130: Chapter 130 Original Resonance, There's Still a Game Beyond the Game
3:17 AM.
Jiang Feng opened his eyes.
He wasn't woken up by noise.
With his intelligence of 466 Jian, the low-level state of "light sleep" did not exist for him; the moment he closed his eyes, his consciousness automatically split into two layers—the surface level resting, and the deep level anchoring.
The object of his anchoring was that set of ancient patterns deep within the crust of Blue Star.
He hadn't ignored the faint light that had flickered for an instant before he fell asleep.
At this moment—that set of patterns moved again.
It wasn't glowing. It was vibrating.
The frequency was extremely subtle, completely invisible to the naked eye, yet it locked perfectly onto the same beat as the pulsation of the Pangu Dao Fruit within his body.
It was like resonance. Or perhaps, a response.
Jiang Feng sat up.
Moonlight spilled in from the window, whitening a patch of the floor.
From the next room came the unrefined snoring of the dragon girl, while the wall clock in the living room downstairs ticked away, unhurriedly.
He stepped barefoot onto the floor, compressing his intelligence into a needle of extreme fineness, and plunged it into the deepest part of Blue Star's crust.
The structure of the patterns unfolded layer by layer in his mind.
He had only scanned it roughly last time, but this time he looked closely.
The depth, angle, and spacing of every scratch were all precise to the subatomic level.
The conclusion was reached.
It wasn't carved on. It grew out.
This set of patterns was perfectly embedded with the mineral lattice structure of Blue Star's crust, like tree roots digging into soil—it was impossible to tell whether the roots came first, or the soil did.
It was a part of Blue Star.
It had been there since the very first moment Blue Star existed.
Jiang Feng's brows twitched.
The remains of Pangu were smashed into Blue Star later.
The Demon Realm was tied onto it later by Cang Yuan.
The high-dimensional chess game was set up later by the two elders, Xuan and Ming.
It was all added later.
But this set of patterns—it was earlier than all of that.
It was the foundation.
Everyone was stacking things onto Blue Star.
But no one noticed that Blue Star itself already had things carved into it.
The vibration frequency of the patterns suddenly changed.
From a stable resonance, it switched to a set of rhythmic long and short alternations.
Long—short—long long—short—
Jiang Feng stared at this frequency for three seconds.
It wasn't natural decay.
It wasn't random fluctuation.
It was a signal.
Something was sending him a signal through this set of patterns.
He didn't rush to respond.
His intelligence of 466 Jian told him a very simple thing—not knowing who was on the other side, answering rashly was equivalent to revealing one's own identity.
But he was thinking about another matter.
Old Man Xuan's gray-pattern mark had the same underlying logic as this set of ancient patterns.
Exactly the same.
What did this mean?
There were two possibilities.
First: Old Man Xuan's marking technique was copied from this set of ancient patterns.
Second: Old Man Xuan and the existence that carved this set of patterns came from the same master.
Regardless of which, the conclusion it pointed to was the same—above the chessboard, there was still another chessboard.
Jiang Feng stood barefoot in the moonlight.
There was no expression on his face.
He had originally thought that overturning the table of the two elders, Xuan and Ming, would be the end of it.
Now it seemed that those two old things might also just be food on someone else's table.
"……It never ends, does it."
He cursed.
His voice wasn't loud, and there was even a hint of sleepiness in his tone.
He turned back to the bed, lay down, and closed his eyes.
No rush.
What should come will come.
When it comes, he would kill it.
If he couldn't finish killing it, he would keep killing.
There would eventually come a day when no one dared to make a move.
……
Outside Blue Star.
Xuanji didn't know how long she had been drifting in the starry sky.
A few hours, or an entire night?
For a high-dimensional body of creation, time should have no meaning.
But she was cold.
It wasn't a cold of temperature.
It was a vague, indescribable emptiness seeping out from the deepest part of her source.
Jiang Feng's words kept spinning in her ears.
"Not a single shred of all the thoughts you have about yourself belongs to you."
She lowered her head.
She didn't know for the how-many-eth time, she probed her divine sense into the deepest part of her source.
That pale golden mark stayed there quietly.
Thump. Thump.
Synchronized with her heartbeat.
From the moment she was created, this thing had been there.
It was earlier than her first wisp of spiritual intelligence, and older than the first thought she ever had.
It wasn't planted in later.
It grew on the root.
Xuanji gritted her teeth.
Her divine sense condensed into a needle tip, cautiously touching the edge of the mark.
Extremely light.
Lighter than touching a spider web.
—A burst of acute pain exploded deep within her source.
It wasn't just pain.
It was "existence" itself being torn apart.
The edge of the mark was interlocked seamlessly with the fibers of her source; moving one strand pulled on a whole area, and pulling on an area meant a chain collapse.
