Chapter 850: Paint your Path
The enormous statue of Yrial looked a bit different from how it used to. Today, a haze chock-full of fiery and icy energies surrounded it, and it actually released an aura akin to a real cultivator. It looked like Brazla hadn’t lied when he said he needed some time to gather energy. The scene made Zac a bit cautious – why did the second inheritance trial require this kind of energy? Was it related to difficulty, or was it something else?
If it was the former, then Zac held complete confidence, but if it needed the energy to teleport him to some other sector, then it might become a problem. He wasn’t willing to leave Zecia again, especially not while his escape bangle still hadn’t been repaired. So Zac turned to the Tool Spirit, who was in his warrior persona today, with a mighty broadsword on his back and glimmering armor. “You’ve worked hard.”
“It’s nothing to the mighty Brazla,” the Tool Spirit snorted, his nose almost pointing at the ceiling. “So, what have you brought today?”
Zac stifled his annoyance as a small mountain of golden ornaments appeared on the floor. One day, he would push down the haughty Tool Spirit a peg or two, but for now, he simply wasn’t strong enough. So he could only smile and showcase his offerings; chandeliers, statues, furniture, paintings, and all kinds of knick-knacks he had gathered.
“These are invaluable heirlooms I collected during my last outing. Each one was a defining treasure of great renown,” Zac lied as he channeled his inner Calrin. “While they don’t contain much spiritual energy, their artistic value is incalculable.”
Brazla gazed at Zac for a few seconds before turning his eyes to the shimmering pile of treasures. “Well, they cannot be compared to the artistry of my towers, but what can? I guess these trinkets will have to do. If anything, they can showcase the great gap between mundane artistry and the celestial artistry that is Brazla.”
Zac inwardly breathed out in relief that his attempt to pawn off some useless decorations had worked out. He still had a bunch of actual treasures and arrays prepared just in case, but why waste his money if he didn’t need to?
“It’s their honor to be placed in your grand temple,” Zac nodded before pointing at the Lord of Cycle’s statue. “If I may ask, what’s with the aura?”
“You would have to ask the haughty guy inside,” Brazla said in a mighty showcase of his unsurpassed lack of self-awareness. “I was just responsible for collecting the necessary energy. If you ask me, it’s a feeble attempt of the Lord of Cycles to match the grandeur of the Towers of Myriad Dao.”
“Alright then, so the same procedure as before? Do you know how long it might take?” Zac asked, trying to finagle at least something useful from the Tool Spirit.
“All these questions,” Brazla grunted with annoyance. “Do you take the great sage for your tour guide? Just step onto the teleporter and get out of my sight. It shouldn’t take too long.”
Zac only grunted in response this time as he walked away, stopping right in front of the teleportation array. Since the Tool Spirit was in an unhelpful mood, he tried to gather any hints from the array. Thankfully, it looked the same as last time, which decreased the odds of this being an actual long-distance Teleportation Array.
His gaze once more turned to the statue towering in front of him, and a wave of nostalgia hit him. It was hard to believe that just over ten years had passed since he stood here last. It both felt much longer and shorter than a decade. He was so inexperienced back then, fumbling his way forward as he desperately grasped for the power needed to save Earth from the threats it faced. Now, he was almost completely reborn, but he still hoped Yrial could provide the answers to the questions that were ailing him.
Zac took a deep breath as he scanned his body one final time, making sure there were no lingering threats or weaknesses that might impact him in the trial. By now, he was mostly restored, with only some lingering echoes of forming a Glimpse of Chaos remaining. With that, he stepped onto the teleporter.
The next moment, Zac found himself standing on a floating disk among purple and pink clouds beneath a foreign sky of breathtaking beauty. The scene was mesmerizing, but his attention was soon drawn to the massive object floating in front of him. It was a large disk wrought from stone, its rim engraved with some unfamiliar scripts as it slowly rotated in place like a wheel.
Most of its flat surface was completely smooth, and there were no clear hints to its function. There was a second, much smaller, wheel right in front of him, looking a bit like a daughter array to its 50-meter-tall parent. Zac guessed it was related to whatever trial Yrial had come up with, and a familiar voice confirmed the hunch soon enough.
“Paint your path of Cyclic Supremacy,” Yrial’s voice echoed through the clouds as the smaller disk floated closer, his tone containing a grandeur that felt extremely fake after knowing the real Lord of Cycles.
Zac grimaced as he gripped the disk in his hand, his fears somewhat realized. If it was just about Dao or strength, Zac had full confidence in dealing with the trial, having far surpassed what anyone could have expected for a small local Dao Inheritance. But if he needed to prove a cyclic path, then things had suddenly become a lot thornier.
“Uh, teacher? Master?” Zac hesitated as he looked at the disk in front of him. “There was kind of a change of plans. Can you change the test a bit?”
The unfamiliar scripts at the edges had been utterly ruined as well, and the wheel had ground to a halt. However, Zac saw that the runes were slowly reforming, and he swapped forms, his eyes turning black as his skin turned pale. Simultaneously, [Love’s Bond] hummed as his new axe appeared in his hand.
