After a brief flicker of confusion, Wang Chen moved. His reaction was instantaneous, instinct overriding thought. Fingers blurred through a sequence of seals so fast that the air whined in protest.

A heartbeat later, the space beneath him lit up.

Layer after layer of formation circles erupted under his feet, overlapping like a blooming lotus forged from pure light. The rings expanded, folded, and interlocked until they formed a tightly woven cage of runic brilliance. Even the faintest ripple of energy was crushed flat and devoured.

Only then did the raging aura settle, suppressed before it could escape and shatter the fragile calm that had only just returned to the imperial city.

His long dark hair lifted and swayed despite the utter stillness around him, drifting like threads of shadow through a wind that did not exist. The absolute concealment formation sealed the world shut, carving out a separate pocket of existence—silent, lightless, breathless. Nothing could enter. Nothing could leave.

Wang Chen lowered himself into a cross-legged posture, his expression unreadable as he turned his focus inward.

The moment his spiritual sense entered his inner world, his eyes widened.

The Garden of Eternity… had changed.

Once a modest realm only a kilometer across, it had swelled outward by another three kilometers, its borders stretching like a world drawing its first violent breath. But expansion was not what shocked him.

It was the devastation.

Entire forests lay flattened, their life force sucked dry until only bleached husks remained. The delicate shoots of civilization that had begun to form—small villages, tiny spirit-beast dens, the first traces of structured qi veins—were nowhere to be seen. Swept away. Erased. As if a massive celestial hand had plunged into the Garden, stirred it violently, and left chaos in its wake.

At the core of the inner sea, qi churned like a hurricane trapped beneath glass. The violent resonance had triggered tidal waves so powerful they'd torn through valleys and drowned plains, leaving behind nothing but ruin and trembling earth.

He didn't just see the destruction.

He felt them.

Countless faint consciousnesses—sprouts of life born within the Garden—shivered in fear. Their panic pressed against his soul like cold fingertips. A collective terror. A world crying without sound.

Wang Chen exhaled slowly, the weight of their emotion settling heavily across his chest.

"…So the Garden has grown," he murmured inwardly, though the words were swallowed by the sealed formation. "But its will… is unsettled."

A faint pulse throbbed at the center of the ruined world, ancient and unstable.

Like a heart that had been forced to beat too fast.

Upon sharpening his focus, Wang Chen began to hear them.

Not with his ears, but with his soul.

The cries of the Garden's inhabitants rolled through his mind like distant thunder. Their words were foreign, an ancient tongue birthed by a newborn world — yet the emotions behind them were unmistakable.

Terror.

Desperation.

Supplication.

"Oh great heavens, have mercy!"

"Calm your anger!"

The raw pleading cut into him, trembling with a kind of collective despair no mortal scream could ever carry.

His consciousness drifted farther across the ravaged land, and he found them — a congregation of more than ten thousand beings kneeling atop a cracked plain, their heads lowered, bodies shivering, conducting a primitive ritual. Their hands raised toward a sky that no longer responded. They cried, they begged, they offered what little they had.

But the heavens did not quiet.

The devastation ravaging the Garden only intensified. Earthquakes rolled through the soil, uprooting forests. Winds howled like maddened beasts. The world he'd cultivated was splitting apart faster than its children could pray.

This disaster… this single upheaval…

By the time its fury settled, more than ninety-nine percent of all life inside the Garden of Eternity had been wiped away.

The First Great Calamity of the Myriad Races.

Wang Chen inhaled sharply.

A knot of guilt twisted in his chest — faint, but real. He had never meant for this to happen. How could he? No one in any realm would expect their inner world to suddenly swell from one kilometer to four in an instant. This wasn't a breakthrough. This wasn't cultivation flow. This was a cosmic detonation forced into a space that wasn't prepared to contain it.

The Foundation Building realm was meant to stabilize a cultivator's basis, form the groundwork for a Golden Core, strengthen qi and essence.

The spiritual space wasn't supposed to grow at all.

Yet here it was — torn apart by its own expansion.

As he scanned its edges, the once-stable boundary of the Garden flickered violently, then hardened into place at the Four-kilometer mark. But the stability was an illusion.

If one looked closely, faint microscopic cracks riddled the air itself, like tiny fractures in a glass sphere. They multiplied slowly, silently — a network of death lines threatening to tear the Garden open from the inside.

Wang Chen felt the blood drain from his face.

His spiritual strength was nowhere near enough to fully support the Garden's sudden, monstrous size. If the cracks continued to spread — if the spatial fabric collapsed inward — the resulting backlash would tear his consciousness apart.

And his brain with it.

"This situation is extremely terrible," he muttered under his breath. "If I don't push my cultivation fast enough, I'll die with my head exploding… not even able to fully enjoy the ten years of my limited lifespan."

The realization sank into him like ice water.

All thought of rewards, quests, and system notifications vanished.

Because now, for the first time in a long time—

Wang Chen faced a deadline.

A very real one.

…

Meanwhile, Li Mei — completely unaware of the crisis unfolding in Wang Chen's inner world — sat quietly in her meditation chamber. Her physical body remained still on the mat, yet within her spiritual space her phantom form hovered weightlessly, drifting above the vast expanse like a sovereign surveying her realm.

A faint, satisfied smile tugged at her lips.

Her gaze swept over the shimmering landscape of her spiritual space. At its heart, a pristine qi lake had already formed, glowing with a deep, tranquil blue. The surface rippled gently, as if breathing in harmony with her own heartbeat. And nestled within the lake, like a pampered divine beast unconcerned with the world, the Nine-Petaled Soul Calming Flame floated about lazily, its tiny body leaving trails of iridescent light wherever it swam.

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.