Desolate Era (Book 41 - Book 45)

It wasn’t an actual explosion. Time continued to slowly flow forwards, allowing Ning to view everything clearly. The actual scene… was of countless different streams of matter and energy slowly coming together to form an enormous Chaosverse!

“So the Chaosverses were actually formed by countless amounts of matter and energy coming together?” Ning nodded. This made sense. He continued the temporal inversion.

“Eh?” Suddenly, Ning noticed something special. The matter and energy which had ‘exploded’ outwards came together to form many celestial objects of various size, with the nine Chaosverses being the largest. “So all matter actually came from that direction over there?” Ning immediately turned his gaze to the location where all this matter had come from.

Time inverted at the point where he focused his gaze, staring at the place where all this matter had come from.

Once, long ago, a single absolutely enormous landmass had existed across an incredibly wide area within the Infinite Void. This landmass was absolutely, inconceivably sized. It vastly surpassed any Chaosverse.

“What an enormous landmass! Is this where everything came from?” the golden-robed Ning immediately began to move closer to that region.

……

“Ah. He’s discovered it?” The thin, horned man atop that levitating boulder watched from afar. When Ning began to move towards the location where that landmass had been, the horned man’s heart clenched. He then immediately began to warp over there as well.

……

When Ning arrived at the location of the vast landmass, time began to reverse once more. The scenes of what had once occurred within that vast landmass began to replay in front of Ning. This world had been far vaster than any Chaosverse, and it also held far more living beings within it, including countless living beings and countless races.

“How lively.” Ning watched the lives of those countless beings being replayed before him.

BOOM! Suddenly, the vast landmass began to crack apart.

“You traitors! TRAITORS!” A towering, black-robed emperor who emanated an aura of incredible power was surrounded by over a hundred figures of tremendous might. These figures all had different appearances, including both humans and beasts, and their blows were filled with incredible strength.

“Traitors? You enslaved us! Should all of our hard work been meant for nothing save to serve as your eternal slaves?”

“Haha… you thought that the seal you placed on our truesouls would enable you to control us unto our deaths. You fool! In the end, you are nothing more than this continent’s will incarnate. You are no true cultivator! You have no idea how formidable Omega Autarchs are. We escaped your control long ago. We simply put on an act and bided our time!”

“We’ve been waiting for so long, while brother Heavencloud poured all his effort into creating this Grand Armageddon Formation to deal with you!”

Although Ning didn’t understand what the experts of this era were saying, through watching the battle he was able to tell what level the hundred-plus experts were at, as well as the black-robed emperor’s level.

“What?!” Ning was shocked by the battle occurring before him. “The attackers are all Omega Autarchs!”

There were a total of 129 experts attacking the black-robed emperor, and all of them were Omega Autarchs. They had joined together into an incredibly complex formation. Even though Ning was also an Omega Autarch, he felt that he was incapable of truly understanding it. He had the vague feeling that it had probably been created by someone who had reached Omega Autarchy via the Dao of Formations. This was why the formation was able to allow over a hundred Omega Autarchs to fuse their energies together perfectly.

“How can there be this many Omega Autarchs?” Ning was rather stunned. “Although each blow from that black-robed emperor is filled with awesome power, he’s actually at a lower level of insight than them. He doesn’t seem to be an Omega Autarch. He’s at a lower level, yet can contend with 129 of them by himself?”

Whoosh. A second figure warped through spacetime and appeared next to Ning. It was the horned, azure-robed man.

“You?” Ning glanced at him.

“This is our first time actually meeting, I believe.” The horned man smiled. “I am Alphan of the Sithe Chaosverse.”

Ning blinked. He suddenly realized that his Chaosverse didn’t have a name yet. There were nine of them, after all; it wouldn’t be appropriate to keep calling his ‘the Chaosverse’. What name should he choose for it?

Ning thought back to his homeland, of the many living beings who had struggled within the Chaosverse to clamber upwards on the path of cultivation. So many forerunners had helped clear the way, cutting their way through thistles and thorns as they blazed a path through the wilderness. Their efforts had finally culminated in Ning’s success, allowing their Chaosverse to enter a new stage of development.

“Desolate Chaosverse, Ji Ning.” Ning looked at the horned man.

“Desolate… Ji Ning?” the horned man murmured softly.

“Why have you come here?” Ning felt nothing but ill-will towards this horned man, and so he came straight to the point.

The horned man pointed at the scene of the great battle which had occurred in the past. “In this era, the vast landmass before us ended up being destroyed by the battle we are now watching. After breaking apart, its energy and its matter ended up forming many celestial objects within the Infinite Void, with the largest being our nine Chaosverses.”

Ning simply listened.

“That black-robed emperor was the continent’s will incarnate. Its Quintessence was far more powerful than those in our Chaosverses, and as a result it reached a level of such power that it actually gained true sentience,” the horned man said. “The will of the landmass governed itself and all of the living beings with it. Once a cultivator succeeded in the Daomerge and broke through to become an Eternal Emperor, it would set down a seal upon that cultivator’s truesoul which allowed it to take full control over that cultivator’s life and death.

“Since it was nothing more than a psychic being which arose from the prime essences, it only understood the various Eternal Omega Daos. It didn’t understand what an Autarch Omega Dao was! However, it had the power of the entire continent behind it, and so it remained invincible.

“More and more living beings arose within this continent. Omega Autarchs eventually began to rise, but even after reaching Omega Autarchy they were still unable to extricate themselves from that seal. One… two… three… more and more Omega Autarchs began to appear. Finally, an incredibly powerful Omega Autarch managed to devise a method to solve the seal, and he secretly passed it over to the other Omega Autarchs.”

Ning continued to listen silently.

“Look. That’s him over there.” The horned man pointed towards a white-haired man who was amongst the attackers. “His name was Grand Sovereign Crimson Wind, and he was one of nine Grand Sovereigns under the command of that black-robed emperor who was responsible for helping the emperor manage the entire landmass. He was the one who solved the seal.”

“Later, the Omega Autarch of Formations known as Heavencloud managed to develop an absolutely terrifying formation, the ‘Grand Armageddon Formation’.” The horned man pointed at another man who was bald. “He was the black-robed emperor’s Sentinel for the seventh universe.”

“Seventh universe?” Ning suddenly said.

“You might not have noticed yet, but that landmass actually has a total of thirty-two universes circling around it. Each of them is roughly on par with our own Chaosverses in size,” the horned man said.