Although Ming was cycling, pushing all the qi into his tree friend that he could muster, the wall of darkness had almost reached them.

“What happens, in the dark?” Ming asked.

“Ming, I…” Hope started, “It seems my earlier assessment was right. We don’t have enough time.”

Ming just nodded, though his hopes had been dashed. It didn’t feel quite real. Or maybe that was just denial speaking. In any case, he was glad Bo would live on.

“I suppose I can answer your question. The material realm is our bastion against the primordial force of decay. Anything unlucky enough to find itself outside the bounds of the Wujin plane quickly rots down to nothing,” Hope said.

“It rots?” Ming said aloud, hope trickling back into his voice. “Is it possible time just moves much faster out there?”

Hope sent the impression of a frown. “I’ve never heard anyone describe it that way, but I suppose it could be like that. However, I don’t think there’s air.”

Then the world of emptiness finally descended upon them, and all was dark.

But Ming was still breathing, somehow.

Breathing the void feels like drowning, and it tastes faintly of death, Ming thought.

As he inhaled in the pitch black, dark miasma passed through Ming's lungs. As he exhaled, it was dark miasma all the same. He couldn’t see it, only feel it. In the endless void, his existence was merely an oversight; he was inconsequential. His cycling technique allowed him to process the highly viscous fluid into qi much like he could from meditating in the real world, and that qi was enough to sustain his body, so long as he kept cycling.

It was a hellish torture Ming wouldn’t wish on his worst enemies, and it took everything he had to continue breathing in the cycling pattern Guren had taught him, but he knew that if he stopped, he would quickly suffocate.

“We’re not dead,” Ming said.

“We’re not dead,” Hope repeated. “What even are you? Some kind of demon?”

Ming suppressed a laugh even as he continued to feel like he was a thousand li under the ocean.

“Seriously, I have no records of anything ever surviving out here, not to mention anyone. We’ve officially exited the domain of trees and entered the domain of gods. Are you secretly a god? Did you trick this poor tree into binding himself to an estranged deity?” Hope continued, voice heavy with mirth.

“Am I dying?” Ming asked.

“Well, all mortal creatures are slowly dying, in a certain sense of… wait…” the tree paused, and Ming felt his presence running over his whole body. Then the scanning stopped, only to be picked up again after what felt like an eternity drowning in the black currents surrounding them. “Not only are you not dying, but I see no signs of senescence. You had two years of vitality left to enter the Qi Gathering Adept realm, and yet your aging has stalled completely. How is this possible?”

“I think that if I dropped my cycling technique, my aging would resume, slowed as it may be. But I’d also die, so that seems out of the question.”

“Please don’t do that,” Hope replied.

“Honestly, it’s tempting. Breathing fluid is horrible. I’m not sure I could spend ten thousand years like this, if that’s really what it’ll take for you to grow the realm seed.”

“I’m sure. But think of the opportunity before you—it’s as if you were within another Dao vision! Or hell,” Hope pointed out. “But perhaps this is the solution to your sensitivity problem.”

“How’s that?” Ming asked, askance.

“You might discover a concept related to suffering,” Hope replied cheerfully.

“Oh, I suppose it’d all be worth it then,” Ming said, rolling his eyes.

“It would!”

The qi in his surroundings wasn’t even dense enough to push at a breakthrough, and he knew that even if he could do so, the unbalanced void might ruin his foundation forever, so Ming was truly left with nothing to do. Cycling constantly had replaced sleep, but it was still just another thing that was deeply unpleasant about the experience, much like not being able to see, hear, smell, taste, or feel anything but the unforgiving dark. He had already discovered that what words he could force out in between breaths didn’t make any sound at all.

After a period of time that could’ve been a few days or a few months, for Ming had no way to keep track of such things, he began to question his purpose.

“What’s the point of any of this?” Ming asked. “I mean, I know you’re growing the realm seed, so we might be able to leave eventually, but why are we trying so hard to survive? Why am I voluntarily putting myself through hell?”

Ming felt himself choking up, his breathing pattern starting to slip as his tears dissolved into the inky black.

“Do you remember what you told me the day you gave me the power to speak?” the ancient tree asked. “Because I do. Were those words so hollow that you would abandon them so easily now?”

Ming turned away, as if there was something to turn away from. It was one of those reactions that had ingrained itself so thoroughly in his brain that he performed it even in the absence of sense. For a moment, he had forgotten why he was doing any of this, but Hope’s words reignited his passion.

“I remember,” Ming said, a new strength burning in his mind as he thought back to that day. “Why must the strong bully the weak? I refuse to accept it!”

And so it was that a new, tiny red character imprinted itself into his mind cultivation, separate from the paradigm of the two that had come before it, written upon his heart. It was called Resolve, and he forgot his pain as it wrapped around the other two characters, augmenting both of them and acting as a buffer to the outside world. He knew instinctively that he wouldn’t be able to use it for a massive active boon in the same way as the others, but that didn’t matter.

Resolve was his salvation, and he felt his mind cultivation break through with the added character.

