The line moved at an excruciatingly slow rate and only after a full six hours of standing in line Naath, Baal, and Zeke were finally within a few meters of the stairs. There were two elders sitting at the bottom of the stairs checking the title plates of all incoming disciples. When Naath stepped forward and showed his to them they grunted in approval and told him to be careful ascending the stairs. It should be fine for a cultivator but there was still a degree of pressure on the stairs. Of course this pressure naturally increased as one got closer to the top.
As long as a disciple didn’t rush up all of the stairs all at once they would be fine. But some fools always just ran all the way up and ended up hurting themselves as they didn’t acclimate to the pressure. Naath nodded and waited for Baal and Zeke, once they were past the gate and onto the stairs he told them.
“Guys I’ll see you at the top. I’m one of those impatient people who wants to test his limits haha. Also I’m curious about this pressure as I cannot feel anything here.”
Leaving those words Naath turned around and jumped forwards bounding up the stairs by the dozen. Baal and Zeke just let out breaths, the elder who warned Naath scowled slightly noticing this out of the corner of his eye. But he had seen enough of these overconfident little brats already so he otherwise ignored it and went back to his duties. Meanwhile Naath had reached the 100th step and finally felt a touch of pressure. Feeling this Naath stopped and closed his eyes sensing this feeling deeper.
As he did King spoke up.
“Naath, don’t just use your martial sense to feel the pressure observe it with your soul sense. You’ve been ignoring your soul sense abilities or forgetting about them entirely as of late. It’s an incredible gift that you are a soul master you should absolutely take advantage of it. Just because you are still building a foundation doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use soul sense. In fact soul sense will allow you to learn fine control of soul energy if you play around with it a bit. Rather than a detriment it can become your greatest asset while you build your foundations. Who knows it may even inspire you in the future to come up with new uses for the True Void Arts.
After all being a complete artform it should only be limited by the imagination and understanding. Anyway I’m going to go back to working out how you can cultivate your soul with me here, I just wanted to remind you that you have soul sense.”
Naath wanted to smack himself when he heard King’s reminder. He had in fact completely forgotten about his soul sense and gotten so used to it being there he never even focused on it anymore. After this reminder he shifted his focus and began to feel out the pressure that he was feeling with this third eye of his. When he did he noticed that the pressure came from an incredibly dense energy field that came from the stairs. No that wasn’t quite right either, it was more like the energy was coming from the plateau itself and the stairs were tapping into this energy. Naath focused and used the true void membrane of his right hand in order to try and absorb some of this energy and see what it was composed of.
He was able to absorb it easily enough but he could only really break it back down into nothing. He didn’t have the fine control to separate energies yet, after all breaking things down into energies was the territory of the third stage of the True Void Arts. Shaking his head Naath opened his eyes and continued to shoot up the stairs like a rocket. In only a few minutes he had climber to the 500th step. Here he was really starting to feel the pressure and he paused to acclimate to it a bit. In order to do so he absorbed a small amount of the energy in all of his true void membranes and then let them produce it. He might not be able to break it down into its components but he could still replicate it by just directly using his creation energy.
After he did this he carefully controlled the energy and used it as a barrier on the surface of his skin, immediately dissipating the pressure. This was one of the horrifying aspects of the True Void Arts. Assimilation. Any energy absorbed could be replicated and used by Naath for whatever he needed. Later in the third stage once he began to absorb matter by breaking it down into energy he would be able to reproduce that too. The True Void Arts made anything and everything into a resource for cultivation!
After Naath assimilated the energy and used it as a barrier he continued to shoot up the stairs. This time he stopped on the 700th and had to stop to absorb a new sample of the energy as it’s composition seemed to have changed and it had become denser and the pressure much heavier. After taking a moment Naath had adjusted the energy and was moving on not stopping again until the 900th step to adjust again. After taking a moment to do this he finished his climb going over the thousandth step after only 20 minutes of climbing. As soon as Naath stepped over the thousandth step he noticed that where he was was not in fact the top of the plateau. Rather it was a cliffed area that seemed to go into the plateau several dozen meters there were more stairs on the other side of a large, open street in front of him.
Naath was enjoying the challenge of the stairs and wanted to see if he could absorb even denser energy higher up. As he approached the next set of stairs he was stopped by another couple of elders. They told Naath that his cultivation was not enough to try and go up these stairs and that he would only be hurting himself if he continued. One of the passers by said.
