Chapter 740 - Ji Hu’s Vow, Primordial Earth Mother, Reaching for the Stars - Part 3

Dark curtains of shadow swayed gently in the stillness of the Underworld.

The mortal world had its worldly affairs. But so too did the Underworld have its own touch of passion.

In the depths of the palace hall, atop a vast black bed, the storm had passed.

From that small, delicate body radiated an overwhelming yin energy. For most beings, even drawing near would trigger a soul-deep terror, enough to make them fall gravely ill, or die on the spot.

But Li Yuan burned with intense heat.

Between true powerhouses, even love was a clash of energies.

If not for the black veil woven of pure Yin keeping it all contained, the entire Underworld might have heard the thunderous echoes of their union.

For Li Yuan, this was the first time in many, many years that he had felt so thoroughly, deeply satisfied.

Now, he raised his hand, gently brushing through Yan Yu’s ink-black hair as it spilled over her shoulders.

“You found me judges,” Yan Yu said, her voice soft, teasing. “Freed up my time, all so you could seduce me, hmm?”

“Also to remind you, you’re

my

lady, not some impersonal force of Heaven.” Li Yuan replied with a grin. Then he said seriously, “If Heaven and I were playing tug-of-war, I’d pull you to my side, every time.”

He said it with such deadpan sincerity that Yan Yu couldn’t help but laugh.

She leaned in, lips red as cherries, and whispered, “Fine then. I’ll let you pull me over.”

She turned, curling into his embrace, murmuring, “I haven’t become Heaven. I just don’t want to see this world destroyed. If the world ends, we all die. And even if we do escape...what’s out there anyway?”

Li Yuan didn’t know.

That question, it was just like the ones he used to ponder back on Earth. What lay beyond the edges of the universe? The ultimate mysteries. The questions no one could ever truly answer.

Back on Earth, that old question,

What lies beyond the universe?

, had never had an answer. But now, drifting through the voidveil, tethered to a small skiff, Li Yuan had come to realize something.

The answer was here, somewhere in the vastness of the void.

˙·٠✧🐗➶➴🏹✧٠·˙

A long while later.

Yan Yu stirred. Twisting her lithe body, she slipped from Li Yuan’s embrace and sat up.

Her body was suffused with Yin energy and the power of Valley Obscura, allowing her, even during intimacy with Li Yuan, to absorb every thread of Yin and Yang between them. And so, as she stood, not a trace of blemish or disorder remained on her body. She looked like a goddess carved from perfection itself.

She stepped down from the bed, her soft, full feet touching the cold stone floor. With a light, elegant twist of her leg, she drew a graceful arc in the air. And with a flick of her toes, her ghostly azure robe rose from the ground and floated toward her.

It wrapped around her slowly, draping her like mist.

A ghostly hairpin floated into her hand. Her long, black hair, which had been loose and wild, flowed upward as if stirred by an invisible breeze, then swiftly gathered into a dignified, elegant bun.

The Primordial Earth Mother, her azure robe trailing like a river of shadows, stepped out from the palace. A hundred ghosts followed in silence.

˙·٠✧🐗➶➴🏹✧٠·˙

Li Yuan lay reclined on the cold black bed, his dark hair loose around him, watching her go.

And all he could think was,

My wife really is getting more beautiful by the day...

A glowing notification flickered in front of his eyes,

「

You spent a harmonious night with Yan Yu and gained 607 stat points.

」

The stat points he received had gone up from 507 to 607, which meant his bond with Yan Yu had deepened again.

He stared into the distance, lost in thought, reviewing everything he’d gained and what still needed doing.

Most matters were already settled.

Only one thing remained, and that was his son, Ping’an.

Both Yan Yu and Ji Hu were unwavering in their roles as

builders of order

. They were determined to restore structure and balance to the mortal realm, and deeply opposed to the idea of

sages

interfering from above.

Li Yuan had come to accept that. He had no intention of stepping in unless the mortal world truly descended into chaos.

But that didn’t apply to Ping’an. He didn’t even know whether Ping’an was alive or dead. But no matter what, he had to look. He had to go into the passage of reincarnation and see for himself.

