Chapter 999: Hexacolored Flower (1/2)

“What do you mean?” Lu Yun wasn’t quite following Qing Yu’s line of thought. First she spoke of a third realm, now it was suddenly the fourth realm?

“Take a look at this.” Qing Yu rose and stretched out a finger, drawing four concentric circles in the air. Each successive circle enveloped the previous one, but they were connected at the very bottom with the one starting point in common between all of them.

“The innermost circle is our realm. It continually grows and will one day assimilate the second circle—the chaos. This new combined realm will continue to expand and one day subsume the third realm, then the fourth, becoming a world without end or boundaries.

“As for how big the fourth realm is… I don’t know that either. Maybe there’s no border that defines its reach.”

She looked around at where they stood. It was bereft of anything other than the Bridge of Forgetfulness. Even the immortal dao couldn’t extend into this place.

“The bridge has obtained a special power here that’s helped it come alive and become a real life form…” Qing Yu frowned.

“Then what about those corpseflies on it?” Lu Yun was beginning to wrap his mind around the situation. The fourth realm was an incomparably sophisticated plane of existence. Their own realm was inferior to it before it finished swallowing the chaos and that unknown third realm.

The Bridge of Forgetfulness had come alive in the fourth realm and the endless gigantic corpseflies on it set him very ill at ease. This fourth realm appeared quite empty, but there must be some sort of horrific existence living within it—unknown zombies, for instance.

Since Qing Yu had identified it as alive and not a zombie, there was no way these corpseflies came from it.

“I don’t know…” Qing Yu shook her head. “I can’t calculate any further. There’s no immortal dao here or the energy of our realm. It’s so much less real than the chaos and it’s all I can do to deduce this much.”

“A few hundred billion, is it? Let’s go take a look!” With a wave of Lu Yun’s hand, the Tome of Life and Death turned into a curtain of light that encased him and Qing Yu.

He didn’t dare separate from his beloved in this place and the book was his only surefire trump card. He couldn’t even sense the Gates of the Abyss anymore. If he wanted to return to the world of immortals or hell, he’d have to do so through the Tome of Life and Death.

“Big brother, big sister, don’t go over there.” The ethereal voice of a child sounded by their eyes. Startled, the couple halted in their tracks and looked backward at the same time.

A little girl wearing a red dress had appeared at some point and was standing charmingly behind them. She looked about eight years old, but also seemed to be not fully present on the scene. She was standing there, but also not there.

“That stone bridge has become a scary monster and it’ll eat you if you go over there. You’ll turn into something like those flies,” she said earnestly.

“And who are you?” Lu Yun asked the girl. “Why are you here?”

“Me?” A lost look flashed across her face. “I don’t know who I am either… I’m not here. I’m in the world below.”

“The world below? The third realm?” Qing Yu asked subconsciously.

“So that’s called the third realm…” The little girl nodded. “That used to be a battlefield where a lot of people died, and then someone tried to bring them all back to life. But that person failed, so they all turned into little flowers planted in that world.

“I’m in that place you call the third realm to protect those flowers.”