464: Chapter 464 The Long River of Searching for Home (Part 1)

"Willing to change, traveling through time, wanting to be by your side~."

"Upon arrival, suddenly realizing, it's an unknown location~."

The somewhat dated BGM echoed in Zhou Yan's ears, but he was so overwhelmed by the sight and sensations before him that he couldn't even turn it off.

The surroundings consisted of indescribable colors and an indescribable space, largely composed of countless flowing lights.

These flowing lights were primarily white, yet they were encased in various colored glows, shimmering brilliantly upon observation.

Zhou Yan felt as if he had fallen into a non-Newtonian fluid; his body was spread-eagled, drifting forward while spinning in an extremely ungraceful posture.

Whenever he tried to struggle with force, his body would tighten, so he could only slightly adjust his posture to make the spinning less uncomfortable.

"Is this... the river of time?"

To be honest, if Zhou Yan weren't flying forward like a dart, he would truly be captivated by the magnificent scenery before him.

But now, he was just glad that cultivators didn't have the concept of motion sickness... well, at least not yet.

After struggling for an unknown amount of time, Zhou Yan finally corrected his position. He was no longer roleplaying as a dart and finally had a moment to turn off the BGM, bringing instant peace to his ears.

"Good heavens, this feels nothing like it did in the dream. It's way too strange."

Zhou Yan squinted his eyes, taking everything in. Only after adjusting his position could he clearly see the full picture.

Unlike the river-like appearance he had observed through the rift, here he felt more like an Incarnation of an electrical signal traveling through a fiber optic cable.

He couldn't tell if he was falling downward or flying forward; he could only feel himself moving, heading toward the point of light he had marked.

"Ding, observing Ti█e River█, @#$^%!$# ..."

"Crap, what's going on!"

Just as Zhou Yan was getting used to the bizarre environment, the System started acting up, flashing red lights.

Strings of garbled code continuously surfaced before him, while a series of pop-up windows appeared and kept multiplying.

Originally, Zhou Yan could see the flowing lights and the mysterious brilliance in the distance, but now everything was tinted red by these translucent pale-red interfaces, as if he were wearing red sunglasses.

"Don't do this! Don't do this! Don't do this!"

"I finally managed to head back, don't go exploding on me now! Didn't you just finish upgrading?"

"And it's not like I haven't been here before. Everything was fine when I came here; why did it turn into this on the way back?"

"I won't end up surviving only to be blown up by the System, will I? What would my death here even count as?"

Seeing this sight, Zhou Yan's originally stable Dao Heart trembled. Before entering the river of time, his Power of Law was nearly depleted.

The remaining power was only enough for him to go home; otherwise, he definitely would have used the complete Feng Xu template to go back and slap Ma Hao across the face instead of leaving directly.

Now that the System was acting up again, he wouldn't know how to handle it if an accident occurred.

But just then, as the pop-ups increased and his vision grew redder, the original scenery of flowing light seemed to change.

To Zhou Yan's front-left, through the translucent interface, he seemed to see an image.

It was a young man whose face was obscured, holding a wooden sword and thrusting it into a place Zhou Yan knew all too well.

It was the ruins of the Heaven-Kowt Platform he had just left.

However, compared to what he had seen, the place in the image looked as if it had been abandoned for a very, very long time, giving off the vibe of an ancient civilization's ruins.

He seemed to hear the person softly chanting a few lines.

"On this day, at this hour, humanity shall once again initiate the Severance of Heaven and Earth!"

As soon as the words fell, the originally empty scene suddenly seemed to connect to a network; countless images unfolded, filling Zhou Yan's entire field of vision.

Zhou Yan's fear of the System malfunctioning instantly dissipated as he unconsciously became immersed in them.

The images didn't stop; an even more massive amount of footage was witnessed by Zhou Yan through those red pop-ups.

Until he saw a young, haggard boy napping under a tree, only to be suddenly hit by an apple.

In that instant, time seemed to freeze.

