Great Xuan.
Following the location from his memories, Li Fan found Yi Xing’s tomb and effortlessly deactivated its mechanisms.
After casually setting up an array around the area to prevent anyone from accidentally intruding, Li Fan entered Yi Xing’s tomb once more after many years.
Passing through the long passage, he reached the tomb’s depths.
Above, luminous pearls shone like stars; below, a sea of clouds drifted between forested peaks.
The traces of an array were immediately apparent.
This array has persisted for thousands of years despite the absence of spiritual qi?
Li Fan couldn’t help but marvel, and began to examine it closely.
Before long, he understood.
He substituted reality for illusion, using pearls as stars and soil excavated from famous mountains across Great Xuan to form peaks, thereby minimizing the array’s energy consumption to the greatest possible extent.
This unknown array completely lacks offensive and defensive functions. Its sole purpose is... misdirection.
In Li Fan’s perception, the golden-thatched cottage housing Yi Xing’s spirit tablet was clearly the source of spiritual qi powering the array.
Li Fan soared to the mountaintop, located the array node, and stomped down.
Break!
The peak vanished instantly like a burst bubble, and a black void appeared beneath the golden-thatched cottage.
Li Fan descended through the newly revealed passage, arriving beneath the illusion array.
Here lay Yi Xing’s true burial chamber.
The tomb was decorated like an ordinary study. Before a vermilion desk lay a skeleton,
beside which a faint candle flame still flickered weakly.
Countless papers densely covered in mysterious symbols lay scattered across the desk, around the skeleton, and throughout the entire floor of the study.
Li Fan picked up one sheet and studied it briefly, but couldn’t decipher what Yi Xing had written before his death.
He casually collected all the papers and searched a while longer. To his disappointment, he found no Dao Transformation Stone.
Apart from Yi Xing’s skeleton and the papers, there was nothing else.
Is this still not the true tomb? Though Yi Xing was just an outer disciple, he was responsible for relocating mortals. His status shouldn’t have been too low. This resting place of his shouldn’t be so pitifully barren.
Unwilling to give up, Li Fan meticulously searched every inch of the place again. But the result remained unchanged.
After pondering a moment, he collected the desk, the candle upon it, and Yi Xing’s skeleton.
To ensure nothing was overlooked, Li Fan unleashed One Congyun Sword Strike, violently destroying the entire room with brute force.
The Congyun Sword’s immense power exposed the surrounding geological structure. Yet to Li Fan’s disappointment, this was indeed the tomb’s lowest level. Only rock and soil lay beneath it.
It seems I made a wasted trip. Li Fan shook his head helplessly.
He had come with high hopes, only to leave disappointed.
After returning to the Xuanhuang World, Li Fan cremated Yi Xing’s remains, scattering them to the wind. Then, he went back to the Tianxuan Mirror.
If there’s anything I missed, it must be among the remaining three items.
After some thought, Li Fan submitted the desk, the candle, and one sheet of paper to the Tianxuan Mirror for appraisal under the pretense of liquidating assets.
The first two were ordinary items. The Silver Fir Redwood desk and the Seawhale Eternal Flame Candle together were worth only thirty contribution points.
But those papers covered in strange symbols weren’t ordinary paper.
"Divine Lock Treasure Box, one contribution point."
Li Fan's eyes gleamed. So there's more to this after all.
Choosing not to sell it, Li Fan searched for information about the Divine Lock Treasure Box.
As the name implied, a Divine Lock Treasure Box was a storage container sealed through some special method.
Only by solving the decryption puzzle set by the box's owner could it be opened.
Yet even knowing there was a secret hidden within, Li Fan found himself utterly stumped when faced with these tens of thousands of papers covered in what looked like ghostly scribbles.
Fortunately, Li Fan wasn't entirely on his own.
He might not know the answer, but surely someone within the vast Myriad Immortals Alliance did.
Following his usual method, he began searching through the Tianxuan Mirror using keywords.
After sifting through countless unrelated pieces of information, Li Fan finally found a clue in an article introducing several leisure activities ancient cultivators engaged in during their free time.
Reverse Kalpa?
Li Fan's spirits lifted as he read carefully.
The article explained that in ancient times, some cultivators believed the world generally developed from order to chaos.
From the initial Primordial Origin, to the dual energies of Yin and Yang, then to the Five Elements of heaven and earth, and finally to the Myriad Things, order was being lost, while chaos was accumulating.
Once chaos completely overwhelmed order, a force capable of annihilating everything would erupt, returning heaven and earth to primordial chaos.
This was what was called the Kalpa. [1]
Reverse Kalpa, then, was a game of restoring chaos to order, returning disorder to sequence.
This game was an excellent way of training a cultivator's divine sense and deductive abilities, and was generally popular among major array sects and divination schools.
It sounded complicated, but was actually quite easy to understand.
Take the tens of thousands of papers Li Fan had discovered in Yi Xing's tomb as an example.
These papers originally had a fixed sequence. All Li Fan needed to do was restore this pile of shuffled papers back to their original fixed order. It sounded simple enough.
With this thought, Li Fan retrieved all the papers from his storage ring, preparing to give it a try.
But soon, he realized something, and his face darkened.
There was nothing simple about this!
Here there are... A sweep of his divine sense gave him the answer, and Li Fan's expression grew even more grim.
Forty-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine sheets of paper.
If there are no other hints, and I simply try to brute-force every possible sequence...
Just thinking about it made Li Fan's head spin.
Even if I did nothing else for the rest of my life, I'll never manage to solve it!
Li Fan picked up one sheet, studying the content written on it.
These seemingly meaningless symbols must be the clue.
Unfortunately, they're equivalent to some prearranged cipher key, known only to the original parties involved.
Maybe it was something commonly used among disciples of the Taiyan Sect back in the day?
Unable to make heads or tails of it, Li Fan felt somewhat helpless.
I wonder if the Dao Transformation Stone Jiao Xiuyuan found back then was encrypted like this too?
Li Fan couldn't help but consider sending his avatar to ask for advice.
But then, a flash of insight struck him, and he temporarily abandoned the idea.
...It's nothing more than a password with a few extra digits. I might not be able to do it, but this guy certainly can.
Li Fan cleared his throat lightly and asked the Tianxuan Mirror whether it offered decryption services.
Tianxuan Mirror remained silent for a moment before giving an affirmative answer. However, a fee would be charged based on the difficulty of decryption.
After inquiring, he learned that it would cost no more than twenty to thirty thousand contribution points.
With his deep pockets, Li Fan felt reassured and boldly entrusted Tianxuan Mirror with the task of cracking it.
1. a Kalpa is an immeasurably long cycle of time that defines the birth, death, and rebirth of a universe, a world system, or even a cosmic god. ☜