Chapter 90 - Heart of the World Tree
"Pant ... pant ..."
Hei was standing covered in wounds. His breath was labored as his heart was beating rapidly. He was trying to recover his normal breathing rhythm, but his enemy would never let him do this.
Chang Huan looked at the ten corpses he had summoned lying on the ground with his brow furrowed. Their limbs had been torn apart one by one, and large pieces of flesh were missing, scattered here and there on the battlefield. He didn’t expect such a result. The young Flower Sect martial artist was already injured and had consumed much of his spirit power against Ren, the number one of the Tree Sect younger generation. And yet he had given such a performance, arriving to make Chang Huan wonder what would have happened if he had fought at his peak condition.
But regardless of whether he could have had a chance or not, it didn't matter anymore. The reality was this - Hei had consumed his strength and was no longer able to fight. Nothing now would have prevented him from claiming his body.
"I have to admit it. I'm even more impressed than before, but now it's over. Get ready.” Chang Huan said as he slowly approached Hei.
Seeing him approaching, Hei looked up and smiled.
"You still don't understand. I told you. I'm not your only opponent. It’s the three of us."
At those words, Ye and Xing arrived near Hei as they covered him with their bloodied bodies. Both had faces that expressed ferocity as they bared their teeth. The remains of the spirit soldier corpse laid several meters from them.
Usually, the corpses of Ghost Law corpse manipulators reflected the sense of battle and the talent of the one who commanded them. So the quicker and more precise a corpse was in its movements, the stronger its puppeteer was.
However, there were cases in which the corpse couldn’t be controlled all the time with extreme concentration. As a result, techniques that allowed the corpses to have individual autonomy regardless of the martial artist's control were necessary. And Corpse Fury was one of them.
It allowed the corpse to assume an automatic combat function thanks to the formation engraved inside itself. That function, therefore, forced the corpse to attack every living being within a certain radius, giving priority to those who possessed the highest amount of spirit power. The movements’ precision and the ability to react correctly to the enemy's moves would have been discarded to leave room for more strength and ferocity.
But although this move was excellent against human martial artists who would be nervous about facing an enemy who felt no pain and didn’t worry about losing an arm or a leg, this didn’t work as well against spirit beasts.
When spirit beasts fought seriously, their fighting would always take on a violent connotation, literally destroying the enemy and sometimes their own body. Even in the battle against the beast tamers’ group, several months ago, Ye and Xing had shown this feature and had slaughtered their enemies to the point of tearing their flesh and organs apart.
So, against two spirit beasts who were also divine beasts by birth, and therefore possessed Elemental Laws, even though it was comparable to a seventh stage, that corpse now devoid of the rationality of its master, was nothing but a puppet a little hard to destroy. That's all.
And as Hei had foreseen, they had finally torn it to pieces and returned to their big brother.
Chang Huan now had an even uglier face than before. That spirit soldier was his strongest and rarest piece; after all, it didn't happen every day to run into a dead spirit soldier. But now it had become unusable. And even if he were to repair it, it would never be as good as before. That was because Chang Huan had a minimal understanding of the Ghost Law and was limited by his abilities.
Furthermore, his guards, as well as the other corpses he had, had been destroyed. At this time, he was entirely unguarded, but there were still some enemies to deal with.
"Shit, shit. F*ck! If only I had also learned spectral or bone techniques. If only I had been on the Continent, and not limited by this f*cking shitty island. If so, there was no way I wouldn’t be able to use those techniques."
It should be known that the users of Ghost Law were generally divided into three branches - corpse manipulators, spectral fighters, bone users.
The corpse manipulators, as the name suggested, modified and commanded corpses from a distance. The spectral fighters, on the other hand, were able to make a part of their body incorporeal, as if they were ghosts, even going as far as to make their whole body incorporeal. Lastly, bone users could use the bones of their body to fight, increasing their density and becoming combat machines with resistance and body hardness comparable to Metal Law users.
It should also be said, however, that all three branches being part of the Ghost Law, it was also possible to learn all three of them. And that was why Chang Huan was cursing.
Despite his talent, he was born on one of the various islands and not on the Continent. The islands weren’t only limited only by the low amount of spirit power but also by the legacy of techniques and resources. As a result, it was already quite surprising that he had managed to achieve such a control degree with the Ghost Law, coming to manipulate more bodies together. But such chains had finally ended up constricting him to accept the harsh reality of the facts - he would never have become the sovereign he had always wanted to be.
