Chapter 1920 - 1920. Higher

It was hard to explain what was happening to the world. Sword Saint was only a shadow of his former self. His cultivation level barely allowed him to stand. His body was so fragile that the softest wind would shatter it into countless pieces.

Yet, Sword Saint didn't summon his power. He didn't even try to cause a reaction in his surroundings. He was only showing the pure feeling that his long cultivation journey had generated, and the world wept.

The devotion toward the sword was the core drive behind Sword Saint's path. That feeling was similar to Noah's ambition. It fueled the expert's determination and understanding, but it had never shown itself into the world.

That changed once Sword Saint lost everything and abandoned every hope. His aspects fused to return to the original idea that had given birth to his astonishing path, and the world approved it. The way of the sword was endless, but it had laws, and they acknowledged the expert. His feeling was so touching that even a cultivator belonging to Heaven and Earth's system ended up in tears when she experienced it.

Noah wore a solemn expression. At first, he thought that the world was willingly giving to Sword Saint power connected to the path of the sword. However, that turned out to be false.

The world wasn't free to do what it wanted. Almost everything belonged to Heaven and Earth, so it was hard for such a massive event to happen unless it involved something that even the rulers couldn't control.

Being almost in complete control of the world didn't make Heaven and Earth rule over laws. They could move energy at will and generate a wide range of true meanings due to their new fuel, but some forms of general understanding existed even above them.

Space, time, destruction, creation, and more were vast fields that contained many laws, some approachable only by existences beyond the ninth rank. The sword path was one of those true meanings, and it answered Sword Saint's selfless devotion.

Of course, Noah couldn't understand that. He studied the event and created countless hypotheses, some even close to the truth, but he couldn't be sure of any of them. He only confirmed that Sword Saint had managed to summon a force that went beyond Heaven and Earth.

Heaven and Earth screamed in anger, but Noah could sense different chaotic emotions among that monstrous cry. There was something that the rulers of the world should never express, even when they lost control of their actions. He felt their fear inside that voice, the fear that only something that went beyond their understanding could generate.

The white sky contained most of the energy and understanding of the world, including the sword path. Heaven and Earth had even absorbed countless experts who carried laws related to blades, so their existence had an abundance of those true meanings. They almost had a monopoly over them, but everything changed after something above them acknowledged Sword Saint's devotion.

The rain of sword-shaped drops contained raw understanding and power. It shared some features with the four spheres that Noah had obtained from the dragons, but it also carried a qualitative difference. That white water-like fluid wasn't something that Sword Saint had to study. It was a reward.

Noah's hunger intensified, but he suppressed that urge. He even retracted the features of his consciousness that could affect that majestic event. The sheer amount of energy carried by the rain was enough to build a rank 9 existence from scratch. His body would probably grow extremely close to the breakthrough or directly face it if he absorbed those drops. However, he didn't want his greed to kill Sword Saint, and he feared what could happen after disturbing that event.

Getting in the way of something that could make Heaven and Earth scream in pain and fear wasn't exactly a smart move. Noah felt slightly tempted to create a mess to understand what stood above the white sky, but he refrained from doing so. Part of him even felt glad that Sword Saint's near-death state made that choice so easy.

The drops curved when they risked hitting Camille or Noah. They even stopped falling when they were about to cross Sword Saint. The rain transformed into a floor made of tiny white swords that bathed in the silver light generated by the expert's devotion and let it change their structure.

Noah committed the event to memory. Laws could have many behaviors according to their meanings, but they could never steer away from that path. They were forms of energy that had reached a deep state, but they weren't existences that could act as they wished. Still, the sword-shaped drops proved that knowledge wrong.

Each drop contained various chunks of laws. All of them appeared incomplete, but they all belonged to the sword path, and they didn't hesitate to transform to answer to Sword Saint's devotion. Their shades changed as they generated a vortex that had the expert as its center.

It didn't take much before a whirlpool of laws formed around Sword Saint and forced both Noah and Camille to retreat. More true meanings separated from the sky and fell into the vortex to join the reconstruction of the expert. Sword Saint had given his life to the sword path, so the sword path would give him life. That was the least it could do in front of such a moving gesture.

A silver radiance filled the area and generated a pressure that Camille and Noah struggled to ignore. The cultivator tried to fly back again to avoid that force, but countless cuts opened on her back as soon as she tried to move. Noah attempted to do the same, but white marks appeared on his side and stopped his retreat.

The whole area was on the edge of a sharp sword now. The slightest movement would make the experts slide on that blade and create injuries. Both Noah and Camille understood that it was better to remain still until the process ended.

The rain soon started to fall, and the sword-shaped drops completed converging toward the center of the vortex. A blinding silver radiance pushed the whiteness back and stopped the two experts from inspecting the scene. Noah even failed to make his consciousness converge toward that area because his mental waves shattered whenever they moved.

The radiance quickly dimmed, and the experts could finally see Sword Saint again. Noah revealed a wide smirk at his appearance and cultivation level while Camille opened her mouth in surprise. Her opponent didn't only release a different aura now. He had also healed all its injuries.

Moreover, Sword Saint reappeared as a rank 9 cultivator that didn't have a single center of power stuck in the eighth rank. The energy that he had received as a reward for his determination was so massive that he had managed to complete three breakthroughs in a matter of minutes.

The time required to approach and overcome breakthroughs into the ninth rank usually involved entire years of seclusions and reckless actions meant to trigger the event. Still, Sword Saint had long since approached the limits of the eighth. He had only needed a slight push to step into the ninth rank completely.

Noah saw how Sword Saint hair had regrown. The same went for his long eyebrows, but his eyes managed to shine on the environment anyway. They radiated his new reassuring feeling and the deep gratitude felt toward forms of energy that he would encounter only if he went past the sky.

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Author's notes: Second chapter in an hour or so.