From Fanwu to Xinghai

Chapter 38 The Nature of Time

When Lin Chen left the city, Zhao Fengchun's three thousand men were in the midst of the fourth wave of attacks.

The wilderness outside the city lay in ruins—land distorted by the fluctuations of time, ashes, scattered armor, and lingering gray mist. The sky was just beginning to lighten; the clouds in the east were tinged with an eerie dark purple by the purple beam of light, as if the heavens themselves were bleeding.

He and Lin Yuan traveled side by side, heading northeast.

The ground beneath their feet grew increasingly scorched black, the vegetation vanished completely, and the air was thick with an indescribable, sweet, metallic scent, like the lingering aroma of something burning at extremely high temperatures. With the Time Eclipses surging towards Flame Wasteland Pass, this area had become considerably more deserted.

"Lin Yuan," Lin Chen asked as he ran, "what's needed to close the dimensional rift?"

"Bloodline resonance." Lin Yuan followed his steps. "The bloodline of the Time Guardians can sense dimensional boundaries, apply pressure at the anchor points of the rifts, forcing them to contract and eventually close."

"What is the price?"

Lin Yuan was silent for a moment, then said, "It consumes a lot of time energy."

"How much?"

Another silence.

"This is enough to prevent a cultivator in the early stages of Foundation Establishment from using time manipulation abilities for three to five years after completion," Lin Yuan said. "It's equivalent to temporarily sealing the time imprint within their Dao foundation."

Lin Chen didn't stop walking: "Then let's leave it at that."

"Have you thought this through?" Lin Yuan turned to look at him. "Without the ability to control time, you'll be at an extreme disadvantage in the Qingyun Sect on your journey ahead."

"I've thought it through," Lin Chen said. "But right now, there are three thousand people guarding that door for me. I can wait three to five years, but they can't wait an hour."

Lin Yuan didn't say anything more.

He simply lowered his head, his hands, weathered by time, clenched into fists.

For some reason, he always felt that he was doing better in this timeline than he had back then. Perhaps it was because he had someone with him that he wouldn't be all alone, keeping everything bottled up inside and crushing himself.

The anchor point of the dimensional rift lies beneath a massive black rock.

The rock was seven or eight zhang tall, its surface so smooth it reflected light, as if it had been melted and solidified at an extremely high temperature. When Lin Chen walked up to it, the mark between his eyebrows suddenly began to throb violently, as if being pulled by something, while at the same time a strange, both unfamiliar and familiar feeling spread from the soles of his feet.

"Right here." Lin Yuan pointed to a narrow crack at the base of the rock. "That crack is the entrance to the fissure."

Lin Chen crouched down and approached the narrow crevice.

A purple light shone through the crack, a living light that flowed slowly, like a river meandering in the darkness. He placed his hand on it, and in an instant!

He saw it.

Instead of seeing with my eyes, I sensed it through time and directly touched the essence of that crack.

It was a wound, a wound torn open at the boundary of dimensions. In essence, like anything in nature, it had a beginning, an end, and some source of energy that sustained its existence. And that source of energy, at the deepest part of the crack, was something beating, like a heart.

"As long as we close that anchor point," Lin Chen murmured, "the crack will heal itself."

"Theoretically, yes," Lin Yuan said, "but the location of that anchor point is not within three-dimensional space."

"Where?"

"In the dimensional gap."

Lin Chen raised his head and looked at Lin Yuan. Lin Yuan's expression was calm, as if he were stating a fact he had already accepted.

"Therefore, you must use your time-manipulation abilities to find the coordinates of that anchor point in the river of time, and then precisely transfer the bloodline energy of the Time Guardian to that coordinate to achieve resonance."

"It involves influencing the dimensional gaps in three-dimensional space," Lin Chen understood. "That's why it requires a large amount of time energy."

"You only have one chance," Lin Yuandao said. "If you fail, it will take a very long time to gather the energy again."

Lin Chen took a deep breath, stood up, and closed his eyes.

Time perception unfolds.

This time, he didn't try to perceive the things around him, but instead went downwards, deeper, into the interior of that narrow crevice.

It's like threading a silk thread through a tiny, invisible pinhole in the dark—it requires absolute precision, complete shielding from all external interference, compressing your consciousness into a single point, and then slowly seeping into that crevice.

The outside world disappeared.

The battle cries at Yanhuang Pass ceased, the wind died down, and Lin Yuan's presence beside him vanished.

Only silence, and that purple light.

He floated in it, like a fallen leaf sinking into deep water, without direction, without up or down.

Then, he saw the river of time.

It's not the first time I've seen it, but every time I see it it feels like the first time.

That river was flowing and vast, beyond the complete perception of any being in any dimension. He could only touch a corner of it, like an insect standing beside the roots of a giant tree, only able to feel the roughness of the bark, but unable to see the top.

