When Feng Qi opened his eyes, everything around him seemed as usual.
Xiao You was curled up in the corner of the sofa, soundly asleep. She seemed to be dreaming of herself doing the crawling-around training, and her expression suddenly became strained, instinctively arching her body a little.
Outside the window, the branches and leaves of the old locust tree swayed in the wind, occasionally tapping against the window, making a sound.
Looking through the dense branches and leaves, Feng Qi gazed at the sky. The moon had already climbed up into the clouds.
Without needing to call out to the narrator, Feng Qi already knew that he had entered the sacrifice line.
A sudden wave of weakness hit his body, making it feel as though breathing itself had become a heavy task.
Having shed the tough body of the main timeline, he returned to his ordinary self.
At this moment, he should have felt sadness, but entering the sacrifice line had become a routine. His heart wasn't filled with much sorrow; instead, there was a flame burning in his chest.
He knew, the new journey had begun.
On this sacrifice line, he would grow according to the planned future path, until he became the guide for the sea of spiritual consciousness and paved a new path for the human race's growth system.
Getting up from the sofa, Feng Qi walked over to Xiao You, smiling as he gently ruffled her hair.
"I'm not eating... can't eat anymore."
Xiao You mumbled, then turned over, facing her back to Feng Qi.
Not wanting to disturb her sleep, Feng Qi stood up and walked to the desk, turning on the computer screen.
According to the plan for this timeline.
He needed to cultivate the "Eternal Spirit" technique, perfected by Lin Ran and his team with their life's effort, to raise his mental strength to the point of transcending his physical body.
Once he achieved this, he would become the guide for the sea of spiritual consciousness.
This would also be the first attempt to not retain memories in the brain but to store them entirely within the sea of spiritual consciousness.
Thinking of this, Feng Qi felt as if he had lived another life.
The first time he traveled to the future world, he had no idea that he was in the year 1500 after the present; he thought he had crossed into another world.
Later, he realized he was in the future and started to understand the truth of the world.
At that time, he could only search for extremely limited information from the Star City database, without any permissions.
To better investigate the historical truth, he chose to use the database mailbox to record brief histories, hoping to peer into the truth veiled in fog.
When the Crimson Research Institute joined the ranks of his companions, the direction of the exploration changed. The Crimson Research Institute also found the path for extracting memories from the brain-in-a-vat.
Thus, his understanding of the world began to deepen.
During this time, many stories unfolded. Through the improvement of information and strength, he gradually resolved the crises within Star City and gained many friends and companions, including non-human entities like Old Mist and other domain creatures.
This time, technology once again experienced an innovation.
The brain-in-a-vat would become a thing of the past, just like the mailbox records.
Technology was advancing, and the steps toward hope were steadily progressing.
Feng Qi's heart was always filled with hope and anticipation for the future.
At least with constant effort, history proved that it would be rewarded. Every sacrifice line showed him a glimpse of a farther future.
Though the lost timelines were no longer visible, his memories engraved every moment of struggle.
Countless marvelous stories, countless figures of those who fought...
After verifying his identity and permissions, Feng Qi opened the Star City database.
After sifting through the data, he clicked on the prepared technique information, where the four large characters "Eternal Spirit" stood out.
This cultivation technique was not originally created to make him the guide for the spiritual sea.
When the Eternal Spirit technique was first created, the Mist Lord was seen as an enemy that must be eliminated. The Mist Lord controlled the Crimson Research Institute from behind the scenes and was also the one responsible for possessing Wang Jinsheng and turning him into a historical great.
To combat the Mist Lord, Feng Qi had considered many methods.
For example, getting Old Wang to retire early.
But this would only treat the symptoms, not the root cause. Without Old Wang, the Mist Lord would still establish a new human great, such as Lin Ran, to promote the "Flesh Sacrifice" technique and harvest the vitality of humanity and even domain forces, to lay the groundwork for the Mist Clan's future.
Without the ability to traverse the future, Feng Qi felt he would undoubtedly lose to Old Mist's calculated steps.
But having the ability to traverse the future was equivalent to having infinite trial-and-error capabilities.
Eternal Spirit was one of the methods he had prepared to deal with the Mist Lord after repeatedly restarting the timelines.
At that time, Old Wang was recruited into the Crimson Research Institute to crack the Flesh Sacrifice technique, while Lin Ran became the target of the Mist Lord's possession. The Mist Lord tried to use Lin Ran's fame and potential to help promote the Flesh Sacrifice technique.
