A Cornered Rat Bites the Cat (2)
A Cornered Rat Bites the Cat (2)
I set him down at the boundary of the Blood Lotus Palace.
Using formations and talismans, I construct a temporary barrier to ensure safety so that neither demon beasts nor cultivators will notice.
"Is it finished?"
"Yes."
"Since his aptitudes are extraordinary, if he is lucky, he might be able to keep his life."
"...I hope so as well."
I have spent ten long years coming to terms with this.
Now is the time to let him go from my grasp.
'Come to think of it, I still don't know his name.'
Should I have asked him at the end?
It is a pathetic lingering attachment.
I follow Master back to the Blood Lotus Palace.
Perhaps because I have left the cave dwelling for the first time in ten years, the sect feels oddly unfamiliar today.
Not a single disciple is in sight, and human presence is eerily scarce.
Since it is such an important ceremony, did they send away all the lower-ranking disciples to eliminate variables?
'The stench of blood is thick. And why is the death aura like this?'
Have I just become needlessly sensitive because the end of my life is approaching?
Things I had never felt before begin to prickle against my skin.
Looking at Master's back, I suppress my curiosity.
Somehow, I felt that I would soon realize the cause of this recent strange phenomenon on my own.
"Palace Master, have you arrived? Have you finished all your business?"
The place where the ritual begins.
On the topmost floor of the Palace Master Castle of the Blood Lotus Palace, an elderly Vice Palace Master comes out and greets us.
"I have taken care of everything worthy of attention. Are all the elders at their positions?"
"Except for the Third Elder who was dispatched, everyone is fully prepared once he returns."
The Third Elder was dispatched?
Why am I bothered by those words for no reason?
Is it because he is one of the few ill-fated connections tied to him?
'I'm in deep, aren't I.'
An elder's position is always busy with public and private affairs.
The Third Elder being absent at this time is a coincidence.
It must be a coincidence.
'Master swore upon her Dao Heart. It makes no sense for a mere elder to break that.'
To a cultivator, the Dao Heart is a pledge regarding their Great Dao.
If one treats it lightly or abuses it recklessly, that cultivator will crumble before long.
Master clearly said, 'I will not inflict any harm until this person leaves the outside of the Blood Lotus Palace—'
"Ryeon-ah, are you nervous? You have been quiet for a while."
"...I am sorry."
"No, I too am so thrilled that I don't know what to do with myself. It is entirely understandable."
Master patted my shoulder and pointed to where I needed to go.
At the center and core of the ceremony, atop an altar strewn with all kinds of unknown patterns and pool of blood, lay two coffins.
"You've been here many times during inspection hours, so you know well what to do, right? Let us begin now."
"...Understood."
Inspection: the time to adjust the synchronization rate between the First Ancestor and me to the absolute limit.
Though called an inspection, every time I do it, I feel an agony as if my soul is being torn apart.
Through those long years of inspections, the First Ancestor and I have become almost indistinguishable from the same person.
If only the last piece—the ego—matches, she will awaken from her long slumber.
'The subject of that ego won't be me.'
It was something I had prepared for. After all, I was born for this.
Dragging my heavy legs, I ascend the altar.
I see the coffin I will lie in and the coffin that has already found its master.
A woman terrifyingly resembling me was sleeping inside the coffin.
Even though it was a soulless body, perhaps because she was once a Half-Immortal at the pinnacle of the Dao Entry Realm?
From her faintly emanating aura alone, it possessed a pressure that would leave a Foundation Establishment cultivator unable to even breathe.
At least because she and I were similar, there were no constraints on my movements, but if he had been in this place, he probably would have been crushed to death by that momentum.
'Paradoxically speaking, it means the body of the Dao Entry Realm has deteriorated to the point of barely pressuring a mere Foundation Establishment cultivator.'
The average lifespan of a human born in the Dao Entry Realm is ten thousand to twenty thousand years.
Unless one possesses special cultivation methods, bloodlines, or consumes lifespan pills, one cannot escape the rust of time.
'This body should have returned to the dust long ago.'
Yet the Blood Lotus Palace had clung onto it for a staggering ten thousand years.
That madness and loyalty toward the First Ancestor were truly baffling.
'For demonic cultivators who care for nothing but themselves to be this devoted... is there really some hidden backstory I don't know about?'
Doubts I wouldn't normally entertain suddenly surge up.
Is this too a defense mechanism to turn away from the moment of death?
"Are you ready?"
"Yes, thank you for everything until now, Master."
"I shall not forget you. My first and last disciple."
— Blood Lotus Reincarnation Grand Ceremony, activate formation!!!
With the order of the Faceless One as the last thing I heard, I closed my eyes inside the coffin where I was born.
And then, my spirit rapidly expanded, beginning to look down from the sky.
'This is...?'
An unexpected situation; as if I had become an omnipotent immortal, the entirety of the Blood Lotus Palace came into my view.
And then, I faced the true madness of the Blood Lotus Palace.
Mangnyeonggye is scarce in spiritual energy.
Mangnyeonggye is a realm where lowest-grade spirit stones, which would be treated as trash in other realms, are traded as legitimate currency.
Then, how does one supply spiritual energy in Mangnyeonggye?
Finding a spiritual vein rich in spiritual energy would be best, but such things have long since dried up or been destroyed.
The easiest way is, as expected, extracting it from living beings.
Every living being has spiritual energy. Even if it is a worthless mortal.
What about cultivators? To the demonic path, all cultivators are potential spirit elixir.
They possess spiritual energy far richer and more refined than mortals.
'Ah...'
In formations, there are tools called formation flags and formation stones.
