Volume Four: High Mountains and Flowing Water Chapter Forty-Four: A Spontaneous Journey

Chen Chen began his story anew, though this time his heart was set on wandering through the world's most renowned scenic destinations. It was a true reflection of the sentiment: the world is so vast, and I want to see it.

Initially transforming into an ordinary traveler, Chen Chen hiked up a towering mountain. The ascent was rather steep, and leaning on his walking stick, he made his slow and arduous way upward. With every step, his altitude increased until, breathless and utterly exhausted, he finally seated himself on a mountain ledge to rest, enjoying a boundless field of vision. The distant earth stretched out in an unbroken plain, and standing at such a height, he could take in the magnificent scenery afar at a single glance.

Withdrawing his lingering gaze, Chen Chen resumed his climb. The summit lay not far from his resting place, and pressing onward with his staff, he finally reached the peak. There, against a backdrop of blue skies and drifting white clouds, the flora grew low to the ground. Ancient stones, weathered by countless vicissitudes and ages past, stood firmly in the mountains, enduring the baptism of wind and rain for untold years.

Chen Chen sat upon the peak, filling his lungs with the crisp, fresh air. The wind rushed and whistled past his ears—just like that gentle breeze he had once felt long ago, standing high upon a city gate tower in another lifetime.

His figure gradually faded away, and when he reappeared, he stood before a snow-capped mountain. Climbing upward was a different kind of challenge: the challenge of standing upon the apex of the snow peak and shouting aloud to vent the frustrations of years. The surrounding temperature was bitterly cold, and the snow beneath his feet lay deep. From the foot of the mountain to its heights, Chen Chen traversed a very long road. Without reaching the end, without pausing, the direction forward was his only compass.

Yet the snow mountain soared to immense heights, and scaling its ultimate pinnacle gradually began to seem unwise. Considering that the road ahead remained distant and the journey back would be long, he pondered the matter for a moment. He merely shouted twice toward the distance from the mountainside, made a hasty affair of it, and promptly descended the mountain.

Chen Chen’s form dissolved once more. This time, he manifested as a young man fishing by the riverbank. The fishing line was somewhat short, and he exerted himself to cast the hook as far out as possible. Yet when the hook was cast and dragged back to his side, almost no bait remained upon it. A sense of release washed over him, accompanied by a quiet epiphany, inspiring him to walk toward more distant horizons.

He slowly began to remember that within the three realms and six paths, even if one's essence was purely spiritual, he remained a living soul. He too held aspirations—a yearning to travel to far-off foreign lands and truly become himself. In this lifetime, he finally realized that he existed within the spiritual realm. Sometimes his existence overlapped with the material world of reality, and sometimes it did not, lingering instead within some fleeting space-time for a brief rest.

Across the distant earth, countless broad domains remained. Chen Chen could only press forward as best as he could, longing to pause and rest awhile.

For the sake of his own existence, he sometimes wished not to move quite so swiftly. To finish admiring the scenery in one place, only to have his soul instantly transported to another, was a rather wretched feeling. After all, he differed from living beings possessing flesh, blood, and bone; he had entered the spiritual realm alone, and within that realm dwelt countless other spirits.

A book spirit was merely one among them. Eventually, Chen Chen walked to the place where reincarnation is governed, underwent rebirth, and became an entirely new life form. Looking back upon his former existences, the true descent into a womb, the process of reincarnation, and the arduous journey of finding that path of rebirth had been fraught with difficulty. Fortunately, heaven rewards the diligent; even a spirit that governed all living beings could occasionally encounter the affinity and opportunity to undergo reincarnation.

In this lifetime, Chen Chen was no longer reborn into the human realm, nor was the stellar region of his growth any longer the domain where the Third Cultivation Star resided. He grew far removed from the Third Cultivation Star where he had once lingered—perhaps having walked its paths long ago, only to eventually grow weary of it. He distanced himself from the Third Cultivation Star and the stellar sector to which it belonged, journeying to far more distant realms. Yet at this level of rebirth and existence, countless unknown stars and factions remained hidden from the world.

