Qingshi stood suspended over the coastline, a solitary figure etched against the vastness of the sky. Below, the port city pulsed with its usual frantic energy—the rhythmic thud of docking ships, the guttural shouts of merchants, and the shimmer of cultivators weaving through the harbor.
Then, the rhythm broke. One by one, the eyes of the city turned upward. The bustle slowed to a crawl as a heavy, uncertain silence washed over the streets.
Qingshi ignored them. His gaze was fixed on the horizon, where the sea stretched into an infinite, flat blue. It was a distance without change, an expanse that promised everything and yielded nothing.
From the city below, a single figure rose into the air. He was a Golden Core cultivator, his movements stiff with a mixture of duty and terror. He halted at a precise, respectful distance, his hands cupped in a deep salute.
"Senior," the man began, his voice wavering slightly. "If there is anything you require... this city will do its utmost to assist."
Qingshi did not respond. He didn't even grant the man the mercy of a glance. He simply continued to stare at the water. The cultivator waited, the seconds stretching into an agonizing minute, before he finally fell into a shamed silence.
"What lies beyond the sea?" Qingshi finally asked.
The cultivator stiffened. "Sir... it is known as the Endless Sea. No one has ever reached its end. Many ships have attempted the crossing, as have the most powerful among us. Some return with nothing but stories of exhaustion. Others..." He hesitated. "Others simply never return at all. It is believed there is no boundary."
Qingshi turned his gaze toward the man, a cold, clinical observation. "Understood."
He offered nothing more. With a slight shift in the air, Qingshi moved, leaving the coastline and the trembling cultivator behind. He headed straight for the heart of the deep water.
At first, there were signs of life—small fishing vessels hugging the coast, trade routes marked by white sails, and low-flying cultivators patrolling the nearby islands. But as he pressed further, the world began to thin. The ships vanished first, then the cultivators, until the only things remaining were the water below and the sky above.
Qingshi continued forward, his speed unchanging, until he reached a point where the air itself seemed to lose its scent. He stopped.
He looked ahead, then down at the churning waves. To a mortal eye, the sea still stretched into infinity. To the senses of an Envoy from the Immortal Realm, the truth was much cruder.
"This is the boundary," he murmured.
There was no more water beyond this point. There was no more sky. What lay ahead was merely the illusion of distance—a clever visual trick sustained by the fragment's fading laws to keep its inhabitants from realizing they were trapped in a jar.
He shifted his gaze, scanning the "Endless" horizon not for a path, but for an anomaly.
A small, isolated island came into view. It was a jagged speck of rock, easy to miss against the repetitive blue of the ocean, sitting exactly where the world's logic began to fray.
Qingshi moved toward it. He didn't go because he expected a welcome; he went because in a world of illusions, the only thing worth investigating is the thing that sits on the edge of the lie.
Qingshi touched down on the jagged shoreline of the island. It wasn't large, but it wasn't insignificant either—wide enough to hold uneven ground, a few clusters of wind-bent trees, and stretches of bare rock shaped by years of isolation. Toward the center, a small hut stood near a quiet campfire, its smoke rising steadily into the still air.
Qingshi touched down on the jagged rock of the isolated island. It was a miserable little patch of earth, barely large enough to host a single stunted tree and a very small, very smoky campfire.
At the center of the camp sat an old man. He was currently poked a scrawny, charred-looking fish with a stick. He didn't jump when Qingshi appeared; he simply froze, his eyes widening as they locked onto the Envoy. He wasn't terrified, which was a refreshing change of pace for Qingshi. He was just genuinely surprised to have company.
The wind whistled lonely across the rocks. The fire popped, sending a spark onto the old man's foot. He didn't seem to notice.
"Do you want some?" the old man asked, finally breaking the silence. He held up the charred fish. It looked like it had been dead long before it hit the fire, and it had definitely seen better days.
Qingshi stared at the blackened offering. "No."
"Suit yourself," the old man muttered, pulling the fish back. "More for me. Though, honestly, I'm not sure 'more' is the right word for this. It's mostly scales and regret."
Silence settled over the island again, save for the sound of the old man chewing something that sounded suspiciously like charcoal. Qingshi looked out at the empty sea, then back at the pathetic meal.
"It's not easy to find fish this far out," Qingshi noted, his voice flat. "You'd have to go much closer to the shore to find anything... edible."
The old man gave a small, solemn nod, wiping a bit of soot from his lip. "There aren't any fish here. Not a single one. This far out, the water is basically just blue-tinted boredom."
"Then what are you eating?"
"I eat whatever I can find," the old man replied vaguely. He poked the fire again. "Mostly bits of driftwood. Some particularly adventurous seaweed. Once, a very confused seagull." He paused, looking down at his plate. "I think this might actually be a piece of an old boot. I eat it mostly out of habit, really. My stomach hasn't realized I'm a Nascent Soul master yet, so it keeps demanding appointments."