So, he consulted with Lin Ran, hoping that Lin Ran could develop a special technique that would allow a fragment of his spiritual consciousness to persist, hiding within Old Mist's spiritual sea, slowly absorbing Old Mist's mental energy to grow stronger, and then later, in the future, reclaim Old Mist's body through spiritual possession.
Feng Qi called this plan the "Reverse Possession Plan."
However, it was proven that despite Lin Ran's long years of parasitically hiding in Old Mist's spiritual sea, absorbing tremendous mental power and becoming very strong, he was still no match for Old Mist.
So, for the next sacrifice line, Feng Qi changed his approach.
This time, he hoped Lin Ran could develop a spiritual assault technique, specifically aimed at spiritual warfare.
After refining over two timelines, Eternal Spirit finally gained the strength to challenge Old Mist.
During this time, Feng Qi also practiced the Eternal Spirit technique himself.
On that particular sacrifice line, he had demon dragon rune crystals embedded into his body, but the power provided by those crystals was insufficient to face a formidable enemy.
Therefore, he decided to take the risk and attempt to cultivate the Eternal Spirit technique.
This technique, however, had serious hidden dangers and could be considered an incomplete method.
After practicing Eternal Spirit, its mental energy started growing uncontrollably, constantly absorbing external mental energy. As a result, his spiritual sea became increasingly mottled, filled with mental energy of all colors.
This was an extremely terrifying thing.
The inevitable outcome would be that his spiritual consciousness would abandon the physical body, breaking through the spiritual sea to become a spiritual entity.
To solve this problem, there was only one solution: the strength of the physical body must always suppress the strength of the spiritual consciousness, binding the consciousness within the body.
Even if the physical body's strength kept up, the hidden danger was not resolved.
Because the spiritual consciousness became mottled, its original stability was destroyed, and the spiritual consciousness could shatter at any moment.
On the previous sacrifice line, Lin Ran and his team focused on solving this issue of spiritual mottling.
To have the spiritual consciousness last for a long time, its stability was paramount.
Lin Ran spent his entire life trying to solve this problem but could not perfect it before his death.
However, just before his death, Lin Ran discovered a way to perfect Eternal Spirit. In the years that followed, his team continued Lin Ran's work, and they eventually perfected Eternal Spirit.
This version of Eternal Spirit still had hidden dangers, but it brought a huge improvement in the stability of the spiritual consciousness. This was also the reason why Feng Qi chose to begin the belief growth path in this future line.
As Feng Qi reviewed the cultivation methods created by Lin Ran and his team with their lifelong efforts, he felt the weight of these words.
He could imagine the effort behind every word and image.
The path to saving the world, and the hope it carried, was due to these companions walking alongside him, giving the future more hope and possibility.
As he went through the techniques, time flew by.
Though he had already practiced the second version of the Eternal Spirit technique, the latest version felt like an entirely new technique. Even the framework of the cultivation method had changed.
It was essentially a fresh start.
Feng Qi quickly entered a learning state, his thoughts gradually focusing on the written descriptions and images of the technique.
At times, he would even try to practice as described in the technique.
As a sacrifice line, the only benefit was that he could cultivate the technique like an ordinary person, something that was absolutely impossible in the main timeline.
The body of the main timeline was extremely special.
It was like a picky gourmet, only capable of absorbing the most excellent talent imprints hidden within the bloodline of each race, while being exceptionally resistant to spiritual energy. Even when trying to absorb spiritual energy through cultivation, it would flow in briefly, only to seep out again.
But Feng Qi no longer found this important.
In the past, he regretted not being able to cultivate and missing out on many excellent cultivation techniques.
Now, holding over a thousand innate abilities, the importance of cultivation systems seemed somewhat insignificant.
The special constitution was also the reason why the main timeline could grow so rapidly.
Sometimes, the narrator would joke that, in the future, Feng Qi might be the origin of the great calamity and the source of the destruction of an entire era's life.
Though it seemed like a joke, Feng Qi could tell that the narrator's words had some analysis behind them.
First was the eradication: the lives lost in the future would disappear forever from the years ahead in the reality line.
This ability was related to the causal link with time, and its terrifying nature was no less than that of miracle objects that create their own systems of rules.
Secondly, the ability to steal talents.
This ability allowed him to strip away the best racial abilities from the bloodlines of the lives he killed.
This was also extremely terrifying, especially when he possessed tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of innate abilities. At that point, his main timeline self would become an almost indestructible super life form.
