Chapter 1813: Two Worlds

“It’s not a clam.”

“Oh!” He thought so; it shouldn’t be.

However, what lay before them certainly resembled the opening of a shell. Only, this one was a bit… large.

“Much larger than a clam.”

He Lingchuan asked the Queen of Spiders, “Madam, what does this look like to you?”

Madam Zhu considered for a moment before replying, “A giant clam? The inner walls of giant clams are also multicolored and magnificent like this.”

“But Thousand Illusions has horns.” Concubine Mei once used Thousand Illusions’ horns to transform her appearance and infiltrate the Carefree Sect’s territory.

“Perhaps it’s the shed skin of its foot-like appendage, mistaken for horns.”

The foot-like appendage is a large, hatchet-shaped muscle mollusks use for digging, with a pointed tip.

Dong Rui murmured, “If this huge shell is Thousand Illusions, then it makes sense that no one could leave during its seclusion.”

Once the clam’s mouth closes, who can escape?

“But how did we get in?”

Madam Zhu kindly explained to him, “Perhaps through the mollusk’s filter-feeding gills…”

Hence, a one-way entrance.

“Alright, alright.” Dong Rui said with a grimace, “I don’t want to know.”

So, they had entered through a food passage, sucked in.

Was this karma for all the clams he had eaten in the past?

“We only know it has a shell; it might not necessarily be a clam or a giant clam. There are many shelled monsters,” He Lingchuan patted his shoulder and continued. “If we’ve been inside its true body all this time, no wonder Wondrous Zen couldn’t find Thousand Illusions before, no matter what.”

Thousand Illusions was nowhere to be found because they were all inside Thousand Illusions’ belly!

“No matter how many Illusion Sect elders and disciples Wondrous Zen killed, or what storms it stirred up in the Inverted Sea, Thousand Illusions remained calm, waiting for it to exhaust itself.” He Lingchuan exhaled. “To Thousand Illusions, those losses were insignificant, just as the mortals on Silver Pearl Island are insignificant to an immortal like Elder Liu.”

The Illusion Sect had always dealt with the mortals on Silver Pearl Island arbitrarily. If their numbers were too large, they would release yasha to reduce the population. They would uproot mountains and churn seas at will, completely disregarding how many mortals might be accidentally harmed by such grand movements.

And how much affection did Thousand Illusions truly have for its disciples? Sixty percent of the Illusion Sect elders had died fighting for it, yet it still refused to come out and face Wondrous Zen personally.

In contrast, Wondrous Zen, from casting divine spells at sea and building lighthouses on land to raising the Lotus Lamp barrier in this realm, had been continuously exerting divine power and protecting the Heavenly Palace team.

Thousand Illusions’ approach couldn’t be called wrong, even astute, but the immortal’s ruthlessness was undeniable.

By this point, Dong Rui was no longer afraid to voice his thoughts: “This Illusion Sect, from top to bottom, is truly cut from the same cloth.”

In any case, Thousand Illusions was busy dealing with Wondrous Zen; it had no time to concern itself with their disrespectful remarks.

He Lingchuan gazed at the mirror, deep in thought. “Wondrous Zen is Wondrous Zen after all. Once it sees through the deception, Thousand Illusions will be in serious trouble.”

Wondrous Zen had been unable to locate Thousand Illusions’ true body, making it impossible to attack. Without a primary target or direction, where could its divine power be directed? But now that Wondrous Zen had discovered the truth, it would naturally have a clear target.

As if to confirm He Lingchuan’s words, the beam from the Eye of Truth shifted again, suddenly shining vertically towards the center of the ceiling!

The clouds and mist at the ceiling seemed thickest; the beam pierced through layer after layer, taking more than ten breaths to break through.

Then, the beam from the Eye of Truth suddenly diffused, transforming from a concentrated ray into a colossal fan-shape, directly illuminating the entire sky above!

To He Lingchuan, it looked like the aperture light from a projector, cast onto the sky’s screen.

The thick, dark clouds and mist were dispelled. No one knew where the sun had gone, nor did anyone care, because the sight above the sky once again stunned everyone!

“Good heavens!” Wan Si-liang and the others were dumbfounded.

They had just recovered from the shock of seeing the clam walls and hadn’t fully processed that scene. They thought they had seen enough of the world and wouldn’t be easily surprised anymore, but the image in the mirror proved they were still too naive.

Because the Eye of Truth had parted the clouds, the sky directly above was crystal clear, as pristine as a sheet of glazed tile.

And on the other side of that glazed tile, there was a stretch of blue water!

It was a sea surface emitting a shimmering blue light, now appearing to be caught in a gale, as the raging waves curled into thousands of snowy crests.

Those whitecaps were particularly conspicuous in the sky.

A sea beyond the sky? And on that sea were islands, and on those islands, mountains and valleys. Their shapes looked damnably familiar!

“The Illusion Realm!” Dong Rui blurted out.

Wan Si-feng couldn’t help but say, “That’s where we came from earlier!”

That clear, inverted world beyond the sky was the Illusion Realm they had been in before sunrise!

“It truly lives up to its name, the Inverted Sea,” Madam Zhu remarked, looking at the mirror. “These two worlds are indeed inverted reflections of each other, facing each other but not connected. The only, or perhaps only two, points of connection are probably the two lakes.”

The Kidney Lake, used by humans, and the Inverted Lake, used by yasha.

