The ancient return was exposed by his sister's live stream.

"Okay. Let's get down to business." She took a deep breath. "Brother, I was thinking, we know absolutely nothing about the situation in that other world."

"We don't know if the environment is suitable for human survival, we don't know if there are any hostile forces there, and we don't know the situation of our predecessor Jingwei. I think we should send a group of people to scout ahead first, at least to get a clear understanding of the basic situation."

Chen Hao looked at his sister's face on the projector.

She had lost a lot of weight. Her cheekbones were prominent, and her chin was noticeably pointed. The dark circles under her eyes were quite pronounced. But her eyes were still bright; she was still thinking of solutions, still planning, still researching pathways.

He stared at her for a long time, making Chen Siyao feel a little uncomfortable.

"Brother? What's wrong?"

Chen Hao's throat moved slightly.

He had a lot to say. He wanted to tell her the truth about the passage.

I wanted to tell her about the intervention of the law of cause and effect, I wanted to tell her that he had tried everything and failed. I wanted to tell her!

He didn't say anything.

"Yao Yao".

"Um?"

"You and Wanqing, go home and prepare."

Chen Siyao blinked.

"I'm preparing to open the interdimensional portal," Chen Hao said calmly. "I'll go there first, establish a foothold, and prepare for the subsequent migration."

Chen Siyao's expression brightened: "Okay! Then Qing and I will go back and pack now."

"Um."

"Brother..." she called out again.

"What?"

Don't overwork yourself.

The call ended.

After the projection disappeared, Chen Hao sat alone in the wind on the mountaintop.

He stood up.

Facing the archway.

He slowly raised both hands. It was not a mudra, nor was it the starting gesture for a Taoist technique.

It is a posture that has never been recorded in any ancient texts... interlacing your fingers, palms facing inward, and pointing towards your chest.

That is where the foundation of the Way lies.

"The Five Elements Return to Nothingness Sacrifice".

His voice was very soft. So soft that it could be drowned out by the wind.

But the law heard.

This is a forbidden technique that Chen Hao deduced using his accumulated cultivation over ten thousand years.

No one has ever walked this path before. Because no one knows how to walk this path.

The Five Elements Return to Nothingness Sacrifice uses the practitioner's lifespan, the foundation of the Great Dao, and the vitality of their entire life as offerings.

The Five Elements Dao, which had been perfectly integrated, were extracted from the foundation and transformed into pure Dao power, which was then infused into the designated law structure.

Irreversible. Unsolvable. There is no way back.

Chen Hao's hands began to tremble.

It's not fear. It's the foundation of the Dao resisting.

The Five Elements had taken root within him. Metal, Wood, Water, Fire, and Earth—the five elements had long since merged with his foundation, becoming inseparable as flesh and blood. To separate them would be like uprooting a ten-thousand-year-old tree from the ground.

He gritted his teeth and channeled his magic.

The first principle...the way of gold.

Deep within the Dao Foundation, the sharp golden light struggled violently for a moment.

Like a wild beast dragged out of its den, the threads of the laws of the Golden Path tightly entangled the underlying structure of the Dao Foundation, refusing to loosen their grip.

Chen Hao's divine sense transformed into a knife, severing all connections.

Golden light was forcibly pulled out from the foundation of the Dao.

pain.

It's not physical pain, it's the feeling of having a hole torn in your soul.

It felt like someone reached into his brain and ripped a piece of something growing on his brain tissue.

Chen Hao grunted.

The moment Jin Zhidao detached from the Dao Foundation, he transformed into a pure golden Dao force, rushing along his arm towards the archway. The Dao force poured into the archway's groove, causing it to burst forth with a burst of golden light.

The second...the Way of Wood.

The vibrant green principle of life is harder to strip away than the principle of metal. This is because wood represents life. Stripping away the principle of wood is like removing a part of the "life" from the body.

Chen Hao's face visibly turned pale.

