The absolute, freezing darkness of the circular vault rippled.
The scattered, ambient energy of the Void-Silver Flame that had permeated the room during the three stages began to move. It didn't attack. It swirled gently, coalescing in the center of the room.
Fang Lin watched the coalescing light closely. He didn't know for certain if this was a trial, a trap, or some ancient execution method, but given the structure of the three stages, he had his suspicions.
The silver light grew brighter, condensing into a humanoid shape.
An illusory figure slowly materialized before him. It was an old man, dressed in simple, ancient blacksmith's robes. His sleeves were rolled up, revealing spectral forearms corded with muscle, yet his face possessed a dignified, scholarly aura.
However, beneath that scholarly veneer, his eyes betrayed a different nature. They were sharp, calculating, and danced with a hidden, cunning light. It was the look of a man who smiled while striking a lethal bargain. A man who was good-natured on the surface, but ruthlessly pragmatic underneath.
It was the soul remnant of the ancient cultivator.
Ou Yezi.
Fang Lin did not lower his guard. He remained kneeling on the frozen stone floor, his breathing ragged but steady. The Eradication Gaze flickered in the depths of his pupils, casting a dangerous, silver hue across his vision. The newly birthed grey mist of his cosmic force swirled around his naked, silver-tinged obsidian skin.
He was a fortress of absolute violence, ready to detonate at the slightest provocation.
Ou Yezi did not immediately speak. The ancient remnant floated a few feet above the ground, clasping his spectral hands behind his back.
He looked at Fang Lin.
Then, he blinked.
He leaned forward, his translucent eyes widening as his divine sense swept over Fang Lin's exhausted form. He looked closer. He rubbed his spectral chin. He floated in a slow circle around Fang Lin, muttering under his breath.
"Impossible," Ou Yezi whispered.
His voice carried the ancient weight of a bygone era, yet right now, it was laced with the undeniable tone of a baffled old man.
"Absolutely, categorically impossible."
Fang Lin said nothing. He tracked the remnant's movements with sharp, predatory eyes, a sliver of doubt mixing with a guarded sense of gratitude for surviving.
Ou Yezi stopped directly in front of him, throwing his hands up in a dramatic gesture of sheer disbelief.
"I have lived in an era where gods shattered planets for sport and demons swallowed stars!" Ou Yezi exclaimed, his scholarly demeanor cracking into a talkative, almost frantic energy. "I have seen heavenly geniuses born with supreme physiques! I have seen monsters with foundations deep enough to crush mountains! But you? What in the nine heavens are you?!"
Fang Lin's expression remained completely blank. "I am Fang Lin."
"A name tells me nothing, boy!" Ou Yezi pointed a trembling, spectral finger straight at Fang Lin's chest. At his Dantian. "Four cores! You have four mutually exclusive, perfectly flawless cores sitting in your Dantian! A core bursting with terrifying vitality. A core dripping with absolute corruption. A core of absolute zero. And a core blazing with dark fire!"
Ou Yezi began pacing again, his hands pulling at his spectral hair. He was utterly, incomprehensibly flabbergasted.
"It's suicide!" Ou Yezi continued his rant, his voice echoing loudly in the vault. "No, it's beyond suicide! It's an insult to the fundamental laws of cultivation! One does not simply shove Life, Death, Frost, and Fire into a single vessel and expect them to share a cup of tea! They should have detonated the moment you formed the second core!"
Ou Yezi suddenly stopped pacing. He leaned in so close that his glowing nose almost touched Fang Lin.
His sharp, cunning eyes narrowed, peering deep into the structural mechanics of Fang Lin's Dantian.
"And yet... they don't detonate," Ou Yezi murmured, his tone shifting from frantic disbelief to profound, scholarly awe. "They spin. They grind against each other in an agonizing, flawless equilibrium. They birth a grey energy that defies basic elemental laws."
Fang Lin maintained his silence. He was absorbing the information. He had known his path was unprecedented, but hearing it confirmed by an ancient entity from beyond the starry river solidified the terrifying uniqueness of his foundation.
Ou Yezi looked up, locking eyes with Fang Lin.
