“Father, what is this really for?” Ao Jiayin looked at her own father curiously, waiting for his answer.
Ao Zhan lowered his hand from his chest and rubbed his palms together. “Jiayin, my precious, this isn’t a fun toy. How about Father exchanges it for something else?”
The little dragon cub Jiayin shook her head. “No! The moment I saw it, I loved it. I love its color—it matches me perfectly!” The truth was, she was a light golden five-clawed golden dragon herself, and this pearl looked just like her own dragon orb.
Ao Zhan sighed helplessly. “Since you like it, Father will give it to you. But you cannot play with it in your hands—you must keep it safely stored away. This is the Realm-Breaking Pearl, a supreme treasure of the celestial realm. There are only three in the entire celestial realm: one is with the Heavenly Emperor at Mount Spirit, and one is in the Western Buddhist Domain. Your father only obtained this one through a stroke of fate. You absolutely cannot lose it or toss it aside carelessly…”
Ao Jiayin turned the pearl over in her hands and looked at it from all sides, not seeing what made it so precious. “So what does it do?”
“With this pearl, you can break through the barriers of time and space and travel between the Three Thousand Worlds,” Ao Zhan explained, educating his little cub.
Ao Jiayin’s eyes lit up. “Wow! So I can go to lots of worlds and play, right? Wherever I want to go!”
Ao Zhan shook his head. “Activating this pearl requires energy, and the main source of that energy is merit. You need to collect a world’s worth of merit to travel through time and space just once. And collecting a world’s worth of merit is not so easy. At the very least, you must save ten thousand people, or benefit ten thousand people, to gather enough energy for a single crossing.”
Ao Jiayin listened, completely confused. She understood “saving ten thousand people”—that meant saving others’ lives. But what did “benefiting ten thousand people” mean?
Ao Zhan saw that she didn’t understand and had to explain it to her. “It means you need to save ten thousand lives—directly or indirectly—and receive their merit. Also, you can let tens of thousands of people receive your kindness, whether in food, clothing, shelter, or transportation. As long as they feel grateful to you and sincerely thank you, that can also generate merit. Ah, why am I explaining all this to you in such detail? You can’t go anyway. To travel between worlds, you have to be an adult. Someone like you, who can’t do anything—if you went, you’d just starve to death!”
Ao Jiayin puffed out her cheeks and glared at her father angrily. “I am not someone who can’t do anything! I can already recognize characters, and I can cultivate! Mother has praised me!”
Ao Zhan looked at her sideways, his face full of disbelief. “You say you can recognize characters? Then write your father’s name, and write your own name as well.”
“Um…” The little dragon cub pursed her lips and poked her fingers together. “Our family name is too hard to write! I can write my cousin’s name!”
Ao Zhan let out a derisive snort. “Yes, I heard from your cousin. Your cousin’s name is Feng Tian. You wrote ‘Feng Gan’!”
The little dragon cub continued to make excuses. “But they sound almost the same! If they look alike and sound alike, of course it’s easy to get them mixed up…”
“Oh, fine! I’m not talking to Father anymore. I’m going back.” With that, she trotted off on her short little legs and returned to her own palace.
Jiayin’s palace was called Qingyun Palace, named by her grandfather, the king of the Phoenix Clan. The furnishings inside could be described as magnificent, all collected by people from the Phoenix Clan and the North Sea Dragon Palace.
Jiayin sat down on the floor covered with snow-cloud spirit wool felt and carefully studied the Realm-Breaking Pearl in her hands. She tried probing it with her spiritual soul power and discovered a small space inside. In the very center stood a glowing door, with many small characters carved on it. Most of them she didn’t recognize (◔_◔).
“This space is way too small, isn’t it? It’s not even as big as my own space. I could barely fit any shiny things in here before it’s full…” She muttered softly.
Divine beasts like dragons and phoenixes all carried spaces within their bodies. Those spaces would also expand as they grew. For a little dragon cub like Jiayin, in her early childhood, her internal space was only a hundred meters in length and width. For an adult dragon like her father, thousands of years old, his internal space had already become a small world of its own…