My Journey to Immortality Begins with Hunting-Chapter 765 - The Truth - Part 1

Tens of thousands of years later.

Li Yuan stood beyond the skies, quietly sensing the looming presence creeping ever closer from the distance. It was an unstoppable tide of chaotic ocean, the Deformed Sea

Thanks to Ah Ting’s explanation, he already understood what it was.

The Deformed Sea wasn’t something a Lesser Myriad Worlds could hope to withstand. Even a Greater Myriad Worlds would be doomed if it happened to lie in the sea’s path.

It was one of the four great forces that eternally existed within the voidveil.

The four forces were, the Eternal Sun, Eternal Moon, Primordial Origin, and Deformed Sea.

The Eternal Moon was boundlessly vast, cold, and gentle.

The Eternal Sun was endlessly small, blazing hot, and dense.

These two bathed the infinite expanse of Grand and Lesser Myriad Worlds alike, forming the fundamental balance of existence.

As for the Primordial Origin, it was the homeland of all souls. Even Ah Ting didn’t know what it looked like inside, but it was undoubtedly both unimaginably strange and divinely sacred. Ah Ting had once said that the Yuan in Li Yuan’s name was meaningless if he remained untranscended. But having come this far, that single character in his name might just signify a great destiny.

If those three forces represented order, then the Deformed Sea was the highest form of chaos.

Everything within it was twisted, malformed. Its very substance was a jagged path of madness, overflowing with ultimate horror.

No one knew when it first appeared. No one knew whether it had a will of its own. But it roamed through the voidsea like something drawn by an unseen force, steadily advancing eastward.

Li Yuan’s Lesser Myriad Worlds was merely unlucky, just barely brushed by the trailing edge of its influence.

And even though the Deformed Sea was still unimaginably far away, so far that even aboard an empty vessel, it would take Li Yuan nearly a hundred years to reach it, the Lesser Myriad Worlds was still doomed. There would be no escape.

Over these long millennia, Li Yuan had tried countless methods. None could make the Lesser Myriad Worlds flee quickly enough, unless he used his power to destroy it first. Only then, in the chaos of ruin, would its energy be cast into the voidveil. That might generate enough displacement force to shove the world aside...just enough to avoid the final sweep of the Deformed Sea’s tail.

Standing in the void, Li Yuan slowly raised his hand.

Divine power surged in his palm. He hesitated for a moment, then reluctantly brought his hand down.

That power descended like a divine judgment, a final punishment that would annihilate all.

˙·٠✧🐗➶➴🏹✧٠·˙

That day, the universe trembled.

And the Great Shattering began.

After the Great Shattering, the universe’s blooming prosperity came to a grinding halt.

Yet, like a reflex, the regions surrounding the universe began to wither, while its core, the Ancestral Land, erupted with an explosion of spiritual energy.

Suddenly, powerful beings emerged across the mortal world, breaking free from the fragile beginnings where even the ninth rank hadn’t yet been attained.

Li Yuan had unleashed the Great Shattering. Yet deep down, he still clung to the hope that he might use this moment to mend the universe.

He recalled the ancient bloodshed, remembered the forbidden method of using human lives to patch the Heavens.

And so, he descended once more into the mortal world. He spread the knowledge of the ninth rank, guided the most gifted talents, and quietly sowed the idea of mending the Heavens. His hope was that these rising stars might one day take up the mantle he had carried, as protectors of this world.

Years passed, then decades, then millennia. Before long, tens of thousands of years had slipped by.

Then one day, after offering guidance to the head of a Daoist sect, Li Yuan suddenly froze. Something clicked in him.

He looked at the Daoist master in the distance, then back at himself, and murmured, “So all those strange figures I met...they were just me.”

Those memories he’d experienced, they were starting to feel less like recollections, and more like recovering data from a backup.

The reincarnation passage, the Dragon Vein’s enlightenment, every power he touched in this world, every insight he gained, each one came bundled with memories. And wasn’t that...exactly how a download worked?

And now, if he willed it, he could bestow this same kind of memory-laced power upon anyone he wished. Yet he remained cautious.

As the embodiment of the Heavenly Dao, he could see both past and future. And still, this stretch of time remained cloaked in fog.

In other words, he was walking through a blind zone. A corridor of darkness in which even Heaven could not see.

Li Yuan had thought he could simply wait it out. That if he and the others did enough, they could change the future.

And for a while, it looked like they had. The Great Shattering hadn’t proven fatal. In fact, the universe itself seemed to be slowly, steadily healing.

But just as Li Yuan allowed himself to believe that maybe, just maybe, everything really could be changed, he discovered something terrifying.

