He woke up from an unusually deep sleep. That was strange since he should have been in an extremely dangerous situation last he checked. He wasn't sure what that situation was. He felt as if there were issues with his memories. Maybe he died. Maybe he got resurrected again.
But it didn't feel like the usual resurrection. But he felt as if he was alive. But he couldn't detect anything with his spiritual energy. But he could feel that he was lying on the ground. He could feel the wind blowing. He could feel something crushing his leg.
The sky was also strangely blue. The main star was yellow.
The sky should be purple last he checked. The main star should have been green.
Maybe he was in another world. But he knew none who lived in a world with such a sky and star. Maybe this world belongs to an enemy.
The air in this place felt uncomfortable to his nose. There was a weird energy in the air seemed to be supressing him. His body felt unusually heavy and once again, his spiritual energy kept telling him that everything he was sensing didn't exist.
But his instincts told him that it was real.
It reminded him of the Illathea prison. A real illusion. But it felt different. Illathea felt whole. There weren't any contradictions between his basic senses and his spiritual energy. There wasn't any suppression. There was a lot more suffering. It felt a lot more inescapable.
This place was weird, but it felt frail. Like he could destroy it after a few days' worth of effort. The tale of him escaping from Illathea after only a couple months of effort was widespread. None of his enemies would bother locking him up in a much frailer space, especially since his cultivation had more than doubled after Illathea. Unless the enemy was extremely desperate or dumb.
He thought of desperate enemies as dangerous, so he had made sure to kill them all. He didn't know of any dumb enemy, at least none capable enough to capture him.
It was possible that this was only a temporary containment until the enemy could move him to a much more secure location.
But he currently didn't feel as if he was a prisoner. He merely felt lost. So, the first step would be to figure out where the heck he is and which God oversees the local region, then have him/her help him get back to the old man's turf.
Having decided to now act, he sat up from his star position and trained his eyes on the rock comfortably crushing his leg, he could even see blood trickling out steadily. That was strange.
At his cultivation he could destroy a planet with a slap and a good kick would snuff out the typical star. It would take a weirdly heavy rock to hurt him. And the rock felt heavy, he couldn't flick it away. It really wasn't that big a problem since it wouldn't take much to destroy the rock and heal his leg. And that's what he immediately tried to do.
He failed.
He tried again. This time he paid close attention as he tried to gather his qi…
He couldn't gather his qi.
This confused him. He didn't feel as if his cultivation had been sealed, his body felt as if it was brimming with qi, but he couldn't use any. He tried to send his senses into his body to see what is happening…
It didn't work.
At this point his logic was telling him that something is off, but his instincts kept feeding him information about the state of his body, they kept saying everything is more or less as it should be. That was a particularly annoying contradiction. One must not look down on the instincts of a cultivator who was a single step away from the peak of the Fourth Order. The Fifth Order was the ranks of Progenitor Gods. He had depended on those instincts to reach a mere two steps away from those hallowed beings.
At this moment, he felt as if those instincts were wrong.
He no longer felt as relaxed as he previously was a moment ago.
He no longer looked down on that injured leg, without the ability to utilize his qi it could pose a problem. The first thing he did was to constrict the blood vessels around the injuries. After making sure he did it properly, he bent forward and tried to push the rock of his leg. Although he could move it slightly, he felt it was weirdly heavy.
Optimistic hypothesis: everything in this world was very heavy. He was temporarily weakened for some unknown reason.
Pessimistic hypothesis: he had lost a major portion of his physical abilities or worse, his cultivation had regressed, a lot. His senses were messed up and the vast cultivation they were detecting was a mere phantom.
He was of the thought that pessimism was preferable, but he ignored that thought as he leaned back and pulled back his other leg. He carefully aimed at a relatively flat area that was sloped in slightly and kicked hard. The rock rolled back, and he quickly pulled his leg out before the rock rolled back.
With all his appendages free, he immediately got to scanning his surroundings from a higher viewpoint. He was in some kind of ruin. The floor he previously laid on had a formation circle carved into it. Strangely enough, he, the Head Scholar of the Library, couldn't understand any of the runes. The scholar in him wanted to research the runes and the formation that consists of them, but he reigned in his curiosity and continued surveying his surroundings.
Cracked or missing walls and floor, fallen pillars and towers, pieces of the roof lying here and there and various debris thrown everywhere. He felt happy that none of the larger pieces found themselves anywhere near his vicinity, with the weird state his body was in, that would have killed him.
There was some dry blood two or so meters away from where he was, but it wasn't much. The murals on the walls were damaged but discernible. Studying the structures and murals, he couldn't tell which culture they belonged two. He had studied every recorded civilization that existed in the past million years within the old man's turf and the neighbouring territories, so the civilization that built these structures was unknown or from a faraway territory. But the damage seemed fairly recent, maybe whoever put him here did so a bit roughly. Aside from the blood and various plant materials strewn about, he couldn't see any sign of life in this place.
Satisfied with his preliminary investigation he turned his attention back to the formation. The floor was damaged so some runes were also damaged but that couldn't stop him from trying to memorize them. He couldn't place the formation school they used so he would have to memorize everything exactly as it is. He went to one half of the formation, careful when walking on his injured leg, and cleared the debris there.
He picked up one of the larger rocks and tried to move it out of the formation. But when his foot moved out of the bounds of the formation, he passed out.