1260 Infinity Mist
Ryu suddenly felt a great pressure crashing down around him from all sides. It felt as though he was trying to squeeze his body through a tube. The spatial nodes were so close and binding that it felt as though he was being stretched out. At any moment, he could be snapped to nothingness, but his gaze remained resolute as he pressed forward with even greater speed.
"Ah!"
The Favor Alchemy Sky God suddenly realized what Ryu was doing and she went entirely pale. He was a complete madman.
She hadn't said anything while he was observing the pillars because she had yet to put two and two together. Plus, when she saw that his aura was slowly getting stronger, she could feel that there was clearly some logic to what he was doing. But she could have never expected this.
Some wild explanation wasn't needed. Ryu's madness could be summarized in a single sentence.
He was currently trying to circumvent the protections a Ninth Heaven Sect had put in place to protect their legacy!
A Ninth Heaven Power, not just any Ninth Heaven Power, but one that had stood at the pinnacle of all things. This was a power that produced several Dao Gods in its time, a Power that had once produced a Founding Father!
No matter how you sliced this, this was complete and utter madness, it was shocking beyond compare and it really painted the kind of daring that Ryu had in his heart. How could the Favor Alchemy Sky God hold back her shock? He was practically playing with his life!
Her heart quaked. This sort of recklessness wasn't something she had. She had spent her entire first life without experiencing much true hardship or putting herself in danger. She only did the things she knew she could do and she spent her time accumulating as much wealth as possible all so that she could continue pressing forward with her experiments. She had always believed that her talent was alone to take her to where she wanted to go.
Never in a million years could she have expected that she wouldn't have even managed to become an Omniscient Sky God, let alone a Dao Lord, or her true goal of Dao God. She still remembered being entirely unable to accept it even until the very end.
She did have good reasons, great reasons, in fact. As an alchemist, there was no need to put herself in danger. She had all the resources she could ever want at her fingertips and she could even make them more powerful than the sum of their parts. She felt that risking her life was a foolish pursuit, especially since there was so much riding on her shoulders.
But what had been the ultimate end to it all? She was now tied to the Fate of another and she couldn't easily escape it. In fact, escaping it was probably impossible.
Seeing Ryu now, she felt as though she had just suffered a rude awakening. She had truly wasted her first life in its entirety.
ROAR!
Ryu unleashed a bellow, streaking out of the final node. He could feel that the rock around him had vanished. Sensing the outside of one's void was incredibly important for anyone entering it, or else what would happen if you exited too early? It would be a really foolish way to die for a small rock to suddenly appear in the middle of your brain.
When Ryu stepped out, he found himself in a field of grey fog. Almost instantly, he felt a crushing weight.
The bones in his body shattered one after another and he was nearly forced to his knees. It was only after entering the void once again and circulating a drop of Embryonic Qi was Ryu finally able to breathe again.
His gaze couldn't help but sharpen. He didn't know what that grey fog was, but it was actually so heavy and yet somehow light enough to remain in a gaseous form. It sprayed across his body like fine mist and it even felt quite good for a few split seconds, until the weight aspect clicked and it suddenly felt like every square inch of his body was experiencing the pressure of a beast in the depths of an ocean millions of miles deep.
The only part of him that still seemed fine were his eyes, which made him raise their evaluation in his heart once again. He didn't know what kind of changes the Black Vein Spirit Seeking Lilies were causing within him, but they were most definitely enormous. There was simply no way his eyes should be this sturdy otherwise. Ryu even had a feeling that much of his 999 years of rebirth were spent reconstructing his eyes.
If not for his eyes, his benefits from that Rebirth would have definitely been far greater. One had to remember that he had been around the Shrines at that time, the support he could draw on should have been at the level of the True Martial World. Logically, upon Rebirth, he should have already been at the level of a genius born in the True Martial World with his particular set of talents. But he was actually still weaker than even First Heaven geniuses back then.
This had been rolling around in Ryu's mind for a while. He had originally thought that the mutation of his Bloodlines had just been inferior to the original product. This wasn't impossible, after all not all mutations could be exceptionally powerful. But it seemed that there was another reason...
Ryu shook his head. This wasn't the time to think about this, he was in a bit of a predicament, if "a bit" could be used to describe an existential crisis.
He couldn't stay in the void forever, and he obviously couldn't survive the fog.
Despite the sharpness of his gaze, he couldn't see through this fog at all and his Void Spiritual Sense was actually entirely useless. It was clear that this was a measure that the Nine Pillar Flame Sect had either left behind, or a choice in location they had chosen carefully.
Ryu had reacted extremely quickly just now, not even a few split moments. His body was already nearing the level of a Sky God, and yet he couldn't last a few fractions of a second. If one was too reckless and didn't have a method of getting out immediately, even extremely powerful Sky Gods would die.
The time he could spend in the void had increased exponentially since he stepped out of the incomplete Heavenly Path, but it was still not indefinite. He could at most last an hour or two.
The trouble was that how far forward he had to go was completely unknown. If the Nine Pillar Sect were smart, they would definitely choose a place that was as thick and dense as possible, and there was no guarantee that it would be any worse.
And now, he couldn't even see the way back. He had only gone straight, so logically he should just be able to back pedal and go the way he came again. But when Ryu turned back, even after moving a while, the inheritance ground was nowhere to be seen.
That was when he understood that the inheritance ground wasn't stationary, it was moving through this vast grey fog and now finding it would be a nigh impossible task.
"Do you know what this grey fog is?" Ryu asked, much too calm given the dire situation he was currently in.
"Grey fog?" The Favor Alchemy Sky God replied somewhat weakly.
Ryu understood. It seemed the Favor Alchemy Sky God couldn't see what was going on either, so he took his time to explain it.
The Favor Alchemy Sky God immediately paled.
"Infinity Mist... You actually ran into... Infinity Mist only appears at the bottom of a very rare few oceans. Millions of miles deep wouldn't be enough to describe it. There's a point of concentration where the water is under so much pressure that surpasses a liquid form and enters a solid for. This state continues for a very long while, but its said that beneath the solid state, there's a further layer after billions more miles. That layer is known as the Infinity Mist Layer.
"This phenomena can only appear in the oceans of the Ninth Heaven. You're actually on the Ninth Heaven right now...!"
Ryu's pupils constricted. "Didn't you say that if I stepped onto the Ninth Heaven..."
"Your body is stronger than it was when I made that statement, but that's irrelevant. Infinity Mist is a very unique material, it has reached such an extreme of pressure that its somehow both easy and impossible to move through.
"Even the pressure of the Ninth Heaven cannot penetrate through so many layers of ocean, this might as well be an entirely different world. Even a Dao God wouldn't casually step into such place. Just making it here would be an incredibly difficult journey!
"I have no idea how the Nine Pillar Flame Sect managed to pull it off, teleporting here is even more impossible than teleporting into a blackhole. At least a blackhole is like a sink that pulls all things in, but Infinity Mist can't be penetrated by anything."
Ryu's gaze narrowed. He understood at that moment that there was no way out.
Up above him, there was a sheet of ice billions of miles thick.
Below him, there was only more Infinity Mist and likely, eventually, a bed of rock.
As for to the left and right, if this ocean was billions of miles deep, its width and length couldn't be properly described at all.
How would he even find where the inheritance had gone in this place?
