SSS-Rank 10x Reward System: Accepting Disciples to Live Forever-Chapter 207: Dream

Time flowed like water over stone.

Without realizing it, Wang Chen had walked for hours.

The cold landscape stretched endlessly before him, and beneath his steady pace he had already covered tens of kilometers. Yet nothing changed. The sky remained a cloudless, indifferent blue. The frozen plains remained crystalline and undisturbed, reflecting pale light like an endless mirror.

The wind did not intensify.

The terrain did not shift.

No mountains appeared on the horizon.

No ruins emerged from beneath the frost.

For a brief, unsettling moment, Wang Chen wondered if he had truly moved at all.

The crunch of his footsteps sounded real. The sting of cold against his skin felt real. The faint ache in his lungs from the dry air felt real.

Yet the scenery did not evolve.

It was as if the world had been painted once and never revised.

Pointless thoughts began creeping into his mind.

Am I walking in circles?

Is distance even meaningful here?

Is this landscape finite... or am I simply repeating the same stretch of ground without noticing?

His expression slowly grew solemn.

There it is.

Something was interfering.

Not violently. Not overtly.

But subtly.

He could feel faint distortions in his thought patterns, like gentle fingers nudging his focus off course. His mind, normally sharp and efficient, felt slightly dulled around the edges.

Hmm.

This can’t continue.

I need to anchor myself.

With that thought, Wang Chen shifted his attention inward toward the Thousand Soul Flag.

Just as he did—

The flag trembled.

Subtle.

But unmistakable.

It was not a fluctuation of energy. It felt more like something pressing outward from within.

Wang Chen’s brows lifted slightly.

The next moment, black mist spilled out from the flag like ink dissolving into water. Slowly, elegantly, Mo Huyan’s figure materialized upon the frozen plains.

Against the endless white, she looked almost unreal.

Her long dark hair flowed behind her, purple strands faintly shimmering. Her robes, deep and ethereal, contrasted sharply with the barren ice around them. She stood like a goddess descending into a forgotten world.

Her eyes—deep, ancient, immeasurably calm—swept across the surroundings.

They narrowed.

She was searching.

For fluctuations.

For inconsistencies.

For cracks in reality.

A faint frown appeared between her brows.

"There is no doubt this is the domain of the Eternal Dream Dragon," she murmured, voice low and contemplative. "But why does it feel slightly different?"

She closed her eyes briefly, as if tasting the air with her soul.

"The cold biting against my spirit... it feels too real. Everything here possesses vitality. Even the frost carries a pulse. It is as if the—"

"The world is real," Wang Chen interrupted quietly. "Not a simple dream."

He finished her sentence for her.

His voice was solemn now.

All this time, he had felt it.

The texture of reality here did not feel hollow. It did not carry the thinness of illusion. The wind had weight. The ground had density. Even the faint presence of distant wildlife left traces of existence.

This was not a flimsy mental projection.

And more than that—

He felt a strange familiarity.

A faint sense of déjà vu.

It reminded him of the Tower of Infinite Enlightenment.

Back then, the constructed realities inside the tower had also felt disturbingly authentic. Pain had hurt. Time had flowed. Growth had occurred.

Yet it had still been a construct.

Silence settled between them.

The wind swept gently across the snow, lifting faint crystals into the air like drifting stardust.

Neither spoke for a few breaths.

Wang Chen resumed walking.

No destination.

No landmark.

His gaze moved steadily across the endless white, searching for the slightest deviation—any crack in symmetry, any disturbance in pattern.

Mo Huyan walked beside him now, her presence subtly stabilizing his thoughts. The faint mental interference he had sensed earlier seemed weaker.

Finally, she spoke again.

"The Eternal Dream Dragon did not create illusions," she said slowly. "It manipulated layers of reality."

Her gaze turned distant.

"Dream and reality were interchangeable within its domain."

Wang Chen absorbed those words carefully.

"So this could be both," he said.

"A dream layered upon a real world."

"Or a real world layered upon a dream."

Mo Huyan nodded faintly.

"The question is not whether this world is real."

Her eyes sharpened slightly.

"The question is whose dream we are standing inside."

The frozen wind howled faintly across the plains.

For the first time since arriving, Wang Chen felt something shift deep beneath the ice.

Mo Huyan’s expression grew increasingly focused, her gaze sweeping across the frozen horizon as if she were peeling away invisible layers only she could see.

She was not merely observing the landscape.

She was measuring it.

Testing it.

Searching for seams in reality.

Wang Chen continued walking beside her, step after step carving shallow impressions into the snow. The wind remained steady, the sky unchanged. Time lost its weight here, flowing without markers.

Hours passed.

He did not count them consciously, but at some point, an entire day had slipped by.

Twenty-four hours in this endless white silence.

It was during that twenty-fourth hour that Wang Chen finally noticed it.

A subtle crack.

Not in the ice.

Not in the sky.

But in the monotony.

Far ahead, where there should have been nothing but frost and horizon, color intruded.

Green.

Tall trees rose in the distance, their canopies thick and vibrant, cutting sharply against the pale landscape. The forest filled his vision unnaturally, as if someone had torn open the painting and inserted a new scene behind it.

Wang Chen slowed.

His eyes sharpened.

As if that anomaly were not enough, he noticed something else—disturbance in the snow.

Footprints.

Multiple.

He bent down immediately, brushing away loose frost with his fingers.

The impressions were clear.

Fresh.

They were not dragged or scattered as if someone had wandered aimlessly. They appeared abruptly, deeply pressed into the snow.

"Whoever this person is..." Wang Chen murmured softly, tracing the depth of the prints, "...they didn’t walk here from behind. They appeared directly here."

His gaze followed the tracks toward the distant forest.