“Ah another idiot here to challenge the steps for the energy baptism of legend haha.”
Naath was confused and asked one of the elders what the man was talking about. The elder let out a breath saying.
“Ugh that stupid rumor just wont die will it? There is a baseless legend that if one finishes climbing all 5000 stairs within an hour they will receive an energy blessing from the plateau. This blessing will allow someone to be completely immune to this pressure and will receive an energy that will supposedly nourish ones body making them stronger. Supposedly it will increase the rate at which a person that someone can make breakthroughs too. This rumor has cause a lot of young cultivators to charge recklessly up the steps and cripple themselves. Ah its worth mention that the rumor says that the baptism only happens if you do this on your first attempt.
This has stopped countless people from continuously trying and just absolutely destroying their bodies. Either way kid you shouldn't go further, I’ve seen too many people cripple themselves trying.”
Hearing this only made Naath more interested in climbing the stairs so he asked.
“Am I not allowed to climb by the rules of the sect or by simple recommendation?”
The elder sighed “alright fine, go ahead but don’t come crying to me when your need to be carried back down.”
Naath smiled wide and immediately shot passed the elder and up the stairs soon moving out of sight. Now that Naath had gotten used to absorbing this energy he was able to absorb the newer energy passively. Using this he shot up the stair and reached the 3000 mark in only 10 minutes. The elder who was keeping an eye on Naath now was absolutely gobsmacked, this was insane, nobody had ever done this before! Naath didn’t care about this though and continued shooting up the stairs.
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But on the 4,763’d step Naath felt a familiar sensation. This energy was truly dense, it also definitely had some level of benefit to cultivators. Naath felt his bones adjust under the energies pressure and he had the feeling of being ready for another breakthrough. Naath was delighted but decided he would break through after receiving the energy baptism. Fate, however, seemed to have other plans. On the 4,900th step the energy had built up too much and Naath had to compress it once in his bones already! Noticing this Naath sat down on this step and decided to just break through right here and now.
So circulating his True Void Arts and pulling in the energy around him he began to run the cycle of True Void in his membranes. As he was doing this a thought occurred to him. Why didn’t he compress the energy in his True Void Membranes first? Twice in a day Naath felt like smacking himself for being so dense! He began to compress energy inside of his true void membranes to the highest extreme he could in the attraction phase rather than simply running right through it. This made Naath think again, and have an idea that he stored in the back of his mind for later.
Right now he needed to focus on his breakthrough and see what compressing his energy in his true void membranes like this would accomplish. A minute passed, and then 10, and then 15. Even still the True Void Membrane was still pulling in energy and condensing it down to the absolute limit. It still wasn’t done! Naath realized that if he he didn’t hurry up he would miss any chance at this energy baptism. He had wanted to try to lie low and hide his True Void Arts as best he could so he wasn’t running the energy absorption at full capacity ever since he left the forest. He let out a breath and decided he hadn’t been low-key at all anyway so he might as well say fuck it and go all out.
With that thought he ran his True Void Membranes at full capacity. Instantly there was a vortex of energy that formed around Naath and siphoned into his True Void Membranes. Everyone within 300 steps of him turned to his direction and went wide eyed. They all had the same though. ‘Who is that little monster?! What on earth does he cultivate in?!!’ Naath though was fully immersed in his cultivation, his attention split four ways into each of the membranes. Finally after another minute the energy had reached some sort of critical point and under Naaths astounded gaze the liquid energy compressed and crystallized!
Naath realized this was the absolute limit of how far he could compress the energy as the crystal began to grow. In a matter of seconds the crystals had grown to maximum size, absorbing all energy in each of his membranes. After this he ran the destruction phase. The energy in the crystals changed, turning to destruction, yet the crystals themselves remained. Naath was curious about this and felt like he could absolutely destroy the crystals too if he wanted to. But he felt like that was a bad decision. His gut instinct told him that these crystals were absolutely something he should work with.
He always trusted his gut feeling no matter what and above all else. So with that he simply let the energy of destruction do its work naturally and leave the crystal intact. Once the energy of nothing was all that was left Naath slowly extracted this ultra compressed energy from his True Void Membranes. It was as thin as a single hair as the energy entered his bones, but the feeling it gave off was immense. Once the energy settled inside of Naath’s bones there was simply no need to compress it at all. It was already at its absolute physical limit. Any more compression and he would be crushing the structure of the energy itself and causing it to decay.