If it weren't for the fact that the main timeline only had one opportunity, Feng Qi would definitely have embarked on the path of killing and growing as the world's savior.
In the narrator's concept, these two abilities were essentially the template for a world-ending demon king.
Feng Qi had discussed with the narrator, the senior members of the Crimson Research Institute, and even Mu Qing about what the great calamity really was.
Although he had never seen the final moment of the great calamity.
But they had also speculated many things about the coming great calamity.
One of the speculations was the "World Breeding Ground Theory."
The intelligence provided by Mu Qing proved that, before the current era, there had been many eras that were destroyed.
One of those was the Pillar God Era, an ancient era that had already disappeared.
It was like how humanity in the agricultural era would plant seeds in the spring and harvest them in the fall—at the beginning of a new era, life is like newly planted seeds, and at the end of the era, the great calamity is the merciless scythe that harvests the mature life.
At that time, he had questioned Mu Qing's viewpoint.
He pointed out that if it was indeed a harvest, wouldn't the wars between races at the end of the era consume a large number of lives that were supposed to be harvested? A great number of races and lives had fallen before the arrival of the calamity, which didn't align with the benefits of the harvest.
Mu Qing's response addressed this question.
She explained that not all lives would be targets of the great calamity's harvest. In other words, those weak lives were not worthy of being harvested.
The great calamity was a slow process, intended to create a battlefield of slaughter to accelerate the growth of the seeds.
Through slaughter and the centralization of resources, it would cultivate super life forms of immense value.
It was like breeding worms: using the killing and devouring between worms to cultivate the worm king.
And the human world was the container for breeding these worms.
They took different isolated species that had been raised separately and shoved them all into one large world, where they could compete fiercely with no barriers to stop them.
Everything that happened during this time was under the control of the "Great Calamity."
It's undeniable that in such a cruel competitive environment, strong races would develop rapidly. One could imagine that in the future, when only a few peak races remained, some of them might give birth to super life forms with the strength to match the Pillar Gods of the previous era.
Perhaps these super beings were the true targets of the great calamity's harvest.
The logic behind this speculation was that trans-dimensional life forms viewed the entire human world and the Domain World as a breeding ground, and the final calamity was a destructive harvest of all lives, after which a new breeding era would begin.
According to the narrator's jokes, Feng Qi applied this speculation to himself.
He was shocked to find that he perfectly matched both viewpoints of this theory.
First, regarding the idea of harvesting lives, his special constitution could achieve this, harvesting the innate abilities of the lives he killed and turning them into his own talent seeds. This matched the terminal harvest theory of the breeding ground perfectly.
The narrator even joked in a conspiracy theory that the process of harvesting lives was actually a premature harvesting of seeds that had not yet matured, going against his original intentions.
Second, was his ability to erase the traces of life.
The start of a new era required the erasure of the life traces of the old era, and his abilities could perfectly accomplish this, even erasing life forms from other timelines.
This was likely preparation for the start of a new breeding era.
The two domineering abilities that the main timeline's special constitution possessed gave him a growth template comparable to that of a world-ending demon king.
This was a deeply unsettling thought.
Even Feng Qi, upon thinking about it carefully, couldn't help but feel a chill.
He had once firmly declared that his original intentions remained unchanged, and even though he had the "demon king panel," he would never become a world-ending demon king.
At this moment, the narrator mischievously offered him a new conspiracy theory.
The narrator suggested that perhaps his true memories had already been sealed.
His memories of the world-ending demon king had been sealed, and when his true memories awakened, his current several hundred years of memories would seem trivial in comparison.
If the world-ending demon king truly existed, his memories spanned multiple eras, and Feng Qi's few hundred years of unchanging intentions were too brief, like a drop of water in the endless sea of memory.
What unchanging intentions? In the face of the long and vast memories of the world-ending demon king, his memories could not alter the demon king's mindset at all.
He was just a small reincarnation of the demon king before the great calamity.
For the demon king, sealing memories was like a game, entering the breeding ground to observe the growth and changes of species.
This theory was truly terrifying.
Thinking about eventually becoming the world-ending demon king, Feng Qi shuddered.
But when he realized that this was something the narrator had said, he suddenly wasn't afraid anymore.
After all, the narrator always talked nonsense.
Conspiracy theories like this were nothing new. Previously, the narrator had even suggested that he was another version of Feng Qi from a failed timeline, returned to help him combat the coming calamity.
One moment, he was a reincarnation of the world's savior, the next, he was a miniature version of the world-ending demon king.
That was very much the narrator.