1645 A Barrier

The Ebony king had failed to continue flying a long way down and was pulled up by the multiple Saints around him. With a cultivation base in the Saint Soul realm, he had stopped being able to fly long before Alex did.

The few other saints had failed before Alex too, and only 3 could continue flying beyond the 17-kilometer point, 2 of them being his elders.

"What exactly is going on?" Alex asked once they were all standing on solid, albeit slanted ground. The air here was thin, almost nonexistent and breathing was hard, although not hard for a cultivator.

They were strong enough to last hours without breath so long as they had Qi to keep their body moving. Some cultivators were said to go on for days, but it needed practice.

"This is the most we can fly," the Ebony King said as a matter of fact, but Alex failed to see the point the man was trying to make.

"When did you learn how to fly, Your Majesty?" old Yao Ning asked him with a thoughtful look on her face.

Alex thought for a bit. If his memory was correct, it was around the time both of his masters had taken him as their disciple. 

"I was in the Bone Tempering realm, I believe," Alex answered, sending a murmur of surprise through the people. Most people weren't supposed to be able to fly until they were in the Organ-tempering realm.

"And how far could you fly at the time?" the woman asked.

"Just a meter or two off the ground, if that," Alex said. A glimmer of understanding seemed to try and peer through the back of his mind, but he needed a little more.

"And it improved as you got stronger, did it not?" the woman asked.

Alex nodded. "It did," he said.

"How much did it improve?" the woman finally asked.

Understanding poured through him and he finally realized what he had been missing. "Is there still a limit when you are a Saint?" he asked before instantly realizing that there was. He had just felt the limit.

"You're young, Your Majesty, so maybe you haven't had the time to try and find your limits," she said. "Us old folks have lived long enough to sometimes have thought if we could reach the stars. But anyone who did think of that would know that there was only so far you could fly as a Saint. We cannot leave for the star just because we want to."

Alex slowly nodded. He was surprised he didn't know that until now even though the explanation had been right there since he began cultivating. The limits of how far he could fly had been there even when he was a True realm cultivator. And yet, he had somehow forgotten about the limit as the constraints he had unknowingly set on himself made him feel as though he had no limit.

"I wonder why that is," Alex asked softly, although nobody answered him. No one knew it seemed. Either that or he had just asked these people why water was wet. It was something so obvious to these people that there was no point in asking about it.

"It's the same way if you try to make it to the edge I hear," one of the counselors said.

"We should start walking now," the Ebony King said hurriedly, catching everyone's attention. "We don't want to be late."

The path to the Peak wasn't difficult, especially because a path was already made with the thousands of people who visited the top every year. While the path was still rough, there were almost stairs in the mountain.

They weren't made there but rather were carved out of the mountain itself.

Alex and the group saw a few people on the way up, mostly weaker individuals who needed to catch their breath before they continued. The King remarked that those people should have stopped at a lower peak, but aside from that, he said nothing about them.

Alex was very much surprised at the thinness of air at this height, and at times his lungs tried to pull in air only to pull in nothing. It was an extremely weird experience.

They had been walking for nearly an hour, and even then it felt like they were still far away from reaching the peak. Alex could only just start to see the peak as the very slightly curved mountain revealed the peak to him. 

His Demon Eyes could already start picking up movements at the top, which surprisingly his spiritual sense could not. There was something… wrong with this place where spiritual sense didn't work.

Alex didn't believe it was the fault of the mountain, but rather the fault of the height in general. Whatever was making them not fly so high was also suppressing the spiritual sense. 

He knew that especially well because he could move the spiritual sense in all directions but just up. 'Just what the hell is causing such a phenomenon?' he wondered. 

He was so very curious that he had to tell Godslayer.

Godslayer had to be woken up to ask the questions. For the past year, the sword spirit had nothing to do with Alex doing nothing but visiting the various cities. Keeping the Shadow aura around him took effort even for him and sleeping was a good way to conserve that energy.

It took a moment for Alex to tell the Sword Spirit everything, and after taking it all in, the Godslayer answered.

"I don't know what exactly causes this phenomenon, but I do know that it is not only your world where this is. Every other realm from the Bloodhaven to the Divine Sanctuary, from Myriad Spirit realm to the Sky God's palace, even Sun's Talon has this phenomenon."

"It's part of… for lack of a better word, a barrier around the world that does two things at once," Godslayer said.

Alex listened intently.

"First, it is a barrier, or mabye a suppression field, that stops regular cultivators from flying outside of the world. Only when you are strong enough, usually an Immortal would you be able to leave this place and fly into space," Godslayer said.

"It stops us from leaving?" Alex asked. "So we cannot just fly away?" 

He wasn't sure, but he thought he remembered someone talking about flying away from one realm to another, only that it was difficult due to the distance. There was no mention of any such phenomenon. 

"No, you cannot. Not unless you are an Immortal," Godslayer said. "Although that doesn't mean you can't leave. If you took a boat that could fly you away or had an Immortal help you, you could still leave."

"After all, it is just stopping you to go on your own."

Alex nodded slowly. The Ebony King had been aided into flight for part of the way through. "And what is the 2nd part of the phenomenon?" he asked. He wondered if it was about the spiritual sense, but it seemed likely that it would be part of the first explanation. 

"The 2nd one…" Godslayer paused a second, seemingly thinking. "Oh right, it's so simple that you sometimes forget something is even causing it."

And then he spoke a single word.

"Atmosphere."

Alex paused in his step before quickly continuing his walk. "I'm sorry, atmosphere?" he asked.

"Yes," the sword spirit said. "The 2nd part of his phenomenon is that air sticks to one side of the world, the side that had life."

Now Alex had to stop. A few of them noticed his stop but said nothing. Yao Ning appeared next to him, but Alex quickly told her it was nothing.

"What do you mean?" he quickly asked Godslayer.

"You do know that your world is just a large chunk of floating rock where only one side, the flat side had an atmosphere, right?" the sword spirit asked.

Alex thought for a bit and nodded. He knew that, didn't he? But why was this being considered a phenomenon? Where else would the atmosphere be if not the side with life?

Thinking along the vein, he realized that while he knew that to be the case, he never knew why. To him, there being atmosphere on the this side was his version of water being wet.

It just was. 

But now that he questioned himself why, he started to see that it was weird.

"The atmosphere stops at the edge of every world, like trapped in a bubble atop the floating rock," Godslayer said loudly in his mind before an almost whisper trickled behind it. "Why do I know that?"

Alex wanted to think about why Godslayer was questioning himself, but another part of what he had said caught his attention. His head jerked to the right toward one of the counselors who had said something that he had ignored previously.

"Lord Jian, it was you who said something about not being able to fly near the edge, right?" he asked. "Did you mean the edges of this world?"

"Oh yes, Your Majesty," the man quickly answered. "I've not tried it for myself, but I've read records of those who tried to reach the edge in the east and they describe an almost similar thing happening where they cannot fly close to it. It was almost as if their Qi failed them."

"But their boat could take them?" Alex asked.

"I don't know. They never went to the edge itself," the man said. "They were afraid of falling into the void."

Alex thanked the man and returned to his thoughts.

So, it wasn't because he was flying too high that he wasn't able to fly any longer. It was because he was reaching close to this figurative barrier that lay across the world.