Chapter 172: Time Abyss

“You’re finally awake?”

A voice echoed in his mind.

Ning Changjiu slowly opened his eyes.

Light filtering down from above entered his pupils. Time seemed to regain its flow little by little with the arrival of the light. Ning Changjiu gazed at the dim, faintly luminous dome, and his consciousness gradually awakened.

The bloodstains on his white robe had dried, and the wounds on his body had scabbed over. He was surrounded by extremely fine grains of sand, half his body submerged as if he were a buried fossil.

Ning Changjiu clutched his head and struggled to get up from the ground.

The voice came from within him, its gender indistinguishable. It took Ning Changjiu a moment to remember it was the spirit of the Sword Scripture.

“Where is this…?” Ning Changjiu coughed a few times, struggling to rise from the fine sand. His head throbbed, as if pierced by poisoned needles, the stinging pain relentless.

“Did you really hit your head that hard?” the Sword Scripture spirit grumbled. “This is the bottom of the abyss! You, that old man, and that snake all fell in together.”

“The old man…” Ning Changjiu pondered for a moment. The last scene from the Southern Wilderness flashed through his mind: Grandmaster Hanchi’s wild laughter, the nine-headed monster’s head plummeting to the ground, Lu Jiajia’s tear-streaked face and desperate cries… These images were hard to shake, replaying like a nightmare once recalled.

After a long while, Ning Changjiu finally calmed himself.

“Grandmaster Hanchi and the nine-headed monster… where are they?” Ning Changjiu asked.

The Sword Scripture spirit’s voice was chilling. “Look behind you.”

Ning Changjiu felt a chill behind him and slowly turned his body.

The young man’s pupils constricted. He immediately reached for his waist, intending to draw his sword, but after a brief search, found nothing.

Before him, a pair of withered, wrinkled eyes stared, captivating his gaze entirely. Only after pulling his eyes away could Ning Changjiu see its full form: a large, shriveled snake. It looked as if it had been exposed to the scorching sun for hundreds of years, its skin completely devoid of moisture. Its scales, which once had a pebble-like pattern, now resembled the dried shell of a softshell turtle, all concave inwards. Its entire body looked like a deflated ball, suggesting that its flesh had almost entirely rotted away. The exposed, iron-hard bones were slowly turning into fine sand, gradually merging with the flat sandy surface.

“This is…” Ning Changjiu slowly exhaled. “The nine-headed monster?”

Only after speaking did he notice a rotting growth between the two eyes, with fragments of clothing on it—the transformed corpse of Grandmaster Hanchi.

At the bottom of the abyss, there was no headless deity, only a boundless, desolate desert. The laws of time lingered in this desert; within the mighty flow of time, the nine-headed monster’s bones had endured countless ages, along with that mad idea, weathering into dust.

They had rotted, collapsed, and turned into flowing fine sand.

“Jiajia… Where’s Lu Jiajia?” Ning Changjiu’s heart tightened again. Although he had cut off the nine-headed monster’s tail she was clinging to with a sword at the last moment, given Lu Jiajia’s personality, it was highly probable she would have jumped down. If she had…

This terrifying thought arose in Ning Changjiu’s mind.

He knew that although the nine-headed monster’s remains were in the same place as him, in reality, centuries separated him from this monster.

The Sword Scripture spirit sneered, “What good is worrying? Even if you’re alive now, can you actually get out of here?”

Ning Changjiu calmed his breathing.

He looked around at the vast, dim sky and the endless sea of sand, silently hoping that Lu Jiajia had not come down.

“Why am I still alive?” Ning Changjiu looked at his hands; his skin was merely dry, showing no signs of decay.

The Sword Scripture spirit said, “I wonder the same thing. Why are you so incredibly lucky?”

Ning Changjiu shook his head. “Luck alone can’t explain this.”

The Sword Scripture spirit agreed, “That’s why I’m even more curious. What exactly is your background?”

