Chapter 582: Cultivation is Creation - Chapter 577: It’s You...

The corridor opened up after the first trial was done and I walked through into a circular chamber that was maybe thirty feet across, the phosphorescent fungi were growing thick on the walls here and gave off enough light that I didn’t have to strain my eyes to see anything clearly, which was a relief after everything that had just happened. The walls were made of the same black stone that was everywhere else in this palace, but this chamber didn’t have that same oppressive feeling that the rest of the place had.

I found a flat section of floor near the entrance and sat down cross-legged, my body wasn’t exhausted since the qi armor had handled most of the physical strain, but my spiritual energy reserves had been hit pretty hard during the trial.

“Master, I recommend at least thirty minutes of meditation to restore optimal energy levels,” Azure said.

“Sure. Keep monitoring our surroundings while I focus on recovery.”

“Of course.”

I closed my eyes and began following the meditation pathways I had practiced so many thousands of times before that my mind could trace them without any conscious effort at all, turning my attention inward to where my spiritual energy pools sat depleted and waiting to be refilled.

Time passed, and I wasn’t entirely sure how much because the palace did something strange to the way time felt, making minutes stretch out like hours or compressing hours down into something that felt like barely any time at all, and I couldn’t figure out what caused it to do that. But eventually my spiritual energy recovered to acceptable levels, and I opened my eyes again.

The chamber looked exactly the same as when I’d closed my eyes and no one else had emerged from the first trial corridor which meant they were either still working through it or had exited somewhere different and were already ahead of me heading toward the second trial.

Song Wei had said we would meet again at the entrance to the second trial, but he hadn’t actually told me where that entrance was, and the palace’s layout was not the kind of place that made navigation easy or straightforward in any way.

I stood up and stretched out the stiffness that had settled into my joints from sitting, and was about to start exploring the corridors leading out of the chamber when I felt it.

There were violent spiritual fluctuations radiating through the stone and warped space of the palace that told me there was active combat happening not too far away. The signatures were faint, but I could read their approximate cultivation levels well enough.

One of them was Half-Step Lucid Lawbearer, strong and controlled, and feeling like someone who had almost achieved the next major realm but hadn’t quite managed to cross that threshold yet.

The other was weaker, Early Oneiric Sovereign based on the pressure reading I was getting, but the energy moved with an intensity and precision that didn’t match what you would normally expect from someone at that cultivation level, it moved like someone with experience far beyond what the numbers suggested.

My first instinct was to ignore it and keep moving because other people’s conflicts were not my problem and I needed to find the Celestial Dream Lotus and then locate Tian so I could finish this tournament, getting pulled into fights that had nothing to do with me would just drain time and energy I couldn’t afford to waste.

But then I thought about my teammates, Pan Jun, Xu Feng, and Xie Ling, we had entered the palace together as an expedition group and if one of them was in trouble and I just walked away, that would defeat the entire purpose of having entered as a group to begin with.

Beyond that. I was curious about what kind of fight could generate spiritual pressure intense enough to be felt through multiple walls and layers of twisted palace space.

I moved quickly through the corridors, following the spiritual signatures, the palace’s architecture worked against me as it always did, passages curving back on themselves and opening into spaces that physically shouldn’t fit within the structure’s external dimensions.

But the combat was putting out enough spiritual noise that tracking it wasn’t actually that difficult, and I kept adjusting my direction as I moved.

The phosphorescent fungi grew sparser the further I went, and the light changed, silver luminescence coming from the walls themselves now, pulsing in a rhythm that I couldn’t quite identify the source of.

I came around a corner and found myself looking into a massive chamber, easily a hundred feet across and twice that tall with a ceiling that disappeared into darkness above where I occasionally caught shapes moving that I couldn’t identify as architectural features or something else entirely.

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The floor was covered in shallow water maybe an inch deep that rippled constantly despite no visible current and when I looked at the ripples, they formed patterns, symbols in some language I had never seen before, but whenever I looked away the patterns would change into something different.

Two figures were near the chamber entrance, and I recognized them immediately.

Pan Jun was on his back with one arm bent at an angle that told me it was broken, his robes were torn in several places and blood ran from a cut above his left eye, but his chest was rising and falling steadily and his spiritual pressure though weak was stable, defeated but alive.

Xu Feng sat propped against the wall nearby with both hands pressed against his ribs and his round face was twisted in pain, and his earth-toned robes were stained dark with blood. Both of them were conscious but very clearly out of any condition to keep fighting.

Neither of them noticed me because their attention was fixed on what was happening in the center of the chamber.

