Gen and Baili found themselves not in a void, but in a place. It was still the Sky Ocean—the same liquid-gold light filtered through high, narrow windows—but they stood in an ancient, silent hall.
The hall was empty except for two things.
The first was the walls. They were covered not with murals or epic tales, but with a single phrase, carved and re-carved in a hundred different hands and scripts, covering every stone surface:
**IS IT REALLY IMPOSSIBLE?**
The words held no story, posed no riddle. Just the stark, repeating question.
The second was in the exact center of the hall, where the light from the windows pooled on a small, circular dais. On it sat a simple, unadorned clay pot. Inside the pot was a plant. Or what was left of one. Its stem was thin and brittle as old bone, a dull grey-brown. Its few leaves were shriveled into tight, grey crisps, clinging to death. No hint of green, no whisper of moisture. It was utterly, completely dead.
Baili and Gen stood facing each other, but not fighting. The will to fight had drained from Baili the moment the sphere enclosed them, leaving only a hollow coldness. Learning of the two-fold loss—Duo Yi gone, Ning's aura extinguished—had broken something in him anew. Back at the Tower of Wonder, he had been broken by defeat. He had clawed his way back from that, reforged himself with a sharper, colder edge. This time, he was broken not by a blow, but by an absence. The empty hole in his being had reopened.
Gen could vaguely understand the feeling. He had seen Baili before the Tower, during their clashes, and now. He had seen the trajectory. But his eyes kept being drawn back to the three elements: the endless question on the walls, the dead plant on the dais, and Baili's hollow silence.
"How did you overcome your defeat from Duo Yi?" Gen asked, his voice echoing softly in the hall. "Now that your… pride was broken. What was the source of your strength?"
Baili took a faint glance at Gen, his grey eyes devoid of their usual cutting intensity. He simply ignored him. His gaze swept the hall, lingering on the dead plant before returning to the walls. "We are not friends to be chitchatting. Find a way to get us out of this thing. I have the Sky Ocean to explore."
Gen frowned. "You haven't changed. Back then, all you knew how to do was order Lorel around."
Baili traced a finger along the deep grooves of the nearest carving. "She is my sister. I do whatever I want with her. That does not concern you."
Gen laughed, a short, hard sound. "It does concern me. She is supposed to be my wife in the future. You can't treat people like objects."
Baili finally turned to him, a cold, mirthless laugh escaping his lips. "Do you really think that is what will happen? Come on, Gen Jiang, you are smarter than that. The arrangement was never about anything special. It was a lifeline your father gave you." He took a step closer, his voice dropping, each word precise as a blade. "Linking you to the second world's strongest via his daughter… ensuring your life to a certain extent. She was used by your father, by my father, and now by you. How is it different from what I say or do?"
Gen fell silent. He bailed his fist. *My father would never do something like that.* But he had asked about the reason behind the arrangement. His father had never given him a clear answer, only a gentle, inscrutable smile. Could Baili be right? A sliver of doubt, cold and sharp, wormed its way in.
*No.* Gen shook his head violently, as if to dislodge the thought. That was the memory of his father he had. He would not allow such an idea to dwell.
He forced his attention back to the hall. The question. The plant. The connection was obvious, but the *how* was a closed door. *Is it really impossible?* To do what? To reverse death? To spark life in that husk?
Master Yujin was the cultivator said to have the two birds of life and death on his shoulders—Muiyin and Muijin. If the trail was indeed left by him, this was his question.
Gen turned his head. "Baili. Do you know the name Yujin?"
Baili, his eyes now also on the dead plant, didn't look up. "I have never heard that name."
"What about the legend of the creator? The two birds?"
Baili was silent for a moment. "Muijin and Muiyin. The harbinger of life and the messenger of the end. Everyone knows that children's tale."
The duo looked at each other then, a flicker of simultaneous understanding passing between them despite the animosity. Their eyes went from the carvings to the plant and back.
Gen spoke first, the idea forming. "Could it be… Master Yujin is asking if it is possible to *bring life* with the Wheel of Destiny? *That* is the 'it'. This plant."