Naath did five cycles before all of his bones were full to the brim with energy and once all of them were full the energy re-crystalized! Naath bones immediately felt heavier, denser, like they just tripled in weight and density. Then Naath added just a little bit more to break through. The energy catalyzed and then Naaths bones shattered in a way they never had before. His bones from before except the core of nothingness that didn't go away last time all seemed to evaporate after shattering. The pressure wave released was like nothing before. The steps underneath Naath cracked and chipped and even broke.
Not just the elders but every single cultivator in the sect, and even some outside of it all felt this disturbance of energy and pressure. They all realized that someone was breaking through and that it was the arrival of a god level genius. The lower level cultivators, that is anyone below blood cleansing all suddenly had the same though at the same time. Inside of their minds they all heard their instincts scream the same word. RUN!!!
The air itself seemed to vibrate and tremble as the pressure wave moved out not all at once and quickly but slowly. It was like the weight of a small mountain spreading outwards but not dispersing as it went. Rather it was like everywhere the pressure wave touched felt the same weight. Cracks quickly spread all across the stairs, up and down. Every nearby cultivator below muscle strengthening ran for their lives! Some even jumped off the sides of the stairs taking their chances with the fall. They felt a sense of fear from watching the slowly approaching pressure wave that they had never felt in their lives. It was like the instinctual fear of a higher life form.
In a matter of minutes the pressure wave with all this weight behind it had spread a full mile. Every high elder in the sect was now rushing over to where this pressure wave was. Even the blood cleansing cultivators had backed away from this pressure wave feeling a sense of danger. When the elders approached even most of them stopped outside the pressure wave to watch. Only four people stepped into the pressure wave to try and observe who was behind it. The sect master, the law enforcement elder and the examination elder. Other than these three was another high elder of the sect that went noticed as he entered.
Finally after the pressure wave had been around for five minutes a rumbling started. It was faint at first, but slowly grew in volume, it was the sound of rattling bones. Slowly the volume climbed higher and higher and the sound spread out. Brutus down below in Naaths dwelling suddenly shuddered and seemed to know what was coming next. He quickly ran outside and dug a hole in the ground, he shoved his head in it and buried his own head as deep as he could! Then for good measure he put his paws over where he had buried his ears.
Back at the stairs the rumbling was still growing in volume causing sound waves to go out ever few seconds now. Finally it seem to crescendo into its peak.
BANG!!!!!!*
An explosion like the sound of a hundred volcano's sounded. Even the elders who were nearby paled slightly, the ones who had entered the pressure wave had long since prepared energy barriers. Even the sect master was sitting there with wide eyes looking at Naath. This explosion of sound was utterly insane, a massive crack went right down the staircase and seemed to split it at the point that Naath was sitting! Inside of Naath’s body his old bones were gone, completely. Not even powder remained, Naath spat out massive mouthfuls of blood after this sound scaring the elders witless. But their worries were unfounded this blood was all filled with the remains of Naaths old bones.
His body was directly expelling them! The crystals where his bones used to be started to reform and take the shape of an entirely new skeleton. Once the crystals finished forming into the shape of a perfect skeleton they also followed Naaths will and made a few imperfection on purpose! Every single joint on Naaths body was now completely dislocatable if Naath willed it but otherwise it was nigh impossible! There was a familiar bump that Naath had in his last life on the back of his skull. Once all of this was done the energy inside of these new crystalline bones began to change. The very center was filled with the energy of nothing, his new marrow turned an unsullyable, pure white. Half of the bones internal structure turned black like light simply couldn’t escape! The other half turned into an almost static like gray coloration that looked like it could grind down creation itself to nothing.
Finally the outermost layer seemed to be completely transparent as if it simply didn't exist. Once his bones were finally done changing. All of the pressure Naath expelled earlier seemed to be sucked right back towards him. Along with every last ounce of freely available energy for kilometers. This sudden energy vacuum filled seconds later like nothing had happened at all. Then the energy that held Naath in place released and Naath let out a miserable scream and fell unconscious. This pain was millions of times beyond what had happened in his previous breakthroughes. It threatened to be the absolute limit of what his nervous system could endure!
Even King in Naaths soul sea was unconscious right now, not only had this energy completely overwhelmed Naaths bones and body. All of the excess went directly to Naath soul sea! This made a pressure wave here too that King simply couldn’t endure without preparing and caused him to be knocked unconscious as well!