Ye and Xing didn’t take pity on him and attacked. Chang Huan did his best to react. He didn't want to accept his situation. How could he? But it was a useless and desperate attempt.
Ye and Xing ended up sinking their fangs over him, breaking his spirit power protective layer. Then they began to pull both from two different sides as if they were playing tug of war with Chang Huan, who had the same function as the rope.
But Chang Huan wasn’t a rope that could be pulled without thought. At one point, his body collapsed, and two large horizontal tunnels were dug out of his body. To divide these flesh tunnels was a small strip of skin in the center of the chest.
In that so gruesome way, the number one genius of the Tremor Sect younger generation and even of the entire Rainbow Island was dead. In the end, he had become like one of the many corpses that he loved so much.
Watching the victory of his little sisters, Hei smiled. Indeed, he wouldn’t have felt disgusted or terrorized from how they achieved victory. After all, his fights sometimes ended up making such grotesque conclusions that they could make people feel sick.
"Good, well done, little sisters. But even if we beat all five big sects, our work is not finished," Hei announced as he watched the rest of the participants who had stopped to observe the conclusion of the clash between the five big sects.
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The Flower Sect had won on all fronts and could undoubtedly be considered the first as far as the younger generation was concerned. But in any case, with the defeat of the big sects representatives from the Lake Kingdom and Mountain Kingdom, the middle sects and the other families from those kingdoms were automatically out of the reward promised by the dead or unconscious martial artists on the ground.
The only ones who had benefited were those from the Forest Kingdom. But now that the balance was broken, if they wanted to keep their word, they had to hold back the coalition of martial artists from the other two kingdoms.
With Hei, who barely stood up and all the other representatives of the big sects out of the picture, nothing could prevent those sects and families from having their spotlight. But before they could make a move or suggest something, suddenly the flower opened slightly, and from there, three large vines sprang up at extreme speed.
These lianas bound themselves around the body of Hei, Ye, and Xing. And they began to be dragged towards the inside of the flower.
"Do not resist. Let yourself be carried away.” Hei commanded his two little sisters.
The flower until now had given no signs, except for that voice at the beginning. Now instead, it brought out vines to take the three of them from all the living beings present here. There was no doubt that it had to be somehow related to Lian. After all, she had been inside for a while.
Obeying the command of their big brother without question, Ye and Xing let the vines dragged them. In a short time, together with Hei, they entered into flower. There, they were blinded by the darkness until they met the light at the center produced by a small flower.
At that point, Lian was sitting on the floor while meditating. Her body looked slightly different as a faint pink-green aura surrounded her body. Beside her, there was a beautiful woman who was watching them arrive. From her hands hung the three vines that had dragged them in there. She was, therefore, responsible for this.
"Welcome to my home, Hei, Ye, Xing. I talked to Lian, and she told me about you. My name is Gaiya, but I am also known with another name: Lotus of Love. "
As she introduced herself, Gaiya's eyes flew over the new arrivals one by one. In particular, they focused on Xing, which was the spitting image of Bao Bei. If it weren't for the silver patterns on her body, she would have been identical to her.
When Hei, Ye, and Xing heard the name Lotus of Love, they couldn’t help but be stunned. They couldn’t believe it. In front of them, there was one of the divine beasts of which their mother had narrated in her stories.
"How? One hundred thousand years have passed. Mother said that divine beasts couldn’t live so long." Hei asked with wide eyes.
How was this possible? It seemed like a dream, but it was a reality before his eyes. And if the Lotus of Love was still alive, then their father ...?
"Bao Bei is right. I'm not alive but can't even be called dead. What you see is nothing but the residue of my soul. Normally, the soul disappears after the death of the body. But the strong beings possess strong souls, and if nearby any particular container, it is possible to keep one's soul alive. The problem is that, even so, at a certain point, the soul dies permanently, and even if they were to steal a body and resist the reaction of rejection of the body towards the new soul, one can't avoid his death. In any case, the souls of those who have died are unable to hold out for so many years."
Gaiya closed her eyes and let out a long sigh. Lian meanwhile had finished meditating and stood up, silently standing behind Hei. Her gaze was fixed on the boy in front of her. Her eyes contained conflicting emotions while she kept looking at Hei.
