My Longevity Simulation

Chapter 1247: Insisting on Exploring the Star Sea

“All transcendent power in the world has already vanished. Ordinary people’s lifespan is limited to a century at most.”

“Yet the eternal pursuit of the Dao by people in the world remains unchanged.”

“By researching, analyzing, and utilizing laws, even mortals can unleash astonishing power.”

...

In the blank world before Sun Erlang, a sphere suddenly appeared.

The sphere rotated on its axis, and countless black dots representing humans moved across its surface at an extremely rapid speed.

At first the buildings on the ground were only a little over one zhang tall, but as time flowed quickly, more and more high-rise buildings rose from the ground.

Before long, even flying vehicles appeared among the clouds.

While weaving the world conceived in his mind, Sun Erlang recalled his master’s teachings from that time.

“The predicament of the Xuanhuang Realm is essentially the same as that of these worlds without transcendent power. Ancient texts often say that the immortal path is eternal. Perhaps those words are not false.”

“The so-called [immortal] refers to those beings who exhaust the principles of the Dao and employ the Dao to their utmost. They stand at the far shore of all living beings, equal to the Dao itself, looking down upon the masses, undying and indestructible.”

“But what if the [Dao] itself undergoes a change?”

“The Dao remains the Dao. Yet those beings unable to adapt to the changed Dao will inevitably head toward destruction.”

“Unable to harmonize with the Dao, immortals would no longer deserve the name. They would fall.”

“Among the myriad living beings, new [users of the Dao] will always emerge. The power they wield will grow stronger and stronger.”

“They will become the new [immortals].”

...

At that time, the Faceless Holy Emperor’s words had seemed profoundly mysterious. Not only Sun Erlang, but none of the other direct disciples beneath the Holy Emperor had understood the reasoning within them.

Yet now, thanks to the power of the Truth Fruit, he had the fortune to experience the sensation of a creator.

Sun Erlang gazed at the world he had created before him and suddenly felt a stirring in his heart.

In that spherical world, after countless years of natural evolution, groups would inevitably arise that aligned with the Dao of the world he had made.

They could perceive the ultimate secrets of the world that other living beings could not detect and thereby become the so-called [Users of Dao] in this realm.

Boom!

Sun Erlang’s vision rapidly traversed space and descended onto the sphere he had created.

Inside an ordinary building, a young scholar sat frowning in thought beneath a lamp.

The blackboard before him was covered with complex formulas and diagrams.

“Wrong, wrong, wrong…”

“Where exactly is the problem? Why does my calculated result deviate so greatly from the actual trajectory of motion?”

“It feels as though some force is restraining us, preventing us from leaving this planet.”

The scholar painfully clutched his hair, then suddenly raised his head and looked out the window.

In the pitch-black night, his gaze seemed to meet Sun Erlang’s eyes directly.

...

Sun Erlang’s vision blurred, and the scene shattered with a boom.

When he came back to his senses, he discovered with surprise that spaceships had already begun appearing on the sphere, attempting to fly beyond the “boundary of the world.”

Yet outside the world, Sun Erlang had not yet created anything; it remained empty.

Naturally they would not succeed.

Sun Erlang’s thoughts turned rapidly as he began opening new maps.

The white space gradually darkened. In the starry sky, besides the original first planet, thousands upon thousands of other planets began to appear.

The map’s scope expanded more than a hundred thousand times in an instant, and Sun Erlang’s Dao Deviation Stone suddenly felt overburdened.

To reduce the workload, Sun Erlang set nearly all these planets as desolate, lifeless wastelands devoid of any living beings.

And to prevent the original planet’s inhabitants from expanding too quickly, he made the distance between each planet extremely vast.

So vast that, without immortal power, the tiny people could scarcely cross between planets in an entire lifetime.

...

After expending tremendous effort, Sun Erlang barely managed to rescue the world that had been on the verge of collapse.

But soon, before he could perfect and expand the star-sea landscape, the world once again became precarious.

