Chapter 998: The Third and Fourth Realms (2/2)

With Lu Yun as her protector, no further worries nagged at Qing Yu’s mind. She concentrated fully on operating formula dao and tried to get the truth of the matter regarding the bridge.

Crystalline glyphs sparkled around her and continuously transformed into different shapes. At the same time, terrible surges of force erupted from the bridge and blasted down at Qing Yu. The light from the Tome of Life and Death shook and trembled, dispersing the attacks.

The backlash wasn’t an active attack from the Bridge of Forgetfulness, but a natural recoil from Qing Yu’s use of formula dao. Some great personages in the world permitted no blasphemy against them. Even saying their name out loud would result in attacks from their enemies, to stay nothing of deducing their true nature.

Plainly, the bridge was an entity at this level.

Qing Yu’s eyes shot open after an indeterminate period of time and she looked at the stone bridge with great shock.

“What is it?” Instead of putting his treasure away, Lu Yun quickly followed up on his beloved’s expression.

“It’s alive!” Incredulity crossed Qing Yu’s face. “The Bridge of Forgetfulness is alive, it’s a living being! It’s not a dead thing!”

“What?!” Lu Yun didn’t quite understand. “Alive? The bridge is alive?”

The Bridge of Forgetfulness was an ultimate treasure born from the hell of human dao. It was the same kind of treasure as the Stone of Three Lives and the Yellow Spring. But… it was alive?

“This is a special kind of existence caught in a plane between our world and the chaos, but it’s abnormally spacious. I think we could call it… the third realm.” [1]

If the chaos was viewed as one realm of existence and their multiverse another, then where they were was the third realm.

“No, wait, I shouldn’t say that it’s caught in a plane between us. If my deductions are right, this third realm is older than ours. It exists between every world that is born and the chaos.” Qing Yu gave the notion careful thought. “Our worlds are never truly destroyed. Whenever the chaos creatures destroy a lower world, a second is immediately born in the chaos. This chain of life has never been broken, which makes whatever lives in the chaos the true poison of everything.”

“The third realm, huh?” Lu Yun looked around at the nearly completely empty void. So this was a plane of existence on par with theirs and the chaos.

“So our worlds are on the same footing as the chaos. I’d always thought the chaos was bigger than all of us combined and more sophisticated.” Lu Yun scratched his head. “How far away are we from it?”

He pointed at the bridge that looked so close, but was plainly very far away.

“Extremely far!” Qing Yu made an estimation. “At least a hundred billion kilometers away…”

“A hundred billion?! How big is this third realm??”

A hundred billion rivaled the entire cosmos of the cosmos over the world of immortals, yet this was only the distance between them and the Bridge of Forgetfulness!

Qing Yu frowned slightly. “I don’t know how big this realm is… but something feels off. I feel like there should be another realm apart from the third. Or rather, we’re in the fourth realm now and the plane of existence we haven’t seen yet is the third.”

She squatted on the ground and started drawing various diagrams. “That’s right, we’re in the fourth realm and there’s an unknown third realm we haven’t reached yet!”

1. The ten realms, sometimes referred to as the ten worlds, are part of some Buddhism beliefs that there are 240 conditions of life that sentient beings are subject to and in which they experience from moment to moment. The ten realms are part of Buddhist cosmology and consist of four higher realms and six lower realms derived from the Indian concept of the six realms of rebirth. For NECRO, think of these as different planes of existence. I almost did refer to them as planes.