“Hope,” Ming said, smiling, “I found it.”

“One week to discover a new defining concept,” the tree said, continuing to cultivate the realm seed as he replied to Ming, “I’m glad you’re on my side, you glorious monster.”

“One week of torture,” Ming said solemnly, resuming his meditation.

A year slipped by like this, his willpower unwavering in the face of the challenge. He talked to Hope every so often, sometimes asking about what it was like to grow a realm seed, and others just discussing life. It was both an inexorably long time and a brief, flitting moment in the grand scheme of things. He was sure he would’ve gone insane a long time ago if not for his Resolve character.

Soon enough, he was forgetting what it was like to move, his senses fading away with disuse. When attempting to seize his own body’s faculties in the endless sea of the void yielded no actual reaction, it felt entirely pointless to try.

So it was that he fell into a never-ending trance, his breath a lullaby that seemed so familiar, yet so foreign. After what could’ve been ten more years in a trance, a character started to form. It was obscured, and he couldn’t read it. It was a transcendent shade of gray—the most beautiful color he had ever seen.

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But this one was different. It required qi to form—Ming’s own qi. It occurred to him that he was surrounded by the stuff, but his cycling technique wasn’t efficient enough to do more than allow his body to continue functioning. Or, at least, much more. It seemed that, at some point, the balance had shifted ever so slightly in his favor. His cycling technique had grown.

He offered the extra trickle to the character, and it drank it in greedily until there was nothing left, but it took in equal measure from his own stores. From that point on, the character happily took anything extra that his body didn’t require to operate at peak efficiency.

It seemed that until the character was done forming, he would be unable to access the extra qi from the void, but Ming didn’t really mind, since he knew it would likely corrupt his cultivation base to use it, anyway. Given, he didn’t really mind anything at all, in his trance.

Every so often, Ming would wake for a moment, lucidity clouding his mind. The times in between the trances always felt so strange.

He blinked, and empires rose and fell.

He posed a question to Hope, listening raptly to what he had to say, before falling into another slumber, centuries passing in silence.

Another moment of wakefulness arrived, after five millennium spent in the veil, and Ming realized the character was nowhere near finished. He didn’t mind. He fell back into trance.

Ming’s mind cultivation would progress every few decades, aided by the intensity of his meditation and the grandiose character assembling in his mind, bit by bit, but he didn’t pay much attention. That is, until he felt something truly shift inside him, and his mind began to run in parallel.

“Mind Splitting Realm!” Hope shouted in reverie, and the excitement might’ve scared Ming out of his cycling pattern, had he not now been capable of focusing perfectly on two things at once. Part of him wondered if this change had removed some of his own humanity.

“Now we just have to live, and maybe I’ll be strong enough to protect us,” Ming said.

“Yeah, yeah. I’m working on it, kid.”

“Who are you calling kid? I’m over five thousand years old,” Ming said, mirthful.

“And yet I’m still your elder,” Hope said, chuckling. At that, Ming fell back into his trance, but he soon resurfaced, noticing something shifting in his heart.

“The characters… they’re changing somehow,” Ming said. “Wrapping around my heart.”

“That they are,” Hope replied. “Those characters were never meant to require your focus to activate in the first place, but your mind cultivation was simply too weak, so they adapted to suit you, as they are wont to do.”

Ming watched as the characters expanded their domain, circling his heart in a prism, and he could already tell his awareness and acuity had improved tenfold with the change.

“Even now, you’re not yet powerful enough to incorporate them fully, so they will continue to require focus to be used to their ‘full’ potential, which is now much stronger. Such is the boon of accessing ascendant concepts as a mortal.”

“I see,” Ming said. “That must be why my concept of Resolve incorporated so cleanly, then?”

“Correct,” Hope replied. “As useful as it is, it is no higher order concept.”

“How’s the seed coming?” Ming asked.

“About five more millenia.”

A few moments passed in silence.

“Do you ever wonder why that dungeon core decided to dissolve one of its own realms?” Ming asked.

“Truth be told, I have no idea. It’s a rare occurrence that a realm seed just appears for the taking, though, so in a certain sense it was fortunate.”

“I suppose,” Ming said, shaking his head.

With that, Ming allowed himself to fall back under again, the state of trance coming easier than ever after actual eons of practice.

A few millennia later, the character was finished forming, and his mind cultivation had advanced leaps and bounds along with it. He could sense that he was at the cusp of something entirely new—he had achieved Peak Master in the Mind Splitting realm, and was so very close to the Soul Manifestation stage. This character did not wrap around his heart like the other concepts, though—nothing so mundane.

The concept of the Eclipse deigned to remold his body in myriad ways, spreading itself across each of his channels and meridians with impunity, circling his dantian easily, and even covering his spirit roots, which connected him directly to his tree friend. The strange character followed those roots, reaching outside his body to cover Hope, who yelped in surprise at the intrusion.

It called to him, shaking, asking him. It wanted permission.

“It wants to remake us,” Ming said.

