Yin Na did not learn the identities of the Suns he devoured, and he could not have cared less even if he learned of their ancient names and deeds.
Who cares if you were a wise figure from ancient history? Here you were just potential food for everybody else, and none of your wisdom nor experiences would be transferred upon being devoured.
The way Yin Na viewed it, the Third and final Sun named Eight Fans Yong Jun was meat on the chopping block. She had nowhere to run within the realm, and Yin Na becoming the largest Sun and acquiring all the Soul abilities meant that he would eventually capture her.
As the youngest Sun, Eight Fans Yong Jun never even unlocked a single Soul Ability, and couldn’t even use Soul Articulation or Concentrated Soul Splitting to communicate with Yin Na.
For the next one thousand years, the third Sun Eight Fans Yong Jun orbited as far away from Yin Na’s titanic 100-million li Giant Soul as she could. Yin Na’s movements were slower than ever, now that he was a super Sun. He made the 45-million sized Eight Fans Yong Jun appear like a moon in comparison.
The majority of the light orbs that were being produced in this realm came from Yin Na. Yin Na made use of his propaganda techniques, and began rebuilding an army of worshippers.
It was his final campaign to vilify the remaining Sun, Eight Fans Yong Jun.
By the end of the thousand years, barely any Soul orbs wandered near to the third Sun. They all participated in the culture of the Super Sun Yin Na, shunning the Third Sun and therefore prohibiting her growth.
Wherever Eight Fans Yong Jun traveled, empty blackness followed. Nearby Soul Orbs parted away from her course, not even scrambling after her wake to eat her emitted light orbs.
The Third Sun was continually decreasing in size, the only way she could maintain it now was to retrace her steps and eat her own light orbs.
How pathetic it was for the Third Sun to be reduced to survive off her own byproduct light orbs!
After a thousand years of Eight Fans Yong Jun wracking her brains for a solution of any kind, Yin Na boomed his voice throughout the realm:
“HOW LONG MUST WE DRAG THIS ON?”
Since Eight Fans Yong Jun did not have Soul Articulation, she could not respond back.
She was not likely going to obtain any new Soul ability, since she was being deprived of sustenance and could not make any progress in her devouring. She was bereft of inspiration and sympathy.
She remembered the mysterious ability Yin Na displayed twice, to switch the places of his general Zhou Fei with one of his ants, and then Zhuang You Liang with another in order to devour them quickly.
Why didn’t he pull the same ability again on her?
Was Yin Na simply recharging the ability over a millenia? Or was he sadistically toying with her choice to prolong her suffering and hopelessness?
The answer leaned towards the latter. Yin Na wanted for the final Sun to submit to him of her own free will. Partly because he enjoyed his foes’ slow dawning of awareness of the helplessness of their situation, but also because he was unsettled with the rules of the realm: was it really over if he ate all of the suns?
Yin Na saw what happened when he ordered all the ants of the realm to shun the Third Sun. She was left with no more source of sustenance, and was starving and surviving off her own light orbs. He worried over what would happen once he ate the final Sun, and nothing occurred.
Would he be doomed to be the one lonely Sun in this realm until he eventually suicided or ate every ant within?
Yin Na steeled his heart for an answer he did not want to find out. So be it! If after devouring the third Sun he was still not given a way out of this realm, he would still find a way to do so, and dutifully absorb every ant within sight! It would only take another billion years, right?
Regarding the ability Soul Displacement, Yin Na’s mind was on the trigger. If he wanted to, he could sacrifice a large portion of mass and immediately swap the position of Eight Fans Yong Jun with an ant in front of him.
But a thousand years had passed, and Eight Fans Yong Jun made no move other than to avoid Yin Na and maintain her own mass.
That is, until she finally reached her conclusion. Her answer was this:
“What’s this?!” Yin Na couldn’t believe his observations. “The Third Sun just split itself! And again and again!”
Eight Fans Yong Jun split herself until her spherical giant mass resembled more of a cloud of tiny Soul Orbs. Together the army of ants totalled her original 45 million mass.
“Is the Third Sun mimicking my starting-from-the-beginning action? Or is she hoping that abandoning all her hard work after all these years would suddenly spontaneously generate inspiration for her?”
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
No, Eight Fans Yong Jun had no hope. Since Yin Na had devoured and attained the most mass out of any Soul Orb in the realm, the population of the realm had dwindled, its remaining Soul Orbs relentlessly shun her.
But now that she was vulnerable, what plan was she implementing?
“If I can’t have it, no one else can.”
Eight Fans Yong Jun knew she had no hope of winning, so the most damage she could do to Yin Na out of spite was to prolong his victory as long as possible.
“ABSORBING REMNANTS OF THE THIRD SUN WILL COUNT AS COLLUDING WITH THE ENEMY AND WILL BE PUNISHED BY ABSORPTION.”
Yin Na broadcasted his warning to the ants.
All within the realm obeyed. Eight Fans Yong Jun was a cloud of tempting benefits that no one wanted to touch.
Her speed was much faster, but because she was a bundle of thousands of one-li sized ant Soul orbs, she left a long trail of remnant Soul Orbs. It looked like a trial of abandoned children in her wake, in one straight line of tiny Soul Orbs.
