As the World Pearl entered Xu Zimo’s body, it was instantly wrapped in spiritforce.
Bit by bit, the energy poured into the World Pearl, marking the start of a long refining process.
The World Pearl possessed consciousness, though only a nascent form of it. At first, it resisted Xu Zimo’s efforts to refine it.
But as he steadily tempered it, that resistance gradually faded.
The refining process lasted a full seven days, and throughout this period, the World Pearl triggered one strange vision after another.
A deep sea hung upside-down across ninety thousand miles, slowly rising to become a radiant blue sky.
A colossal beast let out a thunderous roar, standing as tall as billions of feet, punching a hole through the heavens.
A lone willow stood in a wasteland, its floating catkins gently swaying. Yet with every sway, the earth split into deep cracks.
A hurricane swept up a towering sandstorm, tearing heaven and earth in two. At the horizon, the sky dimmed, and darkness reigned.
When Xu Zimo finally completed the refinement, the entire World Pearl began to emit a deep blue glow, constantly shifting through strange phenomena.
All the surrounding spiritforce rushed toward the pearl. As more and more energy gathered,
Above South Goose Mountain, the concentration of spiritforce resembled storm clouds before a downpour, so dense they refused to disperse.
Countless storms of spiritual power swirled at the horizon, sweeping across the entire mountain as if trying to uproot it, then surged into Xu Zimo’s courtyard.
Inside his body, chaos reigned. The World Pearl had vanished, leaving behind a thick, pure white mist.
This mist was incredibly dense and seemed to be gestating something. Every gust of spiritforce from the outside world was sucked directly into it.
Xu Zimo himself had become like a black hole. All the energy flowed into his body and merged with the mist.
The condensation of this mist would take a long time. As the volume of spiritforce consumed increased, the area around South Goose Mountain became almost a vacuum zone.
Spiritforce in the area grew increasingly scarce, the mist’s absorption outpaced the available supply.
Atop South Goose Mountain, the energy storms had already caught many people's attention.
But Xu Qingshan made a move, shielding the space with his power, deterring anyone from coming to investigate.
Xu Qingshan now hovered above the peak, frowning as he sensed the rapidly dwindling spiritforce around the mountain.
“What is this brat doing to cause such a massive disturbance?” he muttered to himself.
Then, with a wave of his hands, a white beam shot into the sky.
Soon, every disciple in the True Martial Sacred Ground heard a booming rumble in their ears, as if something ancient was awakening.
From the four corners of the sect, four beams of light, each different in color, shot skyward.
As they crossed and merged, it was as if a massive wheel began to turn. A huge formation seal appeared beneath the sect’s land.
It was a Taiji Diagram, the yin and yang fish slowly rotating in harmony.
As the array activated, spiritforce from a hundred miles around was drawn in, all flowing into the formation.
Every member of the sect looked up in awe at the spectacle.
Hundreds of miles of spiritforce formed into a great storm, sweeping across the land with a deafening roar, uprooting trees and shaking mountains.
“Has the sect activated the Guardian Formation? Are we under attack?” some well-informed disciples wondered aloud.
This was the very formation laid down by Grand Emperor Zhen Wu himself. Later reinforced by three other Grand Emperors, its power was immense.
Each activation required a massive amount of spiritforce. Just as the energy was about to rush into the core of the formation,
Xu Qingshan stepped forward, his aura soaring as strands of black hair danced in the storm.
With a single motion of his right hand, the space around him collapsed, cracks spreading through the sky like a shattered mirror.
It looked like a giant spider web, endless streams of energy were split and redirected.
The energy storm, which was meant to feed the array core, was forcibly diverted, pouring entirely into the courtyard where Xu Zimo was.
At that moment, Xu Zimo could already feel the spiritforce inside his body reaching depletion. But still immersed in the gestation of a new world, he could do nothing to intervene.
He had known the process of condensing a True Fate would demand massive energy, especially since he was creating a pseudo-world, but he hadn’t expected the consumption to be this excessive.
Due to the lack of spiritforce, the white mist inside him was slowing down its transformation.
He didn’t panic. Although the process had slowed, it posed no real danger, only a longer wait.
But then, he suddenly sensed a surge of unbelievably dense spiritforce pouring into his body.
No matter how hard he tried to absorb it, the influx kept coming, endless, relentless.
With it, the white mist inside him began to transform and evolve at a much faster rate.
Outside the True Martial Sacred Ground, the grand formation continued to draw energy from hundreds of miles around, funneling it into Xu Zimo’s courtyard.
The spiritforce howled louder and louder, tearing clouds from the sky and blanketing the heavens in a sea of white.
Even with all this power, it still took Xu Zimo a full half-month to complete the process.
On this day, a dull boom echoed from within him. The sound carried a trembling resonance, like the voice of the Heavenly Dao itself descending, as if something had been born.
The white mist within his body finally dispersed.
A brand new world had fully taken shape inside him.
Heaven and earth began to split apart. The sky represented purity, slowly rising high above, watching over the world.
The earth represented heaviness and suffering, slowly sinking downward, bearing the weight of life.
The higher the sky rose, the lower the earth fell. When the sky rose one foot, the earth dropped one foot. When the sky reached a hundred meters, the earth did the same in reverse.
No one knew how long this rise and fall continued, until finally, they stopped.
A vast world had formed.
But there was a flaw, this world had no sun or moon. What should have been a clear sky was murky and dark.
The pitch-black heavens were riddled with countless black holes, like a spider’s web.
Massive meteors rained from the sky with unstoppable force, crashing down like a meteor shower destined to destroy the land.
On the ground, deep fissures tore through the crust. Tsunamis rose in mountainous waves, smashing everything in their path.
Volcanoes erupted, floods surged, and as meteors rained down, tectonic shifts ravaged the surface. The world was already scarred and broken.
From the edge of the sky, divine lightning descended, each bolt carrying supreme power, smashing the ground into fragments.
This newborn world… was nothing short of a living hell.