Her figure swayed.
Her cyan-gold dharma robe was lifted by the overflowing source aura, and a wisp of golden blood seeped from the corner of her mouth.
Venerable Xuan's voice floated in her mind.
"The mark is rooted in the source, living and dying with her existence."
"If she tries to pull it out by force—"
"Her life will be gone."
Xuanji raised her hand to wipe away the golden blood from the corner of her mouth.
Her hand was trembling.
How many epochs had she lived?
From the day she was created, she had stood at the peak of the myriad worlds.
Looking down on all living beings, judging life and death.
Nothing could shake her in the slightest.
Because she "knew who she was".
Now this foundation had collapsed.
She didn't know, in every one of her judgments, how much was her own, and how much was made for her by that mark.
She wasn't even sure—whether this very thought of wanting to break free was also in Venerable Xuan's script.
Xuanji looked up.
In the distance, the taixu barrier of Blue Star flowed quietly.
Clean and transparent, without a trace of gray pattern residue.
Behind the barrier, somewhere, the person who casually crushed a high-dimensional edict was sleeping.
Sleeping.
He had just slaughtered ten Hunyuan Supreme, went home to eat a meal of pork ribs, and then went to sleep.
The sentence he threw down when he left popped into Xuanji's mind.
"If you want to live, pull that thing out yourself."
Pull it out yourself.
He didn't say how to pull it out.
He didn't say if she could survive after pulling it out.
Much less did he say he would help.
This sentence was cold, chilling her from head to toe.
But Xuanji chewed on this sentence over and over all night, and chewed out another layer of meaning.
He said "want to live".
Not "want freedom".
Not "want to break free".
It was "want to live".
A person who could casually crush even a Hunyuan Supreme would not waste breath saying an extra word to an unrelated chess piece.
He used the word "live".
This meant—in his judgment, after pulling out the mark, there was a possibility of surviving.
Even if it was very small.
Xuanji clenched her fists.
Her knuckles pressed against the skin of her hands, turning them white.
Deep in her source, the mark was still beating.
Thump. Thump.
Steady. Composed.
Without a shred of malice.
As natural as breathing.
But it was not her breathing.
It never was.
……
Early morning.
Oil smoke rose in the kitchen of Tianshu Dragon Garden.
Liu Cuilan was frying eggs, the spatula flying, her movements as deft as a breakfast stall owner who had done it for thirty years; one could not tell at all that she was the mother of a Half-Step Heavenly Venerable.
The dragon girl lay on the dining table, her eyes fixed on the direction of the frying pan without blinking, drool almost dripping onto the tabletop.
"Mom! Add two more! Soft-boiled!"
"I know, I know, when have I ever given you less? You girl are just impatient."
When Jiang Feng came downstairs, six fried eggs, a small dish of pickled vegetables, and two bowls of white porridge were already on the table.
He sat down and picked up his chopsticks.
The dragon girl quickly shoveled two mouthfuls of porridge, then suddenly leaned her head over, lowering her voice: "Master, that woman is still floating outside. She's been floating all night without moving an inch."
Jiang Feng picked up a piece of pickled vegetable.
"Mm."
"You're not going to do anything?"
"Do what?"
"What if she's here to cause trouble—"
"She can't."
Jiang Feng chewed twice and swallowed, his tone as if he were discussing the weather: "She hasn't even figured out who she is yet, what could she possibly use to cause trouble."
The dragon girl puffed out her cheeks and pondered for a moment; it seemed to make sense.
She thought about it again, but still felt something was off.
"Then why doesn't she leave?"
Jiang Feng didn't take the bait.
He picked up his porridge bowl and took a sip.
Liu Cuilan poked her head out from the kitchen: "Xiao Feng, are you going out today?"
"No, I'm not."
"Alright then, accompany Mom to the supermarket this afternoon, the soy sauce is almost out."
"Sure."
The dragon girl raised her hand high: "I'm going too! I'm going too! I want to buy potato chips!"
The dining table was lively.
Jiang Feng ate very slowly.
He was thinking about that set of signals.
Long—short—long long—short—
Sixteen mental threads at the bottom of his mind were turning simultaneously, performing an exhaustive decoding of the signal.
It didn't match any known high-dimensional language system.
It didn't match any set of rune logic existing in the myriad worlds.
It was brand new.
Or rather—it was brand old.
It was so old that when all existing civilizations hadn't even appeared yet, this thing was already there.
Jiang Feng put down his porridge bowl.
His face was no different from usual.
"Mom, what brand of soy sauce should I buy?"
"Haitian is fine, don't buy the expensive ones, the expensive ones don't taste good."
"Okay."
Deep in Blue Star's crust, that set of patterns was quiet, no longer vibrating.
It was as if it had finished saying what it needed to say.
Or as if it were waiting for an answer.