412: Chapter 412 The star map provides no guidance, but revisiting familiar places sparks interest.

The spring rain fell like silk.

Fine droplets descended from the grayish-white sky, tapping against the dark blue roof tiles with a continuous rustling sound. Rainwater gathered along the moss-covered eaves into strings of broken beads, crashing onto the bluestone pavement below and splashing into tiny circles of water.

The air was thick with the earthy scent of rain-soaked soil, mixed with the fragrance of peach blossoms wafting from deep within the alley. The steamers at the street corner bun shop were half-open, sending white steam infused with the aroma of fermented dough and meat filling into the humid air. A peddler carrying a shoulder pole and wearing a worn coir raincoat hurried through the puddles, the copper bells at both ends of his pole letting out muffled tinkles.

Zhou Wannian sat under the eaves of a dilapidated wine shop deep in the alley.

The long bench beneath him was in disrepair, its wood grain coarse and smelling of damp, decaying timber. He held a large, crude porcelain bowl with several chips along its rim. The bowl contained a portion of cloudy rice wine, with a few grains of rice residue that hadn't been filtered out floating on the surface, smelling of a sour yet mellow fermented mash.

He tilted his head back, brought the crude bowl to his lips, and took a large gulp.

The cool wine slid down his throat, turning into a mild warmth in his belly. This cloudy wine brewed from mundane grains lacked the marrow-cleansing effects of the jade nectar found in the cultivation world, yet it carried a grounded sense of belonging to the earth.

For Zhou Wannian, who had just crushed a high-dimensional Dominator with his bare hands in the endless Void Realm and leveled an entire Immortal-Demon Great World, this grounded, mundane atmosphere was the best medicine to pass the long years. The loneliness of the Chaotic Star Sea formed a sharp contrast with the bustle of this Jiangnan water town. One moment he was tearing stars apart with his hands, and the next he was sitting under the eaves listening to the rain and drinking wine; this sense of fragmentation seemed perfectly natural on him.

He set down the wine bowl. The bottom of the crude porcelain bowl collided with the uneven wooden tabletop, producing a dull thud.

A few drops of cloudy wine splashed out of the bowl, landing on the wooden table that was covered in a thin layer of patina.

Zhou Wannian did not wipe it away like an ordinary drinker. He extended a long, pale index finger and lightly tapped the drop of wine.

Great Perfection Space Law flowed silently at his fingertip.

That ordinary drop of wine, drawn by his fingertip, slowly rose and hovered in mid-air. Immediately after, the internal structure of the water droplet was instantly expanded and reorganized by spatial power.

A speck of dim blue light lit up from the center of the droplet.

The light spread outward, weaving into countless slender silver lines. These lines frantically intersected and folded within the small space before Zhou Wannian, eventually forming a three-dimensional, complex, and vast miniature Star Map.

This was exactly the coordinate map of the myriad realms that he had imprinted with his Divine Soul at the bottom of the moat surrounding the Ten Thousand Bone Stairs in the Immortal-Demon Great World. By cross-referencing it with the ancient markings on that broken stone tablet, he had completed the full route.

The Star Map hovered in the dim corner of the wine shop, emitting a cold, quiet halo.

In the shop, the dozing, blind old proprietor noticed nothing, still snoring against the counter. Passersby holding oil-paper umbrellas hurried past, and none saw this top-secret Universe mystery—one capable of driving high-dimensional civilizations into a frenzy—casually displayed before a down-and-out scholar's wine table.

Zhou Wannian leaned against a wooden pillar, his gaze casually scanning the miniature Star Map.

The silver lines represented the dimensional routes laid out by the Absolute Truth Realm. Those brightly shining nodes were low-dimensional worlds whose Origin was being drained; those dim, gray patches were the dead Star Domains that had already been sucked dry and turned into world-remnant paving stones.

The entire Star Map exuded a cold, mechanical sense of calculation. The planning of every route followed a mathematical model of profit maximization.

Zhou Wannian looked at these dense grids, recalling The Angler whose face he had slapped to pieces. That group of fellows hiding in tin cans treated the Universe like a massive database, attempting to use straight lines and circles to cage all cycles of life, death, and Reincarnation. They used the bones of billions of worlds to pave their path, all to derive that perfect formula in their hearts.

He shook his head, his gaze following the veins of the Star Map toward the peripheral regions.

Those clearly marked coordinates failed to pique even half of his interest. He had originally just wanted to see exactly how far those fellows had extended their reach and if there was any fun to be had along the way to kill time.

Suddenly.

Zhou Wannian's gaze paused at a remote, desolate corner on the edge of the Star Map.

The coordinates there were not connected by silver lines.

Outside the Star Map network composed of countless regular geometric shapes, that area presented a state of Chaos, distortion, and disorder.