He was so absorbed in the physical evidence that he failed to notice the expression that had surfaced on Mo Huyan’s face.

Shock.

Not mild surprise.

Not analytical interest.

Shock edged with something that bordered on fear.

For an entity as ancient as her, such expressions were nearly extinct.

Mo Huyan had witnessed dragons at their zenith. She had seen the Upper Realm in its golden age, and she had endured its slow decline. She had seen Supreme beings rise and fall like passing constellations.

Very few things unsettled her.

This so-called "fake dream" of the Eternal Dragon should not have been one of them.

Yet her eyes trembled slightly.

"How is this possible...?" she whispered.

"How can it be real...?"

The answer struck her with chilling clarity.

This was not one of the countless manifested replicas.

This was not bait.

This was not a feeding ground.

This was the true domain.

The genuine Dragon Race Inheritance Ground—hidden for millions upon millions of years beneath layers of Supreme-level concealment—stood before her.

And somehow—

She had stepped into it.

Not through elaborate preparation.

Not through cosmic alignment.

Simply by following this young cultivator.

Mo Huyan was not foolish enough to attribute this to luck.

Luck did not breach Supreme barriers.

Luck did not bypass ancient concealments.

There was something else at work.

Her gaze slowly shifted.

It settled on Wang Chen.

He remained crouched in the snow, examining footprints with a focused, slightly puzzled expression. From the outside, he looked like an ordinary Nascent Soul cultivator stripped of cultivation, investigating a trail.

But that image no longer aligned with what she knew.

This was the same individual who could enter and exit her sealed prison at will.

The same cultivator who comprehended the Authority of Non-Existence—an Authority so obscure that even among Supremes, few acknowledged its presence.

He had moved through events that should have been impossible.

And now—

He had stepped into the real ground.

Her eyes narrowed.

This little cultivator was not simple.

He was an anomaly.

Perhaps even a variable the Dragon Race had not accounted for.

It was then that Wang Chen’s voice broke her thoughts.

"Nether Empress," he called, straightening up, snow clinging lightly to his sleeves. "What exactly is this ’Dream of the Eternal Dragon’?"

He gestured toward the vast expanse behind them.

"For something as grand as the Dragon Race Inheritance Ground, this place feels... too peaceful."

His brows furrowed slightly.

"Monotonous. I admit it sealed my cultivation completely, which is no small feat. But in an entire day, I have encountered no danger. No trials. No guardians. Nothing."

His gaze flicked back toward the distant green forest.

"This does not make sense."

In his mind, the image of a Dragon Race Inheritance Ground had always been bloody and cruel—piles of corpses, rivers of molten fire, grotesque beasts lurking in the shadows ready to tear a man to pieces the moment he let his guard down.

That was what made sense.

That was what power looked like.

This place, with its silent frost and endless sky, felt wrong.

Mo Huyan’s eyes flickered ever so slightly at the genuine confusion in his voice. There was no pretension in it, no hidden calculation—only honest bewilderment.

She did not answer immediately.

Instead, she slowly turned her gaze away from him and lifted her eyes toward the pale sky.

Her pupils seemed to deepen.

For a brief moment, it felt as if her vision pierced beyond the thin blue dome above them, beyond layers of frozen air and drifting frost, tearing through the fabric of space-time itself. The cold wind brushed against her robes, causing the edges to flutter faintly, yet she stood unmoving, like an ancient statue recalling a forgotten era.

When the Dragon Race still ruled.

When their shadows stretched across worlds.

After a breath of time, she finally spoke.

"All dragons were violent and prideful creatures," her voice echoed softly across the frozen plains, carried by the wind. "Arrogant of their power, treating other living beings as nothing more than livestock."

Her words felt heavy in the cold air.

"But there are exceptions to everything."

Her tone shifted slightly.

"And that exception was the Dragon of Eternal Dream."

The wind howled faintly between distant snow dunes.

"An incredibly wise ancient dragon," she continued, her gaze still fixed on the sky. "Whose wisdom knew no bounds. He was deeply empathetic to the suffering of other races."

Her voice softened almost imperceptibly.

"He wished to create a just society. And for that, he chose to strengthen himself—not for domination, but to reshape the world."

The frozen plains seemed to grow quieter as she spoke.

"Creating a world in which all beings were equal. A world where there was no fear of death. Where the tyranny of the strong did not exist."

Her gaze slowly lowered.

"This domain you are standing in now..."

She paused.

"...is that very world."

A faint, meaningful light flickered in her eyes.

The cold air bit into Wang Chen’s skin, sharp and real.

"Although cultivation allows us to glimpse the truth of the world," she continued, "it is also the root of inequality. Power divides. Strength creates hierarchy."

"That is why, even though the Eternal Dragon of Dream stood among the strongest of his kind..."

Her lips curved faintly.

"He hated cultivation."

Wang Chen felt something click inside his mind.

The absence.

The emptiness within his mind.

No wonder.

No wonder my cultivation is gone...

The realization settled like frost over bone.

Mo Huyan allowed a brief silence to stretch between them before speaking again.

"All creatures within the Dream of the Eternal Dragon, as the name implies, are eternal and undying."

Her voice was calm.

"They enjoy true freedom. No fear of death. No suppression by strength. No slaughter by the powerful."

The frozen desert seemed to breathe with quiet vitality beneath the surface.

"Here, life does not end."

"Here, no one rules through force."

"Here, existence simply... continues."

"Hmm..."

A faint frown appeared on Wang Chen’s face.

The wind tugged lightly at his sleeves as he raised his arm, staring at it with a slight scowl. The skin looked normal. The cold stung when the air brushed against it.

He flexed his fingers slowly.

If I’m eternal and undying...

Then what exactly is the challenge?