The Third Eye Clone had been deep in Divine Sage practice—running probability threads, divining fate lines, scrying possible futures—searching tirelessly for any item, location, or phenomenon that could accelerate Ankit's grasp of the Time element.
He found nothing concrete.
No ancient clock tower humming with trapped centuries.
No hourglass relic leaking sand that flowed backward.
No time-locked ruin where seconds looped eternally.
But failure was not empty.
It came wrapped in a single, cryptic vision:
A broken reflection of a never-seen-before place.
The clone had tried everything his mind could muster.
First, raw computation—his brain running faster than any supercomputer on Earth—cross-referencing every known location, myth, and anomaly from Ankit's future memories.
Nothing matched.
Then he turned outward: generated a perfect image of the vision with his power and uploaded it to online forums, with the simple question:
Has anyone seen a place like this?
He waited.
Still, he didn't stop.
He ran thousands of layered calculations—tarot spreads translated into probability matrices, hexagrams fed into chaos calculation, astrological alignments cross-checked with uncertainty models. Every symbol, every card, every alignment brought him closer… but always stopped just short of clarity.
On the other side of the world, the forum post had exploded.
More than a billion people saw it in just a few hours.
Because the post was made by Returner—the undisputed top player of Free Fire: Cultivation Era. His name alone carried weight; anything he touched became trend overnight.
The comments poured in:
"Never seen this place's"
"Don't know"
"Is it even real?"
"Is it edited?"
Doubts were loud. The place in the image: A vast, cracked plain of black stone and frozen ash stretched endlessly under a sky the color of dried blood—neither day nor night, only an eternal bruised twilight that never shifted.
Seven-colored snow drifted lazily from nowhere, each flake shimmering with impossible hues—crimson, violet, emerald, gold.
The ground was littered with the remnants of cataclysmic battles from eras long erased from history: shattered swords half-buried like broken teeth, cracked tablets weeping black ichor, the petrified husks of ancients frozen mid-scream, their expressions locked in eternal agony or defiance. Massive rifts tore through the landscape—gaping wounds in earth where leaked red blood river like a fresh cut on the skin.
Then one comment rose above the noise and silenced thousands:
"I know this place. I've seen this exact description in a novel. The description matches perfectly."
The forum ignited.
People flooded the reply thread:
"What is the novel name?"
"Why would a place description attract the attention of Returner?"
"Where did Returner get this image?"
"I'm curious"
"Me too x10000"
The novel-reading and creation trend had already become the world's top obsession.
After magic energy was detected and confirmed that humans could cultivate, cultivation novels exploded in popularity. Half the world's population began reading them—some for entertainment, most for survival.
If this novel suddenly becomes real, how do I survive? How do I seize opportunities?
Even mediocre books amassed lakhs of readers purely on the "what if" factor.
Platforms hosting these stories grew obscenely wealthy. The undisputed king? Webnovel itself—because it hosted the most complete, detailed, and addictive xianxia libraries.
So when people learned that Returner's mysterious image tied back to a novel, excitement reached fever pitch. They didn't know if the book was truly special, but the "what if" was too strong to ignore.
Then the commenter dropped the name.
The readers of that book crossed billions in a single day.
The novel was called Renegade Cultivator.
It had already been famous—steady rankings, loyal fans—but now it became supernova-level viral.
The author, stunned by the sudden flood, appeared on the same forum and posted:
"Yes, this is the same place described in my novel. The place is called the Land of Ancients… a very dangerous and brutal realm.
I don't know why you are interested in it?"
The last line was clearly aimed at Returner—the Third Eye Clone.
On the other side, the Third Eye Clone—who had been struggling with endless failed predictions—finally grew irritated enough to take a break.
He knew why he couldn't fully predict the place: it was born from his own prediction, and wanting to again predict it? I became more difficult, a self-referential loop. The more he tried to predict it, the more it resisted. His proficiency in Divine Sage was still low—he was still learning to weave karmic threads, align stars, interpret omens. He wasn't ready for something this recursive.
He opened the forum to check for replies.
He was first shocked by the sheer number of people—billions of views in hours.
Then his gaze moved to the top comments.
He read the novel name.