At the city gates, people came and went without end.
Merchants carrying shoulder poles.
Carriages pulled by spirit beasts.
Travelers on horseback.
Cultivators of every stripe moved through the streets, shoulder to shoulder, as though the crowd had always flowed this way.
Qi Tian stood beside the city gate, wrapped in nothing but a tattered piece of beast hide, his bare feet covered in dust.
Naturally, he drew countless curious glances.
A child pointed at him and laughed.
"Look! A savage!"
Qi Tian ignored the remark.
Out of caution, he let his spiritual sense unfurl—thin, quiet, barely a whisper—and swept it across the crowd flowing through the gate.
Foundation Establishment cultivators were few. Scattered. No more than a handful in the entire crowd.
And those at his own level—the late stage of Foundation Establishment—
He counted only two.
Qi Tian quietly concealed his aura until not the faintest trace of his cultivation remained.
Then he walked on.
Qi Tian remained near the city gates for a long while before finally approaching an elderly man with a kind-looking face.
He carefully considered his words, trying not to sound too strange.
"Elder..."
"May I ask what year this is?"
The old man looked him up and down.
Qi Tian's clothes were ragged, his appearance disheveled, and he looked little different from a wandering beggar.
Yet there was a calmness in his eyes and a quiet dignity in his bearing that made the old man hesitate to dismiss him.
Stroking his beard, the old man answered:
"This year is the 3,827th year of the Xuanqing Era."
Qi Tian felt his heart sink.
Xuanqing.
He had never heard of that era name.
Before entering seclusion, the world had still counted years according to the Dayan Era.
Suppressing the unease rising within him, he asked again:
"Then..."
"The Dayan Era..."
"How long ago was it?"
The old man stared at him blankly.
"Dayan?"
"What Dayan?"
He thought for a moment.
Then his expression suddenly brightened.
"Oh..."
"You mean the ancient Dayan Dynasty?"
"That was from a very long time ago."
"I once heard storytellers mention it. That was history from more than ten thousand years ago."
"The dynasty has long since vanished."
Ten thousand years.
The words were simple.
Their weight was not.
Qi Tian stood frozen beneath the city gate.
The world around him continued moving.
The calls of merchants.
The footsteps of travelers.
The laughter of children.
All of it slowly faded away.
Not because the sounds disappeared.
But because they suddenly felt impossibly distant.
As though he were separated from the world by an invisible barrier.
He opened his mouth.
But no words came.
He knew he had been in seclusion for a long time.
But he had never imagined this.
Three hundred years.
Perhaps four.
That was what he had expected.
Not ten thousand.
He had been in seclusion for ten thousand years.
Which meant...
Everyone he had known was gone.
His master had been a Void Refinement cultivator—the very pinnacle of that age. Yet even such a being could stretch his lifespan to five thousand years at the most. And when Qi Tian entered seclusion, his master had already passed four thousand years of age.
Ten thousand years.
His master, for all his power, was long since dust.
His senior and junior brothers—the ones who had always argued with him over the smallest things—had cultivation far shallower than his own.
Living three or four hundred years would already have been a blessing.
And the scattered households beneath Qingya Mountain...
They had been nothing more than early-stage Qi Refinement cultivators.
To live one or two hundred years was already the most they could ever hope for.
That little girl who used to bring him wild fruit...
Even had she cultivated well, she too would long since have returned to dust.
There was no need to search.
No need to ask.
Everyone he had ever known was already gone.
His master.
His fellow disciples.
The villagers beneath the mountain.
Every familiar face had vanished somewhere within those countless years.
Their graves had likely been buried beneath new soil, their names forgotten by the generations that came after.
And when they left this world...
he had been sitting deep beneath the mountain.
Still.
Silent.
Unaware.
Unable to offer even a single stick of incense in farewell.
That realization alone was enough to make it hard to breathe.
But then...
A colder thought rose slowly from the deepest part of his heart.
A thought so terrifying that even his blood seemed to freeze.
What about him?
What about Qi Tian himself?
Before entering seclusion, he had been only a late-stage Foundation Establishment cultivator.
A cultivator at that realm had, at most, a lifespan of three hundred years.
Even with the Essence-Returning True Origin Scripture—even with the meditative state that let his body consume far less energy than an ordinary cultivator—
four hundred years should have been the absolute limit.
Four hundred years.
Not ten thousand.
He should have died long ago.
Not merely died.
He should have vanished completely.
Like the oil inside that bronze lamp.
Burned away.
Exhausted.
Leaving behind nothing but a charred wick.
Like his master.
Like the little girl beneath the mountain.
Like everyone else.
He should have become nothing more than forgotten dust buried beneath the weight of history.
But he had not.
He was still standing here.
Alive.
His blood was warm.
His qi still flowed through his meridians.
His body still appeared to be that of a man in his twenties.
Why?
Qi Tian slowly raised his hand and stared at his palm.
The bones were clear and defined.
The skin was smooth and firm.
This was not the hand of someone who should have lived through ten thousand years.
A late-stage Foundation Establishment cultivator...
What had allowed him to survive the death that should have claimed him?
And not merely survive.
What had allowed him to endure for ten thousand years?
Was it the Essence-Returning True Origin Scripture?
Was it Qingya Mountain's spiritual veins?
Or...
Was there something inside that cavern that even he himself had never discovered?
Qi Tian had no answer.
When he entered that cavern ten thousand years ago, his only purpose had been to break through the bottleneck of Foundation Establishment.
He had never imagined he would survive in such a way.
That he would go on existing through a mystery even he could not explain.
"Little brother?"
The old man noticed Qi Tian's pale expression and the distant look in his eyes.
Concern entered his voice.
"Are you alright?"
Qi Tian returned to his senses.
He drew a deep breath.
The air carried the scent of the city.
The smoke of cooking fires.
The presence of countless strangers.
The unfamiliar vitality of a new age.
A world that belonged to people he had never met.
An era that knew nothing of him.
He turned toward the old man and gave a solemn bow.
"Thank you, elder."
His voice was quiet, but steady.
"I..."
"I simply have not entered a city for a very long time."
The old man shook his head.
With a sigh, he walked away.
Most likely, he had taken Qi Tian for some wandering cultivator whose mind had been unsettled by too many years of isolation.
Qi Tian remained beneath the city gate.
He looked up at the two golden characters carved above the entrance.
For a long time.
A very long time.
Ten thousand years.
A man who had crossed over from an ancient age.
A man who had awakened after an entire era had passed him by.
Now, in this vast world, he was nothing more than an outsider.
Without roots.
Without ties.
Without a single person left who knew his name.
And yet...
he was still alive.
Qi Tian looked at Zhenyuan City one last time.
Then he turned and walked into the crowd.
Step by step.
The figure wrapped in battered beast hide soon disappeared among the endless flow of people.
No one noticed him.
No one knew that, on this day, Zhenyuan City had welcomed a man who had once looked upon the moon of a forgotten age.
And Qi Tian himself still did not know...
what exactly he had missed during those ten thousand years.
Nor what he had unknowingly left behind.
Because some things...
were patient.
Patient enough to wait a thousand years.
Patient enough to wait ten thousand.