After a stretch of anxious uncertainty, Yang Kai discovered that he showed no signs of being refined. Instead, the environment he found himself in was rather strange.
He couldn't quite articulate where exactly he was. It felt as though he were suspended in a void, with motes of faint luminescence scattered all around, like stars twinkling in the distance. Distance itself had become an exceedingly nebulous concept here—those flickering glimmers seemed impossibly far away, yet also close enough to reach out and touch.
The key problem was that Yang Kai could clearly sense that he was utterly immobilized, as if struck by a immobilization spell. Alternatively, it felt as though some profound and mysterious force had enveloped him, binding him in place and leaving him suffocating with frustration.
Was this the interior of the Qiankun Furnace? Yang Kai fell into contemplation.
Every sign pointed to the conclusion that he had indeed been pulled inside the Qiankun Furnace. This was the interior of the legendary artifact, no mistake about it.
But this… was far more bizarre than he had ever imagined. The inside of the Qiankun Furnace actually contained an entire vast world! That was something he had never conceived of before.
In his imagination, the Qiankun Furnace was simply a pill cauldron—one in which that miraculous Open Heaven Pill was nurtured into being. The projected image of the cauldron he had seen earlier was admittedly quite large, but it still fell within the bounds of expectation and wasn't too startling.
But for the Qiankun Furnace to house an entire self-contained world within—that was genuinely astonishing.
Though on second thought, this was the most mysterious supreme treasure in all of heaven and earth after all. Within it was nurtured the one that had slipped away from the Heavenly Dao's fifty principles. A self-contained world didn't seem so unreasonable after all.
He calmed his mind slightly and stopped wasting mental energy on that question. What he needed to consider now was how to protect himself.
Because he had touched the true body of this supreme treasure, he had been dragged inside. There were no signs of being refined for the moment, but he still needed to remain vigilant.
He had to find a way out first.
He immediately channeled his strength, attempting to leave this place. But no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't so much as move a single finger. The mysterious force restraining him didn't feel particularly powerful, yet it possessed remarkable tenacity—the harder Yang Kai pushed, the stronger it grew in response, keeping him perpetually constrained.
Yang Kai refused to give up. He activated the Dao of Space, attempting to teleport away.
But the Dao of Space, which had never failed him before, was completely ineffective here. The small pocket of space surrounding his body had been entirely locked down.
Yang Kai then invoked the Dao of Time, projecting its realm outward in every direction. No response.
He called upon the Dao of the Spear next. Still nothing.
After an unknowable stretch of time, Yang Kai had cycled through every Dao he possessed, demonstrating each one in succession. None of it made the slightest difference to his predicament.
Even channeling Time and Space simultaneously to produce the wondrous power of the space-time continuum accomplished nothing.
Yang Kai was filled with helpless exasperation. He could now confirm with absolute certainty that he was truly immobilized—like a prisoner trapped within this incomprehensible cage.
This was nothing short of a tragedy. He had never expected that simply disturbing the true body of the Qiankun Furnace would result in such treatment. What was worse, from beginning to end, he hadn't even been able to discern the exact location where the Qiankun Furnace's true body was hidden, let alone seize the opportunity to kill that bastard Mo Naye.
The Qiankun Furnace still showed no signs of refining him. That being the case, his worries were probably largely unnecessary—the Qiankun Furnace might not refine foreign objects at all. Of course, to be safe, it was wise to maintain a measure of vigilance in case the unexpected occurred.
His situation was more or less secure for the moment, but how could he actually get out of here?
He steadied his mind, suppressing the trace of anxiety that lingered within him, and carefully extended his perception in every direction.
If he wanted to leave, he first needed to break through the force that bound him. To do that, he had to understand what that force actually was, so he could find the right remedy.
His consciousness spread outward like a tidal wave, and Yang Kai instantly detected something unusual.
Inside the Qiankun Furnace, there were an enormous quantity of Dao Marks! Those invisible and intangible Dao Marks were interwoven and layered throughout the interior of the Qiankun Furnace, so abundant as to be almost beyond imagination. Wherever his consciousness reached, they were everywhere without exception.
Yang Kai's mind shook with shock, and an inexplicable feeling washed over him—as though he had stumbled into a treasure vault.
The degree to which a martial artist had mastered their own Dao was most directly reflected in the quantity of Dao Marks they possessed. Of course, this wasn't something that could be precisely quantified—merely a vague impression.
Take Yang Kai himself, for example. His attainment in the Dao of Space was the highest, so within his Small World, the Dao Marks of Space were the most abundant. As a result, the entire Small World was saturated with the marks of the Space Dao, which in turn allowed the Disciples at his dojo to benefit from his blessing and comprehend the cultivation of spatial principles.
The Dao of Time came next, though with the continued refinement of his Dragon Vein, it had roughly caught up with the Dao of Space.
After that came the Dao of the Spear…
And then there were the numerous other Daos. Beyond the Alchemy Dao and the Artifacts Refining Dao, which Yang Kai had invested time and effort into during his early years, the rest had largely been acquired from the Great Sea Celestial Phenomenon.
Back when he had been hunted by that Mo Clan Lord, Yang Kai had been forced to flee for decades, eventually entering the Great Sea Celestial Phenomenon. The gains he had reaped there were beyond imagination.
The reason he had obtained such tremendous benefits within the Great Sea Celestial Phenomenon was precisely because the phenomenon contained Great Rivers of various Daos, with countless Dao Marks flowing through them—he had refined and absorbed them all.
He had never expected that the interior of the Qiankun Furnace would contain so many Dao Marks as well, and that they would be many times more abundant than those found in the Great Sea Celestial Phenomenon.