A Great Dream

The affairs of the world were one great dream; how many autumn chills did a lifetime hold?

Xiao Yan opened his eyes to the familiar sight of blue-green bed curtains, a faint medicinal fragrance lingering at his nose. He sat bolt upright. Dou Qi flowed freely through his body, and the Flame Mantra circulated without obstruction-he had returned to his residence in the Endless Fire Domain of the Great Thousand World.

A fierce dizziness seized him, as if his soul had just plunged from a thousand-mile height and slammed back into this familiar shell. His heart pounded in his chest, battering his ribs, each beat as clear as a drum. He instinctively gripped the armrests of the hardwood chair beneath him, his knuckles turning white. The rough grain pressed against his skin, so real it stung.

Decades of bizarre memories churned wildly in his mind: the joys and sorrows, partings and reunions of another world, the arduous cultivation that had made him a god, separation from those he loved, desires left unfulfilled... Yet those images, once hot as branding irons, now cooled and blurred at a dizzying speed. Like a receding tide, they slipped away from the sands of his consciousness, beyond his grasp, impossible to hold.

Outside the window came the shouts of his clansmen at their morning exercises. Everything was exactly as it had been before he left. It was as though that heart-stopping journey to another world, those years on the Douluo Continent spent pitting Heavenly Flames against Soul Power, had been nothing more than a dream during an afternoon nap.

He held out his palm. His fingertips still seemed to tingle from his clash with Tang San, and he could almost smell the damp air peculiar to the Star Dou Great Forest. Gu Yue's clear laughter seemed to echo faintly in his ears. Those comrades who had entrusted their lives to one another, those battles fraught with peril, those days and nights spent feeling his way forward in another world-could they really have been an illusion?

Xiao Yan pushed open the door and stepped outside into the dazzling sunlight. Yao Lao drifted over and asked with a smile whether his cultivation had gone smoothly that day. Xiao Yan opened his mouth to tell him about the Douluo Continent, but did not know where to begin. Set against the real world, those experiences suddenly became vague and unreal, like the moon in water or flowers in a mirror, scattering at a touch.

"Master, do you believe... that people have past and present lives, or that... parallel worlds exist?" Xiao Yan finally could not help asking.

Yao Lao stroked his beard and smiled. "The Great Thousand World holds every wonder imaginable. Above the Dou Di realm, who can say they understand the mysteries of the universe?" He gave Xiao Yan a meaningful look. "But in life, what matters isn't whether an experience was real or false, but what understanding it leaves us with."

Xiao Yan stood frozen, suddenly understanding something. Whether that experience had been real or a dream no longer mattered. What mattered was that, in that "dream," he had learned to view the nature of power from a different perspective and understood the wondrous similarities between Heavenly Flames and Soul Power. Those battle experiences and those insights into power had become part of his soul, a real and tangible part of him.

That night, Xiao Yan sat alone on the roof, gazing up at the starry sky. The moons of the two worlds seemed no different, both bright and clear. He suddenly recalled a line of poetry he had once read on the Douluo Continent: "What is a life spent wandering here and there? A wild goose leaving tracks in snow and mud."

Perhaps every world was only a footprint in the snow, real yet fleeting. And what a cultivator had to do was not dwell on the shape or depth of those tracks, but become the wild goose that could keep on flying, gathering experience with every landing and ultimately reaching a higher realm.

All things in the world were experiences; all the rolling tides of mortal life were cultivation.

Xiao Yan closed his eyes and looked inward at the Dou Qi Vortex turning slowly in his dantian. He smiled faintly.

What if it was a dream? What if it was not? What mattered was the road beneath his feet now, and the direction he was about to take.

The starry sky was silent. Only the moonlight, like water, spilled quietly over the young man who had once traveled between two worlds, making no distinction between them.

(If anyone has read this far, I'm very sorry. Looking back now, my abilities were still nowhere near good enough. This book hasn't done well, and its numbers have only gotten worse, so I have no choice but to end it here ahead of time. Thank you all once again. If one day I can write a book of my own, let's meet again.)