Chapter Two Hundred Fifty-Five: The Eighth Day

Time seemed to have passed in eons.

Tens of thousands of years slipped by like a fleeting shadow, just like an incredibly long movie titled “The Life of the Spiritual Fox Priestess.”

However, the weight of those years, belonging to a deity, was simply too far away. Miss Vilyric had no intention, nor was it possible, to fully encompass them, for she was not Ming Xi.

The girl opened her eyes and returned to reality.

“…”

She lowered her head, silently examining her unchanged, fair fingers, just like her spirit and heart.

She was still Miss Vilyric, unchanged by this inheritance and transmission to become Ming Xi. Her past life remained a past, and the consciousness that had vanished would never return.

Yet, she had indeed changed.

At the very least, many things she once did not understand were now answered.

“Is it the end of all things returning to silence… what exactly is that?”

Though she had clarified many matters, questions behind those answers gave rise to even larger mysteries, just like the answers Ming Xi had been seeking.

Perhaps the Spiritual Fox Priestess truly knew nothing about this, or maybe even if she did know, there was no way to convey or preserve the relevant content, as if her existence itself was an indescribable and unknowable entity.

And thus, the Genesis Project was established to combat the arrival of this end.

As a deity that transformed from a human, the Spiritual Fox Priestess had a profound understanding of the essence of the world.

She had once buried countless dead worlds with her own hands; though their demise stemmed from various causes, if traced back to the root, it always led to the so-called “End,” a name shrouded in eternity above countless worlds, an inevitability akin to the entropy of the universe.

Ming Xi discovered this pattern and tried to find a way to prevent such an ultimate conclusion from coming to pass.

Even though the world would eventually die, an unavoidable future, at the same time, new worlds should be born rather than letting all things fall into eternal silence and void.

However, unbeknownst to her, new worlds had ceased to be born, and old worlds continued to fall into silence one after another, violating the laws of cycle and reincarnation, a mistake the ferrymen could not accept.

Thus, the Spiritual Fox Priestess decided to utilize her powers and attempt to “create” with her own strength to maintain the stable cycle of beginnings and endings.

Yet creation was extraordinarily difficult; even with countless clear templates to reference, even possessing the great power to be called a “God,” Ming Xi still encountered too many obstacles, failures, and confusion, the arduous road surpassing even that of her breakthrough into the Celestial Hidden realm.

She devised ways to create life and souls as completely as possible, even achieving a new intelligent species capable of self-sustaining cycles to a certain extent, and with the help of her friend, God Fox, leveraged the powers of space to expand the heavens, planning and setting up a deceased world to be habitable once more.

Creation, immigration, stabilizing space, enriching soil, and introducing water and air, Ming Xi did all she could think of, everything she could accomplish, yet the creation of the new world remained fraught with difficulties, unable to break through.

The most important things in a world are not certain races or lives, but the vibrant energy cycling between the sun, moon, and heavens, as well as the laws representing various phenomena. They form the true foundation and pillars of the world, while life is merely the guest that continuously changes and transforms within it, a part of the world.

The world’s death is built upon the extinguishing of the sun and moon and the shattering of laws; thus, she could not apply or extend the old patterns to a dead world, yet the sun and moon still had traces to follow, so attempting to create “laws” from nothing, even for the Spiritual Fox Priestess, was akin to dreaming.

If she could truly achieve such a feat, then her concept would completely transcend the limits represented by being a god, becoming truly the “Origin,” an omniscient and omnipotent existence.

However, Xī was not the Origin; the legendary light that first opened the heavens and created all things had long since vanished. The Spiritual Fox Priestess was merely the ferryman between the “Starting Point” and the “End Point.” How could she surpass the laws and limits she represented to create a true world?

Ming Xi would never bow down to failure and setbacks. To achieve her goal, she thought of a method.

If she couldn’t create actual suns, moons, stars, and laws of heaven and earth, then… what about simulating and fabricating them?

The notion that “the form of life must be physical” was undoubtedly a narrow-minded bias; in fact, Ming Xi had encountered many places where worlds were purely composed of spiritual beings.

This inspired her.

If she could create a world that intertwined reality and illusion, seeming real yet not, the absolute concept would be significantly weakened. Like dreaming, everyone could become the creators of their own dreams, creating everything within, though it usually couldn’t be sustained for long and lacked clear logic.

This was undoubtedly a wild idea but not a delusion.

Relying on her absolute control in the divine realm, Ming Xi detached her dream from herself and cleverly fused it with her incomplete world, forming a special world where the illusory and the physical coexisted, entirely under her command and adjustable at will.

Finally, she could adorn this world with suns, moons, and stars, endow it with laws—even those known, and those completely contradictory to logical norms, could be created from nothing, as long as her imagination was sufficient to fill in their structures.

Even if those laws could only exist and operate within this world, fundamentally it remained a fictional dream; however, for the beings living within it, it was real.

Indeed, this still wasn’t true creation in a meaningful sense, but no great undertaking can be achieved in a single step. Even the legendary Origin’s creation took a full seven days. Ming Xi firmly believed this leap forward would bring valuable experience and a foundation for future endeavors.

She decided to officially name this series of experiments the “Genesis Project,” and that virtual yet real world was called—”Phantom Realm.”

Once the outline of “Phantom Realm” was realized, the promotion of the Genesis Project suddenly became much easier. Utilizing its dual nature of reality and illusion, Ming Xi simplified the originally cumbersome physical world into concepts, and with the help of her dear friend God Fox, redefined the entire world’s exterior into a scroll named “Map of Heaven and Earth.”

In this way, beings could enter “Phantom Realm” through the scroll and truly live in this wondrous world created by the Spiritual Fox Priestess and God Fox, achieving a remarkable transformation between the illusory and the real.

Initially, Ming Xi planned to further perfect the structure of “Phantom Realm” before gradually expanding its scope, attracting more beings from external worlds to migrate within, then seeking to supplement its reality until it became a truly complete world.

However, perhaps this attempt to create a world stirred something in the unseen, a terrifying concept described as “the end of all things returning to silence” suddenly awakened, spreading its dreadful influence endlessly and causing worlds to rapidly decay like a plague.

To be honest, even in the memories of the Spiritual Fox Priestess, Miss Vilyric could find very few records related to that indescribable existence. Whether it was a real entity, what abilities and forms it possessed, its name, past, and origins—all remained a mystery.

But the Ancestor Dragon fell into its shadow; what should have been eternal, the deity succumbed to extinction. The Evil Demons of the Ancient Spirit Realm were birthed by its whim; these were established facts.

If the spread of this entity isn’t curtailed, even if all evil is vanquished, the decay of all things in this world might just be a matter of time.

   

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