“How do you know?”

“It told me.”

“It told you? Never in the history of trees have I heard of a concept doing such a thing.”

“Maybe you’re right,” Ming said, somewhat disheartened. “If you’re not willing, I won’t go through with it. It has offered me that choice.”

“Are you kidding? Like I would miss the chance to make history,” Hope said, sending him a wink. “Go ahead.”

He shook his head, wondering what he was getting himself into, and then allowed it. If he couldn’t trust his own mind not to lead him astray, what was the point of any of it?

First were his channels. The character ran itself along them, imprinting itself into their pristine creation, erasing every scar they had borne from when Hope had sent some of his energy into Ming as a last ditch effort. They soon shone with a gray sheen.

Next was his dantian. The qi sitting in pools there was influenced easily by the character. The wood qi disappeared first, separating into sun and moon qi in an instant. Then black and white mixed, and all that remained was gray. The other characters in his heart seemed to rebel at this change, but the Eclipse character quickly calmed them down, enhancing them so they could understand his new constitution. Eventually they were placated, their surfaces smoother than ever.

His roots changed, then. In a moment, the brownish trait of wood was erased, replaced with white and black qi in unequal measure. The character proceeded to change some of the roots, expending itself to modify them until their amount was perfectly equal in number. It covered them for a moment, as if it needed to perform something truly scandalous, and they all emerged a magnificent gray.

The scar splitting him in two, the one he had borne as long as he could remember, healed in a second as the Eclipse character fortified his body with balance, just as it had done his spirit.

Then Ming lost his connection with Hope, and fear ate away at him, but ultimately there was nothing he could do. He would see this to its completion. He noticed the character reaching out to Hope, running along his form, and Ming felt the first real sensation he had experienced in the void for nearly eight thousand years, since the Resolve character had numbed the agony of breathing fluid. It was pain. Specifically, the pain of his flesh ripping open at the willow mark on his palm, even as the character sewed it perfectly shut, the mark of the willow burned away like it had never been there at all. The character had forced Hope inside of him, and even now it folded him in on himself, compressing the tree into a knot, before placing him just above Ming’s dantian, his final resting point atop that unified pool of gray qi, his spiritual sea.

Then, its adjustment complete, the character modified Hope’s constitution, shifting the tree from an even brown to a splotched mix of white and black, before he finally morphed into a beautiful hue of gray, and their connection reignited, the void disappearing from sight along with the Eclipse character.

He was suddenly standing beside a perfect gray tree that stretched toward the starry sky, though the glorious canopy at the top was easily in sight, willow leaves framing the horizon. The tree was too thick for Ming to get his arms around even here, but exuded an aura of hope and prosperity. Ming could tell that no creature would dare cross that gray tree, no matter how despicable they might be.

“Ming!” Hope called, “I’m alive!” And the words came from that enormous gray, flourishing tree itself, larger than anything Ming had ever seen.

Tears once again ran down his face; for, though he had tried to reserve judgement of that ancient character’s actions until the end, it had been so terrible being alone for even a few moments in the void.

“I’m more glad than you know,” Ming said, delighting in the fact that he could speak again, that he could taste his tears. He had so missed the feelings that came along with being alive.

“Actually, I can feel exactly how glad you are through our connection. I will admit that it is quite glad, though,” the tree said, words floating to Ming in the breeze, leaves rustling as he spoke. “I do feel the same, though you already knew that.”

“Right. So what is all this?” Ming asked, stepping off the lower branch and onto the endless expanse of gray below. It wasn’t quite liquid or solid, but it held his weight fine. He could tell that the starlight pouring down upon the land was quite rich in qi itself, perfectly balanced, and he did not want for light. The gray stretched to the horizon in all directions, and it caused Ming to wonder if it ever stopped.

“That Eclipse character changed much, assisting me in my creation of this realm, which is home to seven other worlds already, each much resembling this one,” Hope said.

Ming took that in, looking closer at the tree, which was home to seven rifts, each leading to a similar landscape, though they were not at the top of the tree, and the last of the seven rifts was home to Hope’s roots.

“It can now be considered an ascendant realm. Further, it changed my race. I am an Eclipse World Tree, the first of my kind, no longer a common willow! I’m now a Heavenly Sprite, though it restricted my power much outside of this realm.”

“An ascendant realm?” Ming asked.

“Primarily, plants grow much faster and produce far superior yields, and no one should ever want for food, once they take hold. Spirit beasts and plants are significantly more likely to transcend their species, evolving to greater heights just as I have. There’s bound to be more benefits, but we will surely discover those later.”

“Is it possible to return to the Wujin plane?” Ming asked, glancing once more at the barren gray sea.

“As a matter of course. I expect to join you in gathering many specimens that will take hold here,” the tree said. “Our control of this realm is absolute, and my domain is yours. Will it, and a rift will appear.”

“Great,” Ming said, laying back down on Hope’s branches, smiling as they formed a nook around him. “I’m going to take a nap, then, Hope.”

And he did.