He Lingchuan smacked his left fist into his right palm. “I understand. Over 150 years ago, Thousand Illusions arrived here and encased both the Inverted Sea and Silver Pearl Island within its shell. Later, it used the real Silver Pearl Island as a blueprint to create a second Illusion Realm, which is the world beneath our feet.”

“These two worlds are constructed on the two halves of the giant clam’s shell, thus they are inverted,” he continued to analyze. “After Thousand Illusions acquired the Great Divination Heavenly Pearl, it might have used these two worlds for chimerism experiments, aiming to merge them so that reality exists within illusion, and illusion within reality, making them indistinguishable.”

Dong Rui doubted, “Can that truly be done?”

“Do you know how pearls are produced by mollusks?” He Lingchuan gave an example. “The core is usually a grain of sand that enters from outside, and it’s continuously coated by nacre secreted by the shell, thus forming a pearl. By then, the sand grain is completely encased at the center, indistinguishable from the shell’s own material. This ability to process foreign matter, Thousand Illusions probably possesses it innately, doesn’t it?”

If it truly is a giant sea mollusk.

“Since both worlds are a fusion of reality and illusion, making them indistinguishable, it has strong control over both,” He Lingchuan stated seriously. “As Thousand Illusions itself once said, only by mastering the boundary between reality and illusion can one qualify to define the Inverted Sea. If we consider the two inverted worlds as a single entity, then this so-called ‘boundary between reality and illusion’ is, in fact, Thousand Illusions’ true self!”

He pointed into the mirror: “That is, this huge clam shell.”

Inside the clam shell is the Inverted Sea abode. Here, Thousand Illusions’ word is law: if it says something is real, it is real; if it says it’s an illusion, it is an illusion. The boundaries are exceptionally blurry, which is why even Wondrous Zen’s Eye of Truth repeatedly met with setbacks.

Madam Zhu wiggled her claws. “Since Wondrous Zen has discovered the truth, it might have a countermeasure.”

“Wondrous Zen is probably furious,” He Lingchuan remarked. “Thousand Illusions is truly a cunning old fox, quietly tricking everyone inside and trapping them, and this was even when it was unconscious. Now, we’ll see how Wondrous Zen breaks the deadlock.”

Madam Zhu suddenly transmitted her voice: “Why do I feel like you knew something beforehand?”

He Lingchuan glanced at her, smiling but remaining silent.

If he had no reliance or intelligence, how would he dare to enter the Inverted Sea?

Wan Si-liang suddenly pointed at the mirror and exclaimed, “It’s acting! Wondrous Zen is acting!”

The Eye of Truth illuminated the sky, revealing another world.

People on the ground gazed up at the sky. Both the Heavenly Palace and the Illusion Sect were left speechless by the sight of the other world.

It turned out they had always been gazing across space at the world they came from.

“No wonder,” the grey parrot sneered. “No wonder neither opening a spatial rift in the Illusion Realm nor unleashing divine flames and heavenly meteors here could blast Thousand Illusions out. We were completely mistaken about the direction!”

“Direction?” This time, Bai Ziqi truly didn’t understand.

“I originally intended to shake the Inverted Sea and blast Thousand Illusions out of its ‘Heaven-Man Unity’ state, but I repeatedly failed.” The great divine abilities it had unleashed couldn’t even rouse Thousand Illusions from its seclusion, only wasting much divine power.

Wondrous Zen had always felt something was off about this. Now that the Eye of Truth had revealed the truth, it finally understood:

“In the Inverted Sea, the boundary between reality and illusion is not beneath our feet, but above our heads!”

Bai Ziqi couldn’t help but look up at the sky.

Above their heads? Could it be?

“The upper and lower realms are actually attached to the two halves of the shell! The ground beneath our feet rests on the hardest part of this old shell, which is why our bombardments had limited effect.” He meant the two large clam shells. “To inflict real, effective damage on Thousand Illusions’ true body, we must attack its weakest point: the node of reality-illusion conversion!”

“The node of reality-illusion conversion?” Bai Ziqi pondered for a moment, his expression subtly changing. “Are you referring to Kidney Lake?”

“Not just that, but also Inverted Lake!” The grey parrot flapped its wings. “Do you remember how the local ghost inhabitants perceived us?”

“Yasha?” Bai Ziqi was incredibly astute; with just a hint from Wondrous Zen, he understood completely. “When the false is taken for true, the true becomes false! That’s it! The ghost inhabitants see us as yasha, so to this world, we can be yasha! The yasha’s passage to the other world is the Inverted Lake, not Kidney Lake.”

It seemed the sign in Inverted Lake was put there for them; perhaps only they could see it:

No return!

“However, directly bombarding these two lakes is useless; we must follow the rules,” Wondrous Zen, who never underestimated its opponents strategically, stated. “In Thousand Illusions’ world, we must acknowledge its rules. We need to find a way to open the passage.”

Bai Ziqi pointed at the inverted world above. “We came from there. If we call that world the Upper Realm and our current world the Lower Realm, then, as you said, the connecting passages between the two realms are likely these two lakes. So, after living beings in the Upper Realm die, their souls must also pass through the lakes to reach the Lower Realm and become its inhabitants—but this process doesn’t require Silver Pearl Fruits.”

The grey parrot confirmed, “Precisely. This is one of the fundamental rules of the Inverted Sea; no Silver Pearl Fruits are needed for this exception.”