System Granted Me Immortality; I Outlived Everyone

Chapter 45: “Doing Business” in the Forbidden Land, Chen Changsheng Comprehends Dao Patterns

“Senior, this price is truly not expensive.”

“This is a coffin of the highest quality golden-thread nanmu. Within a hundred miles, who does not know my reputation for flawless craftsmanship at an honest price?”

“Selling it to you at this rate, I barely turn a profit.”

Within the black mountain range of the Desolate Ancient Forbidden Land, the faint murmur of haggling drifted through the dead air.

A closer look would reveal a young man murmuring to a pile of withered bones.

“This is my bottom line. If you offer no objections, I shall take your silence as agreement.”

After speaking, the young man waited for a few breaths. Hearing no voice of dissent, he smoothly set about the ritual of collecting the corpse.

Indeed, this was Chen Changsheng, who had been trapped within the Desolate Ancient Forbidden Land for fifty long years.

Carefully placing the bones into the heavy wood, Chen Changsheng examined the artifacts left beside the deceased.

Resting quietly in the dust were three items: a pill furnace, a jade slip, and a small porcelain bottle.

Crack!

The very moment Chen Changsheng’s fingers brushed the small pill furnace, the metal crumbled inward, leaving a gaping hole.

Witnessing this decay, Chen Changsheng inspected the other two items. Aside from the jade slip, the porcelain bottle could not escape the weight of time, shattering at his touch.

“Tsk.”

“Time truly is the most absolute weapon.”

“Such a fine pill furnace, reduced to dust. A heavy pity.”

Muttering softly, Chen Changsheng focused on the jade slip resting in his palm.

It was carved from thousand-year cold jade. A fragment the size of a fingernail could easily command a hundred thousand Spirit Stones.

Yet the slip in his hand spanned the width of an entire palm.

“Patching Heaven Paste?”

Sweeping the recorded pill formula with his gaze, Chen Changsheng tilted his head, searching his vast centuries of memory, but found no matching records.

According to the ancient characters, this Patching Heaven Paste possessed the unfathomable power to invert life and death.

No matter how shattered one’s foundation, no matter if their lifespan had burnt to ash, possessing this Patching Heaven Paste could forcefully bind the soul to the mortal realm for seven more days.

True to its name, even if the Heavenly River itself ruptured, a single dose could mend the firmament.

Having comprehended the ancient text, Chen Changsheng flipped his wrist and deposited the jade slip into his system space.

Naturally, he desired to refine such a miraculous pill.

Unfortunately, his current foundation of knowledge was too shallow. He possessed no method to decipher the true intricacies of the Patching Heaven Paste formula.

This skeleton had rested in the dirt for an unknown number of epochs. The knowledge of its era had long since ceased to exist in the mortal world.

Chen Changsheng only recognized the broad strokes of the characters on the jade slip, and the ancient names of the medicinal herbs were entirely foreign to him.

As the cycles of time turned, herbs from thousands of years ago might still sprout from the earth.

But their mortal names had undoubtedly changed countless times. Holding an empty formula without the corresponding knowledge, Chen Changsheng could not refine the Patching Heaven Paste.

Having successfully “sold” another coffin, Chen Changsheng turned his gaze toward the ancient bronze hall resting five hundred paces away.

Behind him stood another ancient bronze hall, though the gap between them was a mere three hundred paces.

Measuring those “distant” five hundred paces, Chen Changsheng clicked his tongue. He then lowered himself to the earth, resuming his silent study of the golden formations etched into the soil.

Five hundred paces away lay his destination, the second ancient bronze hall, where Emperor Zuo’s shattered remains also lay scattered.

When he first descended into the Desolate Ancient Forbidden Land, he had planned to pass twenty or thirty years in complete, undisturbed serenity before slowly attempting to decipher the golden formations.

Yet, he exhausted the entire collection of the Xuanwu Pavilion in less than a decade. Left with no other recourse, he turned his attention to the golden formations.

In the beginning, his progress was agonizingly slow.

An entire year of study barely bought him an inch of safe ground. Even then, he had not fully comprehended that single inch of golden formation; he merely deduced a method to step without triggering absolute destruction.

Grinding forward at this pace, twenty full years passed, and he had only managed to wander five paces beyond the protective ward of the ancient bronze hall.

It was at that five-pace mark that Chen Changsheng encountered his first “customer.”

Discovering a corpse left to rot in the wilderness instantly triggered his occupational duty. He manifested a coffin from his space to properly inter the “customer.”

Curiously, while nearly everything upon the withered bones had decayed, an unknown tome bound in beast skin remained completely untouched by rot.

Regarding this heavy “price” paid by the customer, Chen Changsheng naturally accepted it with a clear conscience.

Upon careful study, he realized the original owner of the beast-skin tome had been a master of formations.

The tome itself contained the master’s lifelong comprehension.

By digesting the profound knowledge within the beast-skin pages, Chen Changsheng’s grasp of formations advanced by leaps and bounds, and he finally learned the true name of these golden patterns.

Ordinary formations typically borrowed the momentum of rivers and mountains, channeling the spiritual energy of the world through specific geometric paths to unleash devastating power.

But the patterns within the Desolate Ancient Forbidden Land were vastly different. They were direct manifestations born from the Great Dao of the heavens and earth.

To be precise, these golden manifestations were the physical scars of the cosmos itself, referred to simply as “Dao Patterns.”

The ancient text within the beast-skin tome described them with absolute gravity:

“Dao Patterns possess the unfathomable power to invert mountains and rivers, to reverse the sun and moon. Only a supreme sovereign may command them.”

……

“This pace is still too agonizing.”

Having successfully taken one more step, Chen Changsheng stared at the remaining four hundred and ninety-nine paces, a slight twitch pulling at the corner of his mouth.

Though the beast-skin tome had multiplied his speed several times over…

…crossing those three hundred paces still consumed forty years of his life. Added to the ten years of quiet reading…

…Chen Changsheng had dwelled within the Desolate Ancient Forbidden Land for half a century.

One hundred and thirty years had bled away since his last slumber. Less than thirty years remained until the cycle of his next long sleep arrived.

Weighing this reality, Chen Changsheng immediately drew out the beast-skin tome and began flipping through the heavy pages.

Yet, even after rereading the ancient text countless times, he could not decipher every forgotten character.

“This is simply unreasonable. Why could the ancestors not forge a unified script to span all eras?”

“If I could comprehend every character on this page, my pace would easily multiply again.”

Releasing a dry complaint, Chen Changsheng turned and began retracing his agonizingly slow path back to his starting point.

Over the past fifty years, he had managed to divine a few crucial laws governing the Desolate Ancient Forbidden Land.

During the daylight hours, the domain maintained a heavy, static peace. But when night fell, that safety evaporated.

During his first decade, Chen Changsheng had glimpsed shifting silhouettes prowling just beyond the bronze hall’s ward under the cover of darkness.

This world held no true concept of mortal ghosts, but whatever “things” possessed the right to wander the Desolate Ancient Forbidden Land were most assuredly not human.

Therefore, honoring the heavy weight of caution, he exclusively conducted his business beneath the sun.

The moment dusk arrived, Chen Changsheng would retreat into the ancient bronze hall and seal himself away within the stone sarcophagus of the Hundred Defeats Immortal Venerable.

Shortly after, as the sun dipped beneath the horizon, Chen Changsheng safely crossed the threshold of the bronze hall.

Seven or eight thick wooden coffins sat silently arranged just outside the hall. Cloaked in the deepening night, a suffocating, eerie dread settled over the ancient graves.