After the aftershocks of the Star Gate's trial operation faded, the starry sky above the Ancient Sunken Continent fell into an eerie dead silence.
Even the starlight that had stubbornly seeped through seemed to have been temporarily scattered by the violent energy.
Between heaven and earth, only the unsettling hum of energy from the direction of the Void Race Royal Court remained, along with the increasingly dense aura of Destruction permeating the air.
The Void Clan's final "Purification Ritual" hung over the entire ancient continent like the Sword of Damocles, ready to fall at any moment.
At the edge of Soul Burial Rift Valley, deep within a field of rubble.
The core crystal fragment carrying Ming Xin's Nirvana Consciousness had now completely transformed into an apparently ordinary "unpolished stone."
All radiance, all fluctuations, even that newly born and faint sliver of awareness had been restrained to the utmost, as though it were truly no different from the surrounding broken stones.
Yet, deep within it, the "Nirvana" that concerned life and death and transcended ordinary understanding had reached its most critical moment.
Consciousness no longer existed in the form of a vortex. It had collapsed into a pure "point."
A singularity containing every opposing concept of "existence" and "nothingness," "life" and "death," "Reincarnation" and "Nirvana."
This singularity was absolutely still, yet within that stillness lay the potential to evolve into infinite possibilities.
The secret Nirvana art passed down by Yao was not simple rebirth. It redefined "existence" amid ultimate destruction, at the end of utter silence.
It required its inheritor to completely abandon every former form, taking their true spirit, memories, laws, emotions... every concept that made up the "self."
Shattering them, refining them, returning them to a state even more primordial than origin itself, then nurturing "something" anew from