At the moment the fruit fell, phantoms of all living beings throughout the ages emerged from the depths of the river—men and women, young and old, spanning a thousand autumns—all holding up this moment of epiphany with their palms, marching grandly toward the shore of civilization.

As more images appeared, Zhou Yan felt his head throbbing more and more, and his vision began to blur, gradually losing focus on it all.

But he could feel that many of these images were things he wasn't supposed to see.

The images continued to multiply, and the slightly clearer ones mixed among the blurred ones began to disappear.

Until to his front-right, a single image appeared, incredibly clear and vast, as if it had pushed aside all the blurred images, bringing clarity back to Zhou Yan's vision.

In the image, a man covered in wounds, wearing a Daoist robe but with a bald head, was walking forward step by step toward an equally blurred expanse ahead.

His body was gradually dissipating, turning into pitch-black dust, as he shouted loudly.

"Stealing longevity, wielding the orthodoxy, the hegemony remains unmoved through the ages.

Initiating Reincarnation, rectifying life and death, all spirits regain their vitality."

As soon as he finished speaking, the chaotic images instantly cleared, and Zhou Yan's vision returned to normal. Even the pop-up windows reverted to pale blue, and the garbled code stopped generating.

Zhou Yan wanted to pant heavily, but he felt he didn't need to. He wanted to rub his throbbing head, but felt he didn't need to do that either.

He closed the pop-ups one by one, unable to utter a word, with only one thought left in his mind.

"Damn, there's an Easter egg?"

Zhou Yan's flight gradually stabilized, and his emotions calmed down.

He admitted that many of those images were quite shocking, but since the later ones were censored, he couldn't exactly stay passionate about a bunch of mosaics.

Aside from his head throbbing a bit, it was no different from looking at mosaics—at most, it was a bit of light pollution.

So the latter part was somewhat baffling, but fortunately, he confirmed that the System wasn't the kind of thing that would "automatically explode after 10 minutes of pilot-machine separation."

After traveling for an unknown amount of time, Zhou Yan suddenly felt that the motionless point of light was getting larger. He couldn't help but widen his eyes in excitement.

"Oh! I'm here, I'm here!"

"That whole ordeal almost gave me a heart attack. Luckily, I arrived safely."

Seeing the point of light becoming clearer, Zhou Yan prepared to use the last of his Law of Time to "drop anchor," but he suddenly felt himself being tugged.

For the first time, Zhou Yan felt the effect of physical force within the river of time.

This force was pulling at him—not left or right, not up or down, but a bizarre sensation.

Zhou Yan could clearly feel himself leaving, but not in any specific direction; he was just leaving.

If he had to describe it, it was like drawing a circle in a two-dimensional world.

A two-dimensional world could never remove an object from inside a circle without breaking the circle.

But in the eyes of a three-dimensional world, it was just a circle, and taking something out of it was incredibly easy.

Yet the two-dimensional world could never understand, because they lacked the concept of height.

That was exactly how Zhou Yan felt right now.

He knew for certain he was being forced out of the river of time by something, but he couldn't comprehend the means of his departure.

And being unable to comprehend also meant he was unable to stop it.

He could no longer make any other expressions.

If the previous images were something Zhou Yan could calmly accept, then this force was truly unacceptable.

"What's the deal? Didn't they say coming back would be easy? What kind of intensity is this? If you wanted to kill me, just say so, don't send me a PPT first."

"So that thing just now was actually a life-flashback?"

"It can't be that because I haven't experienced much in this world, they supplemented it with some other flashbacks, but then realized the later content was VIP-only, so they stopped me from watching?"

Before Zhou Yan could resign himself to fate, another force pulled at him, seemingly from ahead.

Not only that, but two more forces came from behind and from another equally indescribable direction.

"Holy crap, why is there a Shang Yang execution segment!"

"Luckily there are only four..."

Before he could finish, yet another force entangled him.

Zhou Yan snorted and couldn't help but laugh.