Chapter 582: Confrontation Between The Seven Colors And Monochrome
Chapter 582: Confrontation Between The Seven Colors And Monochrome
Hmm?
Li Fan narrowed his eyes, trying to discern what was blocking his path within the all-encompassing darkness.
To his surprise, neither probing with his divine sense nor reaching out with his physical body revealed any barrier ahead.
He frowned slightly.
This time, rather than harmonizing with the rippling fluctuations moving through the space, he deliberately moved against their rhythm and flew directly forward.
Strangely, the wall he had sensed blocking his advance moments before was simply not there.
He could clearly perceive that his position within the void had shifted. Or rather, one aspect of his positional attributes had changed while another remained stubbornly fixed, refusing to advance.
Moving via his own power and flowing with the ripples seemed to be two entirely separate phenomena operating on different levels, neither interfering with the other.
The strangeness of it exceeded Li Fan's current understanding. He had no intention of puzzling over the cause right now. Instead, he emptied his mind and waited until the rippling fluctuations returned to the void.
He merged with them, and with full awareness of the obstacle ahead, drove himself forward with deliberate force.
Boom!
Stars exploded before his eyes as he was violently ejected from the ripples.
A quick check revealed his body was unharmed, but his soul felt slightly shaken.
Li Fan considered this for a moment, then set aside that reckless approach for now.
He did not leave. Instead, he stood motionless in the void and focused his spirit on each ripple as it washed over him, intent on understanding why he was blocked where the ripples passed through freely.
With his full attention fixed on the darkness and silence, the periodically appearing ripples became starkly conspicuous. He recorded the precise moment each one emerged, and after patiently collecting data from over ten thousand instances, he recreated them within the Dao Transformation Stone in his sea of consciousness to determine whether they followed some underlying pattern.
His perseverance bore fruit.
Approximately every thousand undulations, a special ripple appeared. It was distinct from the others and significantly more intense, propagating through the void at nearly twice the speed of the ordinary ones.
Excitement ignited in Li Fan's chest. He kept count, and when the next special fluctuation arrived, he stilled his mind and merged with it.
This time, it worked. He did not crash into a wall.
Instead, he felt a constant, grinding friction against the surrounding obstruction. A blade-like pain erupted from the depths of his soul. Li Fan gritted his teeth and endured.
But as the ripple carried him deeper, his incompatibility with the surroundings grew more pronounced. The grinding sensation slowly transformed into a violent tearing. The inhuman torment nearly stripped him of consciousness outright, and survival instinct wrenched him free from the state of unified mind and ripple before he could stop it.
"Hah... hah..."
Li Fan gasped, his entire form already drenched in sweat. Even separated from the ripple, the soul-rending agony seemed to linger. It took the duration of two full cycles of the thousand-pulse ripple for that sensation to fade.
After recovering, Li Fan felt a flicker of hesitation. Yet when the next thousand-pulse ripple arrived, he threw himself into it all the same.
This time, he seemed to endure a little longer than before. Or perhaps it was just his imagination.
After a brief rest, not waiting for the pain to fully subside, his consciousness merged with the ripples once more.
"Argh!"
A savage expression twisted Li Fan's face as his body began to convulse under the torment. A flash of ferocity moved through his eyes. The urge to give up surfaced in his mind and was instantly obliterated by him inversely refining his Dao Heart.
Such trivial pain dares to hinder me?
Again!
What followed was attempt after attempt to ride the thousand-pulse ripple into the depths of the void, and with each attempt came torment beyond description. The pain in his soul escalated without pause—from tearing, to being pierced by ten thousand needles at once, to the sensation of every part of him being ground back and forth without mercy.
By the end, Li Fan's mind had gone almost completely blank. Only the obsessive pursuit burning in his heart kept him moving, preventing him from stopping halfway.
Throughout this ordeal, the Xuanhuang Heart Refinement Sutra proved indispensable.
It was human nature to recoil from pain. In a situation where his soul felt as though it were being tortured without end, thoughts surfaced every single second—just give up, why bother, this isn't necessary.
These thoughts were enough to break anyone's resolve. Yet rather than taking hold, they were ground down by the great millstone of inverse refinement of the Dao Heart and transformed into nourishment for his soul.
Without it, no matter how strong-willed Li Fan was, he could not have survived such torment.
But survive he did.
He didn't know how much time had passed. When awareness returned, he found himself in a strange space that felt vaguely familiar.
Horizontal and vertical lines crisscrossed the entire expanse of heaven and earth. Colored particles of various hues raced along these lines, and from time to time, a horizontal and vertical particle would collide, bursting into brilliant, multicolored light before vanishing in an instant.
Where is this?
He checked himself first. His own body appeared to have been sketched out in crude lines as well. It was an absurd and strange sight, yet the sensations it gave him were no different from his normal physical form.
He didn't act rashly. Instead, he carefully observed the space while dodging the colored particles that occasionally whistled past.
It feels somewhat similar to the Tianxuan Mirror space I saw before. But the Tianxuan Mirror was only black and white, nothing like this riot of colors.
He paused.
Wait...
He retrieved the recorded images stored within the Dao Transformation Stone and reviewed them carefully. There, at the very edge of the black-and-white world in the recording, multicolored light existed as well.
The two seemed to be opposing types of energy entirely. Within the black-and-white world, the multicolored light was being cut away and absorbed, transformed into part of itself.
The newborn Tianxuan Mirror surfaces...
Li Fan's eyes narrowed, and he sank into thought.
Before long, a hypothesis began to take shape.
The monochrome world undoubtedly represented the Tianxuan Mirror.
The radiant, seven-colored light was most likely a microcosm of the real world.
Those crisscrossing lines, like the principles of heaven and earth Li Fan had glimpsed through the Man's Dao Stardust, represented the myriad laws of true reality.
The Tianxuan Mirror is analyzing the real world in its own way...
And this place...
Understanding broke open behind his eyes.
...is the microcosm of a world in its infancy.