The Deformed Sea had returned. It was once again drawing near the universe from the depths of the voidveil. And this time, it wasn’t just brushing by with a tendril. The entire stream of its current was surging directly toward them.

That current was like a blazing, blade-sharp tide of annihilation. If it so much as grazed the Lesser Myriad Worlds, the aftermath alone would be enough to shatter it, obliterating countless stars, countless lives, with a single sweep.

And this time, because the universe lay directly in the path of the incoming tide, even though it was still hundreds of years away, Li Yuan could already feel the pull.

It was as if a demonic hand had gripped the Lesser Myriad Worlds, crushing it in its palm.

Pale-faced, Li Yuan had no choice but to return once more to the voidveil.

Only then did he understand why time itself had been wrapped in fog in this region of fate. That was because there wasn’t just one crisis from the Deformed Sea. There were two.

Two catastrophes approaching from either end of time. Between them, destiny itself became chaos, unknowable and incalculable.

But a warrior did what he had to, even if it meant cutting off his own arm to survive.

Li Yuan acted at once.

The second annihilation began, but the pressure of that demonic hand was immense.

One world-ending strike wasn’t enough.

So he kept going. Again and again, he shattered what remained.

His divine power tore through reality, birthing an unprecedented destruction, so profound it could never be repaired.

Yet in the end, it worked.

The universe broke free from the Deformed Sea’s grasp. It tore itself loose from that suffocating hand.

And once more, it drifted away into the vast unknown.

By contrast, Li Yuan’s body had been completely obliterated.

Not just his body, even the empty vessel he traveled in, and the Deathless Tomb it carried, vanished with him. 𝘧𝓇𝑒𝑒𝑤ℯ𝑏𝓃𝘰𝑣ℯ𝘭.𝘤ℴ𝘮

The vessel shattered, and the tomb, long since emptied of its sacred presence, was flung deep into the cosmos. Like a shooting star, it streaked across the Heavens and eventually fell to earth, embedding itself in the soil.

But Li Yuan had no energy to care about any of that. Waves of exhaustion crashed over him, one after another. As the Heavenly Dao itself, to feel dizziness and disorientation, this was something beyond imagination.

Suddenly, something clicked. A moment of insight. He drifted in a patch of starry sky, slowly closed his eyes, and slept.

He slept for a very, very long time. Then one day, without warning, his power and even his soul began to dissolve, scattering into countless fragments.

The Deformed Sea was beyond terrifying. Twice, Li Yuan had managed to defy the doom it brought to the Lesser Myriad Worlds. But it appeared he had paid a price and triggered some kind of curse.

He no longer had the ability to find out.

And as Li Yuan’s presence faded from existence, something else appeared, something that had long been fused with him.

It was Yan Yu.

Suspended in midair, she hovered in silence for a long time, gradually piecing together what had just happened.

Then she made her decision.

She was going to save Li Yuan.

In this new era, Yan Yu became the new Heavenly Dao. She continued to guide the mortal world, awakening power within its martial artists, setting in motion fresh waves of calamity and bloodshed, all to follow the ancient method, sacrifice people to mend the Heavens.

At the same time, she searched relentlessly for the fragments of Li Yuan’s soul.

By the end of the Age of the Ancient Gods, Yan Yu cast her net.

The ancient gods were all reduced to nutrients for this world.

And over the course of nearly a million years, she finally succeeded. She found all the scattered pieces of Li Yuan’s soul.

Some were in the present.

Some were in the future.

And some, unthinkably, had fallen into the past.

But even as the Heavenly Dao, Yan Yu was a broken, weakened version of what once was.

To reassemble the soul of a former Heavenly Dao, and to interfere simultaneously with past, present, and future, that was no easy task. It would demand everything she had.

Before she began, she poured the last of her strength into glimpsing the future. She wanted to clear away some of the thorns in Li Yuan’s path, to spare him from a few of the coming disasters, and maybe make things just a little easier.

So, in a distant land beyond the known world, she left behind a stele bearing the Life Star Art.

Then, Heavenly Dao Yan Yu seated herself atop the great river of time flowing through the universe. She reached downward, slowly and gently, as if beckoning the scattered fragments to return.

And then, faintly...the roar of a deep ocean current echoed in the ears. It wasn’t just a sound. It reverberated through the very soul. It was a woman’s voice, ethereal and mysterious, whispering something unintelligible.

Vague and dreamlike, the sound came and went, and time lost all meaning.

Then, at last, within the river of time, a figure began to take shape, slowly solidifying until it was unmistakably human.

That figure drifted upward...upward...and then, the voice became clear.