A Will Eternal

Waving his hand nonchalantly, he said, “Don’t you worry! I have a lot of experience with this kind of thing!” 

Filled with excitement at the thought of getting so many souls, he sat down to wait.

At first, the lamps would come every few days. But a few months later, the frequency dropped to one every few weeks.

Eventually, four months passed in which no lamps came, much to his disappointment. Furthermore, the well itself was beginning to flicker oddly, as though it might vanish at any moment.

From the look of it, it would be gone within a month. Not willing to give up, Bai Xiaochun finally fixed his gaze on the well itself.

“This thing is so mysterious! I wonder what it is. And I wonder when I’ll encounter something like it again….” He was truly torn between his desire to collect souls, and his fear of the potential danger.

Eventually, he came to the conclusion that, considering he had been here for so long without seeing anything dangerous, he might as well go a bit further. With that, he sent the fan closer to the well and activated the fan's ability to consume other things.

“If I could suck that well into the fan, that would be perfect!” 

Bai Xiaochi yelped an objection, but did nothing to interfere. And thus, the fan slammed directly into the well.

Oddly, there were no intense rumbling sounds as Bai Xiaochun and Bai Xiaochi had expected. It was almost as if the well existed in a different dimension, or was transparent; the fan passed right through it!

Bai Xiaochun gasped in shock. This was his first time encountering a situation that the fan wasn’t capable of handling. After passing through the well, Bai Xiaochun looked back at it, and hesitated for a very long moment about what to do. He could give up, but at the same time, couldn’t stop thinking about all of the souls that possibly existed within that well. Finally, he decided to throw caution to the wind.

“Just taking a quick look inside shouldn’t be a problem….” Gritting his teeth, he sent the fan toward the entrance of the well itself!

Upon nearing, he unleashed the power of his cultivation base, and sent some divine sense out. However, the well seemed isolated from his divine sense, making it impossible to see what was inside. He could only approach physically.

Nothing about the situation seemed dangerous, and although that caused him to sigh with relief, he didn’t let his guard down. Heart pounding, he looked down into the well itself.

What he saw caused his eyes to go wide.

It was a completely different world!!

It was as if the entrance to the well were the sky of that world. Even more shocking, the entire world seemed to be made from paper!!

Lands, mountains, rivers, buildings; everything was paper. Visible on the surface of all that paper were countless souls, the quantity of which defied anything Bai Xiaochun could have imagined….

The world seemed very orderly. The souls were strictly ranked by level, and included the souls of devas, demigods, and celestials. There was even a group of paper people clustered around an archaean soul!

It all seemed completely unbelievable. However, it was at that point that, out of the blue, Bai Xiaochi shouted, “Behind you, milord! There’s--”

Before Bai Xiaochi could even finish speaking, a withered hand stretched out of thin air behind Bai Xiaochun, and pushed him!

It wasn’t moving particularly fast, but Bai Xiaochun didn’t even have the time to look over his shoulder, or react in any other way. And any resistance was useless.

Massive force slammed into him, provoking a shriek of surprise as he was shoved directly into the well!

At the same time, a figure became visible, a stooped old woman who held a lamp in her hand. As Bai Xiaochun fell inside the well, she stood on its edge, looking back at the fan behind her.

When Bai Xiaochi found himself the subject of her gaze, all his hair stood on end, and he sent all of the fan's defenses into high gear, including the aura of the sovereign’s arm.

Two clouded eyes existed within the old woman’s wrinkled face, and they flickered with mysterious light. Suddenly, she smiled, a vicious smile filled with yellowed teeth. Then, she turned and vanished.

Meanwhile, Bai Xiaochun screamed as he fell down into the paper world below. Eventually, he got control of his momentum, and slowed to a halt. As he hovered there, he looked around, and then back up into the sky, which was when he saw nine faces!

All of the faces resembled old women, their features identical, their eyes closed, but their mouths open. From what Bai Xiaochun could tell, he had fallen out of one of those mouths.

“The well was actually one of their mouths?!?! Who pushed me? An old woman? What level of cultivation base does she have?!?!” Taking a deep breath, he prepared to think of a way to leave, but before he could, something happened.

His body… began to turn into paper!!

In fact, his hands were already completely paper…. 

His mind began to spin at the realization that this was the deadliest situation he had been in since the founding of the new Arch-Emperor Dynasty!

Even his fight with the Vile-Emperor had been within the bounds of his own control, but this was different. There was no time for thought or planning; he immediately unleashed the full power of his cultivation base, as well as the powers of regeneration from his Undying Codex. However, although they could slow the process, they couldn’t stop it. It was as if the natural laws within the world itself demanded that all living things who entered it become paper!

“Dammit. DAMMIT!” Bai Xiaochun cursed, his eyes bloodshot. He didn’t have the slightest desire to be a paper person with glowing red eyes, and therefore, he howled and tried to escape the world.

Unfortunately, that was when all of the other paper people in the world suddenly looked up at the now stunned Bai Xiaochun. The souls attached to them all had cold, sinister auras as they howled and began to charge in his direction.

In the blink of an eye, they were closing in, unleashing countless divine abilities and magical techniques.

The magics took the form of bits of paper, each of which thrummed with the power of the natural laws in this world. Unfortunately, not even Bai Xiaochun’s Undying Codex was able to do much to protect him. By this point, his entire arm was now paper!

“Complete and utter bullying!!” he shouted. To his frustration, none of his own divine abilities seemed effective at all, not even the Sutra of Future Pāramitā. Gritting his teeth, he used his non-paper arm to grab a handful of Soul Convergence Pills, which he threw out behind him. As they exploded, they sucked in the nearby souls, which seemed to deprive the paper people of their life force, causing them to simply float down to the ground.

If he weren’t being turned into paper, he might have been satisfied with that, and even viewed this place as a holy land. But he was too anxious to be pleased. Tossing out Soul Convergence Pills left and right, and collecting the soul spheres they formed, he shot toward the mouths of the old women, high in the sky.

Unfortunately, there were just too many paper people. One was a group powered by celestial souls, led by an archaean soul. As they closed in, Bai Xiaochun was gripped with a sensation of deadly crisis, and immediately tried to reach out to the treasured fan. Although he could barely make contact, it was at least enough to summon a beam of Archaean Luminescence!