A mass of gray mist, like an ugly abscess, squatted on the edge of the Star Map. There was no twinkling starlight within the mist, and even the refraction of spatial curvature lost its effect there. Light shining into it was like a clay ox entering the sea, failing to stir even a single ripple.

That was the outskirts of the Taiwu Ancestral Court.

The ancient coordinates recorded on that dark gray remnant stone he had crushed with one foot pointed precisely into the depths of this mist.

Zhou Wannian looked at the gray mist miniaturized on the Star Map, a ripple of memory rising in the depths of his eyes.

He didn't know how many eons ago that old matter had taken place.

At that time, he had been strolling through the endless dimensions and happened to pass by that area. He still clearly remembered the feel and smell of that place. No wind, no light, and no sound of Spiritual Qi fluctuations. There was only a pure deathly silence. The air there was permeated with a sour, rotten smell similar to rusty iron buried in mud and fermented for ten million years. Death Qi was like maggots on a bone, pervasively eroding any matter that approached.

Zhou Wannian had always kept his distance from such desolate and foul-smelling places. Back then, he found the smell too pungent and the scenery an eyesore. He had casually pulled out several chains condensed from Great Perfection Law and, like putting a lid on a foul-smelling dry well, he had tightly Sealed the outskirts of that area.

After finishing all that, he had simply left and never returned for another look. In his view, it was nothing more than a garbage dump abandoned during the process of the Universe's evolution; aside from being deathly still, there was nothing else to it.

At this moment, the thought of revisiting his old haunts flashed through his mind.

Zhou Wannian poured the last gulp of rice wine from the bowl into his mouth and leaned forward slightly, closing in on the hovering Star Map.

His gaze was locked onto the mass of gray mist representing the Taiwu Ancestral Court.

He watched for a moment.

On Zhou Wannian's face, which originally carried a somewhat lazy smile, the smile slowly faded, and his brow twitched slightly.

"The activity beneath this lid is a bit unusual."

He extended his index finger and lightly tapped the edge of the mist on the Star Map.

The moment his fingertip touched the light and shadow.

A faint wisp of Divine Soul perception followed the coordinate projection of the Star Map, crossing endless spatial barriers to conduct a simulated investigation.

The feedback that came back caused the dim light in Zhou Wannian's eyes to sharpen instantly.

The mist had become thicker.

It wasn't just a little bit thicker; it was tens of millions of times denser than when he had left all those years ago.

More importantly, when he had left the Seal, the Death Qi there was chaotic and leaking outward. It was like a pot of boiling paste, with no regularity to speak of. That was a manifestation of matter naturally decaying toward its end.

But now.

In the subtle feedback from the Star Map projection, Zhou Wannian clearly perceived that while the mass of gray mist that was too thick to disperse appeared chaotic on the surface, its interior hid a precise and strict sense of layering.

The mist was divided into countless layers.

Between each layer of mist, there existed tiny spatial faults and gravitational collapse zones. Death Qi circulated within these faults, forming closed-loop death vortices.

These vortices appeared to have formed naturally, but if one connected all the vortices together, they would discover that they constituted a massive, complex Deadly Array where moving one part would affect the whole.

It was like an inescapable net woven from dust and cobwebs; it seemed it would break at a touch, but in reality, it was filled with poisoned barbs and steel wires that could grind a Divine Soul to pieces. Once an outsider rashly intruded, these seemingly drifting vortices of Death Qi would instantly trigger a chain reaction, pulling the intruder into a Spatial Meat Grinder from which there was no return.

"A death trap."

Zhou Wannian uttered two words as he looked at the slowly writhing gray light and shadow under his fingertip.

This was not a dangerous land naturally evolved by heaven and earth; this was a man-made trap.

Someone had meticulously constructed a perimeter of barbed wire and dug pits filled with sharp blades outside the well lid he had placed back then.

Who had set this trap?

The first image to surface in Zhou Wannian's mind was that of the tin cans from the Truth Realm.

They collected low-dimensional Origin and deduced the flaws of the Taiwu Ancestral Court. That Angler who had been stepped on also said that the Truth Realm's fleet had once been completely wiped out there. Could it be a blockade they set up to prevent the things inside from coming out, or to intern this region?

Zhou Wannian shook his head, dismissing this guess.

The style of this mist trap was completely different from the Truth Realm's way of doing things, which was straightforward and filled with geometric shapes and rigid code. The Truth Realm's defensive measures were built on strict mathematical logic, pursuing absolute physical barriers and energy shields.

But the mist death trap before him exuded a sense of ruthlessness, deviousness, and a calculation that hid killing intent within cotton. It utilized the Death Qi characteristics of the Taiwu Ancestral Court itself, going with the flow and adapting to the terrain. This cunning method of array formation was definitely not something those high-dimensional mechanical lifeforms who only knew how to use calculators could come up with.