And not just for Ping’an. Bai Xuanxin and Meng Xingxian were there too.

Bai Xuanxin was also his wife, and Meng Xingxian was his daughter-in-law.

He needed to know what had become of them.

The voidship drifted on.

The voidveil was endless, no people, no mountains, no rivers. Just an infinite nothingness.

And there, in the middle of this nothing, burned a single, bizarre red dot, a strange brand stamped onto the remains of the Ancestral Land.

In this colorless sea, the red was jarringly vivid. Painfully bright.

It floated precisely where the Ancestral Land had fractured most violently.

But it was tiny. Compared to the Ancestral Land, it was like a grain of dust beside a planet. Even though Li Yuan had come here many times, this was the first time he’d ever noticed it.

He stared at it for a long time, unable to make sense of it.

Still, he didn’t come here for that.

He was going to find Ping’an.

“That can wait,” he muttered. “Even if I knew what it was, what could I do?”

Li Yuan let out a slow breath.

From the fragments of memory he’d pieced together, he now understood just how terrifying the Great Shattering truly was. It was a force so dreadful that even the

Dao Sovereign

, who ranked at the pinnacle of the second rank in the Age of the Ancient Gods, had feared it.

And with what the Four Symbols had told him earlier, he could now imagine how vastly superior the Age of the Ancient Gods had been compared to the later Great Xia.

The Great Xia had birthed a generation of ruthless schemers, each more self-serving than the last. But in the early days of the Age of the Ancient Gods, there had still been idealists, dreamers who believed in something greater than themselves.

Those idealists must have united, tried to confront the Great Shattering together.

And clearly, they had all failed.

˙·٠✧🐗➶➴🏹✧٠·˙

At the prow of the skiff stood a young man in a black robe, his hair unkempt, not even bothering to tie it back. He turned his gaze from the tiny red mark on the horizon and looked up at the vast starscape overhead.

A thought stirred.

In an instant, the voidship rippled through the voidveil, carving an invisible path as it surged forward like an arrow loosed from a bow.

Ripples spread behind it, wave upon wave of warped space.

Li Yuan had left the mortal world, left the Underworld, and stepped into the

true

starry sky.

At first, he didn’t go far. He lingered nearby, hovering in the void, waiting.

Only once he’d received his daily allotment of 607 stat points did he feel secure enough to keep going.

That journey would last an entire year.

Drifting in the voidveil was lonelier than drifting at sea.

At sea, at least you could see fish, maybe a passing gull.

But in the voidveil? There was nothing but depthless grey, endless darkness. The stars above were black holes of silence. No light. No sound. No end.

With no sun and no night, Li Yuan could only count time by tracking how many times he received stat points.

And finally, after a year of aimless travel, he drew close to his first star.

It was dead.

Li Yuan tried landing. After some searching, he found an entry point. But what greeted him was desolation. It was utterly lifeless, as if even the energies of Yin and Yang had been scrubbed clean. No spirit, no force, not even rot. It was less a planet than a tomb.

He left.

A month later, he found a second star.

It was no different from the first.

He moved on.

Three months later, he came upon a field of asteroids.

Massive collisions must have taken place here long ago. Broken chunks of stars, scattered like bones, littered the entire region. They varied in size but shared the same characteristics, no energy, no vitality, no potential. Fragile, hollow husks.

Li Yuan stood there for a long while, a growing weight pressing down on his chest.

These stars, never mind hosting any supernatural life, weren’t even fit for human habitation.

He didn’t know why, but his mind drifted back to Earth, to the world he’d left behind.

There, people often talked about something called the

Fermi Paradox

, a famous question about extraterrestrial life. If the universe was so vast, where were the aliens? Why hadn’t we found them?

Now, standing here in this silent graveyard of a cosmos, Li Yuan felt he finally had an answer.

There

were

no aliens.

Because this entire universe...was a starry graveyard. And the graveyard had already buried them all.

The Ancestral Land wasn’t lonely because it was far from intelligent life.

It was lonely because it was the last star left, teetering on the edge of death.