Chapter 9 – Heaven Never Bars All Paths

Looking at Kou Hong’s written confession on the table, Li Fan felt his heart sink into despair.

Kou Hong hadn’t lied to him. He truly didn’t know of any method that could allow a mortal to leave this immortal-barren land.

“Immortal-barren land…” Five lifetimes of reincarnation, three hundred years of anticipation—all of it had now dissolved into nothing more than an unreachable mirage.

With his dream of immortal cultivation and eternal life shattered, Li Fan seemed to have aged completely overnight.

Not just physically, but mentally as well.

“Immortal-barren land…” He silently repeated the name once more, an endless tide of unwillingness surging through his heart.

“How could I have transmigrated into a place like this? If I had transmigrated somewhere in the outside cultivation world, with 【Return to Truth】’s power of infinite simulated reincarnation, I would surely have hope of achieving eternal life. How hateful—it just had to be this immortal-barren land!”

The intelligence from Kou Hong’s confession swept through Li Fan’s mind once more.

The so-called immortal-barren land, as the name suggested, was a land where immortals had ceased to tread. Thousands of years ago, the ancient cultivation world had suffered a great upheaval.

At first, it was merely a plague that swept across the entire mortal realm. No cultivator paid it any mind.

But later, when a cultivator accidentally contracted this mysterious plague, things spiraled completely out of control.

After infecting that cultivator, the plague seemed to undergo some inexplicable enhancement, becoming capable of spreading among cultivators.

The means of transmission was none other than the spiritual energy that cultivators depended on for survival.

Through the spiritual energy pervading heaven and earth, the plague rapidly spread throughout the entire cultivation world. Cultivators who contracted it suffered consequences ranging from mild—regression of cultivation and loss of realm—to severe—complete loss of all cultivation overnight, becoming no different from mortals, followed by death within days as their Dao dissolved and their essence returned to the heavens.

As cultivators died in droves, a wave of despair began spreading through their ranks.

Some cultivators, driven to desperation, vented their fury upon the source of it all—the mortals.

And so, mass slaughter began.

Before the lofty immortal masters, mortals had virtually no power to resist. They could only submit to the butchering.

But before long, this campaign of slaughter was forcibly halted.

Not because the cultivators had found their conscience, but because they discovered to their horror that as they killed and mortals died in vast numbers, the plague within those mortal bodies didn’t vanish with their deaths. Instead, as if freed from all restraint, it dispersed entirely through the spiritual energy that permeated heaven and earth.

In an instant, the concentration of plague within the cultivation world skyrocketed.

This in turn led to the fall of even more cultivators.

Left with no alternative, the cultivators finally abandoned their campaign of mortal slaughter.

But sitting idle and waiting for death was clearly not the cultivators’ style either. On one hand, cultivators began developing methods to treat and resist the plague. On the other hand, they proposed the infamous 【Great Migration Plan】.

Though this plan faced considerable opposition from a portion of cultivators from the moment it was proposed, for the sake of their own survival, the majority still voted in favor.

The so-called 【Great Migration Plan】 was based on the following reasoning:

The mortals couldn’t be killed, and finding a way to completely eradicate the plague was nowhere in sight. If mortals were allowed to reproduce freely, the ever-increasing plague would make life progressively harder for cultivators.

And since this bizarre plague could only spread through spiritual energy, a natural solution presented itself.

Exile all mortals from the cultivation world to the surrounding minor worlds, shattered grotto-heavens, and similar places devoid of spiritual energy, then seal them off permanently with formations, preventing these mortals from ever returning.

This would resolve the mortal problem once and for all, after which cultivators could take their time studying countermeasures against the plague.

After all, undeveloped minor worlds were virtually inexhaustible—there was no concern about running out of room for these mortals.

And so, under the unified will of the entire cultivation world, all mortals began a migration that lasted several hundred years.

As for how many mortals would perish during the migration over those centuries—that was simply not within the cultivators’ consideration. Before the might of cultivators, mortals had absolutely no room for resistance.

Thus, after several hundred years of great migration, all the mortals of the cultivation world had been scattered and relocated to various surrounding minor worlds. It took nearly another thousand years after that before the concentration of plague in the cultivation world finally dropped to a relatively low level.

Over those thousand years, cultivators conducted ceaseless research and at last found a method to purify the plague.

It then took several thousand more years before cultivators completely eliminated the threat of the plague.

However, to the cultivators’ chagrin, the plague stubbornly persisted, lurking hidden within mortal bloodlines.

Originally, there were no longer any mortals in the world. But not every child born from the union of two cultivators possessed the aptitude for cultivation.

Over time, a great many mortals were born anew into the world. Within the bodies of these mortals, shadows of the plague lingered.

And because this plague held a particular lethality toward cultivators, any mortal descendant who wished to cultivate had to first cleanse the plague from their body.

Gradually, this plague became synonymous with the divide between immortals and mortals. And so, people named it the Mortal Taint.

The rampage of the Mortal Taint had left an enormous psychological scar on every cultivator. To prevent its resurgence, cultivators established an unwritten convention to avoid, as much as possible, visiting the places where mortals had once been exiled.

Over time, these places came to be known as the immortal-barren lands.

There were countless immortal-barren lands of varying sizes, and the cultivators willing to risk entering them were exceedingly few.

That Li Fan had encountered two at all was already a stroke of extraordinary fortune.

Now that neither of these cultivators possessed a method for mortals to leave, how could Li Fan possibly hope for yet another cultivator of even higher cultivation to stumble in?

What’s more, as a mortal, his lifespan was finite. Even if he could endlessly simulate reincarnations, he was merely repeating within the bounds of his natural lifespan.

This year he was already seventy. His biological upper limit was eighty-six.

The probability of encountering another cultivator in these sixteen years was essentially zero.

Given all this, how could Li Fan not feel despair?

He had clearly seen the hope of cultivating immortality and pursuing eternal life, only to discover that it was nothing but a fleeting joy in the end.

Could it really be that he was destined to repeat the life of a mortal, lifetime after lifetime?

Li Fan truly could not accept it.

The path to eternal life lay right before his eyes, within arm’s reach, yet simultaneously beyond the horizon, hopelessly distant.

How could Li Fan possibly accept that?

Thinking of everything he had experienced across his reincarnated lifetimes, nearly three hundred years of bitter waiting—Li Fan refused to give up on the path to eternal life no matter what.

Was there truly no way?

Suddenly, as if a bolt of lightning had pierced through the fog, Li Fan thought of something he had previously overlooked.

Thousands of years ago, how exactly had those masses of mortals migrated here?

Though the minor world and the cultivation world were adjacent, they were ultimately separate worlds.

These mortals surely hadn’t walked here, had they?

There must have been some kind of vessel or tool to transport them, right?

Did those tools still exist?

If he could find them, could he travel to the cultivation world?

Even if it was only the slightest, most negligible possibility, it gave Li Fan a glimpse of hope for cultivation.

His mood surged with excitement, and he immediately headed for the prison where Kou Hong was being held.

He needed Kou Hong to verify whether his idea was feasible.