These tools, which add or supplement spiritual energy while providing stability and assistance, are essential items that any formation master would unconditionally keep one or two of.
In a ceremony like this, where the sect hangs its life and death, formation flags and formation stones are indispensable tools.
Yet, they were spread out on an impossibly staggering scale.
The countless pavilions of the Blood Lotus Palace took on the role of formation flags.
The formation stones were replaced by those originally deployed to protect the sect.
All of them settled into place in harmony and activated.
Tremendous amounts of spiritual energy were swirling around them.
The storm of spiritual energy was utterly dazzling.
However, if one knew where they were coming from, one could never smile.
Beneath the revealed realities of the formation flags and formation stones.
An uncountable number of corpses was piled high throughout that underground.
Regardless of age, regardless of whether they were mortals or cultivators.
A sea of corpses—a Corpse Sea—was laid across the Blood Lotus Palace.
All the spiritual energy possessed by the corpses was sucked toward the formation stones and formation flags.
As the formation gradually activated, the speed accelerated.
However, none of that mattered.
I had scoffed at the reserve power of a sect that prepared for ten thousand years.
'Ugh!'
Even though I am only a mind, nausea surges.
No matter how much of a cultivator walking the demonic path one might be, is this something that must be carried out at the sacrifice of this many lives?
Did I really grow up born in a place like this, and let him live in the Blood Lotus Palace?!
'Ahhhhhh!!!'
My once whole spirit crumbles starting from the toes.
I didn't want to stay in such a terrible place for even a moment longer.
'W-Where is he?'
But, right before breaking down completely like this.
I turned my gaze to search for him.
If I could just see him leave peacefully——
'The Palace Master is indeed overflowing with mercy.'
The Third Elder, who was said to be absent, stood right in front of the barrier that had been set up.
It was a lie. The Faceless One, that bastard worth chewing to pieces, lied to me.
'He bypassed the Dao Heart oath like that?!'
Does such wordplay really work? No, I was the foolish one.
There was no way that paranoid Palace Master would permit a trivial variable.
'Ahhhhhh!!!'
Why! Why! Why! Why can't I choose even my own end as I wish!
Just once would have been enough! I did my best for the sect!
If only despair ended with this.
But the world did not grant even that.
A day passed, and as he woke up and the barrier disappeared, the Third Elder moved without delay.
'Try it, you fucking bastard.'
Even with his limbs severed, he was valiant.
Still, in those clear eyes, there was no fear whatsoever.
Rather, a resolute determination could be read in his gaze.
However, reality was cruel.
The Third Elder did not kill him right away, but tortured him as if playing with him.
The torture committed in earnest by a Core Formation Master boasted a cruelty in a whole different dimension than even the sea of corpses.
I wanted to gouge out my eyes and plug my ears, but to me, possessing only a living spirit, even that was not allowed.
How much time passed?
Around the time I became devastated watching him get horribly broken down, the Third Elder, fed up with him not letting out a single scream to the very end, picked him up and moved.
He was discarded beneath one of the innumerable formation stones.
Slowly, his spiritual energy was being drained.
I laughed.
I laughed like mad.
Tears of blood flowed from my eyes.
My spirit form was dyed in the color of blood.
— I'll kill them.
— Even if I must sell my soul to a demon, I'll kill them.
It is a vow. Even if it is a desire that cannot be fulfilled in this life.
In the next life, and even in the life after that next life, I will not forget this pain and remember it forever.
"Huhut. Now you finally look a bit like a cultivator."
An unfamiliar voice echoes.
It's the opposite. It is an incomparably familiar voice.
Because the owner of that voice is me.
'Who are you?'
"Do you ask knowing the answer? Or are you confirming?"
'No. It doesn't matter.'
If I can vent this seething bloodlust, what wouldn't I do?
"I like that determination. Yes, that's what makes you 'me'."
Another 'me' burrows into my mind.
My gaze and 'my' gaze overlap as we look down at him.
"Do you want to save your beloved?"
'I do.'
"Good. I want that too."
Toward him, who is giving up even his soul beyond the spiritual energy in his dantian, we reach out our hands.
Protected by a certain art, his soul flowed down along the jingimaek.
"He too trained in a cultivation method to protect his soul in his own way, but at the Qi Condensation level, it's far from enough. If I help, he will arrive safely by our side."
'And after that...?'
"Huhut, just wait and see. Your beloved is trying to do something."
The view completely shifts centered around him.
Having regained consciousness amidst the rough flow of the jingimaek, he was trying to seize control of the qi circuits in reverse.
'It shouldn't be possible at the Qi Condensation level though?'
"What if we help him?"
'Even so, it is difficult.'
"You spent so much time together, yet you still don't know your beloved."
Tilting my head, I watched 'my' action.
"Talent is divided into just two kinds: presence or absence."
Having it, or lacking it.
And, if one possesses it...
"The talent of one who has it is never half-baked."
'I' simply handed control over the jingimaek to him.
Irresponsibly passing on a massive amount of spiritual energy large enough to sustain a small realm.
I was horrified by that action, but what followed was even more astounding.
He did not grip it tightly, but let it flow. However, he guided it. In the direction he desired.
'Don't tell me...?'
That flow was intimately familiar.
It was impossible not to know. It was what he was best at.
Us, at the center of the ceremony, as the dantian.
Everything else around us as the meridians and the body.
Defining this ceremony as a cultivator's breakthrough.
'Th-This crazy bastard!'
"Kyahahat! Witness it! That right there is the true caliber of a cultivator!"
Dantian Explosion.
He intends to blow up the world!
Except for us!