The summit ended with a bang. Jack’s clone was taken away by Elder Godspeed—a short, effeminate man—and rushed through the universe to escape any pursuers. They would take a wide route before returning to Earth.

Jack’s main body wasn’t in a hurry. He sat in the middle of the Church’s meeting room, surrounded by three animated Elders.

“What the hell was that!?” Boatman asked. “Jack! Why would you sacrifice yourself like that? You know you cannot win!” He turned to the Arch Priestess. “And you. Why did you let him do it? Why did you agree?”

“We might have made a mistake,” Soresight said.

“Not if we win the war before the thirty years are up,” Heavencrash added, his face dark. “Isn’t that your plan, Arch Priestess? You would never agree otherwise.”

Facing their tension, she smiled calmly. “If we could win the war within thirty years, that would be great. However, it’s impossible. We don’t even know if the Old Gods will have arrived until then. It is safe to assume the duel will happen.”

“Then what exactly are you planning?” Heavencrash asked.

“Very simple. I plan for Jack to win.”

Everyone’s eyes turned to him. Jack frowned. “I believe in myself, but I don’t know… I’d never heard of Elder Hero until today.”

Boatman spoke up. “He was the Head Envoy of the Hand until a few years ago. He and Sovereign Heavenly Spoon have clashed a few times, and do you know what happened? Hero won. Every time.” He sighed with worry. “What came over you, Jack? You have such a bright future. You’ve already expanded your potential to the limit. Why would you gamble everything on such an impossible task?”

“Because I had to,” Jack replied. “We had lost all our momentum. Those space monster Overlords would never take us seriously if I didn’t step up. Besides, if I hadn’t, you would have accepted his challenge, Master. You or another Elder. And regardless of victory or defeat in fifty years, Hero would be the heroic one now, and we would be the losers.”

Boatman opened his mouth to disagree, then thought better. He sighed again.

“It wasn’t your place to salvage the situation,” the Arch Priestess said softly. “However, as you said, you were forced to. Because we failed. There had been no other way out for our Church. You did the right thing, Jack. Thank you.”

The tones were dying down, but Elder Heavencrash wouldn’t relax so easily. He looked for a table to disintegrate but found none. “The right thing!?” he asked. “He just offed himself, Arch Priestess! If we don’t manage to assassinate Elder Hero within thirty years, he will take away our greatest talent and our reputation. It’s not like Jack will be able to run away. Look at him. You just know he has a headstrong Dao.”

“Thank you for your confidence, Elder Heavencrash,” Jack said.

“Don’t mock me, boy! I’m a thousand times your elder, and I only want what’s best for you. You messed up big time!”

“Only if he can’t win,” Elder Boatman spoke up.

“What?” Heavencrash turned to him. “Do you think it’s possible? Are you also insane?”

“I think it will be very, very difficult,” Boatman replied. “For anyone else, it would be impossible. But Jack has performed miracles before. More than once. If there is anybody who can carry our flag and win that duel, it’s him. And besides…” He stood up, walking behind Jack and placing a hand on his shoulder. “He’s my disciple. I believe in him.”

“So do I,” the Arch Priestess replied.

Soresight chuckled. “It’s not like we have a choice, Heavencrash. The dice has been cast. We can only do our best.”

Heavencrash grumbled. “I know. I still think it was a stupid-ass decision, but at least it was a brave one.” He turned to Jack, worry and confusion alternating in his gaze. “I will choose to believe as well.”

“Thank you, Elders, Master, Arch Priestess,” Jack said. “I know my decision was spontaneous, but there was no choice. I don’t comprehend the heights of my opponent. But I will still work extremely hard, strive for the greatest progress possible, and do my best to win.” Jack sensed himself lack confidence. That had to be fixed immediately. “No,” he said, correcting his previous words. “I will not do my best. I will win. I swear it on my Dao.”

It felt like a stone slab crashed down from above and landed on his soul, weighing it down. His oath was not something he could break. That was good. He could use that weight, a reminder to never relax. In this battle, he had no choice. He would win.

Hearing his proclamation, Elder Boatman laughed. He seemed to have recovered his good mood. “Well said, Jack! There is no other way now. You just have to win!”

“The Church will support you with everything we have,” the Arch Priestess said. “However, we are already running out of compatible cores… I will give you some more, but really, that is all we have.”

“It’s okay,” Jack said. “I have a plan.”

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“A plan?” Everyone looked curiously.

“Yes,” he replied, raising his head. “I’ll go to the Space Monster World.”

***

Jack floated in space, an ethereal body. A ghost. Before him hovered a massive bubble, stretching on for a thousand miles. Despite its massive size, however, the bubble contain just a few particles. It was far emptier than the void of space.

This was the second Dao Vision Jack had gotten from his class, Paragon of Cultivation. It was the one he’d briefly seen just before his clone activated Immortal Commune. Now that Jack had returned to his house, he had the time to watch it more in-depth.

The bubble floated before him for what seemed like eternity. He knew that the flow of time inside it was vastly accelerated, but it had still been thousands of years in the outside world with nothing happening in the bubble. To Jack, of course, those thousands of years came just as information. He’d only stayed here a few minutes.

