[When you learned that the black-robed Ancestor God had taken you out of the chaos world, your face darkened.]
[You had been counting on your grandfather, a World Realm expert, to rescue you. But now that you learned the black-robed Ancestor God had taken you into the chaos, you were overcome with despair.]
[You knew that although a World Realm expert was immensely powerful, finding a single person in the boundless chaos was impossible. It would be like fishing a needle out of the sea.]
[At that thought, you could only do your utmost to improve your strength, so you would not be utterly helpless when you faced the person who had abducted you.]
[And so, in the days that followed, you devoted yourself wholeheartedly to cultivation.]
[Unable to gain insights into the Dao, you decided to focus on cultivating Fiendgod Body Refining and Ki Refining techniques.]
[Ten years passed like this. At the age of 150, you raised your Ki Refining cultivation to Early Primal and cultivated a Second Primaltwin using a Qiantian Fire Spirit Pearl from within the Moonspirit Bracelet as its vessel.]
[At the same time, your Fiendgod Body Refining broke through from Early Primal to Mid Primal.]
[Unlike Fiendgod Body Refining, the Ki Refining Path only required sufficient resources to raise one's cultivation straight to Late Void Return before undergoing the tribulation, but you did not do so.]
[You had discovered that, because your insights into the Dao were lacking, you could not wield your primal power as freely as your own limbs.]
[Moreover, the stronger your Ki Refining cultivation grew, the worse the problem became.]
[To keep your Ki Refining cultivation from becoming a burden, you ultimately raised it only to Early Primal, a stage at which you could still barely control your primal power.]
Unable to control his primal power because his insights into the Dao were lacking...
Seeing the information in the simulation, Zhou Qing pondered for a moment.
This had also been recorded in the original work.
When Ji Ning went to the Twenty-Seven Worlds of Fuju to cultivate the Wubao Sword Art in the original work, he learned of its peculiar nature.
After cultivating the Wubao Sword Art, a cultivator would gradually forget all insights into the Dao except those of the Sword Dao.
Moreover, the further a cultivator progressed in the Wubao Sword Art, the faster he would forget.
And whether one followed the Ki Refining Path or the Fiendgod Body Refining Path, insights into the Dao were needed as the foundation of one's cultivation.
For example, on the Fiendgod Body Refining Path, an Empyrean God needed an ordinary Dao as the foundation to construct his divine body, a True God needed a Grand Dao, and an Ancestor God needed a Heavenly Dao.
The same principle applied to a Ki Refiner's Celestial Immortal golden core, Pure Yang Jindan, and Great Firmament golden core.
If someone cultivating the Wubao Sword Art forgot the Dao used to construct his divine body or form his golden core,
a Fiendgod Body Refiner's divine power would fall into disorder, and his divine body would collapse, reducing him to a heap of rotten flesh.
A Ki Refiner would fare even worse: he would immediately suffer Qi deviation, lose control of his magic power, and explode like a giant firework.
Although his simulated self had not yet passed the Heavenly Tribulation and could not be compared with Celestial Immortals, True Immortals, or Ancestor Immortals, the principle was the same.
Since his simulated self was not in a chaos world, his insights into the Dao were practically nonexistent. It was only natural that, after advancing to Primal, he could not wield his primal power as freely as his own limbs.
[Unable to make progress on the Ki Refining Path, you devoted more attention to Fiendgod Body Refining.]
[Forty years later, your Fiendgod Body Refining cultivation rose from Mid Primal to Peak Primal.]
[To achieve a breakthrough, you began refining your divine power and divine body. Another ten years passed, and during your daily cultivation, you caught a flash of inspiration and naturally broke through to Void Return.]
[That year, you were 200 years old.]
[Just as you were rejoicing over the progress in your cultivation, a sudden change occurred in the estate-world treasure that imprisoned you.]
[You saw tiny black cracks begin to appear at the edges of the estate-world treasure. The cracks quickly spread to every corner of the estate world, and after a violent tremor, the entire estate world fell apart with a crash.]
[In an instant, the estate-world treasure was destroyed, and violent currents of chaotic space and time surged toward you.]
