Chapter 1866

The eighth layer is a vast grassland. The Three Crazed Demon Eccentrics had deduced that the last three layers would hold chaotic dao marks, with Limitless Demon Venerable’s immortal formation, centered on Derivation, a rank nine Immortal Gu, in the ninth. Instead the layer is a small world, not a normal blessed land, and a little frail. A giant tear spreads across the sky with a loud crackle, and Fang Yuan, certain that one touch would kill him, dodges with ease since it does not focus on him. ^{ch. 1866}

The crackle is a small world crumbling, and the tear, a phantom path void tear, devours everything in it. Fang Yuan throws himself into the tear and barely shelters inside. Flying up along it, he leaves the small world and reaches a void as vast as an ocean. Countless worlds drift there like multi-colored bubbles, and the one he left is down to two crescent fragments. ^{ch. 1866}

This is the eighth layer’s true appearance: an infinite void where worlds are born and destroyed. The world he left is destroyed completely, leaving a long white thread, an extraordinary and extremely tenacious dao mark that even the void cannot destroy. From it he sees space path, senses time path, tastes wood path and feels cloud path, and he recognizes heaven path, the dao marks of the Heavenly Dao. He had seen human path dao marks before, but never heaven path. Both had been absent from the seventh layer. Only heaven path dao marks survive the void. ^{ch. 1866}

Cautious, he only follows the thread until a void vortex swallows it. The dao mark collapses, the vortex bursts, and a blue-white bubble appears that expands into a newly created small world. He enters once it is large enough and finds the same mark in a changed world of floating islands. He has an intense premonition that comprehending this would bring a huge, qualitative increase in strength, and he watches the births and destructions, completely obsessed. ^{ch. 1866}

The seventh layer derives dao marks and the eighth derives worlds, but that is only the surface: it is deriving heaven path dao marks. A mark usually grows a bit each round, but when a vortex absorbs three or four together, only one or two remain, so total length can be lost. Fang Yuan reasons that heaven path dao marks can be lost, or that those he has seen fall short of Limitless Demon Venerable’s standard. The Legends of Ren Zu states that fate Gu decides every being must die, its soul returning to the Door of Life and Death. Fate Gu is in essence a fragment of heaven path. ^{ch. 1866}

Fang Yuan guesses that Limitless Demon Venerable, who pursues eternal life, targeted heaven path directly since he could not bypass the Heavenly Dao. Limitless Demon Venerable once attacked Heavenly Court but, not being an otherworldly demon, could not destroy Fate, so he worked harder to understand why. Fang Yuan is extremely troubled: many methods of collecting heaven path dao marks fail. He even senses that Thieves Den, a highly damaged rank eight theft path Immortal Gu House, could do nothing against them. He considers taking the immortal formation directly, but does not know how to reach the ninth layer, and the void gives no clue. ^{ch. 1866}

He drifts aimlessly until he finds a world, the largest he has seen, which looks about to be destroyed, and he enters. Its living creatures, misty cloud people, kowtow, call him sage, ask whether he came to create a Dao field to save their world, and beg to be his disciple. Fang Yuan realizes there are other sages like him. The cloud people name a sage in a green robe and white headband who created the Green Lotus Dao field, and a compassionate bare-footed sage in yellow who saved the Yellow Earth Great World. A third, ferocious, tall and burly, created Savage Wilderness Great World. ^{ch. 1866}