Although that ripple was very weak, it was very clear. It was definitely the ripple of true essence!
What did this mean? This meant that Zhexiu's meridian had already been reconnected. Although it could not be said to be completely repaired, it could at least allow true essence to slowly flow through it. And as long as true essence began to flow, the meridian would automatically repair itself at a much faster rate. What was three years? Perhaps it wouldn't even need thirty days for that meridian to be as good as new!
"What's going on here?" Chen Changsheng thought in shock as he looked at Zhexiu.
Their eyes met. He knew that Zhexiu had already sensed the recovery of his meridian. It had nothing to do with treatment or medicine. It had taken countless times less time than he had estimated, so it could only be said that Zhexiu had done it himself. The question was, how had he done it?
"Pain." Zhexiu looked into his eyes and said, "It can stimulate one's life force. The greater the pain, the more life force can be stimulated. As long as you can clearly endure that pain."
Chen Changsheng was very shocked. For a long time, he could not speak.
… …
… …
Deep in the night, the lights of the Orthodox Academy gradually extinguished, and the starlight in the garden grew even brighter. Chen Changsheng stood in front of the window, silently gazing at the silver surface of the lake. Normally, he would have fallen asleep long ago, but today, he did not. The ruthless will Zhexiu had displayed made him vaguely understand something.
He sat cross-legged in front of the window, began to meditate, and then entered the sheath. Unlike in the past, this time, he did not separate a strand of his spiritual sense into the sheath. Instead, he sent all his spiritual sense into the sheath. He knew that this was a very dangerous matter and that he would have to endure a great deal of pain. Moreover, if his spiritual sense was shattered by the phantom of the black monolith, he would very likely be heavily injured.
But he did not want to wait any longer. He had to enter the Garden of Zhou and take a look.
The sheath was called the Vault Sheath. The countless sharp sword intents within combined to form a dangerous sea. In the past, when his spiritual sense passed through this sea of swords, it would cause a violent storm and a perilous wave, not to mention that he had sent all his spiritual sense in today. The sea of sword intents responded and instantly began to roar in rage.
It was very painful, really very painful. His divine sense kept breaking through the mountain-like waves or sinking into the ice-cold bottom of the sea. After an unknown amount of time, he finally succeeded in reaching the other side of the sea of swords and saw the shadow of the black stone tablet.
This seemed simple, but in fact, it was extremely dangerous. If it weren't for the fact that his spiritual sense had just been cleansed by that drop of tea, making it more agile and full of vitality than before, perhaps he would have been directly swallowed by this vast ocean long ago.
Even so, there were several times along the way when he almost gave up because of the pain. It was just that when he was prepared to give up, he thought of Zhexiu, thought of how he had held up the Umbrella of Ten Thousand Swords at the summit of the Mausoleum of Zhou to support his fall from the sky. He clenched his teeth and endured.
Tonight, it was all of his divine senses that had reached the other side of the sea of swords.
Thus, it could be understood that he had arrived at the other side of the sea of swords and was standing before the black stone tablet.
When his gaze fell on the shadow of the black stone tablet, his Divine Sense also followed suit.
Last time, his Divine Sense could already penetrate deep into the shadow of the black stone tablet, but it could not penetrate it, so he could only vaguely see some scenes behind it. This time was the same. He saw the somewhat dusky cliffs of Sunset Valley, saw the ruins of the Mountainside Whispering Wood, saw the small lakes that seemed to have dried up like scars, and also saw that grassland.
The grassland seemed lifeless. The green reeds and the white frost grass were like large patches of color, cut apart by the ravines formed by the cracks in the ground.
Just when he believed that the monsters had all fled the grassland and gone to some unknown place, he suddenly noticed a large black dot in the northwest. With a thought, he arrived in the sky over there.
On the grassland, at least several tens of thousands of monsters were currently slowly advancing towards the distant mausoleum.
They lowered their heads and panted heavily, saliva dripping from the corners of their mouths. The wounds on their bodies suffused with the smell of decay, and they looked like they could die at any moment.
Suddenly, the black monster tide stopped. A figure the size of a small mountain slowly stood up. It was the massive Mountain-toppling Fiend, and it looked towards the sky.
The several tens of thousands of monsters followed its gaze and looked towards the sky. They all felt as if there was something watching them, but they could not see anything.
After an unknown period of time, the eyes of the demon beasts revealed an expression of despair, and they let out painful whimpers. If the gods were really looking down on us from the sky, why didn't they come to save us? Why did they have the heart to watch us walk into a hopeless situation?
The monsters did not go mad from despair, because the monsters that had gone mad had already killed each other in the past few days. The remaining monsters were all exhausted to the extreme, and had already given up on the hope of survival. They only wanted to return to the place where they had lived for generations, and then sink into eternal sleep with the master of the mausoleum.
… …
… …
Chen Changsheng withdrew his gaze and looked towards the surface of the black monolith.
The shadow of the black monolith was no different from the black monolith, except that it did not have a physical body. It was a complete projection of the real thing.
He looked at the complicated and incomprehensible lines on the surface of the monolith, and pondered the problem of how to pass through it.
If these lines fell into the eyes of a normal person, they would be Heavenly Tomes. No matter how they looked, they would not be able to understand them, and it was even more impossible to analyze any sort of pattern from them. This was because this black monolith had always been a Heavenly Tome Monolith.
