Cooked.
This has been the verdict ringing inside my mind.
…
I shook my head as I opened the hotel room. There, Kiana is meditating. For ten days, she focused on raising her realm. Her realm rose visibly with the spiritual milk and my Gift of Tao.
As expected, the upgraded Gift of Tao cut off half of her needed time. The progress of my breakthrough is included on that. It went from two months to less than one month. That computation includes the spiritual milk.
We had to book an entire month to the AirBnB equivalent of this Earth. Kiana does not come out except for eating. She chose to stay in Shenzhou City for a month. She even postponed her search for Siegfried.
Kiana made another surprising argument at that time.
Once she's stronger, it will be easier to find her old man… or so she says.
I complied. In the meantime, I spent time cultivating and learning about forbidden techniques.
That's right.
They are the techniques that, at the cost of overdrawing yourself, grants you unprecedented power. I chose not the strongest, but the one with the best cost-effect ratio.
[Nine Lives Burning Samsara Art] is a forbidden technique that burns lifespan in exchange of power. The more lifespan consumed, the greater the power gained. It essentially uses lifespan as a fuel to bring one's "potential self". It is the highest level lifespan burning technique involving time.
A Foundation Establishment might have the power of a Golden Core; a more talented Foundation Establishment might reach the Nascent Soul Realm.
Its final level talks about burning nine lives' worth of lifespan, wiping out one's existence from the past, present, and future.
My fight with Parvati spawned that need. Well, not that final level. Just the first level will do.
Everything's fine up to the templars. They mostly do physical attacks. Their variants can spew out elemental attacks.
They don't have Dao Rhymes.
That's the crucial point. As long as they do not have Dao Rhymes, I can fight dozens of them. Everything changes with emperor-classes. Parvati possessed one.
Thankfully, they have a flaw.
A standard Dao Rhyme cannot be affected by Foundation Establishment attacks… Yet I did. It showed that they are not sitting at the Purple Mansion Realm, which I feared.
If I can describe them…
They are fake cultivators.
The ones with unstable foundation, hastily done cultivation, usage of forbidden techniques...
Parvati is a fake Purple Mansion Realm.
I struck Parvati with a physical attack first. That's with the help of twenty minutes' worth of momentum from [Cloud Seeking Steps]. That physical blow should be at the Late Stage of Foundation Establishment.
Unfortunately, Parvati can turn into an elemental state. It avoided death by changing from its physical form. Ultimately, the [Daluo Sword Art] that temporarily pushed my sword cultivation to the third realm dealt with it.
Parvati's vulnerability showed its weakness.
It has a physical body belonging to a Foundation Establishment Realm.
Its authority (qi) belongs to the Purple Mansion Realm.
Its mind belongs to Foundation Establishment Realm.
The biggest caveat is its authority. It is a Purple Mansion Realm authority that can be broken by spiritual qi and mental attacks.
If this is how the honkai does things…
Honkai is a minmaxxer. It pushes its points to one attribute while leaving the rest out.
Immortal cultivation is the opposite. It advocates all-around improvement. Meaning, a cultivator reaching 100 INT has every other stat at 100 too.
They will crush the one who focused on minmaxing. Moreover, the minmaxxer's skills will have flaws that can be beaten by people with lower levels than them.
Honkai is a minmaxer; Immortal cultivation is an all-arounder.
Honkai's title as a fake cultivator won't fade away.
I reached my limits on Parvati. The [Daluo Sword Art] consumed eighty percent of my spiritual qi to bring it down in one strike. Undoubtedly, there are better ways to deal with them that consumes less. It's just that it would be a death battle when it comes against Herrschers. They outclass emperor-classes to a huge degree.
Fortunately, Herrschers' bodies are not as tough as I thought. Welt Yang confirmed it.
They can live in vacuums like Golden Core Realm cultivators, but their physical strength is absurdly lower than that. They rely more on their Herrscher Authorities to bring devastating destruction.
As for their limits, I don't know.
Their ability to exert influence in higher dimensions already belongs to the Golden Core Realm… but that would be too absurd. I am more inclined to think that their authorities have drawbacks.
They can exert authorities of Purple Mansion to the Golden Core. This weird scaling exists since their true power belongs to the Cocoon of Finality; it is bestowed, not truly their own.
Meaning, they can be faced by cultivators with lower realm than them due to their minmaxxing weaknesses.
Their bodies is weaker than a Foundation Establishment Realm. Only their authorities are important.
My biggest worry did not lie on them, however.
I took out a folded paper inside my storage ring. These are the test results of the samples I sent over to Anti-Entropy. My eyes fell to a line of text regarding my honkai adaptability.
