A/N
Just a heads up, near the end of the chapter, I included a short summary of everything that happened since Ke Yin entered the training room because when the chapters are split into books, the readers might have forgotten what happened prior to the epilogue.
Anyways, enjoy!
Chapter 780: Ke Yin - The Demon Lord
I stood there for a long moment just looking at myself.
Azure descended from somewhere above me.
"Master, you need to release the technique before you terrify someone."
He was right.
It had taken a lot of effort to create some goodwill with the newcomers, I didn’t want to ruin it already, so I let go of the energy.
The spiritual reflection dissolved, the crown and the cloak and the red smoke all unraveling at once, and the meditation plateau returned to being just a flat piece of rock with nothing unsettling standing on it.
"Check on everyone,” I told Azure. “If anyone asks what that was, explain that I was experimenting and that there’s nothing to worry about."
With a nod, he drifted away toward the northeast quadrant.
I sat down on the stone and thought about what I had actually just seen.
The Golden Sun energy, as far as I understood it, manifested the peak version of a cultivator. That was what I had done with Snik in Ke Jun's inner world, channeling it through his bloodline until the Sanguine Aristocracy ancestor appeared in all its terrifying perfection, some ideal version of what that lineage could have become.
The Golden Sun looked at what you were and showed you what you could be if everything in you was taken to its furthest point.
The Blood Moon, at its core, specialised in distortion and corruption.
So, when the Golden Sun tried to show the ideal version of a cultivator through the Blood Moon, what came out the other end was the peak version of a corrupted cultivator. This was basically the Blood Moon and the Golden Sun showing me: this is what you look like if you become a demon lord.
Honestly, I wasn't sure how to feel about that.
There was a part of me, and I wasn't going to pretend otherwise, that had noticed the form looked impressive.
Back on Earth when I was a teenager spending unhealthy amounts of time in virtual reality games, demon lord was the build I liked to choose more than I’d like to admit. The aesthetic had always appealed to me. Thorned crowns, void cloaks, it all created a terrifying cool presence.
It was easy to enjoy when it was a character in a game, but looking at my own face underneath that crown was something different entirely. It was a glimpse of a path that I never wanted to walk on.
I shook my head and tried to be practical about it.
Whether or not I ever used that particular combination again was a separate question from whether I should understand it, and I was already starting to see the few instances where it might have some value.
The first one was intimidation.
In cultivation life, there were always moments where unnecessary drama found you, and sometimes that drama led to a life-or-death battle. It would be useful to have a trick or something similar to avoid that altogether. And a demonic lord that looked like it had ascended past the point of caring about consequences was a faster argument than anything I could say with words.
It was well known that cultivators were irrational at the best of times, but it was more known that demonic cultivators were insane, and a single look from that form would end most confrontations before they started.
However, I would only use it for dire situations, I would have to be in quite a predicament if I was willing to walk around looking like some demonic lord. The bar for that was set higher than most situations I expected to encounter.
The second instance I could think of was identity concealment.
Back when I wanted to enter the Celestial Trade Nexus, I had gained Ke Jun’s help to project myself as a blood cultivator, so if I ever needed to pass as someone who cultivated blood arts at a high level, that form would be more convincing than any disguise technique I could make from scratch.
So yeah, the ability was there in case I ever needed it, but more importantly, I had learned a lot about the intricacies of blood cultivation today.
The Blood Moon did two distinct things when you channeled elemental qi through it. It corrupted the element, pushing its nature toward an extreme version of itself, and it reflected that nature back outward. The corruption and the reflection working together.
When it came to the red sun, the blue sun, or the Golden Sun, it could only do the first part. It distorted their nature and emphasized whatever traits were already present, but it couldn't reflect them the way it reflected elemental qi.
The reason that I could think of, but might not be correct, was that it came down to the hierarchy of energy.