Ning Changjiu remained silent, slowly recalling the records about the Southern Wilderness he had read in the library in the past.

After the incident at Linhe City, to investigate the origin of the Southern Wilderness abyss, he had read many related texts. There was even a legend that the patriarch of the Sword Decree Heavenly Sect had once descended into the abyss and left behind relevant scrolls.

That patriarch was a master beyond the Five Paths.

Only cultivators with divine essence or those beyond the Five Paths could be accepted by the abyss. Ning Changjiu recalled this record, silently recited it, then stood up and looked around. The sand beneath him was too fine and soft; every step caused his feet to sink, requiring great effort to pull them out.

He approached the nine-headed monster’s bones, gazing at its countless wrinkled eyes. Between the eyes, a rust-covered sword was embedded.

It was the immortal sword, Minglan.

The sword was too old and worn to be used. When he ran his finger over its blade, fine rust fell away like snow.

Ning Changjiu pulled out the sword, but in the process, the other half broke off directly within the nine-headed monster’s eye.

“Help! Help!”

As Ning Changjiu drew the sword, a loud cry for help came from within its blade.

“Blood Feather Lord?” Ning Changjiu frowned, recalling the demon sparrow once sealed within the sword. “You’re still alive?”

“Ning…” Blood Feather Lord heard the voice and trembled with excitement. “Ning Changjiu… no, no, Master Ning! Master, are you the one Heaven sent to save me? Ah… I’m… I’m dying, please get me out of here!”

Ning Changjiu asked, “How can I save you?”

Blood Feather Lord urgently replied, “This sword is rotting away… I’m hiding in its core now; it’s barely habitable for a bird. Do you… do you have a new, intact sword? This broken thing still calls itself an immortal sword. I just took a nap and woke up to find…”

Ning Changjiu found its chatter annoying. He took the sword with him and said, “I don’t have any other swords. Both the nine-headed monster and Grandmaster Hanchi are dead. It’s a miracle you’re even alive.”

Blood Feather Lord anxiously said, “But I’ll die eventually if I stay like this… Master Ning, please think of something! Back in the Imperial City, if I hadn’t ambushed you, would you and Zhao Xianger have such a stable relationship…?”

“?” Ning Changjiu was startled. He thought, *You almost killed everyone back then, and now you dare to take credit for it?*

He felt an impulse to bury the sword directly in the sand and let it slowly watch itself die.

Blood Feather Lord cried out, “Oh, Master Ning, your wife promised me that if I killed a hundred demons, she’d find me a new body and set me free… You and your wife can’t go back on your word! And I’ve sincerely repented, Master, please don’t abandon me!”

“Wife?” Ning Changjiu’s expression instantly turned cold.

Blood Feather Lord’s heart skipped a beat. *Did I say something wrong again?* it thought.

It pondered whether to change its address, but then saw Ning Changjiu tie the broken sword to his waist and say indifferently, “Show some respect. That’s my master.”

Blood Feather Lord understood, cursing internally, *There’s no one else in this desolate desert, who are you putting on a show for?* Aloud, it smilingly agreed, “Yes, yes, Master, Master! Thank you, Master Ning, for saving my life.”

The Sword Scripture spirit looked down on Blood Feather Lord’s obsequious behavior. “Let’s get out of this desert first,” it said.

“Which way do we go?”

“You decide.”

“North, then,” Ning Changjiu said instinctively.

“Hmm… why aren’t you moving?”

“Which way is North?”

Ning Changjiu looked at the gloomy, veiled sky, which resembled layers of gauze, with faint light filtering through. There was no sun in this world, and that dim light illuminated the entire expanse.

Ning Changjiu didn’t want to remain still; it gave him a sense of being surrounded by unknown dangers.

He began to move through the desert, searching for an exit or walls, because Madam Bai had explicitly told them that she had climbed up from the bottom of the abyss bit by bit.

Since Madam Bai could get out, it meant this wasn’t truly a dead end.