Upon investigation, Sun Erlang realized that the inhabitants had begun to doubt the reality of the world they inhabited.

Not only because they could not fly out of the world, but also because they had observed countless planets in the star sea that had not been there before.

These planets had appeared as if from nowhere, shattering their understanding.

“One must not crudely set rules. Instead, the appearances of all things must be rooted in the fundamental principles of the world.”

This sentence suddenly surfaced in Sun Erlang’s mind.

He quickly made the corresponding adjustments.

In the next attempt by the stubborn inhabitants, one spaceship actually succeeded in breaking free of the planet’s restraint and entered the star sea.

The humans aboard the spaceship discovered a blue ring of light encircling the planet.

It was precisely the existence of this ring that interfered with external observations from inside the planet and had prevented their earlier attempts to escape it.

This was a discovery of world-shaking greatness!

After surviving life-and-death crises, the spaceship finally returned to the surface and made the discovery public.

The scholars on the planet, once they incorporated the variable of the star ring into their calculations, finally achieved temporary consistency between theory and reality.

People cheered and welcomed the arrival of a new era. At the same time, the crew of the first ship to leave the planet were all regarded as heroes.

With the experience of success, the development speed of the planet’s long-suppressed inhabitants reached a peak.

Fortunately, by this time Sun Erlang had already sketched out most of the desolate star-sea landscape.

Moreover, thanks to the vastness of the created star sea, space and time temporarily held these inhabitants in check.

Yet Sun Erlang knew this was only a temporary measure.

Sooner or later they would detect the abnormality of this star sea.

“If one does not wish to be discovered, one must continue expanding this star sea.”

“And the speed of expansion must exceed the speed at which these tiny people explore.”

The macro view pulled back tens of thousands of times once more.

Endless nebulae and star rivers were born beyond the darkness.

The Dao Deviation Stone was already operating at its limit.

“So-called pulling one hair moves the entire body. Every object in the star sea is connected to the others.”

“It is not simply a matter of adding them afterward. One must also consider the influence their appearance has on the original planet.”

“...”

After pondering, Sun Erlang sensed that the Dao Deviation Stone was in danger of collapsing. With a resolute heart, he crudely used spatial spans to minimize these influences.

“By the time these tiny people notice something wrong, it should be a long time later.”

The inhabitants continued progressing at astonishing speed.

They studied the star ring and invented retrograde boats that could reverse-engineer the ring’s restraining power.

Like a slingshot, they hurled the spaceships outward at high speed.

Although there was no turning back, it greatly accelerated the inhabitants’ exploration of the star sea.

“This is too fast?”

Sun Erlang stared dumbfounded as the first reverse-sailing boat continuously accelerated by borrowing the power of the rings of passing planets.

It headed toward the edge of the Star Sea.

“No…”

Sun Erlang pondered for a moment. He guided a meteor, altering its original trajectory and sending it smashing fiercely toward that reverse-sailing boat.

Unexpectedly, the people aboard dodged it at the limit.

In a blur before his eyes, the scene on the reverse-sailing boat appeared before Sun Erlang.

“Sir, thanks to you! Otherwise we would have been completely wiped out this time!”

A middle-aged man with a long beard and a stern face did not relax his expression: “This piece of gravel came rather strangely. The starry sky is so vast, yet it happened to meet us…”

“Stay on full alert! Do not be careless!”

...

Hearing the little person’s words, Sun Erlang could not help feeling embarrassed. He had indeed acted somewhat crudely this time.

But he quickly thought of a way to remedy it.

Sun Erlang pointed lightly toward the planet closest to the reverse-sailing boat.

Before long the planet exploded with a boom.

It transformed into countless fragments that rained down like a torrential storm toward the reverse-sailing boat.

Luck could save them once but not twice.

Such a dense swarm of fragments, precisely guided.

The reverse-sailing boat naturally had no chance of survival.

In the collision it turned into a ball of flame and vanished from the Star Sea forever.

However, a single accident could not suppress the natives’ curiosity about the Star Sea.