A stray thought hit Zac as he formed eight new streams of Mental Energy – should the axe have a name of its own? Or should it be considered part of [Love’s Bond] since they were technically just one Spirit Tool? But the name didn’t seem fitting for a bladed weapon. Zac guessed he would ask Alea the next time she popped up, but he would simply call the axe [Black Death] until then based on its color and affinity.
A second wave of pure Dao shot forward, and a second scar appeared on the disk. If the first one felt like a tear almost exposing a celestial world, then the second one felt like a festering wound, teeming with death and carnage. It was destruction, a shadow of the abyss itself.
With two scars running parallel across the disk, each one rife with his Dao, the wheel couldn’t take it any longer. Small cracks started to spread, forming a spider vein pattern. Interestingly enough, Zac saw how the cracks only seemed to appear in the middle of the disk, between the two scars, while the outer edges were unblemished.
The new cracks started at the cuts and spread toward the other side, almost like they were reaching for one another. Zac looked on with rapt attention, feeling he could actually glean new truths from the scene. The cracks weren’t random – they formed some sort of pattern based on his Daos.
It was almost like he was looking at two armies from a great distance, with streams of cavalry reading toward the enemy lines. It was a war between Life and Death, a conflict as old as time itself. Soon enough, the two sets of cracks reached the middle of the disk where they met one another, which rapidly sped up the process.
Zac could only see a hint of something, he did not know what, a moment before the disk collapsed in a burst of energy that threw Zac off his feet. It had almost looked like a third scar had formed where the two lines of cracks met, one that emitted an aura superior to either of the originals. Unfortunately, it had been so unstable that it only lasted a moment.
Seeing the disk break apart made Zac’s heart sink. His gambit had failed, where he wanted to forcibly engrave his path onto the disk. But a few seconds passed and nothing happened. Why wasn’t he sent out if he had failed? Did he still have a chance to make it? There was, however, one issue remaining.
The curtain of flames was still descending, and it was only a few hundred meters above him now. He looked up at them with hesitation, wondering if he should activate one of his escape means. By now, he had found a few better alternatives to the [Coward’s Escape], methods that would allow him to leave the trial without losing all his other quests.
The easiest method was simply to activate a spatial talisman powerful enough to destabilize this temporary space, which would result in him being spat out. That kind of method wouldn’t work inside Mystic Realms or top-tier heritages, but it should be more than enough for this kind of simple inheritance.
However, Zac refused to give up just like that, and the Miasma in his body churned as his [Spiritual Void] was unleashed. He was going all out from the start, and a massive Dao Braid entered a skill fractal on his right bicep along with almost a third of his Miasma.
Billowing waves of darkness poured out from his back the next moment, but it didn’t turn into a domain of death like [Deathwish]. Instead, the energy condensed into a grid of strings that looked both like some sort of skeletal wings, a mesh of chains, or a spider’s web. They stretched out from his back five meters in every direction, the network constantly twisting as it accumulated energy.
One shimmering orb of utter darkness soon congealed at each tip, while [Black Death] in his hand started radiating a gray haze that lacerated the air around it. Zac glowered at the sky, and with a roar swung his weapon in a sharp overhead arc, causing the insanely sharp haze to rush forward. In an instant, the wave transformed into a metallic skull with a huge scar on its forehead.
The skull only appeared for an instant, where its jaws opened far beyond what should be possible. Before disintegrating, the skull unleashed a soundless wail that contained such force that it formed a barely visible blade that shot forward with almost impossible speed. In its wake spatial tears full of the Dao of the Axe swirled around, creating a trail of destruction that slowly expanded outward.
The scene was pretty shocking, but the skill wouldn’t end with just one single blade. The two wing-like appendages on Zac’s back flapped, and they suddenly expanded five times in size. In an instant, they reached the size of airplane wings before being absorbed by the two orbs at the ends. With that, a set of soul-chilling runes appeared at the surface of the orbs, at which point Zac finally released them.
The two singularities shot forward with such force they tore straight through space, reappearing right next to the blade which had reached the roiling curtains of flames by now. The moment they appeared their surrounding was sealed as the runes flashed, and it looked like the icy flames had been completely frozen over as they stopped in place.
The blade and two orbs crashed into each other the next moment, and Zac was forced to activate [Profane Exponents] to withstand the cataclysmic eruption that followed. Death and Conflict fused into one, and nothing could withstand its might as a black inferno ripped the whole canopy to shreds. Zac looked at the scene with awe behind his barrier, not sure if even he would survive at the heart of that explosion.
He had tried out [Desperation’s End] inside the Orom World before, but the scene back then was barely a shadow of what he witnessed now. For one, the orbs hadn’t been powerful enough to seal their surroundings, and the explosion had been like a match compared to today’s conflagration.
A few errant waves of fiery ice rained down around him, but the chains of [Love’s Bond] effortlessly flicked away the ones that made it past the barriers. A minute later, the sky was clear, void of both his attack and the domain.
“Uh,” Zac eventually hesitated as he looked around, a bit hesitant about what he should do now, stuck as he was on a disk flying among the cloud”.
“How could I ever have accepted a brute such as you as my discip”e?” a sigh echoed out right next to his ear”. “The long years inside this place must have turned me insane, just like the little Tool Spir”t.”