The instant Zhou Heng successfully advanced from level 500,000 to 500,001...
The originally dark and deathly silent Fourth and Fifth Expansions began to revive.
That revival was not gradual. Instead, it began in an instant, as though someone had pressed a restart button.
Darkness began to dissipate at the edges, slowly receding like an ebbing tide and revealing the outlines of spatial structures that had once existed.
The "Boundless Star Pillars" that represented the foundations of the two expansions...
No longer under the control of the "Lord of Compassion · ...%￥%...￥ · (*^▽^*) · (•́へ•́╬) · Yixuxi," they began to descend slowly toward their original positions.
Those two towering star pillars tilted and sank slowly through the void like two colossal towers that had lost their support...
Finally, they settled firmly into the deepest reaches of the Fourth and Fifth Expansions, returning to the positions where they should have stood since time immemorial.
But unlike when he had first seen the "Boundless Star Pillars," there were no longer any membranes of living beings compressed flat like pancakes on their surfaces.
Their smooth surfaces were completely bare. The trillions upon trillions of souls and lives once packed onto them had all disappeared.
It was as though everything had been reset at that moment.
Then, countless rays of colored light began to emerge from the deathly darkness, soaring skyward...
Red, orange, yellow, green, cyan, blue, purple, white, black!
Nine pillars of differently colored light rose from different locations throughout the Fourth and Fifth Expansions, until they converged into nine colored barriers dividing the ten chapters.
Those barriers stood in the void like nine enormous prisms, precisely dividing the reborn world into ten independent chapter regions.
Then, entirely new living beings began to be born within those divided spaces.
The first wisp of