[You chose: one, use a protective treasure; two, hide inside the Moonspirit Bracelet.]
Seeing the options presented by the simulation panel, Zhou Qing chose the second without hesitation.
A protective treasure? What protective treasure could compare to a Supreme Xiantian Spirit-Treasure itself?
After all, it generally took a World God to destroy a Supreme Xiantian Spirit-Treasure.
Of the protective treasures he possessed, never mind meeting the threshold of the World Realm, only a handful could withstand an attack from a peak Ancestor God.
[In the nick of time, you hid in the estate world within the Moonspirit Bracelet. Protected by the Xiantian Spirit-Treasure, you emerged unscathed.]
[Then you found a flying boat that was a Supreme Xiantian Spirit-Treasure inside the Moonspirit Bracelet and piloted it out of the violent currents of chaotic space and time.]
[Leaving the area affected by the currents, you arrived in an unfamiliar region of the chaos.]
[There, you saw four or five enormous ruined worlds. They were slowly being eroded and dissolved by the power of chaos, and in the process, tiny bubble-like worlds were born amid the destruction.]
[Under the erosion of chaos, these bubble worlds had lifespans of varying lengths. The shortest vanished into the chaos after a few breaths, while the longest could last for centuries.]
[When a bubble world was destroyed, it would produce violent currents of chaotic space and time that destroyed everything around it.]
[Seeing this, you immediately realized that the currents of chaotic space and time that had just destroyed the estate-world treasure imprisoning you had probably been caused by the destruction of a bubble world.]
[You then understood why the black-robed Ancestor God who had abducted you had not killed you immediately, but instead left you to fend for yourself inside the estate-world treasure. He had intended to use the harsh conditions here to finish you off.]
So that was it.
Zhou Qing nodded.
Afraid of being struck by a blood curse, the black-robed Ancestor God had not dared to kill him personally and had instead chosen to use the dangers of the chaos to wipe him out.
But... why did the description of this place sound so familiar...?
Gazing at the information displayed on the simulation panel, Zhou Qing fell into thought.
Enormous ruined worlds... bubble worlds born amid destruction... currents of chaotic space and time produced after their destruction...
Could this... be the Realm Ruins?
As if something had occurred to him, Zhou Qing felt a jolt of shock.
The Realm Ruins was a perilous place within the Nine Directions Chaos Kingdom. He had seen records concerning it in the Maha Sect's collection of books.
The Realm Ruins was exactly what its name implied: the ruins of worlds.
And the worlds in question were not the large and small worlds nurtured within chaos worlds, but the chaos worlds themselves.
Generally speaking, after naturally declining over the course of a chaos cycle, a chaos world would undergo the Great Destruction, returning all the matter and living beings within it to the chaos.
Once everything had perished, the heart of the chaos world would absorb the power of chaos and begin nurturing a new chaos world.
But that was on the condition that no outside force interfered.
If a powerful expert wreaked widespread havoc inside a chaos world, its decline would accelerate, and the Great Destruction would arrive ahead of time.
This was especially true of World Realm experts. Such beings only needed to employ a little of their power to bring about a chaos world's Great Destruction prematurely.
If they went a step further and took away the heart of the world-the core of the chaos world-then the chaos world would become a dead world, never again to be reborn or destroyed.
Several World Realm experts in the Nine Directions Chaos Kingdom, including the King of Nine Directions, had destroyed the chaos worlds of several enemy states and taken their world-hearts for purposes such as crafting treasures and cultivating divine abilities.
The remains of those chaos worlds were piled together in a region near the Nine Directions Chaos Kingdom, forming the famous perilous place known as the Realm Ruins.
Because those chaos worlds had been suddenly destroyed by World Realm experts, many powerful experts had failed to escape in time, and many treasures had been left behind. Thus, in the beginning, even though the Realm Ruins was extremely dangerous, numerous wandering cultivators entered it in search of treasure.
But as the treasures within the Realm Ruins were gradually plundered and grew ever scarcer, the risks of entering began to outweigh the rewards. As a result, the Realm Ruins gradually became a perilous place in the Nine Directions Chaos Kingdom that no one cared to visit.