It wasn't set by the tin cans outside.

Then it was made by the things inside.

Inside the Taiwu Ancestral Court, those 'old residents' whom he had locked up with chains for countless eons had not only failed to be completely worn away by the Death Qi over these long years, but had instead used this dense Death Qi to set up such a killing trap at the entrance to invite guests into a trap.

Who were they guarding against?

Guarding against the Truth Realm's fleet?

Or guarding against the passerby who had casually locked them up back then?

Zhou Wannian withdrew his finger.

The three-dimensional Star Map hovering in mid-air instantly collapsed, turning back into a drop of cloudy wine that fell back onto the coarse wooden table with a plop.

The wine seeped into the wood grain, leaving a dark water stain.

Outside the wine shop, the spring rain continued to fall. The rustling sound of it hitting the bluestone pavement, mixed with the barking of a dog deep in the alley, carried a sense of laziness and peace that made one's bones feel soft. Under the eaves across the street, two young children were poking at mud in a puddle with sticks, their crisp laughter carrying through the curtain of rain.

Zhou Wannian leaned against the wooden pillar, listening to the rain and watching the string of crystal water beads hanging from the eaves.

He had truly intended to find an inn in this rainy Jiangnan town, rent an upper room, and sleep comfortably for a few hundred years. He would let the Great Perfection Law circulate naturally during his slumber to wash away the stardust he had gathered during this time. To him, sleeping was both rest and a way to pass the endless years.

But now.

He looked at the ring of water on the table, and the sense of boredom that had just been suppressed by the rice wine began to grow again like weeds.

In aimless wandering, what one feared most was lack of interest.

The bunch of stitch-monsters and tin cans in the Immortal-Demon Great World shouted loudly, but when it came to fighting, they were all straightforward, fragile beings of dead logic. They broke with a single slap, without even a single subtle change that could make him look twice. No matter how many there were, they were nothing more than a pile of numbers before Absolute Mass.

It was quite boring.

And now, in that old haunt he had personally Sealed, on the outskirts of that deathly ruin that could even swallow light.

Someone had meticulously prepared a massive death trap.

Layers of mist, killing intent on all sides.

This was like a gambler hiding in the dark, spreading out a chess endgame on the table, waiting for a passerby to solve it. This kind of arrangement, with its obvious targeting and testing nature, successfully caught Zhou Wannian's attention.

As for sleeping, whether it was a few hundred years earlier or later didn't really make a difference.

But if he missed this death trap laid out at the doorstep, it would likely be difficult to find another bit of fun that could lift his spirits even slightly in the future.

"Revisiting old haunts, and even being prepared such a grand gift."

Zhou Wannian stood up.

The wooden bench beneath him let out an overburdened creak.

He fished out two copper coins covered in verdigris from his robe and casually tossed them next to the chipped, crude porcelain wine bowl.

The copper coins rolled twice on the tabletop, making a crisp clinking sound before coming to a steady stop.

The old proprietor dozing behind the counter was startled awake by the sound, rubbed his eyes, and looked up with a mumble.

"Guest, the rain hasn't stopped yet. Why don't you sit a while longer to avoid the rain?" The old proprietor looked at Zhou Wannian's thin green robe and gave a kind reminder.

"I won't be sitting anymore."

Zhou Wannian folded his hands behind his back, his gaze penetrating the layers of rain to look at the gray sky above the town.

"I want to go see an old place. The mist there is much heavier than this spring rain."

As his voice fell.

Zhou Wannian took a step, his spotless green cloth shoes stepping out from under the wine shop's eaves.

The fine rain fell from the sky, but at a distance of three feet from the top of his head, it seemed to hit an invisible barrier and automatically slid down to both sides. The rain gathered into thin streams outside the barrier, unable to wet even a corner of his clothes.

He walked along the bluestone-paved street.

With one step forward.

The moment his soles touched the puddles, not a single splash was made.

Great Perfection Space Law unfolded silently beneath his feet.

The town's streets, the mottled pink walls, and the swaying willow branches became like elongated phantoms at his sides, instantly distorting and blurring. The laughter of the children nearby and the sound of blacksmithing in the distance seemed to have their mute buttons pressed, coming to an abrupt halt.

With the second step.

The bustle and the sound of rain from the mundane world receded completely.

Zhou Wannian's figure vanished into thin air within a faint ripple of spatial waves in this misty, rainy Jiangnan alley.

Only the empty wine bowl on the wooden table and the two verdigris-covered copper coins remained quietly in this mundane tranquility.

Meanwhile, that figure in the green robe had already stepped through the dimensional barriers, following the guidance of the Star Map, walking unhurriedly toward that endless mist filled with death traps.