The Day of Ascension
One and a half million kilometers from Earth. Between the sun and the planet.
The gravitational equilibrium of two celestial bodies — Lagrange Point L1.
Behind them, the sun blazed with searing brilliance. Ahead, far across the black vacuum, Earth glowed a soft and distant blue.
Long before the Immortal Dao Calendar had ever begun, this place had been home to humanity's eyes turned skyward.
Astronomical telescopes, each one a monument to the countless attempts and failures by which mankind had learned to look properly upon the vast galaxy and the cosmos beyond. Those instruments had long since faded into history, forgotten — yet their purpose and their spirit endured.
Now it was no longer machines that gazed upon the universe. It was humanity itself.
The people who had once only watched the stars now traveled among them.
And so the Ascension Ground stood as the launching platform by which mankind would raise itself into godhood — a place that forged both the eyes that looked toward the cosmos and the weapons that would conquer it.
Upon a square metal plate ten thousand kilometers on each side, those destined to ascend as the next generation of Half-Gods sat in meditation, steadying their minds.
Their number was precisely ten thousand.
Each had taken a seat a hundred kilometers from the next, waiting for the tribulation that was soon to come. These were the finest talents remaining after talent after talent had been sifted and cast aside. One in ten thousand — or odds even lower still — and they had climbed through every one of them.
There was no place here for Four Spiritual Roots or Five. Every last one of them was a prodigy of at least Three Spiritual Roots, each recognized for exceptional gift and temperament and granted the right to rise to the Ascension Ground.
At the center of the Ascension Ground sat a handsome young man with long black hair falling down his back, dressed in robes of deep blue-black, his eyes closed. Black spiritual energy writhed around him as though alive, threatening everything nearby.
To the west of the young man sat Eun Seolhwa, radiating a silver chill. Among them all, her talent ranked fourth.
Since ancient times, the center of the Ascension Ground had belonged to the greatest of each generation. They were arrayed by gift — the exceptional inward, the lesser toward the outer rim.
"This generation is truly outstanding. Truly excellent."
Heh-heh-heh.
An old man laughed — old even by the standards of Foundation Establishment cultivators. His back was bent, and the half-lidded eyes he could barely open settled naturally into a smiling expression.
His appearance was so wretched one might have been tempted to dismiss him. Yet not a single Foundation Establishment cultivator present could afford to ignore him. On the contrary, they regarded the chuckling old man with something close to reverence.
"Indeed, Chief. This one is exceptional. There are fully nine Golden Core prodigies among them…"
"Is that so? And what of a few Golden Core prodigies? The boy at the center is what matters. He is the only one with even the faintest chance of seeing beyond."
An ancient monster who had survived since the End Era of 2030 AD. He had achieved the Golden Core and could have lived a thousand years more — yet by his own will he had abandoned further cultivation to devote himself to the geniuses of later ages. A madman, perhaps.
And for that very reason, a man worthy of respect and awe. Even arrogant young prodigies and the sect masters of Golden Core orders bowed their heads to him first.
They knew what it cost a cultivator to renounce their own realm.
"Since my own era… finding even a single genius who might surpass the Golden Core has been my sole purpose."
Pietro Pasini, Chief of the Ascension Management Bureau under the Spiritual Resources Management Department, pressed his palms together in a solemn gesture and murmured with quiet reverence. Behind him, a thousand Foundation Establishment cultivators standing in ranks bowed their heads as one. They looked for all the world like monastics offering prayer to a god.
"Nascent Soul… I know well how empty and hollow that peak can be. I have watched far too many geniuses challenge it. Not one of them ever crossed that wall."
There had been a peerless engineer whose brilliance had accelerated human civilization by three centuries. There had been a peerless observer who gazed upon a fragment of cosmic truth and went mad.
There had been a peerless explorer who unraveled the secrets of space and expanded humanity's dominion to the stars. There had been a heaven-defying talent who overcame the trickery of time itself and discovered a path into the past.
And every last one of them had failed to surpass Nascent Soul, crumbling away as nothing more than Golden Cores.
The cultivator's road was so long and so treacherous that no genius, however gifted, could be certain of reaching any given height. Fate and timing. Effort and talent. Dao-heart and temperament. Only when every piece fell into place could a human being, by the barest of margins, transcend themselves and become a god.
The whisper-soft resonance rode the vacuum of space and reached every cultivator upon the Ascension Ground.
A low thrum answered him.
When Pietro's declaration ended, a brief silence fell. The amber radiance of the sun, wrapped in its Dyson Sphere, washed over them. The lunar surface base, bristling with every manner of advanced weaponry, trained its aim upon the Ascension Ground.
