Chapter 727 – Second Rank Power, World Destroying Finger - Part 2

Time passed.

Two minutes in, the world began to feel slightly more solid. No longer papery, maybe more like stiff cardboard.

Three hours later, it had clearly taken on greater weight and structure. He could feel the shift, from something childishly flimsy to something more like solid wood.

Still, Li Yuan didn’t move. He wanted to test his limits.

As the day neared its end, he saw the small world he had casually created earlier begin to dim dramatically, its collapse imminent.

So, without hesitation, he pushed this newer, sturdier miniature world, one he had spent nearly a full day crafting, out into place.

The small world slowly drifted into place, settling between the voidship and the Deathless Tomb.

The moment Li Yuan completed the task, the other miniature worlds began to collapse, bursting like fragile soap bubbles.

He could feel the immense energy contained within each one, but since he had created them, he was able to pull all that power back under control with ease.

“So...a world created in a single thought can only last a day?”

A single day. To the stars, that was less than the blink of an eye, barely even a heartbeat. Far too brief.

Li Yuan let out a slow breath.

The crow stood beside him, eyeing everything with curiosity but keeping quiet so as not to disturb him. Only when Li Yuan finally stirred from his thoughts did the crow ask, “Papa, are you hungry?”

Li Yuan smiled. He knew Sheng’er was the one who was hungry.

With a flick of his mind, his perception swept out across a 50-kilometer radius until it found a natural lake.

In its waters, plump autumn fish swam lazily through the cold depths, fat and carefree.

Suddenly, one of the fish froze in place. It tried to swish its tail but couldn’t move.

Moments later, a chill swept over its body, followed by sharp pain. Its organs were being separated from its flesh, its blood leaking out into the water.

Before long, it had become a perfectly prepared fish, descaled, gutted, and rinsed clean in the crystal-clear lake water, ready to go straight into the pot.

Then with a whoosh, the fish burst out of the lake, flying through the air at lightning speed.

In no time, five large, fat fish floated beside Li Yuan.

He glanced at them. Without any gesture, the fish burst into flames.

As they roasted, a rich, savory aroma began to drift through the air, clean and delicious.

“Shame I didn’t bring any spices. Next time, I’ll store some soy sauce, vinegar, and salt on the voidship,” Li Yuan murmured. Then he looked at the crow. “Take your time.”

The crow reached out with its beak, grabbed a fish, and began to devour it happily.

One fish...then another...

After all five had been eaten, it rubbed its belly with its wings and leaned lazily against Li Yuan’s side, its claws sticking out in contentment.

“Papa, you go ahead and do your thing. If I get hungry, I’ll go catch fish myself. I can eat them raw too!” Sheng’er was, as always, obedient and considerate.

“Mhm...” Li Yuan nodded.

“I just broke through to a new realm,” he said. “Right now, I’m figuring out how to actually use that power. I’m still feeling my way forward, crossing the river one stone at a time.”

Sheng’er gave a soft caw of surprise. Her father’s cultivation was far beyond anything she could comprehend.

Still, she nodded smartly. “Okay!”

˙·٠✧🐗➶➴🏹✧٠·˙

Li Yuan closed his eyes to rest for a moment, then resumed creating a new world.

At the first instant, a world was born.

After two minutes, it solidified slightly.

Three hours later, it improved again.

By the sixth day, he had hit his limit.

He let out a breath. Even someone like him, pouring out power non-stop for six straight days to forge a single world, couldn’t help feeling a bit drained. A sense of fatigue crept into his bones.

By the seventh day...he decided he was done.

[ref]"And on the seventh day God ended His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done. Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because in it He rested from all His work which God had created and made". -Genesis 2:2-3

I’m not actually sure if the author was purposefully making a bible reference but that’s the vibe I got translating this. But given how many different references he’s snuck into this novel, I wouldn’t be surprised.[/ref[

But the world he had created this time was in a completely different league compared to the ones he had casually formed before. It had grown in substance, in structure, a leap of several grades in quality.

Though still far inferior to the voidship, this new world no longer had that fragile, paper-thin feeling it once did.

By Li Yuan’s estimate, a world created in an instant would only last a day or so. One forged over two minutes, longer. A world cultivated across three hours would endure even more. And the one he’d spent six full days building? That one, he guessed, could persist for over two centuries.

Two hundred years, this was the upper limit of his current world-creation strength.

That world was now anchored between the Deathless Tomb and the voidship, serving as a stabilizing link.

After resting for a day, Li Yuan got back to work. He deliberately recreated two smaller worlds, one that took two minutes to form, and another that took three hours. He wanted to compare how long each would last in practice. These experiments were part of mastering his foundation as a peak second rank Human Soul cultivator.

Most others probably spent years fumbling their way to mastery through trial and error, building tiny worlds, learning their limits, and improving gradually.

He, on the other hand, had instantly reached perfection...and now had to backtrack and figure out what that actually meant.

Once that was done, Li Yuan fell into deep thought again.

The Ghost Sealing Pagoda of the Radiant Treasure Buddha had definitely been around for more than two hundred years.

Could it be that the Radiant Treasure Buddha’s worlds are just that much stronger than mine? That doesn’t make sense. So what am I missing?

He stared into the void of his newly created world, and the image of the Ghost Sealing Pagoda surfaced in his mind.

With a thought, he sent his awareness flying toward the Eastern Sea’s Immortal Domain, where the pagoda had stood. He was planning to move the pagoda into the six-day world he had just forged.

As a transmigrator, Li Yuan naturally carried certain ideas in his head, concepts like anchor artifacts or world-stabilizing relics.

Maybe, he wondered, planting a powerful treasure inside a small world could help it last longer?

If so, moving the Ghost Sealing Pagoda would be the perfect test.

But after scanning the area for some time, he found nothing, no trace of the old pagoda’s entrance.

The location had long since been submerged. It was probably buried deep beneath the sea now.

If he wanted to retrieve it, he’d have to go there himself, and then use his void vision to comb through the underwater terrain.

After a moment’s thought, he decided that he might as well go take a look at the Eastern Sea.

And once he had fully mastered his current strength, if there was still no word from Yan Yu, he would go straight to the Underworld to find her himself.

Just as Li Yuan was preparing to leave, his senses picked up something strange, something happening in one of the undying folk’s villages 50 kilometers away.

On a raised wooden platform in the center of the village, a young girl, barely more than a teenager, had been stripped bare and tied to a wooden frame. Beneath the platform sat a gem-studded basin.

The man who had once roared at the sky, eyes full of reverence and desperation, was now walking solemnly toward the platform, holding a stone knife in his hand, his face glowing with sacred fervor.

It looked like he was about to sacrifice the girl.

“Barbaric,” Li Yuan muttered, frowning in disgust. He had no tolerance for this kind of thing.

With a flick of thought, the stone knife flew from the man’s grasp and vanished into the air. At the same moment, the ropes binding the girl snapped and unraveled.

The girl collapsed to the ground, stunned and dazed, unable to comprehend what had just happened. A gust of wind suddenly swept through the village, blowing loose a piece of sun-dried beast hide that had been hanging nearby. It drifted through the air and landed softly over her body.