Ning Changjiu walked for a long time. He felt no fatigue, but the hope in his heart gradually dimmed.

The desert was boundless, showing no signs of ending. He was like someone traversing an endless ocean, with only vast waters stretching out in every direction.

Fortunately, he didn’t see the nine-headed monster’s bones again, indicating he wasn’t trapped in a loop, and was at least moving forward.

But…

“How could there be such a vast space beneath that abyss?” Ning Changjiu wondered.

Before entering the abyss, he had caught a glimpse of it in his peripheral vision: a vast, circular, lake-like domain, surrounded by black planes that looked like countless fine, hanging lines.

That lake was indeed huge, but how could it be as boundless as an ocean?

Ning Changjiu thought of Zhang Xieyu’s painted world. After a moment of contemplation, he looked around, hoping to find some clues related to underlying laws.

But in this world, there was nothing but sand.

Ning Changjiu could only rely on his intuition, walking alone in a certain direction.

“Something’s not right…” The Sword Scripture spirit suddenly spoke from within him.

Ning Changjiu paused his steps slightly. “What’s not right?”

The Sword Scripture spirit said, “Have you noticed that the sky seems to be… getting further and further away from us?”

Ning Changjiu looked up.

Because there were no sun, moon, or stars above, combined with the layers of grayish-white, it was easy to misjudge the distance to the sky.

Ning Changjiu observed carefully for a while and realized that the sky indeed seemed to be further away.

As time passed, this increasing distance became more noticeable.

Ning Changjiu’s cultivation level was roughly at the Everlasting Realm. He wanted to try flying with his sword to approach the sky, but when he grasped the broken sword, he couldn’t ascend at all, as if some invisible force was holding him down.

“What exactly is this place…” The Sword Scripture spirit also felt a chill. It now desperately wished for a fierce enemy to suddenly appear, for a decisive battle, a fight to the death, just to get it over with.

Time slowly passed.

The scenery around Ning Changjiu remained unchanged, but the sky grew increasingly distant.

Finally, at one point, Ning Changjiu suddenly realized that the sand beneath his feet was visibly thinning and becoming sparse.

“Whoosh!”

Ning Changjiu’s foot found no purchase; the sand beneath him suddenly vanished without a trace, and his body abruptly fell downwards.

Below him was yet another abyss.

It was a long time before Ning Changjiu landed again.

He lightly floated back down onto the sandy surface.

Ning Changjiu looked up to see a moon, emitting a grayish-white halo, had appeared above.

Ning Changjiu understood at a glance that it wasn’t a moon at all, but a circular void from which he had fallen.

This is…

Ning Changjiu mentally simulated it and said, “This is an hourglass-shaped space.”

The Sword Scripture spirit was stunned for a moment. Although it had only existed for a few decades, it had accompanied Yan Zhou through extensive reading, and thus understood time-measuring tools like hourglasses. After hearing Ning Changjiu’s words, it also pictured an hourglass in its mind and found that many details indeed matched.

“Before, we were standing on the sand, and the sand was slowly sinking,” Ning Changjiu said, staring at the “moon” in the sky. “This should be a time-keeping vessel. Now that the sand from the upper chamber has fallen, normally…”

Blood Feather Lord listened with a puzzled expression.

The Sword Scripture in his Qi Sea, however, chimed in, “Logically, this world should have inverted, right?”

If so, they would be among the first to fall back into the original space, and as time passed, all the sand in the world would pour down on them!

Buried alive, they would surely die…

No sooner had this thought formed than Ning Changjiu saw the “moon” in the sky begin to move slowly.

At the same time, beneath the silent, flat sandy surface, a sudden stirring was heard.

The sandy surface suddenly began to heave in sections, then cracked open like chicks hatching from eggs. Ghostly beings, like poisonous scorpions, emerged from the sand as night fell. They appeared in the form of spirits, and upon their initial appearance, immediately began fiercely fighting each other.