Stopping Time for the Entire World

Fire Man lay on the ground, looking thoroughly dead. To avoid being discovered by anyone else and causing unnecessary trouble, Chen Xia quickly left the scene.

The small world was a place for secluded cultivation. He did not want to provoke anything unnecessarily. Even if this small world was weak, there was no need to stir up trouble.

He wandered around the small world. There was nothing special about it, just an ordinary little world with some supernatural powers. Nor did he sense any particularly powerful beings.

The world's will did not reject Chen Xia very strongly, which meant he could stay in this small world for a while, cultivating and contemplating in peace.

After wandering around, he found a spot beneath an overpass to stay, where he could even cover himself with a little blanket. Keeping a low profile and developing steadily was the name of the game.

During this time, other conflicts broke out in the small world.

But none of that concerned Chen Xia. He had not left the space beneath the overpass for half a month straight.

He had been studying his Time Stop all along. After repeated testing, he could now stop time within a three-hundred-meter radius for thirty seconds.

Thirty seconds was enough for him to kill anyone in this small world.

But it was not enough. There was something Chen Xia wanted to do, and a pause of merely thirty seconds was nowhere near enough.

So he began diligently practicing the Giant Turtle Breathing Technique, as well as repeatedly using Time Stop every day.

Practice made perfect. There really was truth to that saying. Chen Xia's Time Stop progressed at a rate of one additional second per day.

It did not seem very fast, but what Chen Xia excelled at most was making a little add up to a lot.

The world's will still rejected him slightly, and Chen Xia had no desire to integrate into this world either. The two sides happened to agree on that, each leaving the other alone.

Everything remained peaceful.

Until the first year.

Chen Xia froze time beneath the overpass, counting the seconds and timing it to the one-year mark to see whether the system would give him a point.

The birds in the sky did not fly, and the dogs on the ground did not bark.

Only Chen Xia sat on his tattered sleeping mat, witnessing the result.

The exact moment arrived.

He turned his Divine Sense inward and clearly saw that his system points had increased by one.

It worked!

Delight showed on Chen Xia's face. He now knew what he needed to do, and every step that followed would be important to him.

He ought to be cautious in unfamiliar surroundings. He wanted to leave himself a fallback in everything.

The Azure Heaven Sword Sea gave him a deeply uneasy feeling.

Old Fisherman had fished him out, after which he had bobbed about in the Sword Sea for a hundred years. He had been powerless to refuse any of it. Even if Old Fisherman wanted to kill him, Chen Xia could only accept his fate.

Within the Azure Heaven Sword Sea, he had no fallback whatsoever.

You could not leave your life hanging on someone else's conscience.

Chen Xia wanted control himself, and the more he thought about it lately, the more he felt something was wrong.

Old Fisherman's reason for fishing him out was that he was a Great Emperor seedling, the only one in his world.

Was that reasonable?

It sounded perfectly reasonable.

But Chen Xia simply did not believe it.

Especially the subsequent descent into the myriad worlds. It sounded like it was for Chen Xia's benefit, and in fact it was quite good for him. But the problem was that Old Fisherman did not know he could allocate points.

If Chen Xia chose to descend into the myriad worlds, it meant he would spend several hundred years in this small world.

In that case, Chen Xia's understanding of the Azure Heaven Sword Sea would be extremely limited.

Did Old Fisherman not want him to learn too much about the Azure Heaven Sword Sea?

Chen Xia did not know, but it never hurt to keep an extra eye open.

One must never let down one's guard against others.

Even when you saw a stray dog by the roadside, you had to worry about it coming up and biting you.

So Chen Xia came up with a plan.

He would stop time for this entire small world!

He would eliminate the shackles of time upon himself, as well as the world's will's rejection of him.

As long as time did not move, he too was a native.

That way, he could leave this wisp of divine thought in the small world to cultivate as an external incarnation, while his consciousness returned to his original body and began exploring the Azure Heaven Sword Sea more. At the very least, he needed a preliminary understanding of it.

This was the first fallback he had been brewing.

If he did this, even if something happened to his original body, Chen Xia could still reincarnate through this wisp of divine thought.

He just did not know whether Old Fisherman could use some great Divine Ability to track down this wisp of divine thought.

Chen Xia felt a little troubled and sighed. It was getting harder and harder for him to slack off now. He had to cultivate and practice diligently every day.

After a year, his Time Stop now covered four hundred meters and lasted six minutes.

Chen Xia made a rough calculation. If he wanted to stop time for the entire small world, it would take about eighty to a hundred years.

The exact time would depend on how quickly his cultivation progressed.

The range and duration of Time Stop expanded and increased every day.

It was a tedious process, one that required constant daily practice.

And as Chen Xia's cultivation realm rose, the number of seconds his Time Stop gained each day also increased, from one second at the beginning to one minute per day now.

That figure was still climbing.

Chen Xia immersed himself in the long river of time just like that. Time around him stopped more and more frequently. Out of twenty-four hours in a day, time might be stopped for twenty-three.

Of course, that was only true for him. To everyone else in the small world, time had not changed at all.

Because they could not perceive time stopping in the first place.

Chen Xia used the points the system gave him to count the years.

It was now the thirtieth year.

He stopped time for the entire city, with each day's Time Stop lasting twenty-three hours and fifty-seven seconds.

The remaining three seconds served as a buffer.

It was still not enough.

Chen Xia needed his Time Stop to last a thousand or even ten thousand years before he could use this wisp of divine thought as a trump card.

His cultivation was now at peak Foundation Establishment, almost at Golden Core.

His progress in the Giant Turtle Breathing Technique was rapid. Reaching Nascent Soul would only take eighty years.

Chen Xia waited, allocating the points he received each year between strength and luck.

Strength was now: 23.9.

Luck: 161.

The seventieth year.

Now, the duration of each day's Time Stop was the entire day.

The world had stopped turning. The old man eating noodles up ahead had held the same noodle-lifting pose for five years.

Chen Xia seemed to have sunk into the long river of time. He began to ponder a question.

What exactly was time?

If it was a long river...

Then could one cross that river and see the past and future?

If so, could one use the present to strike the future?

For example, if I swung a slap now, ten seconds later you would receive that mighty slap across the face, with no way to evade it, suffering indelible psychological harm.

That touched a little on the laws of causality.

This was yet another Great Dao.

Many questions arose in his mind, and he began to think. This was enlightenment concerning time, signifying that he would move from a beginner's grasp to true mastery.

The hundredth year.

The skies of the small world were piled high with the Nascent Soul Lightning Tribulation, but it did not descend.

Because Chen Xia had stopped the entire world.