“World Sovereign, you intrude on my ancestral tomb and covet my ancestor’s treasures. I should break you into a million pieces for the offense and scatter your true spirit, but you once saved me and my kin from Revered Rednote. You safeguarded the bloodline of the emperor of the original Hongmeng. For that, your merits offset your faults.
“You and I no longer share karmic ties from henceforth. I will also spare the three outside.” Di Yin looked solemnly at Lu Yun.
Lu Yun inclined his head in return.
Di Yin was correct. Since he’d obtained the legacy of the original emperor, he’d completely activated the strand of Di bloodline in his body and risen from the most lowly offshoot to the direct heir of the emperor.
Everything in the tomb was his.
“As for the two of you… Blood Sovereign, I will not stop you if you wish to leave. After all, you died in service to the emperor. Cloud Sovereign, you were close friends with the forefather. His legacy has resurfaced from the shadows because of you. If you are willing to stay—”
Yun Zhongzi shook his head before Di Ling had a chance to finish. “This simple daoist is used to the life of a recluse with no fixed occupation. The great emperor once wished for me to be his strategist of the state, but I declined. You…”
Di Ling didn’t make further offers when he heard the response, he knew Yun Zhongzi spoke the truth.
“We take our leave.” Yun Zhongzi turned to take the Blood Sovereign and gravely injured Lu Yun with him.
“Ohe moment.” Lu Yun waved a hand and glanced at the Imperial Seal hovering over Di Yin’s head.
Yun Zhongzi paused, looking quizzically at him.
“I want to get to the bottom of something once and for all,” Lu Yun murmured. “Those thirty-three cycles I saw… and the ones I didn’t… were they loops of the same cycle… or new life repeating the events of the past?”
“What??” Yun Zhongzi, the four sovereigns, and Di Ling gaped when they heard him.
“All things become one!” Lu Yun suddenly opened his arms and whistled.
“Hmm?!” Di Ling’s eyes widened with shock.
“All shall return to one!”
Hummmm.
Purple-golden radiance blasted into the air from Lu Yun’s body. The Imperial Seal over Di Ling’s head shuddered violently and began to slip free from his control!
“How is this possible?” Not only was Di Ling shocked beyond belief, so were the others.
“As I wander through the heavens!”
The Imperial Seal floated up from Di Ling’s head and began spinning in the air.
“I alone return true!”
Boom!
The Imperial Seal roared with a dull boom as figures walked out of it, drifting down into Lu Yun’s body. There were thirty-three of them in total!
They weren't true life forms, just images. The Imperial Seal landed in his hand as Lu Yun’s expression turned forebodingly dark. Indeed… Just as the Dao King had initially warned him and suspicion gradually crept up on him, here was definitive proof.
The thirty-three cycles he’d seen hadn’t been true eras of different times. They were all a loop of the same exact cycle!
When his future self journeyed through thirty-three instances of great devastation, he hadn’t dared to really talk to the versions of him in those eras. What if he caused some changes in that era that filtered through to present day?
Those versions of himself also later erased their memories of meeting him.
But since he’d visited the eras, he didn’t return empty-handed. He’d left a tiny mark in all of the future versions of him, so that they would leave an image in the primary self’s strongest treasure when they returned to it—the Imperial Seal!
That was how Lu Yun wanted to gather conclusive evidence to verify either one of his terrifying speculations.
Thirty-three Lu Yuns walked out of the Imperial Seal—thirty-three marks hidden within the treasure. Thirty-three of them meant thirty-three repeats!
“So there we have it, the thirty-three great devastations I saw weren’t the result of continuously traveling backward in time, but a simple reshowing of history.
“Someone went to great lengths to show me past history and craft the illusion of a great devastation, a grand beginning, and the development of life occurring in a progressive cycle. None of that exists! We’ve never advanced beyond our current cycle!