It wasn't pale, but rather the grayish-white color of dehydrated tree bark.

He didn't stop.

The Way of Wood was pulled out. Green Dao power surged into the archway.

The third...water. The fourth...fire.

With each strip peeled away, Chen Hao's body shrank by an inch. Not literally, but his spine bent, his bones contracted, and his muscles atrophied.

His hair began to turn white.

Starting from the roots, the black fades at a visible rate, and a frosty white spreads down the hair strands.

By the time the fourth Fire Path was completely stripped away, Chen Hao's hair was completely white.

Fine lines appeared on his face... not wrinkles, but the marks left by the passage of time in a very short period of time.

The face that was originally in its twenties has traversed countless years in the blink of an eye.

Article 5... The Way of Earth.

The way of earth is the foundation of the five elements. Metal is born from earth, wood grows from earth, water is hidden in earth, and fire is dormant in earth.

Stripping it away is like pulling out the last pillar of the Five Elements Dao.

Chen Hao's fingers were already twitching. The veins bulged from the back of his hand all the way to his forearm, each one bulging as if it were about to burst.

He bit his lip until it bled, and blood trickled from the corner of his mouth down his chin and onto his clothes.

But he didn't stop.

Because it can't be stopped.

Once the Five Elements Return to Nothingness Sacrifice is initiated, there is only one outcome... completion, or death.

If he abandons the process halfway, the Five Elements Laws will completely spiral out of control in their partially stripped state, backfiring on his Dao foundation. Then it won't just be a matter of white hair; it will be a complete annihilation of his body and soul.

An earthy yellow light was drawn out from the very bottom of the foundation.

Like pulling a nail out of a bone.

A suppressed hiss escaped Chen Hao's throat. It wasn't a shout; something was blocking his trachea, preventing him from making a sound, leaving only a distorted, breathy noise.

The Way of Earth departs from the body.

All five main roads have been completely stripped away.

Gold, emerald green, earthy yellow, dark blue, crimson gold... five beams of light shot out from Chen Hao's body, carrying his accumulated Dao power, vitality, and lifespan over ten thousand years, transforming into five rivers of light that surged into the archway.

The archway lit up.

Brighter than ever before.

The power of the Five Elements was injected into the channel structure, weaving an impenetrable net of laws around the threads of cause and effect.

It's not about resisting the principle of cause and effect, but about using the pure power of the Five Elements to burst the framework of the channel.

Even if the causal interference still exists, and even if fragments of the void will still be generated, the structure of the passage itself has been welded shut by the power of the Five Elements.

It will not collapse.

It will not collapse until the power of the Five Elements is exhausted.

This is enough.

My sister passed.

Chen Hao knelt on the ground.

He didn't kneel on one knee. He slammed both knees into the stone, then fell forward. He braced himself with his hands, his fingernails scratching white marks on the rock.

A mouthful of blood gushed from his mouth.

It wasn't bright red. It was dark black, with fragmented things... those were remnants of laws that had fallen off after the foundation of the Dao was damaged.

On his foundation, where eleven major paths originally stood, five are now empty.

It's like a palace with five load-bearing pillars removed; the remaining structure is swaying, cracking, and barely holding on to prevent collapse.

There are six left.

But the holes left by those five major roads will never grow back.

will never.

Chen Hao lay on the ground, panting for a long time. He could feel the changes in his body... his lifespan was slipping away.

It's not a gradual loss, but rather like sand being poured out of an hourglass when the bottom is smashed.

A lifespan of 100,000 years.

How much is left now?

He closed his inner gaze to perceive...

decades.

Maybe sixty. Maybe eighty. The numbers are too vague to measure accurately, because the foundation of his Dao is still being damaged, and his lifespan is still leaking away. Once it stabilizes, he doesn't want to calculate exactly how much is left...

Chen Hao braced himself on the ground with his hands and slowly lifted himself up.

His movements were slow. For the first time in ten thousand years, he felt that the action of "standing up" required effort.