Chương 346: Changes (III)

Darkness swelled around him as he stepped out onto the lake, his feet glancing against the unmoving water as he made his stride away from the shore. The moon above was crescent, fading in and out against the carpet of ashen clouds, as he came to a stop about a hundred yards or so away from the shore. Long Tao could have broken through into the Revolving Core Realm months ago. No, he was fairly confident he could have done even before that if he didn't care at all about the quality of the breakthrough. But...

this was the first true crossroads. While Foundation Establishment and Spirit Manifestation were impressively important in building the solid core, the Revolving Core Realm was the first grand decider of the final step one could take. In his past life, Long Tao ended up with a Heavenly Core--immensely rare, especially for these parts of the world, but not perfect. He did make up for the shortcomings later on, but this one kept haunting him until the day he died.

The 'imperfect' core meant that he was bound by the Heavenly Laws, even if he could resist them. It meant that the pricks of the Heavenly Court would mandate Dao, and he couldn't remove himself from that influence. That was why, in this life, he knew that it was either Eternal Core... or it was death. He spent the past few months preparing, trying to ascertain without a shadow of a doubt that he'd be capable of forging the Eternal Core, but there was no certainty there.

He was going to break through before they were to enter the Phoenix Realm, but with his Master's unusual insistence... he decided to trust the man. He all but laughed at the naivete of his mind but didn't decide against it, ultimately. Settling down, he took a deep breath and curled his legs into a lotus position, hovering a few inches above water. Core was precisely that--the core of one's entire existence.

Even reaching the Imperial Realm would not change that, as it would still remain a solitary star within the dantian that all other things orbited. He first began the cycle of the universe; unlike most other cultivation methods, the one he was using--Eternal Voidfiend Sutra--did not have a particular pattern. What it did, however, was reforge all meridians in the body to be a 'single pathway'--it did so by reconstructing not just the meridians, but also the bones, the flesh, the muscles...

whatever was in the way of it. It was grueling, in more ways than one, yet this tattered thing that he found haphazardly tossed aside in one of the ancient tombs was by far the most complex and brilliant method he'd ever encountered in his countless years of living. More than that, however, there was nothing else like it. The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

It broke away from all principles of cultivation, shunning the notions of 'union' and 'unity'; it did not seek to forge the so-called 'Tri-Body Union of Mind, Heart, and Soul', but to make of them independent centers of creation so that destroying one would do no harm to the other two. To create a core, he had to coalesce every single bit of Qi that he had in his dantian and flood his meridians with it--flood until there was no more room.

At that precise moment, he then had to slam it all directly into his dantian, shattering it and remaking it dozens, if not hundreds of times, using the remnants of the pain as the foundational blocks of the core. Qi began to swell around him into a whirlpool of visible energy, surging in a spiral before gushing into him. As the floodgates began to open and Qi began to burst through, he felt his entire body ache--it started with dull, numbing pain, but, before long, it was deeply acute.

His meridians began to stretch beyond their ordinary capabilities, holding far more Qi than they were capable of, but he had to endure it forcibly until he'd drained his dantian of every last bit of Qi. Long Tao's expression turned grave, beads of sweat trickling down his forehead as his entire body reddened; he held his breath as he watched the last few bits of Qi pour into his meridians. They'd swelled to nearly twice their original size, cracks visibly appearing along their walls, but they didn't break.

He held steady for a moment longer before accelerating them like a tsunami, shattering his dantian with an immense output of Qi. The shards, like glass, began to scatter, but he quickly coalesced them, reforming the dantian and using the surplus to start condensing his core. Again! He shouted in his mind, enduring the pain. It was deeply blinding, but compared to so many other things in his life... it wasn't much.

As there was less Qi remaining, having used some of it to start coalescing the core, the sheer pressure on his meridians lessened somewhat. However, if he didn't decrease it further, they'd still crack and shatter. With another cycle, the dantian shattered and was remade in the span of just a few seconds, with Long Tao not allowing a single iota of Qi to leak out. With the second cycle, his core grew ever so slightly, the faint sheen of star-like colors slowly beginning to scatter through its glimmering surface.

Cycle after cycle, pain and pressure began to slowly fade away. There was still bruising bleeding onto his skin, with dozens, if not hundreds, of blood vessels having ruptured as they were pressed into by the meridians. As the pain subsided, coalescing the core became both easier and harder--he could take it a bit more slowly, but he also had to be all that much more careful and deliberate. Any mistake could become a flaw that he would never be able to undo.

His anxiety, however much he wanted to pretend wasn't there at all, quickly began to fade when he saw the sculpted form of the Core--it definitely wasn't a Heavenly Core. There wasn't Dao hanging above it like a warden in a prison. It was alone, suffused with the imagery of the cosmos, ever-changing and moving, full of Qi. His lips began to curl into a faint smile before suddenly freezing; something was wrong.

Though all Qi he had was spent in forming the core, there was something distinctly not his bubbling within his dantian. Fear began to seep in that the Heavens had discovered him, and though he desperately tried to reject the strange energy, it was to no avail.

Just as he thought he'd have to run away as far as possible, the utterly insane thing happened: a second core appeared, practically identical to the first, from literal nowhere, sitting next to the original like a twin that came into the story through a twist nobody saw coming.