The second Sun was in a coughing-blood-inducing state of helpless shock. He had launched his split soul of 25 million li in diameter earlier, which would have reached and devoured Yin Na within these allotted two weeks.
None of the Suns could predict that Yin Na would suddenly unfairly unlock so many rapid Soul Abilities under dire duress, and acquire rapid inspiration in such a short time.
Not only was their prey about to escape their grasp, one of them was flying directly into the impossibly-sprung maw of a trap that was Yin Na’s now 30 million li diameter sized Soul Orb!
Yin Na’s remaining army was swallowed by him. Not a single straggler was able to escape, as they contributed their life and mass to the final General!
This allowed Yin Na to immediately surpass the position of the “fourth imminent Sun,” as the second Sun’s splitting of himself made him no longer one of the top 3 Suns at the moment.
Now, he was delivering his 22 million li half to Yin Na like a gift into the jaws of a tiger!
“You bastard!” thought the second Sun. He had no time nor energy to spare in using Soul Articulation.
In life, he was Cai Qigang. Unlike Zhuang You Ling, who died a renowned Demonic cultivator, Cai Qigang was a righteous cultivator who had no worthy achievements to his name worth mentioning.
He merely came upon the 9-Yin Treasured Jade Block by chance.
It was by heavy misfortune that he died as a mere casualty involving a Beast tide. He had never fully explored the capabilities of the 9 Yin Treasured Jade Block, so imagine his surprise when he found himself not exactly in the fabled mortal portrayals of the afterlife but in a strange room where many spirits were playing Mahjong.
Cai Qigang was not a particularly skilled Mahjong player, nor was he blessed with a healthy flow of luck even after death. Instead, he had to practice his ghostly buffs and learn from his blunders so that he could accumulate enough wins to win the right to learn more from the tight-lipped spirits within the realm.
Taking the door of Uncertain Rebirth was the bravest decision he had ever made in his life.
“If I give up and become a restless loser spirit just playing Mahjong here I’ll truly have died a meaningless life!”
Thus he took him with this newfound resolve and the experiences taught from the thousands of Mahjong games he had to win into this strange realm of glowing Soul Orbs.
Like Zhuang You Ling, Cai Qigang had entered the realm quite early since he too was from an antiquated era, and the population was subsequently scarcer compared to what it was like now.
He fought tooth and nail in this realm, accumulating experience and bearing an unflinching attitude towards the advent of defeat.
“As long as I escape with another split half, I don’t care how many times I have to split myself to be or how small of a size I return to, as long as I survive then there’s hope to cultivate again!”
Many eras passed within the realm, each containing uncountable centuries and millennia.
Maybe it was the mere difference of perhaps 50 thousand years that allowed Cai Qigang to preserve his sanity and intelligence, while Zhuang You Ling eventually lost his mind from the absolutely mind-numbing rules of the game.
For ages, Cai Qigang observed a constant rival, that was to be Zhuang You Ling who mercilessly devoured with a ferocity that simply outshone the movements of the other Soul Orbs. It therefore wasn’t surprising that this Soul Orb would eventually grow to be one of his rivals, with the third Sun not even coming into the picture yet.
They haven’t even unlocked Soul Articulation yet this many eons ago. Cai Qigang did attempt methods at communication many times, using the same crude dancing which Yin Na managed to perfect, but of course, no attempts successfully reached Zhuang You Liang.
After so long, the Third Sun entered the picture. By then, Zhuang You Liang’s orbital movements no longer stemmed from his free will but were simply actions conditioned in him through too many eras of devouring souls within this realm.
Cai Qigang had long suspected, but only after having reached titanic mass as a Sun and hearing Zhuang You Liang becoming the first Soul Orb to unlock the Soul Articulation ability did he confirm his suspicions:
Zhuang You Liang lost his mind.
“EAT!” That was all that came from Zhuang You Liang’s horrific, guttural-sounding voice.
It shook the realm once, and then the Sun that was Zhuang You Liang became silent for an eternity until the present, until Yin Na came wrecking havoc with his 2 other Generals.
Ouyang Fang had remembered that feeling of judging Zhuang You Liang’s mental regression into a mere animal, with only the prerogative to eat and avoid being eaten. Nothing more.
If he still had a cardiovascular system, it would have chilled his blood to mentally guess when exactly did Zhuang You Liang lose his sanity within this realm. Looking back, during their many games of cat-and-mouse, Zhuang You Liang had always “cooperated” with Cai Qigang and the Third Sun based on a selfish animal instinct to survive or seize gains when the opportune moment presented itself. Was it possible that Zhuang You Liang was always insane as a cultivator and brought his personality with him into this realm?
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Nay, he would have never been able to beat those Mahjong games if he was. Cai Qigang was convinced that the isolating nature of this realm was mental poison. If one were to remain devouring within this realm for the same amount of time Zhuang You Liang had been, they too would surely become insane.
In fact, who was to say that the millions of smaller Soul Orb ants around him weren’t also insane? They lacked the progress and mass to show for their years of devouring, how would anyone know that the individual owner of the Soul Orb hadn’t long given up hope and simply were devouring on autopilot?
Cai Qigang thus always tried to keep his mind fresh. He did simple arithmetic; replayed conversations in his head from his mortal cultivating days. He was also a key cooperator in this realm, as it was really him and the Third Sun that were making the conscious warring decisions to either retreat or advance on one another.