They conducted two types of tests on my samples: with and without spiritual qi.
In the tests without spiritual qi, one thing stood out from the rest.
My honkai adaptability is insanely high.
The live experiment we did earlier is related to it. Honkai energy is inserted into my body. I… no, we wanted to see how my body would react.
Surprisingly, the two energies did not conflict. The honkai energy simply flowed in my body, remaining dormant in the molecular levels.
It changed when the concentration reached one thousand honkai welt. The dormant honkai energy began to react. It became active.
At the cost of destroying my bodily functions, it tried to raise my physical limits higher. My body began to cascade.
That was when spiritual qi began to act. It did not clash directly with honkai energy. It chose to repair the damages caused. My spiritual qi worked to repair its damages. That formed a tempering effect.
With one destroying and one repairing, my physical cultivation skyrocketed. The concentration my body holds is stronger than before.
Although, it left me weak. I have to rest for a day to restore my peak state.
Honkai turned out to be another cheat to immortal cultivation. Using two different power systems gave this result. The destruction caused by honkai can be healed with spiritual qi, in turn making me stronger. The recovery effect brought by a high-end technique like [Ten Directions Body Art] is insane.
Still…
My nightmares from before.
Every effect has a cause. My previous nightmares and inexplicable tiredness have a cause.
With my high compatibility with honkai, it spells out one thing.
The Will of Honkai…
It might be interested on me. My biggest confusion lies in the absence of weak mentality. I did not experience shitty things like Sirin and Mei.
This missing point is the one making me uneasy. It also happened whenever I enter the [Eminence] state of [Blade Mantra]. I can feel something is about to go wrong... that my days of peace are numbered.
For the first time, my mental state got shaken to this extent. My [Sword Nurturing Pagoda] could not grow under a weak mental state. It might even regress in realm.
The special nature of this uneasy feeling no longer exists within internal doubts. Somethingis affecting my mind to this great extent.
The other things, I am unsure. Only, this will involve my death.
If left unattended, I will die!
…
Courting death.
I am bound to do this at some point.
Why am I backing out now?
Everything I did since the beginning is not useless.
I won't back down.
That uneasy feeling... I will deal with it once it comes.
No matter how it turns up.
Cling-!
A bell's chime responded to my thoughts.
My sight shifted to endless darkness. The transcendental, rational, and emotionless mental state of Taixuan/Eminence (Grand Void). I am brought inside my mental landscape. It happened without reciting the Blade Mantra.
The sense of unease appeared for the nth time. My instincts are afraid of entering this space... but I don't know why.
Nevertheless, it did not impede me from using [Blade Mantra]. I didn't face any drawbacks too.
My worries started to turn into nothingness. I can feel nothing. I am an unfeeling god of this world.
This feeling worsened. I am starting to go beyond the limits of what human cognition can achieve.
I looked down. It is an endless chasm of darkness.
Emptiness…
How can it be borne by one person?
A strange thought appeared inside my mind.
Fu Hua's words inside the game rang.
"I do not regret the shattering of my Eminence."
The breakage of her [Eminence] liberated her from the subconscious need to show no mercy to honkai. To that, she is grateful.
Taixuan (Eminence) is the same. I received it without any drawbacks. Except for that uneasy feeling, of course.
However…
Is Eminence truly right?
Can you only gain power when your mind is as still as water?
Immortal Cultivation answers that.
No.
Immortal cultivators are not unfeeling gods. Their will equates to their agenda. They have their needs and wants. Mimicking the objectivity and equalness of Dao (nature) erases one's free will..!
Crack-!
At this moment, I felt liberated. The uneasy feeling it brings started to dissipate to the sidelines.
A line of white crack appeared in the darkness beneath me.
Crack-!
Crack-!
…
The cracks completely shattered the darkness. It revealed the same white light I saw the moment I acquired Blade Mantra.
Taixuan is the emptiness of oneself. It is cutting off one's emotions, tuning the mind to an extreme mental state.
Immortal Cultivators are not like that. Their will takes priority over the Dao. It is their will that is eternal. One becomes akin to heaven, yet they do not treat everyone like straw dogs.
Taixuan is not the end. The [Eminence] mental state is flawed. Every fiber of my being is sure of it.
The fifth and new realm represents the purity of thoughts. The unchanging will to go against all enemies.
The first excerpt of Heart Sutra popped up in my head.
In emptiness, there is form.
The level beyond [Taixuan]...
[True Form].
That's what it will be called.
*****
A/N: An upcoming timeskip next. The scaling between honkai and immortal cultivation is something we'll need later...