In the void, a great river stretched across the expanse, its waters churning and surging, whitecaps blooming along its length.
Above that river, Yang Kai sat cross-legged in the void, his hand stirring the space before him. As he worked, the river surged violently one moment and calmed the next.
The power of myriad Great Daos rose and fell with the river's flow.
It had been several years since Yang Kai returned from that forbidden ground.
Thinking back on those years of absurd experiences, he didn't know whether to laugh or cry.
The day he came back from the forbidden place, his closest kin had welcomed him with tears, recounting the pain of separation. Shortly after, everyone returned to the Star Boundary together. When word spread, hundreds of millions of humans erupted in jubilation.
During the eight thousand years Yang Kai had vanished, every memory of him had been erased — yet the moment he returned, those erased memories surged back to life. No one knew what kind of power could accomplish such a feat.
Only Yang Kai had a vague suspicion.
After that, Yang Kai had been placed under house arrest!
That's right — he, a mighty cultivator who had surpassed the Open Heaven Realm and reached a level never before achieved, who could overturn heaven and earth with a mere wave of his hand, had been placed under house arrest!
The ones doing the confining were Fourth Master Yang and Dong Suzhu!
Confined alongside him were all his wives.
According to his parents, they were already old. The fact that they had managed to produce Yang Xue back then was nothing short of a miracle — they could hardly be expected to produce more children. The task of continuing the Yang family bloodline therefore fell to Yang Kai.
The old couple's demands were simple: however many wives he had, that was how many children they expected — one per wife, on average. The moment this requirement was met, he would be released.
In terms of power, his parents were no match for Yang Kai whatsoever. If he truly wanted to leave, he could have escaped at any time.
But his parents had made their position abundantly clear: if their unfilial son dared to defy them this time, they would dash their heads against the peak of Lingxiao Mountain and die on the spot!
There was nothing he could do about that.
As his parents saw it, Yang Kai had been cultivating since time immemorial, passing through countless worlds both great and small, never resting for a single day. Now that the myriad heavens were at peace and his own cultivation had reached its ultimate peak, there was nothing left in this world that required his attention. This was the perfect time to focus on continuing the Yang family line.
Left with no choice, Yang Kai and his wives — Su Yan, Yu Rumeng, and the rest — spent the following years confined together on a solitary peak of Lingxiao Palace.
It was only after several years that Yang Kai finally emerged from the isolated peak, his face haggard and drawn, his eyes sunken deep into their sockets, his complexion an unhealthy shade of green. Trailing behind him came a veritable flock of women, each prominently displaying a rounded belly.
Fourth Master Yang and Dong Suzhu were overjoyed. The Fourth Master declared frankly that people really were products of pressure — all those times they had urged Yang Kai to extend the family line, he had deflected with one excuse after another. If they had known sooner, they should have locked him up long ago!
Only after completing this task did Yang Kai finally have time to catch up with his old friends.
Mi Jinglun and the others were all well aware of what he had endured these past years, and their reunion naturally involved a fair share of good-natured ribbing.
However, it wasn't long before Yang Kai learned from the various Ninth-Order masters about the current state of humanity.
With the great war from over eight thousand years ago concluded, the Mo race annihilated, and the myriad heavens pacified, humanity had become the master of all creation.
Yet the scars and trauma of countless ages of war were not so easily healed.
The myriad heavens had once flourished beyond measure, but now, aside from the Star Boundary, the Myriad Beast World, and a few other habitable realms, every other great domain's worlds had either been thoroughly corrupted by the power of Mo or long since shattered into ruin.
It could be said that humanity's living conditions had been severely compressed.
In the past, every great domain across the myriad heavens bore traces of human activity. Now, all surviving humans were crammed into the Lingxiao Domain and the Myriad Beast Domain — and of those, a full ninety percent resided in the Myriad Beast Domain.
So scarce were cultivation resources that both the Star Boundary and the Myriad Beast World — those twin cradles of Open Heaven Realm cultivators — had long since become so in name only. The human race did not dare allow too many of their kind to settle in these two cradles, lest too many promising talents be born without the resources to nurture them.
If the number of those suitable for cultivation grew without a corresponding supply of materials, people would inevitably fight amongst themselves for resources, plunging everything into chaos.
The Star Boundary and Myriad Beast World now housed only a small fraction of humanity's population. To even enter these two cradles required passing a series of trials and selection processes.
This was the state of the human race — victorious in war, yet homeless.
But there was nothing to be done. The Mo race had inflicted catastrophic damage upon those worlds.
And humanity possessed no means of restoring them. If this continued unchecked, the future of the human race looked grim.
Fortunately, Yang Kai had returned from the forbidden ground.
And at this very moment, he was repairing worlds.
This was a desolate great domain, devoid of all life. Perhaps once it had teemed with people and its worlds had flourished — but after the Mo race had occupied it for untold ages, nothing remained but dead silence. Every world here was lifeless.
The immense River of Time and Space stretched across the void, and within its current, world after world bobbed and sank as the power of myriad Great Daos evolved and unfolded.