Noticing this, Gaiya could only make another sigh. Unfortunately, it was solely up to Lian to resolve her inner conflicts. She had already done more than what she should have had to do. And it wasn't like Lian's mixed emotions were without foundation. As a being who had lived an unrequited love for countless years, she could correctly understand the girl's feelings and what went through her mind.
Leaving aside Lain's dilemmas, Gaiya went on talking.
"This is why my soul is still alive." She pointed to an object inside the flower from which she came out. Inside was a pale gray sphere. "The Heart of the World Tree."
"Heart of the World Tree?"
"The World Tree is a secret guarded by us divine beasts. In our Main Forest, a small tree of a few centimeters is hidden. In reality, that is only the tip of the tree. The rest of the surface is hidden in the subsoil. Its roots reach so deep that not even underground divine beasts have managed to reach them. The World Tree is also the source from which all the spirit power of this world comes.
I don't know how Hei An managed to get it, but somehow he got its Heart and its Blood Essence. I don't know why, but I always thought there was something that he and Bao Bei had never told us. Perhaps only Zhi, the Baize divine beast, knew something. But it goes without saying that through these two things, your father managed to achieve the means to perform the ritual - to sacrifice our essence as divine beasts and thus obtain the god rank to lead us to victory."
World Tree, Main Forest... these were all terms unknown to Hei. Although Bao Bei had told them the story of divine beasts, she never went into details. One reason was that it was painful to talk about it. But another was because she wanted to wait for the right moment. She also didn't think that the Heart of the World Tree that should have been with Hei An was with Gaiya instead or that she was alive.
As for the Blood Essence, Bao Bei had once mentioned it to her children. The Blood Essence of a martial artist or any other being was the condensation of one's vitality. Through special techniques, one could burn one's blood essence to gain more power. But the price to pay was high: the loss of years of life and their potential. It was possible to restore this blood essence, but the means to do so were almost non-existent. For this reason, Bao Bei had only mentioned it without ever revealing how to perform that technique. She didn't want Hei or Ye or Xing to conceive the idea of using it.
"You must know that when your father killed the Hero of the Humans and the Demon Emperor, his power was such as to bring about the collapse of space itself. This world isn’t capable of withstanding the pressure of a divine rank. During this collapse, I was dragged along with a part of the territory towards a tear in the space. But before being dragged, Hei An threw me this Heart saying to guard it until the right person to deliver it came.
Ironically, after my physical body perished, the Heart of the World Tree also became my lifeline from eternal death. So far, I hadn’t understood the reason for his actions, but now I know. The person he was waiting for. No, that we all divine beasts were waiting for. That person is you, Hei. A human in the body, but a spirit beast in the mind and the soul.
For this reason, I give you the Heart of the World Tree. During countless years, I managed to link it to this dimension. Therefore, by taking the Heart of the World Tree, you will also automatically get this dimension. But even if I am giving it to you, the Heart of the World Tree is not yours to keep. You must take it to its place of origin. However, first, you must reunite it with its Blood Essence and the essence of us divine beasts that are still in Hei An’s possession.”
"Still in father’s possession?" Hei almost screamed because he couldn't believe it. His whole body was shaking from the possibility that had sprung into his mind. The same was true for Ye and Xing.
"Yes, if I am still alive in a certain sense, there is no way that his soul isn’t alive. You must find it and reunite the Heart with its Blood Essence and the Essence of us Divine Beasts. Then bring the Heart back to its place of origin. Only in this way can you heal the wounds of the world and restore the lack of density of spirit power in the air. But at the same time, you will also restore the ability of us spirit beasts to turn into divine beasts. "
At those words, all of them, Hei, Ye, Xing, and Lian, were speechless. Restore the density of spirit power; restore the ability to reach the sixth level, divine beast; meet Hei An, the Emperor Beast and Bao Bei’s companion and the biological father of Ye and Xing.
Looking at their astonishment, Gaiya smiled and said.
"But before you take this Heart, you have to know something. My soul is linked to the Heart of the World Tree. As soon as you take possession of it, the bond that keeps me anchored here will disappear, and I will die forever. This will certainly also be true for Hei An. But you don't have to be sad for me, because for the first time in countless years, I'm happy like I never been before. Just promise me one thing. I want you to say something to Bao Bei for me. Something I've never been able to tell her. "
However, while Gaiya was preparing to communicate her last message to the one she had loved more than anyone else, a cold and detached voice resounded throughout the Secret Dimension.
"And so, this is where he hid it. Well, it's time to close this business."