The Third Cultivation Star had weathered several epochs. As early as twelve thousand years ago, highly developed civilizations had already taken root and flourished upon Earth. For instance, the once-glorious Atlantean civilization, while the Mayan civilization vanished from the Third Cultivation Star roughly five hundred years ago, leaving their footprints across the better part of the globe and scattering the ruins of their heritage in numerous places. The Huaxia civilization was founded by ancient peoples approximately six,500 years ago. By that time, the Mayan civilization had not yet exited the stage of history, while the Atlantean civilization had already sunk beneath the waves.

In the subsequent evolution of civilization, a powerful nation emerged in the West. Theirs was the Mesopotamian civilization, which stood proudly among Western cultures and propagated a superpower. The Huaxia civilization had many such neighbors and countless kindred cultures: the Rastav civilization, the Egyptian civilization, the ancient Babylonian civilization... and many other unknown civilizations that existed in their own unique ways, protecting their respective realms.

In the form of a spiritual entity, Chen Chen arrived within another star cluster of the Milky Way. Traveling afar, he reached a distant stellar region that had once been marked with the traces of the Atlantean civilization. Beyond the solar system, deep within the Milky Way, such a place existed. There, amid the shifting stars, stood a primary sun, surrounded by several companion stars. It was a place suited for the survival and habitation of living beings.

Legend had it that more than ten thousand years ago, the civilization there had utilized their cutting-edge technology to reach the Third Cultivation Star. The civilization they left behind upon that world was what became known as Atlantis. As the stories of the Third Cultivation Star gradually drew to a close, he ventured to even more distant stars. The stellar race that had once left behind the Atlantean civilization on the Third Cultivation Star had by now returned to the very celestial bodies that birthed their culture.

Yet that place was ultimately not as complex and diverse as Earth. Chen Chen was merely a name, a designation given to him by the mortal world.

By this time, his spiritual entity had arrived among this civilized race. This civilization was not particularly fond of him and seemed deeply unwelcoming of his arrival. As it happened, the heavenly official in charge of rebirth learned that a vacancy for reincarnation still existed near Fomalhaut in the constellation Piscis Austrinus. Without a second thought, the official assigned Chen Chen to that very location.

There, too, burned the brilliantly radiant light of civilization. There, too, existed humble and unassuming creatures. There, too, shone luminous stars akin to the sun.

Unlike the Third Cultivation Star, the civilization residing in that star system was immensely ancient. Long ago, it had already developed profound cultivation techniques. It no longer belonged to the Third Cultivation Star, nor was it the ancestral land of the Huaxia civilization. Within the distant interstellar civilization, it was an outstanding realm indeed.

The constellation Piscis Austrinus within the Milky Way, the primary star Fomalhaut and its associated companion planets, the governing stars of the Big Dipper such as the Chengzhu Ancient Star and the Purple Star of Emperor—every single one of these stellar bodies possessed extraordinary legends of descending into the mortal world through reincarnation.

In the distant starry sky, countless such marvelous places abounded: diamond planets, ultra-blue giants, ultra-red giants, massive celestial black holes like N18, neutron stars, pulsars—once one ventured into the cosmos, they were simply too numerous to count.

Domains at the level of the ancient Huaxia nation and the Third Cultivation Star were far too elementary for a powerhouse of Chen Chen's earth-shaking and historically unmatched caliber. The boundless universe was the true stage where he could display his abilities and ambitions.

There lay endless desolation, alongside endless vitality. There existed celestial bodies where one could soar through the air relying solely on one's physical body, as well as stellar civilizations possessing highly advanced and leading technologies. There were even more prosperous and dazzling places, where certain flowers and fruits blossomed once every few thousand years and bore fruit only after millennia. Though consuming such fruits might not necessarily grant instant ascension to the heavens in broad daylight, augmenting one's cultivation by countless years and breaking through bottlenecks in a single leap to enter higher realms was entirely within the realm of possibility.

Then there were the cosmic-scale creatures whose roots spanned entire stars, possessing volumes comparable to entire planets. Of course, not every celestial body was as massive as the Third Cultivation Star; some stars floating in the cosmos might be no larger than a fist, and the plants growing upon them could easily surpass them in size with just a little effort.

Countless more fascinating wonders awaited within the endless cosmos, waiting for Chen Chen to explore, discover, experience, and claim as his own.

And thus, Chen Chen embarked upon this impromptu journey of a lifetime.