Chen Changsheng had seen many Heavenly Tome Monoliths, so he was extremely familiar with the lines on the surface of the monolith. He knew how he should look at them.
His gaze fell on the lines and moved with them. It was as if he had returned to the monolith hut in the Heavenly Tomes, sitting under the tree for countless days and nights.
Those lines were the trajectories of the stars, the source or symbol of all changes in fate. It was as if he had returned to the wilderness in the north of Tianliang County, raising his head to look at the starry sky by the stream.
That was the first day after Su Li had passed on the Intellectual Sword to him.
He was very clear that his ability to calculate and calculate was not enough to grasp the Intellectual Sword, so he used another method.
He used the method of comprehending the Heavenly Tome Monoliths to display the Intellectual Sword. Even Su Li probably would not have thought that he could do such a thing.
But now, he wanted to reverse everything. He wanted to use the Intellectual Sword to comprehend the Heavenly Tome Monoliths. It was not the understanding he had obtained when viewing the monoliths in the Mausoleum of Books, but to break them.
He wanted to find the path in those lines on the surface of the black monolith, wanted to find the Divine Kingdom through the trajectories of the stars, wanted to see the truth in the illusory fate, and then use his sword to break it.
After some time, he closed his eyes.
After some more time, he opened his eyes and thrust his sword at the surface of the black monolith.
His spiritual sense was currently in the sheath, his body outside the sheath.
His sword was in the sheath, but it was not in the sheath.
But when he attacked, the Stainless Sword responded to his thoughts and appeared in his hand.
The Stainless Sword pierced through the air and landed on the black monolith. It had clearly stabbed at the intersection of several lines, but for some reason, when the tip of the sword touched the monolith, it struck an empty space.
There was a light pop, like a bubble on a pond being popped by a naughty frog.
With a boom, the sea of sword intent behind him stirred up a massive wave that soared to the heavens.
The surface of the black monolith in front of him rapidly faded, then transformed into a pure white.
That was the light.
It was also the sky.
He drew back his gaze from the sky and lowered his head to look at the grassland around him. He saw the three distant mountain ranges, saw the desolate grass in the wilderness.
A cold wind whistled by, ruffling his clothes.
This was the Garden of Zhou.
He stood at the place closest to the sky in the Garden of Zhou, and also furthest from the ground.
He stood at the peak of the Mausoleum of Zhou.
… …
… …
The early mornings in the Orthodox Academy were no longer as peaceful as they used to be. It was a little better in the separate garden. Zhexiu was resting on his bed, and although Tang Thirty-Six was much more diligent than before, he still could not wake up at five o'clock. Xuanyuan Po circled around from the kitchen on the other side of the lake and came to the house. He called out to a window, "Chen Changsheng, come down and eat."
Previously on the other side of the lake, he had seen very clearly that Chen Changsheng was in front of that window, so he knew that it was already five o'clock. The Orthodox Academy had never needed a device to measure time, and Chen Changsheng was one.
There was no reply from that window.
Xuanyuan Po waved the fat blue lobster in his hand and yelled, "This is a spicy lobster. It's very delicious when paired with white steamed buns. I left one especially for you. Hurry up and come down, or else if Tang Thirty-Six hears this, he'll come and steal it from us again."
There was still no reply.
Xuanyuan Po was somewhat depressed. He ran up the stairs and pushed open Chen Changsheng's door. He said, "Brushing your teeth shouldn't take that long."
There was no reply, because there was no one in the room. The window was open, and the morning wind blew in, lifting up a corner of the bedsheet.
… …
… …
Chen Changsheng looked at the Stainless Sword in his right hand and confirmed that the sword was real.
Then he confirmed that he was real.
This meant that he had truly entered the Garden of Zhou, or in other words, he had rediscovered the Garden of Zhou.
The image of the black monolith now seemed to be the path that led to Zhou Tong, and the original body of the black monolith was the key to the Garden of Zhou.
He remembered very clearly that when he left the Garden of Zhou, the sky was collapsing.
Amongst the miniature worlds discovered by humans, the Garden of Zhou was the most stable and also the largest. However, it was still a fragment of space, so it was naturally not as sturdy as the world of the origin. Therefore, whether it was him or Zhu Luo and Mei Lisha outside Hanqiu City, they all believed that the Garden of Zhou had definitely been destroyed. Who could have imagined that the Garden of Zhou still existed, that it had actually reestablished its laws, that it had managed to stabilize after much difficulty.
… Only, a very large change had already occurred.
It had not actually been that long since he had left the Garden of Zhou, definitely less than half a year, but the Garden of Zhou had already become extremely different.
This world had become much more barren and dilapidated. Perhaps because of that world-shaking calamity, the ground was covered in cracks, the water in the sea of grass had become very turbid, and the distant cliffs were filled with signs of collapse. The mountain springs had dried up, and many small lakes had already dried up. The earth was a scene of desolation, and the green forest was covered in dust. It was a very desolate sight.
Within the sea of grass, the cries of those insects could no longer be heard. The roots of the grass were already on the verge of necrosis, so there was naturally no school of fish to be seen either. As far as the eye could see, there were only a few fish flipping their bellies, weakly spitting out bubbles.
Even the sun in the sky, or perhaps its halo, had now become somewhat dusky.
… …
… …
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