Chapter 34: The Divine Art of the Dream Butterfly Unfolds the Great Realm

“Do you remember that heavy snow more than a decade ago?” Ye Chen’s question sent Wu’s thoughts spiraling back to those days. Wu’s expression grew complicated—though he didn’t know the reason for Ye Chen’s inquiry, he sensed a deeper meaning. With a faint sigh, he replied, “Of course I remember.”

Wu’s mood turned somber. “That blizzard was truly devastating, almost a calamity. Thankfully, the totem warned us in advance. We worked hard to stockpile food, and with the protection of the totem within our tribe, we endured the harsh winter and barely survived.”

“I remember these lands were once dotted with many tribes, but that blizzard wiped some of them out completely.”

Ye Chen nodded. In the face of such natural disasters, human beings were simply powerless.

“The Jiu Tribe nearly vanished that year,” Ye Chen said as he weighed the bone token in his hand, running his fingers over the intricate patterns. A gentle radiance flowed over it, like a piece of carved jade, yet it possessed an extraordinary air.

Clearly, the bone token had a significant origin. Who knew from what depths of the Demon Ridge it had been acquired?

Even though Ye Chen had gleaned some information from Ebony’s memories, it was incomplete—or rather, Ebony himself didn’t know much.

“Ten years ago, the Jiu Tribe wasn’t weak, was it?” Ye Chen asked.

Wu’s suspicions deepened. “I never thought the Jiu Tribe was particularly strong, but if they’d possessed even sixty or seventy percent of their current strength back then, they would have had no trouble protecting themselves.”

“But what if the Jiu Tribe was at the very center of that disaster?” Ye Chen’s words left Wu stunned, then shocked and angry. “You can’t be suggesting the Jiu Tribe caused that blizzard, can you?”

After saying this, Wu couldn’t help but laugh at the absurdity. “That’s impossible. If the Jiu Tribe had such power, what more could be said? All the surrounding tribes would have had to bow to them and suffer their tyranny.”

“It really was the Jiu Tribe,” Ye Chen said with a faint smile. “But as you said, the tribe itself didn’t have such power. That blizzard wasn’t something they could control, but it was related to the bone token.”

“It was ten years ago that the bone token devoured the Jiu Tribe’s totem, awakened a fragment of its power, and triggered a change in the heavens, unleashing the catastrophic snowstorm.”

Wu looked at the bone token in horror, a trace of fear in his eyes.

“If it can devour totems, this bone token must be a most ominous thing,” Wu said, worry growing in his voice.

Ye Chen saw the concern in Wu’s eyes and shook his head. “There’s no need to worry too much. The bone token is in my hands now. Without enough power to activate it, it can’t do any harm.”

“But what worries me is that the secrets behind this bone token run too deep. Our Bamboo Tribe is so weak—how could we possibly withstand what’s coming?” Wu’s anxiety mounted; he felt events were spiraling toward an unpredictable fate, as if caught in a whirlpool that could not be escaped.

His murderous intent toward Ebony only deepened—this was all that man’s doing. Perhaps it would be best just to kill him.

“Don’t be hasty,” Ye Chen said quietly, though his thoughts were focused on Ebony’s memories.

Those memories were now mostly sorted out, though Ye Chen hadn’t edited them yet. Ebony’s resistance was not particularly strong; he was still unable to break free from Ye Chen’s control.

Golden streams of light rose like mist within the dream-realm, creating scenes as if the world itself was being born anew.

The dream-realm, round above and square below, was originally pieced together from fragments of dreams—a small domain, not very large.

Now, however, it was changing. At its borders, rippling lights shimmered, spreading outward in all directions.

A spirit butterfly fluttered gracefully through the sky of the dream-realm, stirring some mysterious force and guiding the realm into a wondrous transformation.

At the edges of the original dreamland, cracks in the void appeared—dark, deep fissures, from which a terrifying aura seemed to surge, as if dragons from the abyss were roaring within.

A peach tree rooted itself in the dream-realm. It shook its branches, and a rain of peach blossoms fell, painting the world in dazzling color.

The chieftain’s spirit looked on in astonishment at these changes. In this realm, his soul was solid, as if he had a physical body—he appeared far younger, restored to his prime, as though the years had left no mark, and even his weary spirit seemed refreshed.

Behind him stood a bamboo hut—crude, but serving as his resting place.

Ye Chen ignored the chieftain, fixing all his attention on the dream-realm.

“After all that effort to stabilize this dream, are you planning to overhaul it again?” Ning Taohua’s voice carried a note of curiosity. “Why go to such lengths? Or have you found a way to expand the dream-realm? Surely you’re not planning to burn up all your incense and wish-power for this?”

Though Ning Taohua claimed not to envy Ye Chen’s dream-realm, that was hardly the truth. It was, after all, an independent domain—small, but brimming with potential.

Reality and illusion are always relative, never absolute. With enough power, the line between the two could be erased. The hardest step was always the first—if you missed that critical moment at the start, all the ambition in the world would be nothing but idle fantasy.

Ning Taohua, for instance, was powerful in her own right—her true form, even battered by thunder, was beyond Ye Chen’s current comprehension. Yet even she could not open up a separate domain without paying a heavy price. Ye Chen, on the other hand, with this dream-realm, only needed to fill it with enough spiritual beings for it to transform and grow.

“Since it’s a dream-realm, it must be strengthened by dream-like means. I do have some incense-wish power, but I can’t afford to waste it here,” Ye Chen shook his head, not bothering to explain further.

In the endless void-fissures, crystalline mist exploded outward, and then a magnificent panorama unfurled.

Within that painting, mountains and forests appeared—so real that they seemed to spring from nothing in an instant.

Not only lifeless things, but people appeared as well, wild beasts roared, and ghost-faced crows swept across the sky in pursuit of prey.

The chieftain leapt up in shock. “The Jiu Tribe?”

He could not make sense of any of it.

“That’s a scene I recreated from the memories of an enemy of the Jiu Tribe,” Ye Chen replied with a soft laugh. “I’m beginning to understand the power born in my bloodline. The Dream-Butterfly is not just about illusion—everything we experience in life fades into clouds and flowing water, all just a dream, is it not?”

“With this ability, I can use others’ memories to rapidly reconstruct the worlds they contain.”

After he spoke, Ye Chen repeated the process, conjuring another panorama in the void—this one like an independent world, a star suspended above the dream-realm, with no intersection between the two.

This painting was drawn from the memories of Wu and the chieftain themselves, with the Bamboo Tribe at its heart.

The chieftain stared in disbelief—Ye Chen’s methods were truly uncanny.

“Could you not use this trick to copy endlessly?” he asked. “With enough memories, the worlds you create could become ever more real, the mountains and rivers indistinguishable from reality itself.”