Xie Ling executed technique after technique, ice forming from nothing to create impenetrable barriers and projectiles that could probably even threaten Lucid Lawbearers.

Her opponent was a young man who looked around eighteen years old, with simple traveling clothes and dark hair that was longer than was practical for combat, his cultivation registered as Early Oneiric Sovereign, which was nothing compared to Xie Ling.

Even then, he was winning.

The young man moved through her ice techniques as though they barely existed, finding spaces between each attack where nothing could touch him, and when he countered, his strikes landed with devastating results that didn’t match his cultivation level at all.

I watched as Xie Ling raised a massive ice construct that roared silently as it lunged forward with its jaw stretched wide, the young man stepped to the side at the very last moment and then drove his palm into the construct’s flank as it passed by him.

The entire thing shattered all at once into fragments that rained down across the chamber floor. And the young man was already closing the distance to Xie Ling before the pieces even finished falling, three quick steps and his right hand extending toward her center mass in what looked from a distance like a simple palm strike.

Xie Ling’s eyes went wide, and she brought up a thick dome of ice around herself.

The young man’s palm connected with the outer surface of the barrier and a shockwave went through the entire chamber, the shallow water jumping up off the floor in a perfect ring before crashing back down, and the ice dome held for maybe half a second before cracks spread across it in every direction and then it exploded outward.

Xie Ling was thrown backward, but she caught herself with a platform of ice that formed beneath her feet and slid to a stop about twenty feet back from where she had been standing, her breathing hard and her pale face showing the first real signs of strain that I had seen from her. Her perfect white robes were torn, there was blood at the corner of her mouth, and bruising showed on the skin underneath the tears in the fabric.

The young man didn’t press forward after that, he stood where he was watching her like he was trying to understand something about her that he couldn’t quite work out.

Xie Ling’s spiritual pressure began fluctuating like someone preparing a finishing technique.

Half-Step Lucid Lawbearers could manifest partial laws which operated on a different level than normal techniques entirely, if she was about to do that, then the chamber was going to become very dangerous for everybody present, including me.

The young man noticed what she was doing and his stance shifted, weight moving to his back foot, hands coming up, and his spiritual pressure began rising as well, the Early Oneiric Sovereign cultivation suddenly feeling denser and more concentrated than it had been before, like he had been holding something back this entire time and was only now beginning to release it.

That’s when I finally got a clear look at his face. I felt my heart stop.

Dark hair, intelligent eyes that held something deeper than what you would expect from someone his age. I knew this face, there was no way I could have been wrong about this. This was Tian.

Which meant this was Wu Kangming, or rather this was Wu Kangming’s wisp of consciousness reincarnated into the Dream World as the child of prophecy who had grown up not knowing who he actually was, and had ended up believing he was me, Ke Yin.

Tian was here, he had passed the first trial, and was heading toward the Celestial Dream Lotus just like I was, which meant we were going to have to fight sooner than I expected.

I didn’t have time to think about that much further because Xie Ling’s spiritual pressure spiked and frost spread outward from her position in waves that covered everything they touched with ice instantly.

The temperature dropped so fast that the shallow water on the floor froze solid in seconds, and even the black stone walls began taking on a bluish tint as the surface temperature dropped below what stone should be able to handle.

“Absolute Zero Manifestation,” she said quietly, almost whispering it, “I didn’t want to use this. But you’ve left me no choice.”

Tian’s eyes narrowed and his spiritual pressure rose to meet hers, the Early Oneiric Sovereign cultivation expanding to fill more space than it should physically occupy, and dream qi swirled around him visibly, silver energy forming patterns in the air around his body as he built toward a counter-technique that would have to be large enough to survive clashing with a partial law manifestation.

Both of them were about to go all out, and that’s when Tian’s gaze shifted slightly, scanning the chamber’s edges, looking for threats, when his eyes found mine.

His spiritual pressure flickered, and the controlled stable energy that had been building toward explosive release stuttered, wavered, and nearly came apart.

His eyes went wide and his mouth opened slightly, and for a moment, he had completely forgotten about Xie Ling standing twenty feet away from him, preparing a technique that could kill him.

Tian’s hands dropped, the technique dissolved, dream qi scattered harmlessly into the ambient spiritual pressure of the chamber. He took one step toward me and then stopped, like he wasn’t sure if moving would make me disappear.

When he spoke, his voice carried relief, confusion, fear, all tangled into something that sounded desperate.

“Hou…” Tian stopped, swallowed, tried again. “Hou…you…you’re alive.”