There was another cultivator with him. A green-robed woman, sitting cross-legged with her eyes shut. Just by existing beside her, Jack could sense a tremendous flow of life energy, as if she contained the life of a thousand planets. He guessed she was an Archon.

If she’d noticed the Dao Vision being recorded from beside her, she did not react. She sat there, motionless, like a statue. She waited.

The few particles inside the bubble moved at extreme speeds. In the almost complete nothingness, even the constraints of the universe didn’t really apply. The particles were far faster than the speed of light. They zoomed around erratically. At some point, two would collide—but they were so small that the chances of it happening was abysmal.

The woman was patient.

At some point, a few minutes after Jack appeared in the vision and watched the bubble in silence, something finally happened. He saw the woman’s eyes snap open. In the next moment, the world exploded. Two particles had crashed head-on to release a tremendous explosion. It came seemingly out of nowhere.

As the explosion occurred, Jack’s understanding of the Dao was suddenly and completely upended. His perception caught how the two particles instantly disintegrated. Yet, from the exact point of the explosion, or perhaps from inside the destroyed particles, more emerged. The universe was born anew. There was time and space, matter, all sorts of wild Daos each flaring with the intensity of a thousand suns. Infinite Dao particles were born of nothingness.

It all happened in an instant. One moment, the two particles clashed. In the next, the entire bubble was awash with energy, a bright, rainbow-colored mixture containing everything. It was only the restraints of the woman beside him who stopped the explosion, preventing it from spreading further. Otherwise, with its speed, Jack was convinced it would have destroyed many nearby stars before it even slowed down.

Everything had happened so quickly he hadn’t time to process it. In his understanding, the Dao could be neither born nor destroyed. It was just particles moving around or changing their properties. Yet, he’d just witnessed an act of true creation. Parthenogenesis. Something out of nothing.

How was that even possible?

He knew that all laws lost their effectiveness as things approached the extremes—too fast, slow, large, or small—but this was another level of discovery altogether. This woman before him, and whatever experiment she was conducting, had taken the most iron-clad rules of the world and used them to wipe her butt. It was ridiculous.

It also meant there was so much more to learn. In comprehension of the Dao alone, Jack could match most early A-Grades. If there was knowledge so vital to the essence of the Dao, but he hadn’t had the slightest clue about it before, just how high did the Dao go? What was the limit? Did it even exist?

While he was busy being shell-shocked, the woman had already gotten to work. Her hands formed a myriad seals in a second. The bubble compressed, returning the released energy of the explosion to its previous white-hot state, then holding it there until it ran its course. Slowly, the energy cooled off.

Jack then watched something even more mysterious. The flow of time within the bubble changed. Before, it had been artificially accelerated by the woman. It had now become something else, something that both moved on its own and was completely different from the universe’s regular flow of time. They were two different rivers. The water droplets which made them up were the same, but the rivers themselves were very different from each other.

Jack had observed the creation of a completely new Dao of Time.

The woman also watched with rapt attention. As the new Dao was created, she smiled. “The birth of time,” she whispered. “All come from one.”

The two of them remained hovering in space, passive observers, as this new Dao of Time found its bearings inside the bubble. From every Time particle dashing around randomly, they all came into sync. The flow of time stabilized. All the other energies fell into line afterward, wrapping around Time like vines around a column.

This isn’t just Time, Jack realized. This is a whole new universe! She created a new universe! That explosion before was a Big Bang!

He was shaking with excitement. The woman, however, didn’t seem interested in watching the growth of this universe any longer. She waved a hand dismissively. The bubble collapsed in on itself and disappeared. The energies inside it hissed and bubbled as they came in contact with the laws of the universe, then slowly melted away, incorporated easily. The new river of time fought back for a moment before falling in line with the time flow of this universe.

Suddenly, there was nothing. No sign of the previous bubble, explosion, and universe. Jack remained there, frozen in space, until the woman turned to look at him. She raised a smiling brow. “Shoo,” she said, waving a hand in his direction. The vision shattered, and Jack was back at his house, still starstruck at what he’d just witnessed.

This vision was the greatest he’d ever seen. He felt it contained monumental secrets of the universe, secrets he could only slowly begin to unpack. There were so many things he didn’t understand.

Why had the other Daos wrapped around time, and only then were stabilized? Did Time play a more crucial role than he’d imagined?

Was it really that easy to create a new universe? Could the woman have kept it on her person to study or use as a weapon? Why did she so wastefully destroy it?

And, most importantly, what secrets hid in that single moment when the two particles collided? How exactly was that universe born? How was something born from nothing? And anyway, what was inside the Dao particles?

That single instant of creation was too fast and too blinding for Jack to observe. One moment, there was an explosion. The next, there was everything. He hadn’t managed to perceive the events in between, but he had a suspicion that, if he could, he’d glimpse into extremely primal mysteries.

He was so damn excited.

There was still some time before he left for the Space Monster World. Therefore, Jack closed his eyes and returned to the vision, watching it over and over.