either he killed them or they killed him. He had endured plenty of days licking blood off a blade's edge, his heart perpetually in his throat.
But weren't things looking up now?
Even at the beginning, the system had only gotten greedy to smooth his path, snatching a Lotus Seed. As a result, it had been beaten offline for years before it could even hand over his study materials, leaving Feng Jiu to suffer considerably.
Now things had changed. The road ahead seemed as boundless as the sea and sky. Feng Jiu figured that once his divine arts reached perfection, he could return home in glory, enter the Heavenly Court, and become the Heavenly Emperor. Why not?
But!
Being the Heavenly Emperor couldn't be a high-risk occupation!
Take the throne today, die tomorrow?
That didn't sound too good, did it?
If that was how things worked, he felt he could live perfectly well by remaining in this realm, spreading Lady Houtu's Reincarnation legacy far and wide, and caring for a certain sick old man on the Plateau in his twilight years...
So what if red hair grew all over his body and ill fortune plagued his old age?
Red hair was a sign of transcendence!
"...The Heavenly Emperor should have been well-liked, right?" System 999 seemed to scratch its head as it recalled the past, searching its remaining data. "Wherever human footsteps reached, none failed to submit; his achievements surpassed the Five Emperors, his blessings reached even cattle and horses; all received his grace and dwelled peacefully beneath their own roofs..."
"Across the vast Primordial World, all living beings, heaven and earth, gods and ghosts revered and obeyed him..."
The system spoke in extravagant terms, describing just how exalted and majestic the Heavenly Emperor had been.
Unfortunately, it was all too vague.
That wasn't its fault, either.
Ultimately, it was a mass-produced little system that had only recently been born. It had barely graduated from prenatal education before being sent out to work. A complete newbie in the world of systems-what could it possibly know?
Feng Jiu shook his head regretfully, abandoning the idea of asking the system about the Primordial World's secrets. Instead, he focused on the Nuwa Inheritance.
The system might have been a newbie, but the study materials it provided were extraordinary. They could actually adapt naturally to all manner of heavenly and earthly laws and cultural ideas, reflecting and manifesting their contents in an accessible form.
Otherwise, Feng Jiu, a complete illiterate who had never received an orthodox cultivation education in his home realm, might have struggled to understand them.
The inheritance was so vast that even an entire universe, or a whole expanse of heavens, could hold no more than a single hair from nine oxen.
Yet it could also condense into one simple point, from which flowed the wisdom and mysteries Feng Jiu needed.
The utmost complexity and the utmost simplicity found unity here.
It was like the simplest circle. Pick up a compass and casually draw one, and it came into being with ease. Anyone could do it.
But if you wanted to calculate its circumference-to-diameter ratio, go ahead. Everyone who tried ended up falling silent.
You could calculate until you died and still never finish, because it was an "irrational" number, infinite and inexhaustible, never falling into a repeating cycle.
And precisely because it was infinite and inexhaustible, leaving nothing out, every permutation and combination could exist within it. It encompassed every order and revealed its "rational" side; all one needed was the corresponding key to pinpoint the desired node.
Feng Jiu fell into a daze, feeling an indescribable impact. For one fleeting instant, something stirred within him, and from a commanding height, he grasped the essence and true meaning of cultivation in the world revealed by this inheritance.
It was incredible, yet entirely natural.
Cultivation had always been this way: a true scripture fit on a single page, while false teachings filled ten thousand volumes.
Just like the world he currently inhabited. To reach its pinnacle, one actually needed only to grasp a few key words.
"Rise amid ruin, revive amid annihilation!"
Opening paths of evolution, reaching the end of the Dao Ancestor's road-all of that was merely outward appearance. What mattered was whether one could align with that single true teaching and comprehend the spirit of this realm's earliest source.
The deeper that comprehension, the greater one's future achievements!
Of course, it was easy to say and hard to do. One misstep, and ruin and annihilation became all too real. It was a walk along a tightrope.
The world where Feng Jiu had been born also had an overarching principle for all cultivation. The "irrational" was chaos, the "rational" was the Primordial World, and the two were fundamentally one. Fully comprehend their principles and unite the mysteries of being and nonbeing, and one could attain the eternal state of the Great Luo!
In chaos, they were demon gods; within heaven and earth, they were divine beings... The Dao Fruit of every great achiever unfolded infinite mysteries. Only their modes of expression differed, while all could remain eternally free throughout endless space and time.
"I'm suddenly starting to understand why my little system could take me across worlds..." Feng Jiu's thoughts turned, and he grew contemplative.
"Different worlds might have different orders at their very foundations. Every rule could be turned completely upside down, with nothing in common..."
"But my little system's code is flexible and adaptable too. If the format of the original world's laws isn't supported, it just transcodes... Wait, don't tell me one of the great divine ability users who created systems in my home world was a bald algorithm programmer?"
"Of all things in the world, only change never changes..."
Feng Jiu remained stunned for a long while. Finally, he shook his head and sank that moment's inspiration into the depths of his sea of consciousness.
That was far too distant.
He could barely walk properly yet, and he was already thinking about flying?
He was dreaming a little too much.
And clearly, even the Nuwa Inheritance agreed.
Its chapters did not begin by teaching novices how to create humans... Otherwise, a later student who mishandled things would pose no threat whatsoever to Lady Nuwa's standing in the domain of creation, but could utterly ruin her reputation in the domain of education.
Before creating humans, what Feng Jiu first needed to learn was... how to be human.
He had to understand "himself" thoroughly before he could even glimpse the threshold of creation's domain and venture deeper into it.
A tiny human body, a vast work of creation.
Where did humans come from?
From a father's essence and a mother's blood, nourished by heaven and nurtured by earth.
Every life conceived through the union of yin and yang was a miracle born of the combined efforts of its ancestors and heaven and earth!
From the tiniest clump of flesh-and-blood essence, it followed the mysteries of heaven and earth's creation and carried the unfolding of the universe's Great Dao. Thus it took its initial shape, developed organs, acquired both body and spirit, and finally left its mother's body to enter the world.
Almost from nothing to something, a source of life was created out of thin air!
One needed only to comprehend a little of the principles involved, returning one's state of life to a fresh gestational phase and resetting its factory settings, to let the human body's life source break through its original shackles and grow stronger!
This was called-Reverse to the Ancestral State!
An increase in quantity-this was
a transformation that began with heaven and earth's creation, reenacting gestation within the mother's body!
But this was only one direction.
Besides heaven and earth, one also had to consider one's parents and ancestors!
"I am myself, yet I am not merely myself..."
"Within my body is the convergence of the life factors of every ancestor across the generations. Each has left their own imprint..."
Feng Jiu faintly grasped something. He seemed to see a river-a river of life, a river of time-which then, hazily, transformed into a... family tree!
Upon that family tree were generation after generation of ancestors. Each person's traits had combined during the union of yin and yang that conceived life, then been passed down, generation after generation.
The vast majority of those traits were hidden and dormant. Those floating on the surface manifested as the characteristics of this body.
Revive them, refine them, integrate and elevate every trait, and thereby achieve a qualitative transformation.
This was called-Bloodline Ancestral Return!