Next, increasingly larger and more advanced reverse-sailing boats flew out from the original planet one after another.

They began exploring in all directions.

Although he really wanted to destroy all these ships again using the old method, Sun Erlang knew that his previous intervention had already shaken the rules of this creation game.

If he continued to intervene so directly, this world would collapse even faster.

So Sun Erlang could only think of another way.

He watched the countless ships bouncing off the star rings and soon had an idea.

With a thought, imperceptible subtle changes occurred in the star ring around the Primordial Star.

It took the native little people a full year to notice something was wrong.

The planet experienced record-breaking extreme weather across the board.

Cold currents and droughts swept through and ravaged everything.

Grain production dropped, and even the natives’ birth rate began to decline slightly.

Sensing the anomaly, the little people gathered the planet’s most elite scholars to study the cause of these disasters.

In the end they reached a conclusion.

Although the star ring bound them and prevented them from venturing into the Star Sea, it was also a protective umbrella.

It isolated the planet from the extreme environments in the Star Sea.

In recent years, excessive use of the star ring’s elastic force had caused a slight shrinkage in the star ring.

Even though this shrinkage was negligible for the star ring itself, the planet’s fragile ecosystem could not withstand the impact it brought.

After intense discussion, the native little people ultimately temporarily abandoned their plan to explore the Star Sea.

The reverse-sailing boats were sealed away from then on.

“We can hold on for a while longer.”

Sun Erlang could not help letting out a sigh of relief.

“I wonder how much time has passed in the real world outside.”

He looked at the galaxy he had personally shaped before him, and his expression grew somewhat dazed.

Time flew by.

In the blink of an eye another century passed on the Primordial Star.

Starting from the third decade, flying boats began approaching the star ring one after another to take samples and conduct research.

In the fifth decade, through the unremitting efforts of all the little people, they finally found a way to repair the star ring’s damage.

Sun Erlang personally witnessed these little people recreating the power of the star ring in the laboratory.

He could not help feeling deeply shaken, with countless thoughts surging in his mind.

“The power of the star ring originates from the foundational laws of the world I created.”

“But these little people are also manifestations of this world’s laws. As part of the world, they are capable of investigating the world’s essential origin…”

“Because they truly exist, they can study it and make use of it.”

...

Changes on the Primordial Star continued.

After multiple experiments confirmed the effectiveness of repairing the star ring, the little people, who had been pent up for so long, could no longer endure.

An unprecedented era of exploration arrived.

Countless reverse-sailing boats once again departed from the Primordial Star, exploring the endless Star Sea.

In the seventh decade the little people invented a method to voyage far without relying on the star ring’s elastic force, using only the star ring power furnace.

From then on the natives officially achieved round-trip exploration of the Star Sea.

From the eighth decade to the hundredth year the little people ushered in a new era of opening up the Star Sea and colonization.

At this point Sun Erlang knew that it was only a matter of time before the lie of this world he had woven was exposed.

Watching the countless little people who still sacrificed without hesitation, an inexplicable emotion arose in Sun Erlang’s heart for some reason.

He no longer tried to expand the boundaries of the Star Sea.

Instead he silently watched as the little people’s footsteps approached the edge of the world.

Five hundred years later.

When a strangely shaped reverse-sailing boat finally reached the edge of the Star Sea, the world before Sun Erlang suddenly shook violently.

Boom!

Like exploding stars, it burst forth with brilliant light.

And disappeared.

Yet Sun Erlang did not return to the real world.

Before his eyes remained a blank void.

“Hmm?”

Sun Erlang was somewhat surprised. He looked around, unsure what had gone wrong.

“Do you think there was any problem with that world just now?”

A voice suddenly sounded from behind Sun Erlang.

Sun Erlang’s heart jumped. He immediately turned his head.

He saw a Daoist with long eyebrows and white hair, holding a whisk, smiling as he observed him.

“This is…”

Sun Erlang vaguely guessed the identity of this person. Gathering his courage, he probed: “Greetings, Heaven