The cave was silent save for the ragged, bubbling breath of Gong Lei, now nothing more than a crippled mortal. Lin Fan stood over him, the stolen storage pouch already secured to his wrist. His new Perfected Foundation thrummed with vitality—a profound, steady resonance that felt foreign and terrifyingly right.
The immediate crisis was averted, but the silence only deepened Lin Fan's awareness of his actual predicament: he was still in the Azure Cloud World, a decaying prison.
The World of the Waning Qi
Lin Fan used the Insight Engine to scan the cave and the sect grounds above. The ancient knowledge from the Jade Pendant had already integrated the complete historical outline of the Azure Cloud World into his mind.
This was a Tier 1 Mortal Realm, but one afflicted by tragedy.
• Cultivation Ranks of World 1:
• Qi Gathering (Where Lin Fan started: mortals gather ambient Qi).
• Foundation Establishment (Lin Fan's current stage: condensing Qi into a stable core).
• Golden Core (Further condensing the core, gaining immense lifespan and power).
• Nascent Soul (The peak attainable rank: a spiritual entity is formed within the core, allowing survival even if the body is destroyed).
• The Ancient Catastrophe: Millennia ago, this world's greatest master, the Azure Sovereign, attempted to shatter the dimensional barrier to ascend to the Immortal Universe. He failed, and the technique tore a hole in the world's core. This wasn't a sudden cataclysm, but a slow, spiritual leak—the Hidden Drain.
• The Cap: The drain was why Nascent Soul was the peak. The spiritual energy density of the Azure Cloud World was no longer sufficient to sustain anything higher. Every cultivator was fighting over scraps of a dying world.
Lin Fan looked at the crumpled Gong Lei, now utterly beneath him. Gong Lei's failure wasn't just his arrogance; it was the world's weakness.
"To linger here is to decay," Lin Fan muttered, his first true decision as a cultivator of destiny. "To live, I must ascend."
The Secret Realm and the Inheritance Key
Lin Fan couldn't stay. Gong Lei's powerful family would scour the mountain, and his mere existence was a liability. He had to vanish and cultivate for centuries—a necessity the higher worlds would demand.
The Sunken Sea Secret Realm—the shimmering, dangerous portal visible from the ravine—was the key. It was a chaotic dimensional fragment, a perfect place for a long, untraceable seclusion. Crucially, the Insight Engine confirmed the long-rumored truth:
The Secret Realm is the antechamber to the Azure Sovereign's true legacy.
The Pocket Dimension Inheritance was not hidden deep within the Sect, but secured by the Sovereign's final will, accessible through this chaotic rift.
Lin Fan had no Pills or Treasures yet, but he had something better: Mei Ling's tragic flaw.
He found a few scattered, discarded pills in Gong Lei's pouch—low-grade trash to a genius, but precious to Lin Fan. Using the Insight Engine, he immediately focused the Dao Residuum Trace on the pills' minute spiritual fluctuations.
[Analyzing Residual Imprint: Low-Grade Earth Pellet. Flaw: Unstable Heat-Binding Intent.]
He wasn't copying the pill's effect, he was copying the failure of the alchemist who made it. This was his starting method: Tracing flaws to learn perfection.
Ten Thousand Years to the Sunken Sea
Lin Fan entered the shimmering, chaotic gate of the Sunken Sea Secret Realm.
The air inside was thick and heavy, smelling of brine and ancient spiritual decay. The realm was filled with the lingering spiritual echoes of the dozens of Foundation Establishment cultivators who had failed and died here over the centuries. For Lin Fan, this was a golden library.
He found a secluded cavern behind a waterfall of corrupted Qi. Here, he placed the small, scattered pills, and began his meditation.
He didn't cultivate conventionally. He used the Dao Residuum Trace to analyze every spectral footprint in the realm: a lingering Defensive Array that failed, a fragment of Fire Intent that sputtered out, and the trace remnants of medicinal energies. The Insight Engine instantly corrected the flaws in the structures, allowing Lin Fan to build his foundational knowledge at a monstrous pace.
He spent the first ten years perfecting his Foundation Establishment Stage 1, using the knowledge from the Jade Pendant to make his core impossibly robust.
Then, the true training began.
Lin Fan delved into the Jade Pendant's legacy—the Art of the Unbroken Core. This ancient technique demanded absolute stillness and a terrifying amount of time, a period no mortal would dare endure. But in the distorted spiritual flow of the Secret Realm, the flow of time felt agonizingly slow.
He cultivated:
• One Hundred Years for every month spent in the outside world.
• One Thousand Years passed within the cave.
• Ten Thousand Years of focused seclusion passed, all compressed into less than a decade of external time.
Lin Fan emerged from the deepest seclusion, outwardly unchanged but inwardly a Golden Core master in terms of knowledge. He was Foundation Establishment Stage 10 (Peak), having perfectly condensed all his Qi into a flawlessly stable core structure.
He finally reached the end of the Secret Realm—not a physical barrier, but a vast, spiritual wall marked by the final words of the Azure Sovereign:
"Only the one who saves this dying world may pass. The key is not power, but Fate Energy."
The Pocket Dimension Inheritance would not open with brute force. Lin Fan had mastered the power, but now he had to go back to the world that scorned him and prove himself worthy of saving it. He had a debt to pay to his world, and a promise to keep to Su Meng.
He stepped out of the Secret Realm, ten thousand years of cultivation stored in his perfect core, ready to solve the Hidden Drain and collect his first true ally: Mei Ling.