"Who are you?"
The strange excitement shining in the black-robed young man’s eyes put Li Yun on guard at once. His expression tightened a little, and his body instinctively settled into a state from which he could react at any moment.
The young man froze for a second when he noticed Li Yun’s guarded look, and then he burst out laughing.
"Hahaha! Little brother, there’s no need to be so nervous. It has just been far too long since I saw a new face."
There was real amusement in his laughter, and no hostility at all.
"This damned place is always full of the same people, and nothing changes from one year to the next. Seeing someone new arrive is rarer than you might think."
Li Yun did not lower his guard.
"Who exactly are you, and where is this place?" he asked with a frown.
What bothered him most was not the man’s overly warm attitude. It was the fact that he could not sense even a trace of cultivation from him. There were only two reasonable explanations.
Either the man’s strength was so far above his own that he could not perceive it at all, or the man had an extraordinarily deep method of hiding his cultivation. Neither possibility allowed Li Yun to relax.
"You want to know where you are?" The young man chuckled, raised a hand, and pointed into the distance. "Look over there."
Li Yun looked where he was pointing, and his eyes widened immediately. Hanging in the strange abyss was an enormous island shaped a little like a spinning top.
At first glance, the island seemed to be hundreds of thousands of meters across. When Li Yun focused on it again, however, it appeared to have shrunk until it was only a few dozen meters wide.
He blinked, and now it looked several thousand meters across. A moment later, the same island seemed to swell until its edges stretched millions of meters into the distance. Its size was not just hard to judge. It seemed to be changing all the time.
The buildings on it behaved in the same impossible way. One moment, a palace looked big enough to blot out the sky, and the next, that same palace looked small enough to fit in the palm of a hand.
Towers grew, courtyards shrank, and whole mountain ranges seemed to stretch and contract according to some principle that Li Yun could not understand. The sight was deeply unnatural.
"Well?" the young man said with a smile. "Impressive, isn’t it? When I first got here two thousand years ago, I probably looked exactly the way you do now."
"Two thousand years?"
Li Yun turned to him at once, and his heart stirred. A Dao Resonance level powerhouse could normally live for around eight hundred years, and even an expert who had reached the Rebirth Realm usually had a lifespan of only a few thousand years. If this young-looking man had really been here for more than two thousand years, Li Yun had to wonder whether he was a Rebirth Realm expert.
The young man read his expression immediately.
"Don’t look at me like that," he said, laughing. "I’m no Rebirth Realm expert. My talent is mediocre. Even after cultivating here for two thousand years, I’ve only managed to reach the Dao Resonance Realm."
His smile turned a little bitter.
"I’ve already hit my limit. Unless I come across some extraordinary opportunity, I doubt I’ll ever take another step forward."
Li Yun’s eyes narrowed slightly. This man was a Dao Resonance Realm expert, and yet he described himself as mediocre.
The young man looked toward the constantly shifting island.
"The reason I’ve lived this long has nothing to do with my own cultivation. It’s because of that place." His expression grew more serious. "That island is called Chronospace Island. For everyone trapped here, it is both an extraordinary land of opportunity and an enormous prison."
"A prison?" Li Yun frowned.
"That’s right."
The young man was about to go on when he seemed to remember something.
"Before I explain any further, I should probably ask your name."
"I’m Li Yun."
"Li Yun." The man nodded. "My name is Feng Xuan. If you don’t mind, you can call me Brother Feng." He gestured toward Chronospace Island. "Come on. I’ll explain things on the way."
His figure blurred, and he flew toward the strange floating island. Li Yun hesitated only briefly before following. He had just arrived in an unknown place, and Feng Xuan was the first person he had met.
If he wanted to understand what had happened after Mo Yuanxiu’s final trap swallowed him, following this man was his best option for now.
Curiously, Chronospace Island looked impossibly far away, yet reaching it took almost no time. After barely a dozen breaths, the island was already close.
Then a furious roar suddenly shook the space around them.
"Old Ghost Gu! Today I’m definitely going to kill you!"
A silver-haired elder in spotless white robes appeared in the distance. His face was gaunt, and his eyes burned with rage. A terrifying aura erupted from his body with a boom, and the pressure swept outward.
Li Yun was still far away, yet his expression changed in an instant. The blood churned in his chest, and he coughed up a mouthful of it.
’He’s at least Dao Resonance level.’
Before Li Yun could recover, another voice rang out.
"Hahahaha!"
A scruffy old man in coarse robes was laughing with a wine gourd in his hand. His hair was a mess, and he looked more like a wandering drunkard than a supreme expert.
"Old Han, you hypocritical fool. You’ve been saying you’ll kill me for tens of thousands of years, and you still haven’t managed it. Aren’t you embarrassed to keep repeating yourself?"
"You old bastard!" The silver-haired elder grew even angrier. "This time will be different."
His aura rose again, but before it could affect Li Yun any further, Feng Xuan casually waved a hand. The pressure vanished, and Li Yun’s breathing returned to normal at once.
The drunken old man laughed.
"If you think you can kill me, come and try."
He moved, and Li Yun barely saw what happened. The old man vanished from where he had been and reappeared tens of thousands of meters away. The silver-haired elder chased after him, and both of them were gone within moments.

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