Qingshi looked at the man. This was the legendary "limit" of the world. A man who had reached the pinnacle of cultivation only to spend his eternity eating footwear on a rock at the end of the universe.
"You've been here a long time," Qingshi observed.
"Long enough to name all the rocks," the old man said, pointing a greasy finger at a nearby boulder. "That's Steve. He's a bit of a conversationalist compared to the others." He looked up at Qingshi, a sudden, sharp glint appearing in his cloudy eyes. "You don't smell like the local air. You smell like... somewhere that actually has real fish."
The old man glanced at Qingshi, his brow furrowing as if trying to solve a particularly annoying riddle. Something about the Envoy's answers felt... thin. Like a veil with no face behind it.
"Which sect are you from?" the old man asked, turning back to his pathetic fire.
"Cloudwatch Sect," Qingshi replied.
The old man froze. He turned fully this time, his rheumy eyes narrowing as he scrutinized every thread of Qingshi's robes. "Cloudwatch..." He repeated the name as if tasting it. "Never heard of it. And I've been around long enough to see mountains turn into puddles."
He stood up slowly, the joints in his knees popping like dry twigs. He brushed the soot from his tattered clothes and paced a few steps away. "Strange. A Nascent Soul master I've never heard of. You didn't exist in my time, boy."
He stopped, his gaze drifting toward the horizon. A sudden, heavy veil of nostalgia settled over his features, the humor bleeding out of his voice. "Tell me... how is the Wanning Moon Sect? Still as insufferable as ever?"
"I do not know it," Qingshi said simply.
The old man went utterly still. For a long moment, the only sound was the crackle of the dying fire. Then, he let out a long, shuddering breath.
"...Then it's gone," he whispered. "They were the strongest back then. Too arrogant, of course. Thought the heavens themselves couldn't touch them. Turns out, time is a better killer than any rival."
He looked down at the charred fish in his hand. He didn't eat it. The silence that followed wasn't just heavy; it was a mourning shroud. After a while, he looked back at Qingshi, his eyes scanning the Envoy with a newfound intensity.
"You don't look that old," he noted, a trace of genuine wonder in his voice. "You reached the Nascent Soul already? At your age, I was still trying to figure out which end of the sword to hold."
"Time doesn't matter much where I am from," Qingshi replied.
The old man frowned, sensing a depth he couldn't measure, but he didn't press. Instead, he gestured vaguely toward the Endless Sea. "You came all the way out here to see this? We've tried crossing it, you know. My generation, the one before me... no matter how far you fly, nothing changes. It's like the world folds back on itself."
He let out a dry, rattling chuckle. "A boundary. A cage for the gifted. Even for us, there is no exit. In the end, we just sit on a rock and wait for death to remember where it parked."
"There is a way out," Qingshi said.
The old man's head snapped toward him. It was the first real shift in his energy—a spark of lightning in a dead sky. "What way?"
"The sect I am from... is not of this world," Qingshi said, his voice cutting through the wind. "It exists beyond this fragment. In the Immortal Realm."
The words settled like lead. The old man didn't jump or cheer; he simply stared, measuring the weight of the lie against the possibility of the truth. "Immortal Realm..." He shook his head slowly. "Why should I believe a stranger who smells like a different kind of air?"
"You don't have to," Qingshi said. "But I am the only chance you will ever have to meet someone from beyond this jar."
Silence returned, thick and electric. The fire had finally died, leaving only glowing embers. The old man looked at the sea, then back at Qingshi. He knew there was nothing left for him here—no more fish, no more sects, only the slow rot of Steve the Rock.
"If you're lying..." the old man said, his voice suddenly dropping into a register of terrifying power, "I won't be polite about it."
"Understood," Qingshi nodded.
Without another word, the old man rose into the air. He didn't rush; he drifted toward the sea and descended into the waves. For a moment, the surface was still. Then, a titanic surge of spiritual energy erupted from beneath the water. The sea parted in a perfect, crystalline circle.
When he emerged, the hermit was gone.
His hair was clean and bound neatly behind his head. The tangled beard had vanished. His posture was no longer hunched but straight and commanding, radiating the suppressed pressure of a true master. He looked no older than thirty-five.
He returned to the island, walked into his humble hut, and emerged minutes later in a set of clean, proper robes—simple, yet of a quality that hadn't been seen in the fragment for a thousand years. At his hip rested a long, elegant sword.
He paused for a heartbeat, his gaze sweeping over the small space that had been his home and his prison. Then, he stepped toward Qingshi, his eyes bright with a fire that had been dormant for centuries.
"My name is Ji Xue," he said, his voice clear and resonant.
"Qingshi," the Envoy replied.
Ji Xue gripped the hilt of his sword and looked toward the sky, toward the fracture he had stared at for a lifetime. "Let's go. I'm tired of this rock."
End of Chapter 89