High Martial: I Grind Professions

Chapter 448: Chapter 286: River of Time

SHREEE—!

A pitch-black spatial rift tore open in an instant. Its edges shimmered with unstable spatial turbulence, leading to the dark, cold void of space.

This time, however, Li Wen did not step through without hesitation as he usually would.

He stopped at the edge of the rift and slowly turned around.

His gaze fell upon his parents one last time.

His father’s lips were pressed into a thin line, his gaze resolute, though it couldn’t hide the redness in his eyes. His mother turned her head slightly, quickly dabbing the corner of her eye.

A thousand unspoken words were exchanged in that single glance.

”Dad, Mom, take care.” Li Wen’s voice was low and steady, filled with unshakeable resolve.

With that said, he hesitated no longer. He turned resolutely and stepped into the deep spatial rift.

Like the maw of a great beast, the rift snapped shut, devouring his silhouette as if he had never been there at all.

All that remained was the heavy sorrow of parting in the hall, and the lingering gazes of his parents.

He disliked boisterous farewells, and there was no need to burden other friends and family with this gravity.

A silent departure was perhaps the best way, for him and for everyone else.

The void of space was cold and silent.

Li Wen’s figure abruptly appeared in the outer orbit of Blue Star.

Below him was the azure planet that had nurtured the Human Race’s civilization, a world that carried countless memories and attachments for him.

It rotated slowly, the outlines of its continents and oceans clearly visible, its atmosphere shrouded in the faint glimmer of life.

He hovered in the void, gazing at his home planet with a deep and complex expression.

After a long moment, he softly uttered a single word. The sound dissipated in the vacuum, yet it seemed to carry an immense weight: ”Goodbye.”

With no more lingering, Li Wen turned to face the deep Star Sea.

The Star Map that Ancestral Master Chang Jia had branded into his sea of consciousness unfolded clearly, pointing to the first stop on his journey—the heart of the Lain Empire, the center of the vast Star Domain closest to Blue Star: Planet Lain.

’Let’s begin.’

With a thought, his True Gang and Primordial Spirit power erupted simultaneously.

Without the aid of any vehicle, Li Wen’s figure suddenly transformed into a blurry streak of light, rocketing toward the depths of space.

His speed increased wildly in the vacuum!

0.1 times the speed of light... 0.5 times... 0.8 times... 0.95 times the speed of light!

As his speed drew infinitely close to the universe’s ultimate limit, Li Wen clearly felt the terrifying power of relativistic effects.

His physical body felt as if it were bound by layers of invisible shackles, growing heavier and heavier, as though he were carrying several towering mountains on his back.

The movement of every cell became incredibly sluggish, and the circulation of his True Gang and vital energy seemed to bog down in a thick mire.

When his speed reached the critical point for his current physical body, he felt immeasurably heavy.

It felt as though his entire body would collapse and disintegrate under the immense inertial mass in the next second.

’Now!’

At this critical moment, Li Wen unhesitatingly retrieved the Time Stone he had obtained from the Bone-Eroding Demon Emperor from his storage space.

It was the size of a fist. The crystal’s interior seemed to contain a flowing Star River and collapsing time, radiating a gentle and mysterious luster.

He clenched the Time Stone tightly in his palm.

HUMMM—!

An indescribably strange fluctuation instantly surged from the Time Stone, flowing like a cool spring over his body, which had been so heavy it had nearly solidified.

Under the interference of this temporal power, the terrifying binding force originating from the laws of physics melted away like ice and snow.

His body suddenly felt light!

The immeasurably heavy, on-the-verge-of-collapse sensation vanished in an instant.

In its place was an unprecedented sense of ”freedom,” as if he had broken free from the shackles of the universe’s rules.

His speed, which had nearly stagnated, leaped forward, enveloped in the light of the Time Stone.

Light speed!

True light speed!

The moment he reached the speed of light, the cosmic scenery before Li Wen’s eyes suddenly twisted and changed.

The surrounding stars were no longer fixed points of light, but were stretched into dazzling ribbons of brilliance.

Space itself seemed to become a flowing liquid, and ”below” it, the phantoms of countless more vast, more fundamental ”rivers” thundered into view.

These were not rivers that could be perceived by sight, but a tangible manifestation of the essence of spacetime.

’Spacetime barrier, break!’

With a low cry, Li Wen focused all the Primordial Spirit power he could muster and slammed it fiercely into the ”river’s surface”!

RUMBLE—!

A colossal sound, like the dawn of the universe, echoed in the depths of his soul.

The scene before his eyes completely shattered and reassembled.

When Li Wen perceived his own existence again, he was no longer in the familiar Material Cosmos.

He had entered the River of Time!

The scene that unfolded before Li Wen was on a scale beyond imagination, far too grand to be described by the word ”river.”

This was a boundless ocean formed from the pure Power of Origin of time and space.

It was endless and profound, containing the entire torrent of information from the birth of the universe to its eventual end.

Within this vast sea of time surged countless great rivers, each as magnificent as a galaxy.