Together, the two Suns treated Zhuang You Liang like an animal on a leash. The beast-like first Sun was to be constantly sicced on each other, or to simultaneously be exploited when the beast had gotten too greedy. Their entire politics revolved around allying with or redirecting Zhuang You Liang’s insane hunger towards the other.
“But who’s to say that this Third Sun isn’t also insane?”
Wouldn’t it be the safest measure to simply operate on the basis that everyone else is insane?
But right now, the most “insane” monster was right in front of him, eagerly about to devour his other half that he had launched!
Yin Na!
This monster who defied all logic and luck with his disproportionately fast rise to power. Cai Qigang did not know this individual Soul Orb’s name, but he hated him to the very core!
He shared Zhuang You Liang’s earlier angry Soul Articulation sentiment: how dare this outsider think he can supplant one of the 3 suns?
How dare he attempt to innovate and create something new outside of this realms’ rules! How dare he even dream of hoping for success, and not cowering and splitting himself in endless fractions to avoid the wrath of the 3 suns!
Cai Qigang was helpless, he could not even do anything after committing to the launch.
Yin Na’s rotund 30-million li diameter Soul Orb graciously received Cai Qigang’s 25-million li soul, which was absorbed in an instant.
The space around Yin Na became incredibly bright as his mass increased. In mere seconds, he had jumped to the place of one of the top 3 suns, effectively supplanting Cai Qigang’s position. In fact, he supplanted ALL of their positions, as Yin Na became the biggest Sun of them all!
Yin Na hovered menacingly before Zhuang You Liang and Ouyang Fang. He was more than 55 million li in diameter.
Yin Na used Soul Articulation: “THANKS FOR THE GIFT.”
“!!!” Cai Qigang had no mouth and he wanted to scream. He had no organs, yet he wanted to cough blood.
The mental strings keeping his soul together frayed at that moment, as Cai Qigang’s movement became erratic, reflecting the change in his mental disposition. Cai Qigang was vomiting particles of himself, smaller versions of his splitting Soul orbs were flying all over the vicinity.
Cai Qigang became insane, too! However, unlike Zhuang You Liang’s single minded prerogative to devour, Cai Qigang’s mind was all over the pace. He was basically doing some wild variation of Controlled Splitting, without any “control.”
Sensing the immediate turn of the tide, Zhuang You Liang’s animal instincts immediately turned his attention to the now incredibly weak Cai Qigang, who was only left with his 25-million li Soul Orb, which was rapidly dwindling in mass due to his suicidal discarding of his own mass.
“Oh no, you don’t,” Yin Na thought.
Sacrificing a lot of mass in order to use Soul Displacement ability, Yin Na swapped a tiny ant floating nearby him with Zhuang You Liang.
Instantly, the first Sun was teleported in front of Yin Na.
Zhuang You Liang couldn’t even comprehend what had happened when Yin Na ate him.
But Yin Na did not stop there, as soon as he ate the gigantic Zhuang You Liang, exceeding 100-million li in size, he unlocked another hidden Soul ability:
Soul Dash.
By consuming their own mass, Yin Na would be able to propel his Soul Orb at much faster speeds. If he burned away millions of souls per second, he could travel with the same speed as a beginner 1-li sized ant.
That was exactly what Yin Na did, as he burned away millions of his own mass to quickly catch up to Cai Qigang, or what remained of him as he was still irrationally tossing his own split Soul orbs in all directions.
Yin Na absorbed about 24 million of Cai Qigang’s remaining mass, immediately making up for his losses in using Soul Dash.
Now, there were only two suns left: Yin Na, and the mysteriously unnamed Third Sun!
Earlier, Yin Na had displaced Zhou Fei with an ant while he was being pursued by the Third Sun.
No doubt, the Third Sun was wracking its brains while trying to decide whether to arrive to support the two Suns in suppressing the outsiders, or to stay back and observe.
Now that the Third Sun clearly observed that both its two long rivals had perished, having been absorbed at once into the outsider, it saw that the tables have indeed turned, for the worse.
Yin Na’s 100 million-li diameter Soul Orb was the brightest thing in this entire realm. It was a Super Sun that brightened the realm like never before.
“GIVE UP,” Yin Na said through Soul Articulation. “IT’S OVER.”
The Third Sun cursed the recent developments and its luck mentally.
The Third Sun’s Soul belonged to a female cultivator named Eight Fans Yong Jun.
She had joined the realm after Cai Qigang, and therefore was the “youngest” of the three Suns. She was part of a Righteous Sect called the Eight Fans sect that would be buried in obscurity, never having its legacy even preserved in the annals of history up until Yin Na’s era.
There is little of remarkable history to account for Eight Fans Young Jun’s time in this realm either, other than the fact that her position fluctuated in eternal competition with Cai Qigang as they attempted to thwart each other while keeping the mad Zhuang You Liang in check for countless generations.
During that time she kept note as the population of the realm gradually became larger and dense. Her fantasies of reliving her cultivation journey and returning to her long-extinct Sect were what kept her motivated. She indulged in many theories as to how one of them would be able to escape this realm and into the realm of the living, such as the concept of reaching a critical mass that would enable one of the Suns to swallow the other two in order to break out of the boundaries of this realm.
But now, all her efforts were revealed to be for naught.
Yin Na had already consumed two other Suns, and clearly it was not enough to enact a change on the realm or allow this cultivator to escape. Yin Na made it quite clear to her that he intended her to be the final conquest!