148: Chapter 148 I almost misheard

Xie Feng leaned against the railing of the ship, his spiritual power perception lazily sweeping across the newly replaced levitating wooden keel on the flying boat's deck.

That semi-living wood wriggled extremely slowly deep within the keel, and the familiar humming began to vibrate beneath the soles of his feet once more.

The flying boat was climbing steadily, and the clouds outside the portholes were scorched into a blindingly bright white by the afternoon sun.

Third Princess had already returned to the upper deck of the flying boat to ready herself, Zhou Jinglan was recalibrating the sealing array in the cabin, and Xu Liujing was squatting in a corner of the deck, inspecting several rune nodes that had cracked from the teleportation deviation jolts.

"Brother Feng, do you think that after we made such a huge fuss several hundred years ago, the timeline won't have issues, right?"

Tu Ziguan squatted beside him, spinning the jade thumb ring rewarded by Zhou Shudan back and forth on his thumb.

Xie Feng turned his head to glance at him.

He had been thinking about this question for a long time while leaning against the railing earlier.

When running tabletop RPGs on Blue Star, all modules concerning time travel repeatedly emphasized the same thing: do not change the past, otherwise the butterfly effect will make the future unrecognizable.

Yet this space-time Transmigration was clearly no ordinary space-time travel; Nyarlathotep had personally opened the door, Tawil had watched over it beside the Gate of the Silver Key the entire time, and even The King in Yellow had reached out to calibrate the teleportation coordinates.

If The All-in-One did not want him to change history, there were ten thousand ways to stop him.

Since it did not stop him and instead actively guided him, it meant that the things he did were inherently a part of history.

Zhou Shudan inviting The King in Yellow to descend, digging Black Water Lake in the northern suburbs of the imperial city, and establishing the imperial family's offering system.

These events were already established historical facts by the era of Emperor Zhou Weixi.

He had not changed the past; he had simply returned from the future to the past, personally becoming a part of history.

"Do what I want to do?"

At this moment, Xie Feng had a new understanding of these few words.

"There shouldn't be any issues; Yog-Sothoth is backing it up, The King in Yellow is endorsing it, and even that stone slab was personally carved by Him."

Xie Feng said, suddenly frowning slightly.

He leaned the cold crystal blind staff against the side of the railing and pulled the original text of the cultes des goules from his bosom.

This original text had been handed to him by Wen Heng, who said, "This is passed down through generations of the Xie Family, said to be left behind by our ancestor."

He hadn't had time to think deeply about it back then, but now that he was free, an unsettling thought suddenly popped into his head.

Liu Yanqing had served as a chronicler in the imperial expeditionary force, writing journals in Simplified Chinese, and his mouth was full of stale tropes that only a person undergoing Transmigration would have.

This 'ancestor', Liu Yanqing.

Was he truly the source of the Xie Family Bloodline?

When that transmigrator returned to the era of the Xie Family's origins hundreds of years ago, if any traces of a transmigrator were left behind at that time, could they have been left by Xie Feng?

In other words.

Could Xie Feng simply be 'Liu Yanqing'?

Except that he simply didn't remember it himself?

He flipped the original text to the inside of the back cover, leaning in close under the afternoon light filtering through the porthole to carefully identify that extremely faint line of characters.

Simplified Chinese, written horizontally, with not a single punctuation mark missing.

He recognized this handwriting; when thumbing through Liu Yanqing's journals in the imperial library, he had repeatedly confirmed it countless times.

It was Liu Yanqing's personal handwriting.

Yet Xie Feng still felt uneasy; this time out on his travels, he had also brought the imperial journals given by Third Princess.

He flipped to the first page of the main text, comparing it line by line from the very beginning.

Liu Yanqing's phrasing habits indeed felt very similar to his own—using short sentences, disliking modifiers, and occasionally popping out a sentence or two of utterly exasperating complaints.

But after reading a few pages, he noticed a detail.

The sense of era in Liu Yanqing's phrasing was very obvious; it was not an expression style that a netizen from Xie Feng's era would use.

He closed the book, leaned back against the railing, and let out a long sigh of relief.

It wasn't Xie Feng himself.

Liu Yanqing truly was a transmigrator, but he did not belong to the same generation as him.

(Hehe)

"What's wrong?" Tu Ziguan noticed Xie Feng's expression constantly changing.

"It's nothing, just confirming something—that previous transmigrator wasn't me."

Xie Feng stuffed the original text back into the inner pocket of his robe, placing it right against the book of eibon.

