Beastmaster of the Ages

Each little dot probably represented a person, and some smaller beast symbols around it probably represented lifebound beasts. However, there were also some other symbols that were much larger humanoids. Those probably represented totems. Did those people all have totems and lifebound beasts around them?

Tianming looked at all the other black dots, and there were always totems and lifebound beasts nearby. Only a few were directly represented with projections, but one could still tell the difference between lifebound beast and totem symbols.

"What does this mean? Did the people marked here also have lifebound beasts and totems like I do?" Tianming wondered. All of a sudden, he saw a figure that utterly shocked him in the corner of that painting.

"This... this is?!" He was so stunned he didn't know what to make of it. Based on that icon's size, it depicted a divine astralship. While the ink painting could only display things in black and white, the details were faithfully recreated. The icon was actually rather familiar to him and had nine dragon heads. "Isn't this the Ninedragon Imperial Tomb? Nobody knows where the Ninedragon Emperor managed to obtain it from, but it's said to have come from the depths of the astralscape of order...."

Tianming had left the sun and gone to Violetglory, and even experienced the Astraldome in the wondersky realm, so he knew that nobody would be able to travel far through the astralscape without a divine astralship. So how could anyone even get a divine astralship from somewhere in the astralscape of order? It simply didn't make sense! Without the Divine Sun Palace, even the sun emperor would be left stranded in Orderia. There was little doubt that the icon represented Tianming's Ninedragon Imperial Tomb; perhaps this was a record of its origins.

"The circle at the center of the painting looks like a flaming nova source world. Even if it isn’t the sun, it's really similar to it." His feelings were all over the place as he pondered the implications. He felt like some fundamental truth was hidden within the painting, but this was all he could see. "I wonder what other secrets this painting has?" Using his left hand, he kept wiping dust off the painting until all of it was gone.

"Come out!" As he gazed at the painting, something odd happened without warning. The black circle looked like it had been ignited and seemed like it was burning. The monochrome ink painting suddenly turned colorful, and the images even started moving! The star at the center burned brightly as the lifebound beasts, totems, and people moved about on it. There were even quite a number of divine astralships flying across it. Tianming's face was illuminated by the flames coming from the star as the painting grew larger and larger before his eyes.

His caelum was completely sucked into the painting, which seemed to have unfolded into a world as real as the one outside. He soared along a flaming pathway as the view ahead grew brighter and brighter. All of a sudden, his feet left the ground and he appeared in the void of the astralscape.

"Huh?!" A shocking sight greeted his eyes. There was a gigantic ball of gold and red right before him, a flaming star! "Is this... Orderia?" Instinct told him they were one and the same, but there were some details that differed. This world seemed to burn even more brightly and wildly. There was even a formless energy that dragged him toward it. It felt like he was being thrown into flaming manna, powerless to resist. The shock he felt when he entered was only the start; there was more to come.

"How could this be?!" He just noticed that he was much further from the world than he had imagined. The closer he got to the world, the larger it seemed—its sheer size had completely messed up his sense of scale and distance. "Even the centermost Skyway Monostar of the Mysterium Cluster is only two hundred times the size of the sun, and that's a supergiant star! A deific-class world!"

The world that he was pulled toward seemed far larger than two hundred solar masses, yet somehow it visually resembled the sun, being surrounded by an endless sea of flame and stretching endlessly. It was filled with dense, vigorous nova source, instilling in him the fear of a super sun.

He had imagined how Skyway Monostar must look and was filled with awe back then, but the shock he felt when his eyes beheld the super sun was second only to how he felt when he saw the gigantic black and gold imperial star within the gate inside the Grand-Orient Sword. That imperial star seemed illusory, whereas this super sun looked as if it was right in front of his eyes. The mere crackling of the moving flames on its surface shook him to the bone. And he was but a mere spectator! The painting itself was pulling his caelum to orbit the super sun, striking in him a never-before-felt awe of the flaming star.

"Is that an astralguard formation?" He saw a reddish gold barrier surrounding that super sun. Beyond it were flames and countless people and lifebound beasts. There seemed to be armies of billions. Had his caelum been sucked in a moment later, he would be hearing Yin Chen describe the very same formation in the sky above them now.

"What’s that?!" Countless people appeared within the formation. Tianming was utterly shocked by how clear the image was, but the people seemed to just pass right through him. There was nothing he could do but observe. They were dressed in a very ancient fashion, yet another clue that hinted at this being a record of ancient antiquity, but that wasn't the most shocking part. Instead, Tianming stared wide-eyed at these people who rode gigantic lifebound beasts, yet also had many totems manifesting from their bodies.

"These are... tens of thousands of experimental subjects?" The people that had both lifebound beasts and totems numbered more than a hundred thousand. They also seemed really powerful, with quite a few of them being sovereign-level figures. There was no way people of that level would have lifebound beasts bound with blood pacts. The strongest person he knew to do so was the dreamless celestial emperor.

Tianming, Qingyu, and Li Wudi were related to the sun emperor solely because of their status as 'test subjects'. Little did he know that there were so many others like them over here.