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

He had no body. No limbs. No sense of bone or flesh.

Only a wisp of transparent, extremely faint divine consciousness, like a spark left after being blown out by the wind, floated in an endless void.

I am dead?

The thought arose and then faded. No. One shouldn't still be thinking after death. One shouldn't still have an "I" after death.

He remembered clearly the process of sacrificing the six Great Daos, burning away the last of his life force, and turning everything into a barrier for the blue planet.

But he did not disperse.

The consciousness remains. It's as thin as a sheet of paper, too fragile to withstand any breeze. But it truly still exists.

Chen Hao tried to move himself. Since he had no limbs to move, he could only direct his consciousness in one direction.

Like a drop of ink falling into still water, it slowly spreads and drifts.

There was nothing around. True emptiness wasn't darkness; darkness, at least, is a color. Here, even color didn't exist.

How long did his consciousness drift in this void? No one knows. Time lost its measure in this place.

It could be a fleeting moment, or it could be many years later.

Then he heard it.

thump.

A sound. Extremely distant. Extremely deep. It came from some direction of nothingness, passed through this space without a medium, and fell into his consciousness.

thump.

Another sound. The intervals were very regular. Neither fast nor slow. Like something pulsating.

Thump. Thump.

The sound continued, steady, again and again.

The entire void trembled slightly in sync with that rhythm, not the tremor of sound waves, but something deeper, like the pulse of the laws themselves.

Chen Hao's consciousness shifted in that direction.

He had no other choice. In this desolate place, that voice was the only beacon.

The further they drifted, the clearer the sound became. It didn't grow louder—it became more "solid." The vibrations stood out from the void, carrying a primal, raw power.

It wasn't an ordinary sound.

It's a heartbeat.

A heart is beating.

Chen Hao's consciousness drifted rapidly through the void. The surrounding space began to change.

It is no longer absolute nothingness, but has an extremely faint dark red background.

It was as if something in the distance was glowing; the light was too weak, only enough to give the space an almost invisible sheen.

Dark red. Hot.

Two pieces of information flooded into his senses simultaneously, stirring up ripples deep within his consciousness...

and so on.

He stopped.

This feeling. This atmosphere. The dark red lighting, the dull pulse, the scorching heat permeating the space...

He's been here before.

No. It's not that I "came here". It's that I tried to go deeper into this place, but was kept out.

Memories surged from the remnants of consciousness. Fragments of images jumped around frame by frame...

That year, he, Yao Yao, and Yang Wanqing went to Suzhou to deal with the dragon, but he discovered a passage underground. The passage led deeper into a world filled with magma.

In that magma world, he saw the Flame Spirit Stone for the first time. He also saw the strange beasts that relied on the Flame Spirit Stone for survival for the first time.

Creatures with lava-like patterns on their bodies swim in temperatures of several thousand degrees.

He had tried to explore deeper into that magma world.

When he reached a certain critical point, the pressure suddenly changed. It wasn't temperature, nor was it physical pressure. It was the law itself, and the pressure of the law prevented him from going any deeper.

Even with his cultivation level at the time, he was unable to penetrate deeper.

The strongest master of the Dao since the beginning of time on Earth, the ultimate synthesizer of the Dao of Space, was stopped halfway by an unnamed force.

He didn't force his way through at the time. He simply noted down the location, intending to explore it again later.

Unexpectedly...

After sacrificing all the Great Daos, he came here again, to the place where he first found the Flame Spirit Stone.

That place he could never set foot in before.

Chen Hao's consciousness remained suspended in place, sensing the increasingly intense dark red light around him and the continuous heartbeats.

Last time, he had cultivation and the Great Dao of Space, but he still couldn't get through.

This time, he was left with only a tattered divine consciousness; he had nothing left.

He floated forward one step.

There was no resistance.

There was not the slightest resistance whatsoever.

It felt like stepping into my own home.

The fact that there was no resistance was itself very unusual.

Chen Hao's divine sense continued to move forward. The speed wasn't fast, nor could it be fast.

This remaining divine consciousness was extremely weak; it was already a miracle that it could remain intact, but at least its direction was clear.

The heartbeat grew closer.

Thump. Thump.

With each sound, the surrounding dark red light flashed briefly, flickering rhythmically like breathing.

He could sense it. Ahead. In the deepest part of the dark red light.

It was huge. Extremely huge. So huge that when his divine sense spread out, he couldn't even touch the edge.

It drifted forward a little further.

The light intensified. A bright orange tinged the dark red, like the color of magma seeping through the earth's surface.

The space was filled with an extremely primal energy, which did not belong to any of the laws he recognized.

Or rather, it is the state before all the laws are mixed together and yet differentiated.

chaos.

Further on.

He saw it.

A heart.

An enormous heart.

Its bright red surface looks as if it were cast by magma, with crisscrossing lines, and each line flowing with scorching liquid light.

The surface of the heart contracts and relaxes rhythmically, which is the source of the heartbeat sound.

With each contraction, the surface liquid is squeezed out and radiates in all directions.

With each expansion, the liquid light flows back from some unseen source, refilling those patterns.

too big.

It was so vast that his divine sense was like a speck of dust before it. So vast that even after drifting for a long time, he could not see its entirety, only a small patch of bright red, pulsating surface before him.

Chen Hao's consciousness stopped in front of that heart.

That was the sound I heard underground in Suzhou back then.

A pulsation originating from the depths of Earth's crust. It travels through the magma layer, through the mantle, and through all barriers of matter and energy, reaching all the way to the vicinity of the surface.

Those strange beasts that rely on the Flame Spirit Stone for survival are merely byproducts nourished by the residual heat it dissipates.

That is the source.

Chen Hao's divine sense swept across the surface of the heart. Those magma-like patterns were not chaotic; upon closer inspection, each pattern was the rudimentary form of a law.

Space. Time. Five Elements. Yin and Yang. Life and death. And many more laws and patterns he couldn't name, densely interwoven on the surface of his heart.

It looks like a giant magic circle.

No, it's more fundamental than a magic circle. This wasn't carved on by someone. It grew naturally.

His consciousness touched the surface of his heart.