Chapter 842 - The Distant Past (1/2)

Shao Xuan stood in puzzlement, planning to quickly defeat his opponent when a giant crack appeared in front of Yi Xiang. A chunk of relatively intact ice broke off from the land and floated along the waves. More and more ice pieces broke off from the piece he stood on, getting thinner and thinner and breaking apart quickly. IN a second, the ice layer that could hold a giant beast now barely held a human.

The piece of ice beneath his feet slowly disintegrated until it could no longer hold him above water.

“That world, it was not just a world of consciousness. It connects the past… to the future. Do you… know anything about that?”

As he spoke, Yi Xiang had started to sink. When he uttered the last word, he had already completely sunk into the seawater.

When Yi Xiang sank into the water, Shao Xuan no longer sensed his presence, not even the fire seed like he had disappeared on the spot. Unless he dove into the ocean himself, he would never be able to find Yi Xiang, dead or alive.

The ocean beasts were all dead animals without their own consciousness or olfactory and visual senses, they could not be used to track him down.

After sensing his surroundings once again, he still could not find Yi Xiang so there was nothing to chase after.

‘He’s scarily good at slipping away,’ thought Shao Xuan.

However, Shao Xuan was severely fatigued too and felt like a beast was stomping around in his head, for it hurt a lot. Running after Yi Xiang would just make his condition worse. He was not as experienced in controlling giant reanimated corpses like him, forcing it would just backfire. He did not want any backfiring here.

He stopped controlling the beasts, about to rest but he quickly noticed the changes in his surroundings when he gave up control.

White flames erupted from within the beast bones, and in the blink of an eye, the flesh and skin that used to be impenetrable towards blades and ice all disintegrated into ash.

The giant beasts as large as mountains disappeared into ash before Shao Xuan’s eyes.

The black herd of animals from various places suddenly turned to grey ash, all that was left were Yi Xiang’s enslaved reanimated corpses, who did not change at all.

Shao Xuan did not understand what just happened, all he knew was that every beast he enslaved self-combusted and turned to ash from the white flames.

The layer of snow was long gone from the battlefield, only sparse patches of ice remained. The ground was mostly brown from the exposed soil, but this brown was soon covered in white again from the ashes.

The giant beast Shao Xuan previously rode also turned to dust, even the hardest teeth and claws became nothing.

Everything as far as the eye could see was covered in white.

Spotting something, Shao Xuan strode over, the ash beneath his feet crackling with every step like snow, though not as cold.

When he arrived, he looked at the protrusion from the ground and wiped away the layer of grey.

It was a chunk of ice, probably fallen from a collapsed ice mountain. This chunk had luckily escaped the fate of being stepped on so it was preserved and not melted due to the cold weather.

What attracted Shao Xuan’s attention was the thing in the ice.

A clump of grass.

Not sure how long it had been sealed inside though.

The clump of grass straw was as large as a watermelon, a golden yellow and clumped together messily. Shao Xuan could see the messy fibres sticking out of it.

There was evidence of it being cut, the cross-sections messy. It did not look like it was cut by a blade, more like it had been bitten off.

Shao Xuan put his palm on the ice so it melted slowly, soon revealing the clump of grass.

A normal plant would be destroyed but it remained in mint condition out of the ice.

When he picked it up, he found that it had a strange texture, it could not be broken from gentle tugging either.

Shao Xuan had never seen grass like this before, perhaps it lived in a place without people or was long extinct.

This clump was made up of several blades knotted tightly together. Taking them apart required some effort. Then, he braided them into a rope.

When Shao Xuan looked at this length of straw rope, Yi Xiang’s last words echoed in his mind.

It was not just consciousness, it connected the past to the future?