249 Xiang Moxie’s Divine Transmission

Elizabeth accepted receiving Divine Transmission against her former Chosen peer and sunk into a light slumber. Before accepting the reward and having Persephone draw her soul with Astral Projection to receive the Divine Transmission though, Elizabeth also redeemed the pending Nascent Soul of Pure Death and left it to integrate with Lisa's still illusory figure in her Soul Land.

With some luck, Lisa would at least be out of stasis after the Divine Transmission concluded.

…

Xiang Moxie. Even before the Cataclysm, she was world-famous on her home planet of Corin. Similar to Elizabeth, she once had a borderline incomprehensible obsession. However, whereas Elizabeth's chosen vice lied with games, Moxie wanted nothing more than to fill her life with music.

Before she was picked to be a Chosen of the Cataclysm, Moxie lived in a world, in a dimension, with a long and rich history of cultivation. Unfortunately, Moxie hadn't the slightest talent for cultivation; at least, to the ignorant small Sects and Guilds on her planet that she visited, she was all but worthless when it came to martial talent.

However, despite her inability to join a faction and cultivate, her musical talent and the effort she put into mastering everything with regards to music was held with such high regard that at just the mere age of twenty-five, she was pronounced as the world's best musician. She was better as a twenty-five-year-old mortal than all the several thousand-year-old supreme Cultivators in her world that had all the resources they could ask for.

Her talent was appreciated by the masses, but there were also a select few who coveted her as a prop, purely for her ability. As nothing but a frail, talentless, mortal woman, there was nothing she could do but watch helplessly as Cultivators fought over her.

Mortal countries, starting with the one she originated from, were obliterated whenever the Cultivators in possession of her were set off; which ranged from insignificant offenses, such as an ignorant mortal not knowing they were talking to a Cultivator, to the extreme, such as when her own father refused to betroth her to a Cultivator she wasn't infatuated with.

The scheming, corrupt, and deceitful culture of a cultivation society was laid bare for Moxie to despair in for several years and she had experienced all but the most negative and terrible emotions there were to feel.

Then one day, she snapped.

For nearly three years, she had managed to stay with the same Core Refinement Stage master and finally grew attached to him, but just like with all her previous masters, he was eventually killed and she had become the possession of a Nascent Cultivator.

This new master didn't particularly treat her badly, but his actions were the final straw that broke the camel's back.

"What's the point of living if this cycle will only continue to repeat itself?" Moxie thought, the first night she was owned by the Nascent Cultivator.

"Living like a prop… Having no other purpose in life than to dance like a monkey whenever my master desires," she choked up. "Just when I had learned to love playing music again, it just had to be snuffed out."

"Heh," she chuckled with a crestfallen smile as she continued, "Serves me right, for displaying my talent without being able to protect myself. To think that all would be fine for besting these wretched Cultivators."

With the same crestfallen smile, a spark of anger boiled over in her heart as she recalled, "To think I was actually blessed by having my musical talent. For the last couple of years, it's been nothing but a curse!"

As the images of the tragedies she had witnessed flashed through her mind, she repeated, "Nothing but a curse to me! Nothing but a curse to everyone around me!"

She was left sobbing by her bedside for several minutes before she decided to kill herself by jumping out the window, down the side of a precipitous hundred-kilometer tall mountain. She may have been treated to countless Cultivator resources over the years, but without building a Cultivation Base of her own, she would only have the longevity of Cultivators, not their strength or abilities.

Before she could jump, however, a foreign voice called out to her, "So you're going to take the easy way out and kill yourself?"

With a sigh, the androgynous voice helplessly continued, "A pity. I had high expectations for you."

Startled, Moxie didn't even try to move as she said, "You're not even going to let me kill myself?" She assumed she was talking to her new Nascent Cultivator master since the abilities of Cultivators had long since been incomprehensible to her and this was probably one she had yet to see.

"I wouldn't deign to intervene with your decisions, but it would be inconvenient to give up on you since you have a hard-to-come-by Affinity for the Energy I happen to cultivate," the disembodied voice replied with even pace.

"Affinity?" Moxie repeated, only to moments after mumble, "Has my decision to commit suicide caused me to go insane?"

