Deep in the uppermost tiers of the library, light from the auroras in the sky broke through the cracks and crevices in the ancient walls and windows.
"This should be the last book," Mo Lingtian murmured, rubbing his exhausted eyes.
"Who would have thought that the wilderness was once a mainland, lush with an abundance of energy and resources? What exactly started the Battle of the Thousand Sects? I refuse to believe it was merely just ego," Mo Lingtian mused, visibly unsatisfied with the historical records.
"Never mind. I still have more work to do." He yawned heavily, stretching his arms high into the air.
"It is your turn now," he muttered, levitating the interconnected bamboo strips containing the cultivation method that caused the ancestor's Qi deviation.
Using his divine essence, he perfectly replicated the bamboo strip within his sea of consciousness.
"What is this?" the chief commander asked, watching Mo Lingtian's soul avatar descend with the bamboo slip in hand.
"This is the cultivation method that led to that old monster's Qi deviation," Mo Lingtian explained as he touched down.
"I want to study it and find the proper way to cultivate the technique. The safest place to do that is in here." He sat cross-legged in mid-air, the bamboo strip floating before him.
With a single wave, his Death Domain expanded, spanning several meters across his sea of consciousness like a protective dome. The thin, luminous geometric lines quickly detached from his body, slowly penetrating the bamboo strip.
"This artifact actually contains an independent space inside!" Mo Lingtian exclaimed. He watched the geometric lines continuously weave into the bamboo strip as it began to glow with a soft, green light.
This technique must be a demonic art; the lines formed from my Death Domain won't help much here, Mo Lingtian deduced silently. He tugged on his demonic core, transmuting raw energy from the core through the geometric lines and directly into the bamboo strip.
The entire vanguard army watched in breathless anticipation, waiting to see what new miracle this youth was about to pull off.
With a slow, precise twist of two fingers, he guided the lines along the etched characters. Using his other hand, he simultaneously replicated them in the air like floating runes as the ancient text came to life.
After spending more than three hours rigorously replicating every character on the bamboo strips, he finally etched the last stroke into the air.
Exhaling a deep sigh, he swept his hands together, compressing the thousands of floating characters into a dense, shifting sphere of light in his palms.
"Are these the instructions on how to practice the technique?" the chief commander asked, floating up to him and taking the sphere into her own hands.
"I don't think so," Mo Lingtian replied. "Instructions for standard cultivation methods rarely require independent spaces. This must be some kind of test designed to filter out anyone unworthy of practicing it."
With a casual flick of her fingers, she expanded the compressed characters, rearranging them into a massive, spiraling dome of interchanging runes.
"You are right. These characters are far too random. They do not resemble the structured flow of a cultivation method," she observed, her eyes tracking the shifting symbols.
"Let me study the bamboo strips again. A lot can be learned about the creator of this method by observing their crafting style," Mo Lingtian said. He arranged the Devil Converging Seal, meticulously reversing its flow into a diverging seal to deeply investigate every edge and microscopic cut on the bamboo surface.
"Anyone could have carved those bamboo strips. If you truly want to understand the owner of this technique, the characters themselves are what you should be studying," the chief commander corrected him, her gaze still fixed on the dome.
"You are right. You take the left side, and I will take the right," Mo Lingtian agreed, flying toward his half of the rotating dome.
Mo Lingtian immediately shifted his diverging seal to aggressively magnify the structural properties of each character under his spiritual probe.
"These four..." Mo Lingtian muttered as he ran the luminous geometric lines across four distinct character stroke styles he had consistently spotted amid the rapid interchanging movements on the right side.
"You noticed it too," the chief commander noted. She immediately recreated the exact same four core stroke styles she had observed on her side, letting them float a few inches above her palms.
"Yes. They match perfectly. All the thousands of characters here are constructed entirely from these four foundational stroke styles," Mo Lingtian said, merging his replications with hers.
"Pause!" the chief commander's voice suddenly commanded, freezing the thousands of interchanging characters in a rigid time dilation.
"Part," Mo Lingtian commanded next. He swiftly manipulated the geometric lines to carefully extract and group every single paused character according to the four core styles.
When the sorting was complete, he merged the hundreds of clustered symbols together, fusing them until only four single, distinct characters remained from the four groups.
"Leaves, Branches, Trunks, and Roots," the chief commander read the four solitary characters out loud.
"Are these not simply the four parts of a tree?" she continued, visibly frustrated by the outcome of their rigorous deciphering.
"Maybe if we arrange them vertically..." Mo Lingtian suggested, stacking the characters in order from top to bottom, beginning with 'Leaves'.
"We might get..." Mo Lingtian gasped as he slid the final character into place.
The moment they aligned, the four characters erupted with an intense, cosmic green light, fusing into the otherworldly silhouette of an ancient tree. The sheer shift in energy radiating from the pattern violently blasted everyone backward.
The bamboo strip instantly decomposed into a small, pitch-black sphere outlined by a halo of distorted light. It rapidly drifted toward the tree pattern before expanding in a single breath into a massive, tremulous, cosmic black hole. Its gravitational pull was absolute, sucking everyone and everything within Mo Lingtian's sea of consciousness straight into the independent world of the bamboo strip.
"Where is this place?" one of the commanding generals whispered breathlessly, staring around at the pitch-dark purple constellations and alien galaxies surrounding them.
Mo Lingtian weakly stood up, his eyes scanning the infinite expanse until it finally clicked. This felt exactly like a place he had been before.
"This is the Void!" the chief commander yelled in sheer shock. She instinctively released a violent wave of energy and light from her body, instantly illuminating the empty space she was standing on.
The commanding generals and the phantom death soldiers immediately followed suit, erupting in auras of energy and light until a considerable portion of the cosmic void was brightly lit.
"You are finally here," a thunderous, unfathomable voice blasted from the deepest abyss of the Void.
The sheer sonic friction of that single echo instantly scorched their minds. Mo Lingtian's consciousness, along with the chief commander and the entire phantom army, was violently refined by the raw pressure.
Mo Lingtian could not look up. None of them could. They collapsed flat on their faces into the endless emptiness, their awareness completely fading into darkness.