"It's a Senior who came even earlier than me. Their mouth is also full of stale tropes, but they're all really old tropes. It seems that in a place like Jiuzhou, there really are more than just a few of us transmigrators."

Tu Ziguan nodded thoughtfully, spinning the jade thumb ring another half turn.

"Then did he leave any words for you? Like how you left words for Zhou Shudan."

Xie Feng leaned against the railing and thought for a moment before speaking. "He didn't leave any words for me. But he left a sentence for the Xie Family."

"What sentence?"

"When you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. But if you jump in, the abyss will make you fly."

Tu Ziguan pondered for a moment, slid the jade thumb ring off his thumb, wiped it down, and put it back on.

"Your family's ancestor truly has issues."

The cultes des goules in Xie Feng's bosom was emitting an unseen, faint glow.

When the flying boat crossed the final beacon tower at the border of Yongzhou, the scenery outside the portholes began to fade at a speed visible to the naked eye.

Poplars and seabuckthorn disappeared from the edge of the wasteland, followed by scattered caravan tents on the rammed earth roads, and then even the official roads broke off, leaving only a gray, frozen plain spreading from beneath the portholes all the way to the edge of the sky.

This was the Northern Wilderness.

The tundra looked like a grayish-brown burlap cloth that had been crumpled up and then smoothed out, sparsely dotted with a few patches of dark green lichen and short brush.

The wind swept across the ground from the northwest direction, whipping up snow particles that rustled as they struck the outer hull of the flying boat.

In the distance were several low volcanic cones; the snow on their peaks had been blown into eerie streamlined shapes by the wind, resembling a row of white giant beasts crouching at the edge of the tundra.

Xie Feng stood by the ship's railing, and as his spiritual power perception spread outward, what it touched was boundless desolation.

The Northern Wilderness was neither Jiuzhou nor the Hyperborean Continent, but a transitional zone sandwiched between the two.

There were no Sects, no imperial courier station systems, only sparsely scattered tribes and small city-states across the tundra.

The flying boat slowly landed on a flat frozen soil plateau at the edge of the Northern Wilderness.

Tu Ziguan shrank his neck, folded his Spiritual Qi skateboard and stuffed it into his bundle, hopped twice to warm his body up, and the white vapor exhaled from his mouth was instantly blown away by the wind.

Lu Mingyuan had already jumped to the ground, and his mental fluctuations gently swept across the edge of Xie Feng's consciousness, carrying a familiarity akin to revisiting an old place.

This Great Race of Yith began to introduce:

"Compared to the surveying data stored in the Great Race of Yith's library from six hundred years ago, the ice thickness of the Northern Wilderness's terrain has increased by about two inches, and the number of volcanic cones hasn't changed, but the westernmost one erupted just last year, so we must pay attention."

Third Princess walked down the boarding ramp of the flying boat.

She glanced at the faint wisps of kitchen smoke vaguely visible at the end of the tundra.

"Those are the indigenous tribes of the Northern Wilderness, not under the jurisdiction of any state in Jiuzhou. When the previous generation's imperial expeditionary force last passed through here, they traded with several of those tribes, exchanging ironware and salt for sled dogs and tundra guides."

Zhou Jinglan followed behind her, tucking his folding fan into his waistband, wrapped in a thick fur cloak over his imperial yellow robe.

"There are at least three city-states on the tundra, each independent and mutually intelligible in language, but quite wary of Cultivators from Jiuzhou's Sects. When passing through, everyone should keep a low profile and avoid revealing their identities."

Lu Mingyuan added that the largest city-state in the Northern Wilderness was called Irkut, with a population of about several thousand people, its own council and militia. It was said that a ruin left by a previous-generation civilization was buried beneath the city-state, and the Advanced council members were all scholars cultivated from ancient texts excavated from that ruin, possessing a far greater understanding of Jiuzhou than other Northern Wilderness tribes.

Xie Feng almost misheard.

Irkut, huh? Well, that's fine then.

Zhou Jinglan immediately decided to take the route through Irkut.

This way, it would be easy to find guides and replenish supplies, while also allowing for a brief rest.

The roads on the tundra were a long string of crooked bypasses compacted after countless years of people repeatedly trampling between the ice and mud.

Although Fourth Realm Cultivators could fly, such long-distance flight consumed a massive amount of Spiritual Qi, and recovering Spiritual Qi was also necessary.

Therefore, several people adopted the method of infusing their legs and bodies with Spiritual Qi to head toward the city of the Northern Wilderness in a more energy-efficient manner.