After being told for years, by Cultivators with powers that were godlike to mortals like her, that she lacked the talent for Cultivation, she could only deduce that she was going crazy before she fulfilled her last act.

"No," the voice replied, "it's just rare for the ignorant fools within the Lower Planes to know of more esoteric Energies, such as the Sound Energies you have Affinity for."

"Wouldn't that be nice," Moxie absentmindedly said to herself, "If sounds alone could form Energies and Laws I could cultivate…"

"Well, you're in luck, since that forms part of reality as you know it. There are indeed Sound Laws and Energies for you to cultivate, master, and maybe even overrule. Moreover, I happen to come to you with the intention to impart a special Cultivation Method of said Sound Energies and Laws that may eventually turn you into a God," the voice tempted.

"I really am going insane," Moxie muttered, obviously not buying whatever the voice in her head was trying to sell. As she began walking over to the window, she said, "Why would something so convenient present itself when I have nothing but death to look forward to?"

"As I said, your talent is hard-to-come-by," the voice repeated, continuing, "Moreover, accepting my Cultivation Method won't come without its fair share of hardships and tribulations. There's no such thing as a free lunch in this world."

"Really?" Moxie rolled her eyes as she lifted the window, "And what kind of hardships and tribulations would be worth worrying over if I had your 'special' Cultivation Method? What would I have to worry about after becoming a God?"

"Accepting my Cultivation Method would enter you into a free-for-all interdimensional battle with ninety-nine others who've been blessed with resources as valuable as my Cultivation Method. Living long enough to become a God would be part of the hardship you face, nevermind figuring out a way to acquire the resources to progress alongside your Chosen peers."

Seeing as Moxie stopped in her tracks and kept quiet, for a few seconds, the voice continued, "So, will you continue with your plans of suicide or take up my mantle and represent me in the Cataclysm?"

A couple of seconds of stark silence pervade Moxie's room before she unstably hopped up onto the window sill. "Music… Sounds… They have ruined my life. Even if I do have a rare talent for cultivating it, I can't see myself practicing it either. I despise playing instruments and Cultivators alike."

"But you didn't in the past, correct?" The voice sounded soothing, despite there not being a change in tone or mood. "Your hatred stems from the actions of Cultivators and not the act of Cultivation itself. Your despair and current state of instability were brought on by the actions of a group of people, not a system. Deep down, you still love to play music, don't you? You just hate the fact that it has to be brought about by force, by the will of another.

"Why kill yourself when you can seize the means to protect yourself going forward? Why not accept my contract and get revenge for yourself. At a high enough boundary, you can even seek the means to change the past and return what's right for this world."

…

After accepting the contract and entering the Cataclysm as a Chosen, Xiang Moxie would go on to grow as a Practitioner and then Cultivator at a borderline-impossible rate. With the Soul Sound Arts, she discovered early on that the years of developing her musical talents would directly translate into understanding parts of the Rudimentary Sound Laws.

Moreover, with nothing but Sound Energies and the Sound Laws to cultivate, she took less than half a year to transform herself from a helpless mortal into a Single Nascent Soul Cultivator. Though, to get there, she lost her once serene and cheerful self to newfound negativity and disgust for Cultivators; male Cultivators having it the worst as she scorned them for the misery they put her through before entering the Cataclysm.

Single-handedly, she destroyed faction after faction during her short ascension and before long, she became the top Cultivator in Corin. She had even resolved the calamity that befell her home-world because of the Second Stage of the Cataclysm, and as a result, she earned the right to challenge another Chosen.

Though, as she would later come to lament, the Chosen she herself had picked sourced the end of her meteoric rise as a Chosen of the Cataclysm.

After Elizabeth completed receiving Xiang Moxie's Divine Transmission, she woke up with cold sweats as she became privy to several methods Xiang Moxie could have used to have made the fight dozens of times harder for her.

"It seems that I was saved by her lack of experience," Elizabeth muttered to herself. Continuing, "Had she not grown to abuse and over-rely on her Sound Soul attacks, I would have had to activate my Chaos Seals. Even then, I can't say for sure that I would have won…"