Ten billion cultivators on Earth fixed their attention upon those who sat there. Across the whole of humanity beyond the solar system, breath was held as the Ascension Ground was broadcast live.
In the East. In spirit-stone mines. In corporate training chambers. In pill refineries. While crushing the skulls of aliens. While gathering spirit herbs. And for some, while sprawled across a sofa…
The first of January. Every year.
Year 470 of the Immortal Dao Calendar.
One of humanity's greatest festivals — Ascension Day — had begun.
A brilliant light erupted from the outermost edge of the Ascension Ground. The radiance gathered gradually toward the center, growing ever brighter. Ten thousand cultivators drew up their spiritual power at once, attempting their breakthrough as one.
A heavy boom rolled out, and the Ascension Ground shuddered. The light they unleashed was so vast it could be seen with the naked eye from Earth and the moon.
For an ordinary Qi Refinement cultivator, the success rate of Foundation Establishment was one-tenth of one percent. But every cultivator here had been filtered and filtered again.
Eun Seolhwa's brow tightened.
The process of Foundation Establishment divided roughly into three stages. First, one absorbed Dao Qi — the energy aligned with one's own path — and tempered the mind until it condensed into spiritual sense.
Next, all nine Spiritual Stars within the dantian were detonated, weaving the Dao Qi together with one's own spiritual power into Chaos Origin Qi. And if, with that Chaos Origin Qi, one raised the pillar of the Dao — Foundation Establishment was achieved.
The cultivators who had risen to the Ascension Ground could compress every one of these steps. Dao Qi was supplied by the government. Spiritual sense had long since been condensed and was wielded as freely as one's own limbs. Foundation Establishment techniques were learned in advance, and the accumulated know-how of generations of breakthroughs was committed to memory. Unlike the cultivators of ancient times, they had no need to scrape together resources and gamble their lives. Success hinged only on properly raising the pillar of the Dao.
A deep, rolling thunder gathered above the Ascension Ground as Heavenly Tribulation Clouds massed overhead.
In contrast to those who had begun Foundation Establishment from the outer rim, success arrived first at the center. It was an absolute, impassable gulf of talent. The difference between the center and the periphery was vast beyond description.
The Heavenly Dao cast its shadow across the sky.
Tribulations took many forms. The representative ones were Lightning Tribulation and Heart Demon Tribulation, and on rare occasions a Karma Tribulation would descend. But the tribulation of Foundation Establishment was only ever the lightning sent down by heaven.
Between the folds of the Heavenly Tribulation Clouds, savage bolts leapt and cracked. Even a stray fragment of residual lightning held power enough to reduce a cultivator to ash without effort. The wrath of the Heavenly Dao, aimed at those who dared challenge the heavens — at heaven-defiers — turned upon the cultivators below.
Ten thousand bolts of Lightning Tribulation crashed down upon ten thousand cultivators.
Blue lightning fell at the speed of light. For kilometers around each subject of the tribulation, the metal plate erupted into flame. And yet not a single cultivator died beneath the heavenly lightning. Anyone who would have perished from so little could never have undertaken the Sevenfold Foundation Establishment Tribulation in the first place.
Light flared. From the outer rim, cultivators who had truly achieved Foundation Establishment rose into the air, radiating brilliance. One after another they took their places in ranks behind Pietro, each of them now projecting a presence of an entirely different order.
Those at the outermost edge had endured a single strand of blue Lightning Tribulation. Moving inward, they had withstood anywhere from two to ten. Those seated near the central ten had endured a hundred strikes. The more heavenly lightning one weathered, the higher the grade of presence and radiance one released.
And so, nine thousand nine hundred and ninety of them succeeded at Foundation Establishment.
Thunder still rolled.
Even so, the Heavenly Tribulation Clouds did not disperse. As though enraged all the more that any had withstood its lightning, the mass of cloud shuddered with a heavy, sullen violence. The blue of the Lightning Tribulation gradually shifted toward violet.
An overwhelming grade of power pressed down upon the cultivators below. Violet Lightning Tribulation — capable of wounding even a Foundation Establishment cultivator — howled through the sky.
Eun Seolhwa rolled her stiff shoulders.
Weaker than what I'd heard.
Ordinary blue Lightning Tribulation could not injure her. She glanced up for a moment at the heavens that had struck hundreds of times without pause, then let the tension rise hot within her.
Violet Lightning Tribulation.
That descended solely according to how exceptional one's divine abilities and accumulated merit truly were. Lightning that took on a violet hue meant the Heavenly Dao itself had acknowledged the potential for Golden Core. From this point forward, even meeting it with her full strength, a single instant's mistake would reduce her to ash.
A violet bolt of Lightning Tribulation fell — faster than light itself.