Ch. 108 - The Beginning of The World
I Really Am A VillainThis chapter is broken. Please report this on discord.
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The world at this moment resembled the Primordial Era, no living beings, completely uninhabitable.
Xu Zimo slowly let out a breath. He knew that this was the limit of the World Pearl's transformation.
The pseudo-world it had formed was incomplete, and his ability to control the world's power remained limited.
But even so, just possessing this pseudo-world already placed him ahead of most cultivators.
He could already imagine future battles, when his Imperial Meridian Realm’s True Fate emerged, he would unleash this pseudo-world and witness the despair on his opponents’ faces.
At this point, his fourth meridian gate had fully opened, and with the push of God Meridian Realm energy of his previous life, his cultivation realm rapidly rose:
It wasn’t until he reached the peak of the Desolate Meridian Realm that his cultivation stabilized.
Xu Zimo exhaled deeply. He thought the transformation had concluded and was about to stand when, suddenly, something inside him trembled.
His heart started beating faster, and for a moment his mind went blank, his entire body frozen in place.
Inside his body, the mysterious Primordial Bead, which had always remained inactive, suddenly began to rotate.
This bead had always been the biggest secret behind his rebirth. Xu Zimo only knew that it could store cultivation energy and tear space-time more easily.
Its other functions were completely unknown. Since his reincarnation, the bead had never shown any sign of activity, until now.
Xu Zimo felt as if he had lost control of his body. The mysterious bead flew into the True Fate world he had just created.
He sensed his consciousness being pulled away from his body, carried by the mysterious bead into some unknown dimension.
When his mind finally cleared, Xu Zimo found himself in total darkness.
In one direction of this darkness flowed a vast, majestic river.
Its surface shimmered with light and pulsed with an otherworldly rhythm. Though it appeared to flow gently, Xu Zimo could sense that every ripple in this river carried the power to reshape the world.
Because the cultivation technique he practiced, Grand Freedom Sovereign Codex, focused on the past, present, and future, Xu Zimo felt a strange familiarity the moment he saw this river.
"The River of Time," he muttered, his voice trembling.
The River of Time, also called the River of Fate, was one of the cores of a world.
From the moment a person is born, their life, destiny, and experiences are etched into the River of Fate.
It’s said that only those who open all twelve meridian gates and transcend the self can escape the River of Fate and truly control their own destiny.
And it wasn’t just people, even a single blade of grass or the birth of an entire world was recorded in this river.
All things in the universe are bound by fate.
Xu Zimo stared at the river, his body subtly shaking. What he had long dreamed of understanding was now right before his eyes.
Yet, he was merely a strand of consciousness here, with no control over anything.
The Primordial Bead carried his awareness upstream along the River of Time, heading toward its origin.
His vision was clouded by white mist; he could barely see his surroundings, and his mind gradually faded into a trance-like sleep.
He had no idea how long he slept, perhaps an instant, perhaps ten million years.
Eventually, when the Primordial Bead stopped, Xu Zimo’s awareness slowly returned.
…
What appeared before his eyes shook him to his core.
He stood under a boundless starry sky, where the stars twinkled with brilliant light, illuminating the heavens.
A galactic river stretched across the cosmos like a silver ribbon from the Ninth Heaven, enveloping the entire sky. Within it, countless star clusters flowed like thick, glistening liquid, unending and radiant.
At one end of the sky, the River of Time surged endlessly. History unfolded before Xu Zimo’s eyes like a living film.
From the moment the River of Time first formed, from the very origin of this world, all of history was displayed before him in the river’s evolution.
…
The grand tides of the world follow a law: all that unites must shatter, all that is shattered must unite.
Just like the myriad realms of the universe, every one of them will eventually move from birth to destruction.
All things in the world are relative. On a small scale, life is born and dies, and new life emerges to replace it, a process of natural reproduction.
Life and death are two sides of the same coin.
On a grander scale, entire worlds begin, are destroyed, and then new ones are created again, this is the cosmic cycle.
In simple terms, from humans to worlds, everything will eventually transition from birth to destruction.
A world is born, it dies, and from that destruction, a new world is formed.
That new world then moves toward its own destruction, and again, a new one is born from the ashes.
This cycle repeats endlessly, it is the history of world development.
No world has ever truly survived since the beginning of the universe. Every one of them is locked in an eternal cycle of rebirth and annihilation.
Every world goes through a cycle, from birth to destruction, and then from destruction, a new world is born. This repeats endlessly.
We call each newly born world an ‘Epoch’.
From the moment the previous epoch ends in destruction to the moment the next begins, the River of Fate also begins anew, recording everything that happens within that epoch.
Each epoch has its own River of Fate. When the epoch is destroyed, so too is its river.
So the River of Fate now before Xu Zimo only records events since the beginning of this current epoch.
Somewhere in this newly born epoch, there is a land known as the Primordial Heartlands.
The wheel of history turned slowly, and the Primordial Heartlands opened its first chapter.
We call this the Legendary Era.
To the people of present-day the Primordial Heartlands, the Legendary Era is far too ancient. Other than a few ruins left behind, there are no surviving traces.
Without these ancient ruins from the Legendary Era, many would even question whether it ever existed at all.
After the Legendary Era, the Primordial Heartlands opened its second chapter,
The Desolate Era.
And after that came a man named Zhen Wu, who stood atop the heavens and bore the weight of destiny.
It was he who began the Primordial Heartlands’ third chapter, the Imperial Era.
From the Legendary Era onward, those long-buried secrets, forgotten in the river of time, now began to unfold before Xu Zimo’s very eyes.
In truth, the Primordial Heartlands is only one part of this epoch.
Everything beyond it, the outer worlds, their origins and secrets, also unfurled in front of him, revealing a vast and magnificent new cosmos.