Li Ban took out a red fruit.
He had previously placed a withered red fruit tree inside his Cubic Space.
To his surprise, the tree actually revived within his Cubic Space, bearing a massive amount of fruit in a short time.
Unfortunately, the tree turned to ash shortly after leaving the Recycling Station. Fortunately, it left behind over a hundred red fruits.
Li Ban had never known how to use these red fruits.
With Heimai's precedent as a warning, he didn't dare let anyone else eat them.
Giving the red fruit to outsiders was completely meaningless anyway.
So he gathered the red fruits and stored them together, waiting for a future opportunity to use them.
Today, however, an idea suddenly struck him.
Meanwhile, the red fruit possessed the ability to restore the sanity of anyone who had consumed other living creatures.
Li Ban wondered if he could apply the red fruit's special power to the beads.
In his view, the fundamental reason the red fruit restored a person's sanity wasn't that it healed their body and brain, but that its power likely touched upon the underlying laws of reality.
He acted on the thought immediately.
Li Ban raised his hand, took out a red fruit, and brought it close to a bead that had just released an offensive ability.
Though the bead obviously couldn't eat the red fruit, Li Ban had other methods.
His finger flicked, using only the power of his spiritual rhinoceros to completely crush the red fruit. He then wrapped the pulverized fruit in starlight and infused it entirely into the bead.
The moment the red fruit powder entered the bead's crevices, it turned to nothingness.
But it hadn't simply vanished.
A special power enveloped the bead.
Soothed by the red fruit's power, the restless energy inside the bead quickly settled down.
Watching closely, however, Li Ban knew that the red fruit hadn't merely calmed the internal turbulence; it had reverted the bead to its state before the turbulence occurred.
It was a power somewhat akin to the domain of time.
This was a domain that even a Solar Priest could not yet touch.
Li Ban crushed another red fruit and infused it into a bead that had been used a long time ago.
This time, however, the bead didn't change at all.
Or rather, any changes were completely indiscernible.
Li Ban carefully observed the bead's condition and finally came to a conclusion.
"I understand now," he murmured. "The reason the red fruit is only effective within a window of one shichen is that it can only rewind the state of people and objects by one shichen. Therefore, if the people in the Recycling Station consumed the flesh of others more than one shichen ago, eating the red fruit wouldn't restore them."
"And the reason the released ability wasn't restored is that the red fruit only targets the bead itself. It has no effect on the elemental abilities attached to it."
"If only the red fruit's power in the domain of time were a little stronger."
Li Ban shook his head and laughed softly, knowing full well how impossible that was.
If the red fruit truly possessed the power to restore things to a state from a long time ago, the energy it contained would be enough to tempt even a Great Wizard.
Time and space were the foundations of the system of creation.
Shaking just one of them was enough to shake the entire world.
Because of this, the red fruit held a rather unique status.
Those who could wield the power of time had no need for the red fruit, while those who couldn't wield the power of time could never get their hands on it.
Only the inhabitants of the Recycling Station enjoyed the red fruits, yet they lacked the strength to further develop their functions.
"The red fruits were likely born from the temporal chaos brought about by the world's reboot. They are a non-renewable product," he mused. "Therefore, after a certain period, the red fruit forest will inevitably wither and vanish entirely from the Recycling Station. It won't return until the whole world reboots again, unleashing uncontrolled temporal power once more."
This deeper understanding of the red fruit made Li Ban feel a pressing sense of urgency once again.
When he entered the Recycling Station, the red fruit forest was already dying off in massive swathes. This meant that the chaotic power of time within the station had essentially been exhausted.
Perhaps the moment all the chaotic power of time finally settled would be the critical threshold for the ultimate Wizard Lord to reboot the entire world again.
"Heh." Li Ban let out a soft chuckle. He suddenly released the vast majority of the abilities stored within the bead string in his hand. Then, without any hesitation, he used the red fruits to restore the beads' condition and recorded his own various abilities into them.
If these red fruits had fallen into the hands of other Priests, who knew what crucial purposes they might have been saved for. But in Li Ban's hands, they were roughly equivalent to a single attack unleashed in combat.
Was it a waste?
Perhaps.
But if the world was going to be rebooted anyway, who would stubbornly cling to a few treasures of marginal value?
Having finished recording his abilities, Li Ban left the asteroid belt and resumed his journey toward the border of the Shattered Realm.
The actions of those two black-robed priests from earlier had given Li Ban a new idea on how to search for Wizard Embryo Fragments.
He couldn't possibly wait in the Shattered Realm for hundreds of years. So, rather than looking for a powerful minor world with a long lifespan, it was better to head to the border of the Shattered Realm and inspect those minor worlds on the verge of destruction.
Even though the wizard embryos of those minor worlds were nearing the end of their lifespans, and obtaining their Wizard Embryo Fragments would barely do anything to upgrade his own wizard embryo...
Li Ban didn't mind.
He only needed a single Wizard Embryo Fragment to hand over to Little Cat as quickly as possible.
As for his own Wizard Embryo Fragments—ignoring the fact that he possessed the Star River—just the Wizard Embryo Fragment left behind by the Ring World combined with Xiao Suo's Witch Embryo Shards would be more than enough for him to advance to the Dark Moon rank.
The only reason he couldn't advance right now was that he still lacked a crucial catalyst.
And this catalyst wasn't something he could find just by being anxious.
Traveling through the Shattered Realm for a long time, Li Ban didn't run into a single soul along the way.
However, for a brief period, he did sense someone spying on him.
But the other party quickly withdrew their gaze and fled the scene before Li Ban could even look back.
"Probably some Black Robe who sized me up, realized they were no match, and ran away," he muttered.
Li Ban was now a Star Glow Priest. Within the Shattered Realm, his strength absolutely ranked in the upper-middle tier.
Furthermore, his personal abilities allowed him to fight above his own Tier.
He could only say that the Black Robe who had decisively given up was cautious and remarkably lucky.
And as long as the other Black Robes didn't actively come knocking on his door, Li Ban couldn't be bothered to waste time hunting them down.
After traveling for another period of time, he finally arrived at the border of the Shattered Realm.
This place seemed very far from the Trash Realm as well.
Li Ban began to search the surroundings. Finally, in a place extremely close to the border, he discovered a minor world on the brink of destruction.
Compared to the previous world where a tiger demon had only just emerged, the minor world before him truly didn't have much of its lifespan left.
The dying wizard embryo was desperately sapping the vitality of all other life within it, uncontrollably unleashing the chaotic power of laws.
This resulted in the minor world before him being completely unable to receive the light of its star, and mutated monsters were continuously spawning across its surface.
Li Ban concealed his presence and took a rough lap through the sky, essentially confirming that not many rational creatures were left down below.
"Maybe a few hundred thousand survivors left?" he estimated. "Among them are humanoids, and some that seem to be elemental creatures. Perhaps there used to be pure humans here too, but it seems they went completely extinct in the early stages of the disaster."