“It would take me one eternity for me to ever rejoin my split halves into the former Sun I was,” Eight Fans Yong Jun thought. “But it would take eight eternities for the final Sun to eat up after my mess! Ahahahahahaha!”
Yin Na’s heart sank to rock bottom.
This Third Sun was the most insane of them all. This was the most counterproductive, critically effective waste of time “strategy” for them both. All she did was prolong her own suffering, why couldn’t she gratefully just throw herself into Yin Na’s embrace and get absorbed?
She was the Third and final Sun, she still owned 45 million-sized mass, there were not many other unallied Soul Orbs left in the realm.
“I just recently forbid the masses from devouring any remnant from the Third Sun,” Yin Na thought. “If I go back on my order it will make me look weak. If I move my orbit over to devour her trial of remnant Soul Orbs, it would take me probably a trillion years, and by then I’ll be forced to follow her path, essentially losing even more face.
“I’ll implement another couple hundred years of propaganda campaigns, get the ants to forget my earlier command by burying it with group dances and stories through Concentrated Splitting, then issue an order disguised as a cleanup campaign.”
Yin Na took three hundred years to brainwash the ants and make them forget. He implemented a secret police force that absorbed Soul Orbs who even displayed a second’s worth of hesitation during the propaganda dances. These zealots swore complete loyalty to Yin Na and promised to contribute their lives and mass to the True Sun in the end anyway. At the end of three centuries Yin Na began his plan to “clean up the realm” by having ants consume up to a limited amount after the Third Sun’s remnant trial (about 100 li to 500 li in diameter) before coming back to Yin Na’s orbit.
This clean-up campaign took not even one full year before 99% of the Third Sun’s original mass was consumed by these ants.
Yin Na felt like gloating, but he didn’t waste any more energy or mass with another Soul Articulation. After all, actions were louder than words!
Seeing her foe ultimately win in the end, the already unstable Eight Fans Yong Jun felt like her heart was being spat on by venom and struck by lightning.
With a final mental wail of her soul, she hurled herself in suicidal anger directly at Yin Na’s mass, as if hoping that the velocity alone would kill him.
Of course, it didn’t. Yin Na barely even noticed her tiny 1-li Soul Orb enter his mass; if he hadn’t been paying close attention on her whereabouts all these years using Soul Identification he’d surely have lost track of her!
“All of the 3 Suns are eaten by me,” thought Yin Na. “Well, not quite.”
Having erased all opposition, Yin Na then ordered a mass sacrificial ceremony in the realm where the most fanatic of his followers, just like he did millenia ago with Ouyang Fang and Zhou Fei, began absorbing each other, before sacrificing themselves into Yin Na’s mass.
The realm became scarce, with very few “stars” and one titanic Super Sun radiantly shining in the center of it.
Yin Na was a 300 million-li Soul Orb. He was the center of the realm, the focus of every ant orbiting around him, and the worst he feared had occurred: absolutely nothing.
Having no response nor indication from the realm that anything had changed, Yin Na could only orbit slowly by eating after his own light orbs while meditating for another million years.
After a million years, Yin Na finally achieved sufficient inspiration and grasped the final Soul Ability:
Soul Orb Breakthrough.
“I now understand!” Yin Na thought. “How could there have been this many individual Soul Cultivators who have leaped through the door of Uncertain life and death? I had long suspected that some of the Soul Orbs were even fabricated, empty souls…like artificial participants in the realm. How could so many individuals throughout history have gotten ahold of the exact same Nine Yin Treasured Jade Block, beaten several thousand games of Mahjong and then ended up here? Why is it that I’m the first after all these eons of devouring?
“It is because the Nine Yin Treasured Jade Block is not the only route to this realm. In other words, this brick must have been a part of a larger mysterious treasure, probably a part of a great building or wall back in the cultivation world!”
To make a modern comparison, the realm was a great big Server, and the Nine Yin Treasured Jade was just a VPN that lead whichever user who died with it to take a second chance at life through becoming the victor in this realm.
“I don’t think Deng Tai Fan, Demon Lord Mao nor the 3 Suns ever grasped how profound the foundations of the brick really was, because it is highly likely that the brick itself is a part of something much… grander.”
This explained the rather high amount of Soul Orbs that have emerged in the realm- they didn’t all make personal contact with Yin Na’s treasure, rather, they’ve all arrived here through contact with something similar.
Yin Na’s mental breakthrough accompanied his physical breakthrough of his Soul Orb, as the realm began collapsing. Like a vacuum, his Soul Orb forcefully compressed the dimensions of the realm, as it devoured all the surrounding Soul Orbs and light particles into his center with the crushing gravity of a black hole.
Before long, Yin Na could actually “see,” or sense the boundaries of the realm! They were closing in on him, or rather, he was bringing them closer to himself through his personal gravity!
At 1 Billion li in diameter, Yin Na surpassed the boundaries of the realm, which appeared like a sea of chaotic lines, patterns and scribbles. He felt a momentary thrill of uncertainty at making contact with it, but he knew that he only had everything to gain from venturing into the unknown.
His puissant, glowing surface burned the chaos. A tremendous explosion occurred!