But this time, he felt more.

At some point in the river of time, he saw the outlines of countless civilizations, which clung to the banks of the river like bubbles. Some flourished, some withered slowly, and some burst suddenly, disappearing into ripples on the water's surface.

Each bubble tells a story.

Every destruction marks the end of a civilization.

Lin Chen saw the immortal cultivation holy land that disappeared three thousand years ago. It was just a very small bubble. The process from prosperity to destruction was nothing more than an insignificant ripple in the long river of time.

He saw more, earlier and farther away, civilizations that had not even left their names, which had disappeared silently, submerged by the river of time and forgotten by the sea of ​​stars above them.

For a moment, he felt real fear.

It's not the instinctive fear you feel when facing an eclipse, but a deeper, cognitive fear: is everything we do just a fleeting struggle in this long river, leaving a tiny ripple before it dissipates?

In the face of this vast river, are the so-called ascension to a higher dimension and the so-called mission nothing more than another bubble destined to burst?

He almost sank.

At that very moment, he sensed something.

It's not the power of time, but something simpler: the weight of a person.

When Zhao Fengchun raised his iron spear atop the city wall, the scar on his arm, long since scabbed over, weighed heavily.

When Qin Mo mentioned his master, there was a slight, suppressed tremor in his voice.

The weight of those words in my father's manuscript, written and erased repeatedly.

The weight of Su Wan's voice as she uttered "I'll wait for you" from the dimensional gap.

Those things are so small as to be almost insignificant compared to the long river of time.

But those weights are the real ones.

Lin Chen suddenly understood something—the power of the Time Guardians does not come from controlling time, but from the weight of choosing to stand here even as time flows by.

He is a guardian, not a bystander.

The river may flow away, but he is the one standing on the bank.

Consciousness, like a needle, precisely pierced the depths of that crack.

He found the anchor point, a fist-sized crystal suspended in the dimensional rift, emitting a steady purple light. It was the energy core that kept the entire rift opening.

Lin Chen poured all the accumulated time energy in his Dao Foundation into that crystal without reservation.

The two forces met in the gap, like two magnets being forcibly pushed to the same pole, violently repelling, colliding, and consuming each other.

Lin Chen felt the time imprints in his Dao Foundation begin to extinguish one by one, like a row of candles being blown out one by one in the wind.

The first one went out.

The second one went out.

The third way.

The fourth one.

He gritted his teeth and continued forward, resisting the repulsive force. The mark between his eyebrows was so hot it was starting to burn, and sweat streamed down his forehead, gathering into a drop on his chin before falling onto the scorched earth and drying almost instantly.

The fifth one.

The sixth one.

The anchor point began to tremble, and the trembling grew more and more intense, like a heart about to burst.

"Lin Chen!" Lin Yuan's voice came from a great distance, as if a shout came across ten thousand layers of water, "Don't use it all! Save the last one!"

Lin Chen heard it, but seemed oblivious, because he could no longer feel anything in his body, only the anchor point and the ever-thinning distance between him and it.

"You are a guardian, not a martyr!" Lin Yuan's voice rang out again. "Save that last one!!"

That sentence, like a stone, struck precisely at the thing he had just come to understand in the long river of time.

Lin Chen abruptly withdrew his hand.

With a loud bang.

The anchor point collapsed the moment he stopped.

Purple light burst out in all directions. Lin Chen was thrown to the ground by the shockwave, rolled seven or eight steps, hit a piece of gravel on his back, and fell to the ground, unable to speak for a moment.

He lay on his back on the scorched earth, panting heavily, looking up at the sky above.

The purple beam of light vanished silently.

The sky began to lighten.

In the east, a sliver of pale light quietly spread from the edge of the clouds; it was true daylight, not that eerie purple, but a clean, ordinary dawn.

"Chen'er." Lin Yuan walked over and squatted down beside him, his voice trembling slightly—a tremor he'd never heard before. "Are you alright?"

"It's nothing," Lin Chen said slowly, sensing the last, lonely, glowing time imprint within his Dao Foundation. "It's just..."

"It's just that my time management skills were significantly reduced for a period of time," he said. "Lin Yuan, I owe you a thank you."

"I didn't do anything."

"You told me the meaning of leaving the last one," Lin Chen said. "A guardian is not a martyr."

Lin Yuan was silent for a moment, then said in a low voice, "This is a truth I only understood at the very end of that timeline."

"If you tell me, I won't have to take such a long and roundabout route."

The light of dawn grew brighter, casting long shadows of the two people onto the scorched earth, like two silent trees.

Then, a long, drawn-out wail came from afar. The sound was more mournful and desperate than usual. It was the sound of the Time Eclipses beginning to disintegrate after losing the energy supply from the dimensional rift.

Lin Chen closed his eyes and let out a long breath.

Yanhuang Pass has been defended.