Each great river represented a relatively independent, mainstream spacetime route in the universe, all flowing in roughly the same direction.

They sparkled with starlight, each point of light representing a star.

At this moment, Li Wen found himself within one of these roaring, surging great rivers.

He looked ”down” at his ”body”—it was not a physical entity, but a hazy, humanoid silhouette of light formed by the glow of his Primordial Spirit and the power of the Time Stone.

In this great river of time, its width unknown and its depths unfathomable,

he was so minuscule he couldn’t even be called a speck of dust. He was more like a grain of sand, swept along by the current.

The ”water” in the great river was not liquid, but a violent maelstrom of countless twisting light-and-shadow fragments, shattering and reassembling spacetime segments, and incomprehensible runes of fundamental laws.

Every ”current” that washed over him carried the mighty force to shake stars and erase eons, suffused with a terrifying spacetime-tearing power.

’Move!’

Li Wen tried to move his ”body.”

Just trying to stabilize himself in the violent ”current” felt like withstanding the shockwave of an exploding star with his physical body.

His Primordial Spirit power was being consumed at an unprecedented rate, and the light of the Time Stone flickered, counteracting the omnipresent pressure of spacetime.

He exhausted all his strength just to ”anchor” himself for a single moment, like a reef in the ceaseless river, barely avoiding being swept away instantly.

’Pinpoint!’

The moment he stabilized himself, Li Wen immediately accessed the Star Map in his sea of consciousness, trying to determine his precise location within the vast River of Time.

Here, the sense of direction was both extremely bizarre and critically important.

The concepts of up, down, left, and right were blurred, replaced by complex positioning based on a spacetime coordinate system.

In the environment of the River of Time, the Star Map also became a set of dynamic, constantly flowing coordinate lines.

Li Wen carefully scanned and cross-referenced with his Primordial Spirit power, not daring to be the slightest bit careless.

He knew that here, the slightest deviation in positioning, once projected back into the Material Cosmos,

could result in a distance error of hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of light-years.

Just as Li Wen was concentrating fully on sensing his position,

an indescribable, terrifying pressure—one that originated from a fundamental level of existence itself—swept toward him like a cosmic storm from ahead and to the side.

Li Wen snapped his head up to look.

He saw, further upstream in the River of Time, a figure so colossal it defied comprehension.

It was ”walking” toward his position in a manner that seemed slow but was in fact impossibly fast, each step crossing an unimaginable scale of spacetime.

It was a giant!

A terrifying being at least tens of thousands of meters tall.

Its body was not made of mere flesh and blood, but rather seemed forged from a kind of bronze that contained an immortal divinity.

Its surface was covered in ancient, esoteric, dark-gold patterns that seemed to record the birth and death of the universe’s stars.

Its head was shrouded beneath the phantom of a crown formed by countless rotating nebulae.

As its enormous eyes opened and closed, its pupils were revealed to be two slowly turning, dark-silver gears, like galactic whirlpools.

They were cold and profound, as if they could see through all the mysteries of the River of Time.

It wore a deep-purple cloak that seemed to be woven from the tapestry of an entire Star Domain, its edges constantly flickering with the light and shadows of stars being born and dying.

Most frightening of all, with every step it took, a dark-purple halo over ten thousand *zhang* in diameter, composed of pure Law runes, would naturally form beneath its feet.

The moment the halo appeared, the violent temporal turbulence would calm and recede, as if surrendering to this being.

In the giant’s eyes, this vast great river Li Wen was in, large enough to contain the flow of galaxies, was probably nothing more than a shallow, insignificant stream.

One step!

The enormous bronze foot descended, covering an incalculable distance in spacetime.

It directly crossed over a third of the great river’s entire width.

As the giant foot fell, the water of the River of Time was parted as if by an invisible wall, kicking up a monstrous ”wave.”

But the giant walked as if on solid ground, the dark-purple halo steadily supporting its body.

A second step!

The giant had already crossed the centerline of the great river!

A third step, a fourth!

In just a few steps, the terrifying, sky-blotting figure had already passed Li Wen’s position and reached the ”opposite bank” of this River of Time.

Throughout the entire process, those gear-like pupils did not spare even a shred of attention for the tiny ”grain of sand” that was Li Wen.

Its target lay somewhere far more distant.

With a few more steps, the giant’s figure rapidly shrank and blurred.

It finally vanished completely at the hazy, indistinct horizon of the River of Time, which led to an unknown destination.

Li Wen remained lost in the soul-shaking sight, unable to recover his senses for a long time.

The absolute disparity in their level of existence, the mighty power that treated vast spacetime as nothing.

For the first time, he felt so viscerally the profundity of the universe and his own insignificance.

However, the crisis did not disappear with the giant’s departure.

In fact, it was just beginning!

The water of the River of Time, parted by the giant, was now free from the suppression of the Law-infused halo after its departure.

Like a spring compressed to its absolute limit, it snapped back with cataclysmic force.

Countless tons of ”spacetime water” collided and compressed, forming terrifying tsunamis a hundred, even a thousand times more violent than before.