Auspicious Cloud Star City.
The instant Zhou Heng's consciousness peeled away from the deepest reaches of Wai Bi Bibirabu's Mind Corridor and receded into his true body like a tide, he found himself standing on a Star Path woven entirely from three-color divine radiance.
The Star Path was brilliant and profound. Red, silver, and deep blue radiance flowed, entwined, and rose beneath his feet like living things, illuminating the entire passage like a sacred stairway leading to an unknown dimension.
Yet Zhou Heng did not hear that familiar call of "Young Master Zhou," tinged with simple honesty and reverence.
His keen intuition pierced the depths of his consciousness like a cold, long needle in the silence.
He sensed something and slowly lowered his gaze toward the direction from which his consciousness had just returned, toward the stretch of Star Path where the three-color divine radiance was thickest, seemingly connected to some invisible corridor.
Wai Bi Bibirabu, rounder and fatter than a fat pig, had silently collapsed on the Star Path at some unknown point.
His mountain-like folds of fat had lost all support and were turning, little by little, into tiny motes of starlight. Like the final flickers of fireflies at the end of a summer night, they quietly and irreversibly returned to the great embrace of the "boundless endless."
The starlight dispersed extremely slowly. Every mote of light that peeled away carried an irrevocable finality, as though silently proclaiming the ruthless enforcement of some established rule.
"This is..."
Zhou Heng murmured softly, without the slightest fluctuation of emotion.
His gaze slowly lifted from the dissolving Wai Bi Bibirabu, and his eyes, as still as an ancient well, looked ahead.
The Three-Color Divine Radiance Star Path on which he stood was not empty.
On either side of the Star Path