Xu Ling reached into the sleeve of her white robe and withdrew something small enough that it disappeared in her palm when she closed her fingers around it. She held it out to Lin Yi.

He looked at it.

A sunflower seed. Or what had once been a sunflower seed. The shell was shriveled, the surface blackened and cracked in the specific way of something that had been exposed to extreme heat from the inside rather than from an external source. It sat in her palm without weight, or rather, with less weight than its size suggested it should have.

"This is part of his inheritance?" Lin Yi said.

"This is the gate," Xu Ling said.

He picked it up. The texture was dry under his fingers, the kind of dry that came from something organic that had been preserved beyond its natural lifespan through means that were not natural preservation. He turned it once and looked at the cracks.

"Your blood," Xu Ling said.

"My blood?" Lin Yi repeated, genuinely surprised.

"Yes your blood," Xu Ling confirmed. "It’s only your blood, the chosen inheritor, can open the pathway to his treasures."

He then drew the Abyssal Celestial Lord Blade, the shard of the true blade, and made a small cut on his left thumb. He pressed the thumb against the seed.

The reaction was not gradual.

The moment his blood made contact with the blackened shell, the seed responded. Not with warmth, not with a gentle glow building slowly from nothing. With immediate, decisive intent. A vine emerged from the crack his blood had opened, ghostly at first, translucent gold, the color of concentrated sunlight seen through closed eyelids. It was thin, almost thread-like, and it moved with the specific directional purpose of something that knew exactly where it was going.

It wrapped around his wrist.

The sensation was not painful. It was the sensation of pressure that was also temperature, heat that carried information the same way sound carries information, the vine settling against his skin and then settling into it, the line between external and internal becoming unclear and then resolving into the vine simply being part of him, a pattern of raised gold lines running from his wrist up his inner forearm in a configuration that was not quite a vine anymore but not quite a tattoo either.

Somewhere between the two. Settled like something that had always been there and had been waiting to be recognized.

He looked at it.

"Reach into your own pulse," Xu Ling said. "You will feel the heat. Follow it."

He looked at the pattern on his arm and understood what she meant before the instruction was complete. There was a sensation in the wrist, beneath the tattoo, not blood flow but something alongside it, a current that ran parallel to his pulse beat with its own rhythm. Warmer than the surrounding tissue. More present.

He reached.

The reaching was internal, the same kind of intent that activated a skill, but directed inward rather than outward, toward the heat, along the current that ran parallel to his pulse.

A space opened.

The sub-space was not like the storage token’s dimensional interior. The storage token had been pitch black and featureless, the dimensional nothing of a container not designed for experience. This was different. This had dimension, not the physical dimension of rooms and walls but the dimensional quality of something that had been inhabited, that carried the residue of presence over a very long time.

He could not see it. He could reach into it.

He reached.

The first thing his hand found was the blade.

He knew it before he drew it out. The heat increased significantly the moment his fingers closed around the hilt, the searing quality Xu Ling had described, the Emperor’s remaining will present in the contact with the weapon that had been the center of his power. He drew it out of the sub-space.

The True Celestial Emperor Blade appeared in his hand.

No ranking appeared in his system panel. He waited a moment and confirmed the absence. The lower domain item classification had no tier for what he was holding. The Abyssal grade, which was the peak of every classification framework he had encountered since the awakening ceremony in Jianghe, had no reference point for this. The weapon was not within that framework. It was outside it entirely.

Visually it was less dramatic than the Abyssal Celestial Lord Blade. Longer. The surface was not dark, not gold, not any specific color. It was the color of the space between stars when you looked directly at that space rather than at the stars themselves.

He held it in his left hand alongside the Abyssal shard in his right.

The shard’s presence, which had been the dominant weapon energy in his frame of reference since the Upgrade Altar, became secondary immediately. Not weak. Secondary. The way a good answer becomes secondary when the correct answer is also in the room.

He set the true blade to the side and reached again.

The second item was a small flask. Dark ceramic, sealed with wax that had the same blackened quality as the sunflower seed’s shell. The system panel notified when he held it.

---

[Brew of a Thousand Steps]

[A prepared cultivation accelerant. Consumption raises the user’s level by 100 when administered below the Level 200 threshold. One use.]

---

He looked at the flask for a moment. Below level 200. He was level 230. The condition was not met. He set it aside carefully.

The third item arrived in his hand as a golden pearl. Smaller than he expected, the size of a large marble, the surface smooth and warm.

The moment his fingers fully closed around it, it dissolved Into him. Through the skin of his palm, through the layers of tissue and energy circulation and into the sea of consciousness that every cultivator maintained as the foundation of their mental landscape. He felt it arrive there, the golden pearl settling into the sea of consciousness the way a stone settles into still water, the initial disturbance spreading outward and then quieting.

He felt it seal.

The seal of something that would open in stages, each stage conditional on what he had become by the time it released. Ten thousand years of the Celestial Emperor’s life, waiting in layers that only his own cultivation would eventually reach.

The current release level was minimal. Impressions more than information. A sense of scale that made Jianghe City feel like a dust grain. A flicker of something that might have been the Aethel-Sun homeworld, the first light of a dying universe condensed into beings born from that condensation. He let the impressions exist without forcing them and returned to the sub-space.

The fourth item was parchment. Golden, the Emperor’s seal visible in the upper corner, the texture of it slightly warm and slightly resistant to folding.

---

[Immortal Decree]

[A single piece of golden parchment bearing the Celestial Emperor’s seal. Anything written upon it becomes a Universal Law for sixty seconds. The decree burns upon use. One use remaining.]

---

He read the description twice. Anything written on it becomes law. For sixty seconds. He thought about what sixty seconds of universal law meant in practical application and filed it as something that required significant consideration before use. He set it aside with appropriate care.

The fifth item was a disk. Circular stone, not flat, the surface carved with four concentric rings that were not carved into the stone so much as present within it, the rings moving slightly when he held it, each one aligned with a direction, the north ring oriented toward what his spatial awareness told him was north even in the white processing room. The rings revolved slowly and independently, each one settling into its directional position with the calm certainty of something that knew where everything was.

---

[Star Compass]

[A navigation instrument of Aethel-Sun race. Facilitates traversal through physical space including interstellar distances. The four rings align with directional coordinates across dimensional and spatial barriers.]

----

A star compass, Lin Yi thought, he already had knowledge concerning how to use it, the information pool coming from the memory inheritance of the celestial emperor.

Lin Yi then reached into the space again, his grip finding...