novelraw Chapter 174: Success....
Chapter 174: Success....
Ye Jun laid inside the White Void, still immersed in his vast memories of two lives even after the trial ended. He had been avoiding them, or rather suppressing them unconsciously, but now the trial made him see and feel everything.
He understood the Goal of Heavenly Dao very well. Currently, his Soul was still in the forming phase and the only thing preventing it from getting assimilated with the Spiritual Realm was his realm.
Memory Trials were supposed to attack his Will, so that cracks appeared on it and his Soul got destroyed. If one’s Soul wasn’t even strong enough to face their own past, they didn’t deserve to advance according to the Heavenly Dao.
Weaver’s life represented his depression of loneliness, longing for love, and the life of identity he lived. All of that was supposed to make his Will weak and depressed, so the Spiritual Realm wins.
On the other hand, Ye Jun’s life was filled with hatred and that’s what the Heavenly Dao focused on. It showed him all those memories that built up hate in the original Ye Jun. It even showed him visions of a possible future if Ye Jun followed his hatred.
All of this so Ye Jun gave in to the delicious taste of vengeance and fell for his hatred. Once that happened, he would lose control over his Will and die a silent death.
’If I didn’t have these two lives....’
Ye Jun felt glad he hadn’t chosen the Memory Severing Technique. Having two sets of memories and experiences actually helped him resist the temptations to fall into depression, loneliness, or hatred.
The Heavenly Dao intentionally kept away the happy memories that would have strengthened his Will, like Ye Jun’s time with the Su family. Although it didn’t completely soothe Ye Jun’s hatred, it had brought some calm to it.
Likewise, there were multiple memories it didn’t show for this exact purpose.
’Still, I can’t run away from it.’
He could, but he didn’t want to. Not anymore. He had inherited this life from Ye Jun and his life now belonged to him too, along with his grudges. He had been unconsciously ignoring it because of this new life he had gotten.
Ye Jun realized that he had been unconsciously trying to forget that either of his lives existed, or rather trying to get away from them and make a new third life, completely separate from them.
In a way, he had succeeded since he was living an entirely different life than either of those. The only thing connecting him to the old Ye Jun was the Ye Clan and even that was something he had been sidelining, making excuses like he was too weak for them.
’There are so many things I could have done...yet I didn’t. How pathetic.’
Ye Jun chuckled to himself and forced himself up. He raised his head and smiled. "Don’t worry, Buddy. I’m done running away. You are me and your vengeance is my vengeance. I won’t let it ruin me like the Heavenly Dao wanted, but I will take the revenge."
He stretched his hand and declared, "However, those visions will come true. Ye Zhong will die. Everyone who humiliated you will die. The Ye Clan will cease to exist. That is my promise to you, my Oath under the Heavens."
The White Void shattered upon his proclamation and he could see a deep, thick Yellow Tribulation Lightning heading towards him. The Third Yellow Lightning.
He straightened up and faced the lightning with full determination and resolve. "I am ready for this. You made me."
The lightning struck the Ancestral Land, shaking the very foundation of it. His body began to glow yellow amidst the red patches of blood, as the lightning wreaked havoc inside his body, attacking every single last cell.
However, the real battle was happening inside the Spiritual Realm. The Heavenly Dao knew it was the last chance, so it attacked his soul with much more intensity than all previous seven combined.
It went through the layers of Will and struck his newly forming Soul, making it crumble the shape, or the lack of it.
Unimaginable pain passed through Ye Jun’s being, as he almost stumbled forward, but his Will was stronger than ever. The Heavenly Dao used the Memory Trials to destroy a being with their own past. However, it seemed to have forgotten a major thing.
Ye Jun was adaptable.
"What doesn’t break me makes me even stronger!!"
He endured the harrowing pain, forgetting everything else. He wondered if that was his doing or if the pain was so much that his Soul itself shut off other things.
Weaver’s adaptation and Ye Jun’s strange spite to survive merged together, creating a terrifying combination.
"Aghhhhh!!!!"