Elemental qi was a subdivision. Fire, water, wood, metal, earth, each of them was an expression of qi broken down into component form. When you refined qi into its elemental types, you were working with something that had already been divided from its source. The Blood Moon could grip a subdivision more easily than it could grip the whole.
The red sun and blue sun energies were different in kind. They weren't subdivisions of qi in the way elements were. They sat at a level that was closer to qi itself, more fundamental, less divided. The Blood Moon could touch them and leave a mark, but it couldn't fully wrap around them and reshape them the way it could with elemental techniques.
The Golden Sun was the same, maybe more so. It occupied the same tier in the energy hierarchy that qi itself occupied, just expressed through a different lens.
Honestly, I didn't mind this limitation.
The red sun and blue sun were already complementary to each other in my inner world.
If I tried to think about what the opposite of red sun energy was, the answer was blue sun energy. They balanced against each other, which was probably the reason they could coexist in me at all without destroying everything. Asking the Blood Moon to reflect them would just create more of that same dynamic, and I didn't need more complexity in that relationship. What I had was already complicated enough.
Anyways, I had been in my inner world for long enough that if I tried to account for everything that had happened since the tribulation began, the list felt like it belonged to someone else's story.
I had been handed what should have been an impossible tribulation and found a way through it that I had not expected. I had watched an entire world end and carried its people through a portal before the last of it dissolved. I had stolen a moon from a dying civilization and dragged it through dimensional space with my hands. The Genesis Seed crippled or killed the Masked One's projection and taken five Stellar Realm souls out of the wreckage. And now, standing on a meditation plateau in the southwest quadrant of my inner world with a Blood Moon hanging in the sky overhead, I had completed my first real experiments with blood cultivation.
When the tribulation had begun, I had been a pseudo Stellar Realm cultivator with a complex inner world and a growing list of problems, and now I was a Stellar Realm cultivator with an even bigger list.
As entertaining as it had been, it was time to leave.
"Little Bloom was worried," Azure said, appearing before me. "The demonic aura alarmed her. She thought something was wrong with you."
I felt a small wave of guilt about that. "Did you explain?"
"I told her you were experimenting with new techniques and not to worry." He paused. "Sun Li Hua helped. She told Little Bloom that a cultivator testing their limits was not the same as a cultivator losing control. Little Bloom found this very reassuring and said that Sun Li Hua is very wise."
I couldn’t help but smile at that.
The two of them finding a language that worked between them faster than I had expected was nice to see. Maybe I was right. Maybe Little Bloom was the first step in curing Sun Li Hua’s trauma.
"I’m leaving. Keep an eye on the new souls," I told Azure. "Problems are going to come up. That's just what happens when you put people with complicated histories in a small space and tell them it's home. Handle what you can, and anything that's beyond managing, let me know and I'll deal with it."
“Okay, Master.”
"Oh, and look after the Dawn Ripple Fish, I want to make sure it’s new neighbours are not disturbing it."
"I always keep an eye on it, Master," Azure replied. “You’re the one who forgets about it.”
“Ouch.”
But he wasn’t wrong. I really did need to give more attention to the fish.
With a wave, I let my spiritual manifestation go, and when I opened my physical eyes, I was back in the training room.
Before I could register anything else, my aura detonated.
The spiritual pressure of a Stellar Realm cultivator's presence flooded the training room.
The walls took the pressure across their entire surface simultaneously, the air compressed and then expanded in a single sharp pulse, I pulled it back in immediately, and after two or three very loud seconds the room went quiet again.
I frowned. This was one of the consistent problems with major realm breakthroughs.
The cultivation happened inside the inner world, where the spiritual body made the leap and integrated the new power first. The physical body only came into contact with what had changed when the spiritual self returned to it. There was always a delay, and in that delay the physical body had to accept it, which meant the aura could sometimes pour out uncontrolled in the first moment of reconnection.
It smoothed out quickly, it always did, but I just hoped that the brief outburst hadn't caused anyone any issues.