“No wonder I couldn’t get those thirty-three cycles out of my mind. The so-called great devastation isn’t the end of life as we know it, but resetting our entire cycle from the beginning.” Lu Yun lifted his head. “Who’s behind this and why did he do it?”
The Imperial Seal was unique—it was the only treasure that wasn’t destroyed when time began anew. Lu Yun had refined it again and again, sending his image into it and thus preserving thirty-three copies of himself.
Lu Yun’s heart trembled while Di Yin was overcome with awe.
He’d seen multiple Lu Yuns walk out of the seal; the incantation the young man had recited had plainly been the mantra to activate the treasure. It didn’t come from the emperor of the original Hongmeng, but from an even more ancient existence.
Though Di Yin had also seen the incantation in the Imperial Seal, he hadn’t been able to give voice to it.
“This is yours.” Lu Yun tossed the seal to Di Yin after collecting his thirty-three images and left. The one who’d endured thirty-three great devastations had been himself! Not someone who looked like him from another lifetime, but him, just him!
An omnipotent existence had him in the palm of their hand. And not just Lu Yun—everything that existed within the limits of their understanding was the unknown entity’s plaything.
However, he had the Tome of Life and Death this time, so everything was going to change. Perhaps… the reason why he’d failed so many times wasn’t the withered wood, but the Imperial Seal. After all, it’d remained the same through all these loops.
……
Di Yin’s expression flickered rapidly as he looked at the treasure in his hand.
“Young emperor, should we eliminate them?” asked the Fog Sovereign as he looked at his master’s face.
“No.” Di Yin shook his head. “You haven’t fully come back to life yet and will disperse as dust if you leave the tomb. Everything can wait until after you’ve fully resurrected.”
“Can we… bring back His Imperial Majesty?” the Fog Sovereign suddenly asked hopefully.
Di Yin remained silent for a long moment. “The emperor is not dead.”
……
Outside the tomb, Lu Yun reconvened with Jian Juexian, Xing Wuliang, and the Brightheart World King. Yun Zhongzi and the Blood Sovereign had already left, and Lu Yun needed to quickly move his men out of Dragonmountain Clime. Di Yin would kill them if they remained there for too long.
The only thing that put him at ease was that the Fog Sovereign and others couldn’t leave the tomb.
“Why didn’t you take the Imperial Seal?” Mo Yi asked with puzzlement.
“There’s no need,” Lu Yun shook his head slightly. “In all those countless reincarnations and loops, the Imperial Seal has always remained the same.”
“What does that mean?” Mo Yi’s eyes widened.
“That I would fail again if I took the seal, nothing about the ending would change,” Lu Yun took a deep breath. “Perhaps not taking it is the key to changing everything.”
etvolare's Thoughts
Wow, it's been a long time since we've had such a crazy twist, did everyone follow that?
When Lu Yun's future self first shows up and sprouts the mumbo jumbo, the Dao King snaps everyone out of it and says that since his future self is a demon, we shouldn't be taking what he said at face value.
Once future Lu Yun melded with primary Lu Yun (he's the dao fruit, after all), Lu Yun gets all of his memories. That's how we know future Lu Yun travels to the very far past and meets up with his future self from the era before the one we're in. They meet up with more future selves etc. and goes on for thirty-three cycles. That builds an impression that we've been living the same lives thirty-three times over (every blade of grass, every heartbeat was the same) while Lu Yun fails again and again. That things are different only because of the Tome of Life and Death this time.
But in this chapter, we learn that while the cycles are true, it's been repeats of the same era. Lu Yun has been failing, but just in his lifetime. So that begs the question, why this trick? (And proving the Dao King right. Things were screwy with future Lu Yun, but not because he wanted to lie to present Lu Yun, but because he himself was also lied to.)
I'd love to know too lol. Does the big bad guy want to make it feel inevitable that Lu Yun will fail, because he's already done so thirty-three times? Is that so important that he wanted to create this illusion…?