The lightning seemed endless, but Ye Jun’s Will was no different. It was as if he was ready to fight the Heavenly Dao even if it meant it would take eternity.
Seconds passed, minutes passed, before they turned into days, or might have been years. Ye Jun had lost the perception of time long ago, and being in a timeless place like the Spiritual Realm didn’t help either.
Finally, the yellow lightning began to subdue and got assimilated with his Soul. The assimilation made his soul bigger, denser, and more potent than ever. And he could also sense the overflowing Heavenly Insights contained within it, slowly being digested.
A small pale smile appeared on his physical body, but it looked horrifying considering the terrible state of his physique. Still, none of it mattered.
He had successfully passed the Heavenly Trials and Ascended...
Just as that thought entered his mind, he sensed changes in his surroundings. But not in the Spiritual Realm this time. No, his Soul had already finished the Soul Transformation and before long, it would stabilize and he would become a full-fledged Soul Tempering Realm cultivator.
But...what was this?
Ye Jun didn’t like the bad premonition rising within his heart, so he forced his eyes to open. It wasn’t an easy task, as blood had coated them, but he forced them open and what he saw chilled his heart.
The thunderstorm clouds above had begun to clear away, but that didn’t make him happy, not at all. Because in their place, a much more terrifying thing had begun to take place.
The sky above the Ancestral Site darkened far quicker than before. The thunderstorm clouds that had been clearing reformed within a heartbeat, denser and heavier than any storm that had come before them, and the Yellow Qi gathering within them was thicker than anything Ye Jun had felt in his life, turning into deep purple.
’A ninth?’
His blood-coated mind tried to piece it together, even as his body trembled from the aftermath of the Soul Transformation. He had endured eight Tribulations meant for his Soul, five normal and three Yellow, the Memory Trials were done and his Soul was stabilizing too. So what was this?
Then the realization struck him.
’The Yang Seed.’
His Innate Physique...He had been so focused on his Soul ascension that he had forgotten about it, but the Heavens hadn’t forgotten. They never forgot anything. The Yang Seed was a Heavenly Physique, or at least held the potential for it, and the Heavens were going to test that too, separately from his Soul.
A ninth Tribulation, targeted only at his Physique this time.
’You damned bastard!’
The cloud condensed and a purple lightning bolt fell down upon him, thicker than any of the previous Yellow Tribulations combined.
The Ancestral Site groaned beneath the strike, its ancient runes flaring with all of their power to absorb what it could, but enough still poured through to find Ye Jun.
The lightning struck his Physique alone.
It bypassed his meridians, his Dantian, his Soul, and went straight for the cellular foundation of his body. Every fiber of his Qi-Tempered Physique screamed at once as the Purple Lightning tried to unmake him, attacking what made him a body in the first place.
His left arm exploded first.
He didn’t have time to scream before the right one followed. His arms, from the shoulder down, simply ceased to exist, ash and red mist scattering in the storm-wind. Pieces of his torso went with them. His left side caved inward. His ribs cracked outward through what was left of his skin. His legs held only because the Ancestral Site’s formation grounded them; otherwise they would have gone too.
The pain was beyond pain. The pain was the dissolution of his existence as a physical thing, atom by atom, and his nerves transmitted every part of it before the nerves themselves burned away.
"AGHHHHHHH!!!"
He fell forward...what was left of him fell forward. His face hit the ground because he had no arms left to catch himself.
Ye Jun lay there with his body coming apart, the lightning still pouring down on him in a steady, cruel river, and somewhere in the middle of the dissolution his mind began to slip.
The pain was too much. His Will, which had held through eight Tribulations and two Memory Trials, was finally beginning to fray at the edges.
Just as he started to lose himself, something rose up out of the deeper part of him.
The madness from the Hunt Trial.
It came up out of his ribs like blood out of a wound, the laugh he had laughed on the red earth a thousand deaths in, the patient unkillable thing that had stopped being a cultivator and started being something that watched and waited and refused.
He wanted to survive.
He wanted to survive.