"What do you call this singularity?" the ancient remnant demanded.
Fang Lin looked at him, his face giving nothing away.
"The Four-Pillared Cosmic cycle," Fang Lin replied bluntly.
Ou Yezi slowly nodded, repeating the name under his breath. "The Four-Pillared Cosmic cycle... I designed this impossible trial to temper a successor, but I seem to have caught a primordial anomaly in my net."
The old man's divine sense, still actively scanning the impossibility of Fang Lin's existence, drifted upward from the chest. It swept past his neck and brushed against his glabella.
It touched the Spiritual Sea.
Ou Yezi's spectral body violently shuddered.
A look of genuine, unfiltered terror flashed across the ancient blacksmith's face. He quickly averted his gaze from the Spiritual Sea, stepping back as if he had accidentally kicked the teeth of a sleeping leviathan.
"And that... presence," Ou Yezi stammered, his usual talkative confidence faltering for a fraction of a second.
He swallowed hard. Deep within that mental void, hidden behind the towering figure of Fang Lin's soul, sat an ancient, broken furnace. And coiled within the absolute darkness of that furnace was an aura so ancient, so terrifyingly predatory, that it made Ou Yezi's soul remnant feel like a fragile piece of glass hovering over a bottomless abyss.
He couldn't identify it. But his ancient intuition screamed at him to stop looking.
Ou Yezi cleared his spectral throat, quickly regaining his good-natured, slightly cunning composure. He decided it was best for his own existence not to pry into the anomaly's deepest secrets.
"Ahem. Well. Leaving your... unique... structural choices aside," Ou Yezi said, clapping his hands together loudly. "Let us discuss the true marvel. Let us discuss what you actually achieved in this room."
The absolute zero temperature of the vault finally began to warm, returning to a normal, breathable atmosphere as Ou Yezi manipulated the arrays.
"You did not stumble into this chamber by accident, Fang Lin," Ou Yezi said, a sly, calculating smile touching his lips. "When you entered the outer ruins, I awakened. I sensed the ripples of your extraordinary foundation. I manipulated the fabric of the rifts, forcing the centrifugal chamber to drag you here."
"You designed a slaughterhouse," Fang Lin said carefully, burying a sliver of gratitude behind a wall of guarded doubt.
"I designed a crucible!" Ou Yezi corrected, wagging a finger. "A crucible requires heat, pressure, and the very real threat of total annihilation. If you had failed, you would not have merely burned to ash. Your very spirit would have been erased from existence. The fire you just survived... it is the Void-Silver Flame."
Ou Yezi raised a hand. The scattered, ambient energy of the conceptual flame swirled around his fingertips.
"It is a conceptual law of eradication," Ou Yezi explained, his tone taking on the cadence of a strict, ancient master. "A law birthed not by nature, but forced into existence by a cultivator's supreme will. It not only burns flesh; it burns existence. In the first stage, it tempered your body, forcing your flesh to evolve that beautiful silver sheen. You now possess a permanent, foundational resistance to destruction."
Fang Lin looked at his own arms. The silver starlight trapped under his obsidian skin hummed with quiet, indestructible power.
"In the second stage, it forced your four cores to synchronize, forging your grey cosmic force," Ou Yezi continued. "But the third stage... the soul eradication... that is where you truly defied the heavens."
Ou Yezi's eyes drifted toward Fang Lin's glabella again, avoiding the dark presence in the back, but staring in pure awe at the towering, immovable figure of Fang Lin's willpower.
"Your willpower, boy," Ou Yezi breathed, the cunning light in his eyes replaced by profound reverence. "It is at the absolute peak. Peak Mortal Will."
Fang Lin frowned slightly. He knew his will had been tested, stretched to the absolute breaking point by the agonizing memories of Uncle Wei and the Mylan village, but he had never quantified it in such definitive terms.
"You are confused," Ou Yezi noted, chuckling softly. "You did not know where you stood before this, did you?"
"I survived," Fang Lin said simply.