Baili fell silent for an instant, then snorted, though his gaze remained fixed on the brittle stem. "Is that even possible? The Wheel of Destiny can take life, for sure. The Wheel of Creation can create things, but it is always based on something *within* the caster—their will, their Qi, their understanding. Giving life to the non-existent… a sentient thing from nothing? No. That is impossible." He gestured at the plant. "This is not a construct. It was alive. Now it is not. To reverse that is to spit in the face of the Wheel of Separation, of time itself."
Gen too leaned back, running a hand through his hair. "You are right. It is too far-fetched. Creation is making a *form*. Not sparking a soul back into a dead vessel."
Baili's brow furrowed slightly. "However… it might be impossible to give *meaning* to something inanimate… but giving an *intent* to a non-existent object… that is different." He spoke as if working it out himself. "Like giving an intent to my Cloud Juggernaut. It is not alive. It has no soul. But it has a purpose I bestow. A direction. A pattern of behavior." He looked at Gen. "This… would not be creating life. It would be imposing a *pattern of life* onto a dead thing. Making it mimic life so perfectly it becomes indistinguishable. Is that what he means by 'bring life'?"
Gen's mind illuminated. "Not a soul. A *process*. You are right! We were thinking about the wrong impossible thing. It's not about creating a sentient being or resurrecting the dead. It's about making something dead *perform* life again." His eyes locked onto the plant. "To make it remember, or to force it to follow, the pattern."
The trial was clear. The question was the key. *Is it really impossible?* The subject was on the dais.
Time ticked by slowly. Hours bled into what felt like days in the timeless hall.
Gen remained seated before the plant, meditating. He tried with his **Shidow**, attempting to manipulate any remnant of moisture or latent energy in the dead cells. The brittle stem did not respond. He tried with his **Jingdao**, pouring reinforcing energy into it, hoping to spark a reaction. The energy flowed through the dead husk and dissipated, leaving it unchanged.
Baili had ended up giving up even earlier than Gen. He sat against the far wall, staring at the opposite carving, his motivation at its lowest ebb now that his driving fury was gone. The hall of an impossible question was a mirror to his own hollow state.
Gen looked at the dead plant, its grey leaves a testament to finality. *How can I make this thing perform life?*
The Wheel of Creation, **Zhidow**, could conjure light, fire, a sword from his will. But that was generating a new *instance* of something. This was about forcing a pattern onto an existing, dead form. The Wheel of Manipulation, **Shidow**, could only work with what was present. Here, there was only dust and memory.
*Is it really impossible?* The question on the walls seemed to press down on him.
He thought of the legend. Muijin, the bird of life. Not a creator from nothing, but a *restorer*. A harbinger. It didn't create the seed; it told the seed it was time to *remember* how to grow.
An idea, fragile as the dead leaf before him, began to form. He wasn't trying to create life, or even force it. He was trying to **awaken a memory within the pattern of the world itself**.
He placed a hand not on the plant, but on the clay pot. He closed his eyes and reached for the principle he understood the least, the one that felt most alien to his direct, reinforcing nature: the Wheel of Creation, **Zhidow**.
But he did not try to create a new plant. Instead, he poured his will into a single, clear, gentle image. Not of leaves or stems, but of a **process**. The memory of sunlight. The pull of water through roots. The unfurling of a green shoot from a hard shell. He created, from his own mind and understanding of life, the *echo* of life's fundamental pattern—not the thing, but the *blueprint* of the thing.
Then, he wove it with **Shidow**. He used Manipulation not on the dead matter, but on the *space* immediately around it, on the faint, dormant Qi still trapped in the mineral specks of the soil and the very air. He pulled that latent environmental energy and *shaped* it with the created echo, guiding it into the brittle stem, not to force it to be alive, but to *invite* it to follow the pattern of life one more time.
It was not giving life. It was offering the blueprint of life to a thing that had once known it, and using the world's ambient energy as the ink, asking it to trace the lines again.
For a long time, nothing happened.
Then, a single, brown-edged leaf at the very tip of the dead stem shivered. Not with greenness, but with a faint, golden glow where Gen's energy touched it—a glow that was the echo of his created pattern illuminating the dead form.
It was not alive. But for a moment, under the combined insistence of Creation's memory and Manipulation's guidance, it *remembered* what it was like to be, and moved according to that memory.