"Surviving is an understatement," Ou Yezi laughed, shaking his head. "Before you entered this room, your willpower was merely at the mid Mortal Will stage. Strong, yes. Stubborn, undoubtedly. But it lacked the conceptual weight required to truly suppress the world."
Fang Lin's eyes narrowed. Mid Mortal Will. He had possessed the raw strength and foundation to fight on par with Elite Late-stage Spirit Manifestation experts, but his will itself had only been in the middle stages.
"The Void-Silver Flame is a law of eradication," Ou Yezi explained, his voice echoing with ancient wisdom. "When it attacked your memories, when it tried to erase the very concept of your humanity, it forced your soul into a corner. You had to push back with equal conceptual weight. The spark of the Void-Silver Flame served as the absolute, perfect fuel. It forced your will to condense, to harden, and to break through its own limits just to survive."
Ou Yezi pointed at Fang Lin's forehead.
"It fueled your breakthrough directly from mid Mortal Will to peak Mortal Will," the ancient blacksmith declared. "Do you understand how rare that is? Cultivators spend centuries meditating under waterfalls, walking through mortal cities, and fighting in endless wars just to advance a single minor stage of their will. You skipped the late stage entirely and slammed right into the absolute ceiling of the mortal realm in a matter of hours!"
Fang Lin remained silent, but his heart pounded against his ribs. He could feel it. The towering figure in his Spiritual Sea was no longer just a defensive barrier. It was a weapon. It was an immovable, unyielding mountain of intent that felt heavy enough to crush the physical world. He could move it easily just by thinking.
"To possess peak Mortal Will at the Core Formation stage... it is a terrifying anomaly," Ou Yezi said, his tone turning dead serious. "With your will alone, your soul pressure can now match or completely crush experts in the Domain Forging stage. You can fight Domain Forging experts, Fang Lin. Not just survive them. Fight them."
Fang Lin clenched his fists. The grey mist of his cosmic force surged in response to his rising battle intent.
To possess the battle prowess to kill an Elite Domain Forging expert. To have the strength to fight an Extraordinary genius to the death. To stand his ground against a Legacy monster. The sheer, apocalyptic leap in his combat prowess was intoxicating.
"But do not grow arrogant," Ou Yezi warned, his sharp eyes flashing. "Peak Mortal Will is the ceiling of the mortal realm, but it is not the end of the Will's path. If you wish to continue climbing... if you wish to truly touch the laws of the universe, you must look higher."
Ou Yezi placed his hands behind his back, adopting a scholarly, lecturing posture.
"The path of the soul and will is brutal," Ou Yezi explained. "You are currently at the third stage, brushing against the Crystal Soul Realm. But eventually, you will reach the threshold of the sixth stage: The Sovereign Awakening Realm."
Fang Lin listened intently. This was ancient knowledge, secrets of cultivation that were hoarded by the highest echelons of power.
"To break through to the Sovereign Awakening Realm, your soul must possess absolute sovereignty over its own internal universe," Ou Yezi said, his voice dropping to a low, intense whisper. "And to achieve that, peak Mortal Will is useless. It is simply not enough."
Ou Yezi paused, letting the silence hang in the freezing air to emphasize his next words.
"To reach the Sovereign Awakening Realm, a cultivator must possess, at the very minimum, an Early-stage Heavenly Will."
Heavenly Will.
Fang Lin committed the term to memory. He did not know exactly what powers a Heavenly Will entailed, but the sheer gravity of the name spoke for itself. A will that did not just exist within the world, but somehow stood above it.
"You are a hair's breadth away from it," Ou Yezi said, a sly, encouraging smile returning to his face. "You are standing on the precipice of suppressing the laws of the world with your bare intent. You have survived the crucible, Fang Lin. You have proven yourself worthy of the Outer World."
Ou Yezi raised both of his spectral hands.
The old blacksmith's cunning eyes gleamed with the promise of unimaginable power. He had broken down the monstrous nature of Fang Lin's foundation. He had explained the terrifying leap in his willpower.
"You have survived the fire," Ou Yezi declared, his voice booming through the vault. "Now, it is time for you to receive the reward."
Now, it was time for the true transaction.
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