Grand Ancestral Bloodlines Chapter 2210

[ … words ]

Ryu unleashed a howl. He didn’t sound human at all, nor did he sound like a beast. It was more like an ancient primordial monster, a lurking fury hidden in the depths of an abyssal darkness.

It was like something within him was rampaging with all the rage in the world. It rattled against its cage, lashing out, violently pulling against the sides of his soul and the walls of his heart.

Black flames erupted from him, pouring out in all directions. Not red-black in the slightest, and not carrying the same fogginess of another familiar type of flame.

It didn’t seem to be either his Rage Flame or his Death Flame. It didn’t really feel like a fusion of the two either… instead, there was a third in there.

It was as though the Rage Flame, the Death Flame, and the White Flame had all combined to form a completely new sort of Flame, one that was the very antithesis of the White Flame.

He was a man that had built his Dao Heart on hypocrisy. Who cared if the Heavens said he shouldn’t be able to brute force this sort of mental breakthrough? Who cared if he had said the Heavens weren’t at fault for the hardship he had faced in the past?

Fuck the Heavens.

When Ryu realized just how irrational his own fury had been, he doubled down. He would rewrite his name. And he meant it with every fiber of his being.

As for what that meant, just what that represented, he didn’t give a damn.

He would do things the way he wanted to do them. He didn’t need anyone else, he didn’t need support, he would do it on his own.

This time, he swore he would do it on his own.

This Nameless Immortal God, he could feel it. He was a sentimental man, someone who cared deeply about every little thing. He had reached the pinnacle and then gave it all up to return to the very start, reliving every aspect of his life once again.

Ryu loved his family with every fiber of his being. But he wasn’t the same man.

He would never allow his women to die in the first place.

There was another path to breaking through. He could feel it. It was the path the Heavens wanted him to take, the logical path. To acknowledge that he needed the help of others, that he needed support, that it was okay to have been a child that needed the caring caress of his mother, of his caretaker.

He didn’t want it. He didn’t care for it. That wasn’t the man he wanted to be.

He wanted to be that resilient child that was indifferent even to being whipped until he lost three layers of skin off his back whether he had Granny Miriam in his life or not.

He didn’t want his heart to rely on others. He didn’t want his emotions to be tethered to the love he experienced.

He wanted to be the pillar that held up the skies. He wanted his wives to live a carefree life, for his children to have everything they could ever want, to repay his parents for what they had done for him, to allow his grandparents their revenge.

If he was going to be a pillar, he had to be akin to the Heavens. Unfathomable, unflappable, unmovable.

He couldn’t grow into it. He had to have always been that man.

Ryu’s shoulder moved, slowly being pulled up as though a string was pulling him along. His qi rippled through the air, his Spiritual Foundation roaring back to life.

Pools of white flames poured out from his White Phoenix Spiritual Foundation, ripping through his body and combining with his Rage Flame and Death Flames.

He didn’t care about anything else, his thoughts focused, yet wild. He converted whatever strength there was left in the Phoenix Princess’ blood into his own flames.

His fury fueled his Rage Flames. The Phoenix Princess’ blood poured out and fueled his Death Flames. And his White Phoenix Spiritual Foundation churned, pumping out what it could in waves.

And then came his Cosmos Fog.

Spark of Life. That was what they called the White Flame.

It was too optimistic for his taste, too steeped in the normal ways of life, of the ebbs and flows, the ups and downs.

He wasn’t interested in it.

Give him something else. Something that was more in line with his personality, something that was more in line with the fury burning in his heart right now.

He wouldn’t call it Spark of Death, he wouldn’t call it a Spark at all.

It was a smothering abyss, a dense suffocation of the normal ways of life, an ignorance of the laws not because he was too stupid to understand them, but because he didn’t care to understand them.

He didn’t care what the normal path was, he never had. He didn’t care about what should have been natural, he would write his own rules.

Spark of Life would just follow those rules, bending them a little bit here and there, but ultimately the foundation would remain the same.

He didn’t want that.

Rewrite it.

Rewrite it all.

Including his past lives.

Ryu’s second shoulder moved, his body lifting itself up.

The flames were blacker than night, blacker than the void, so dense and heavy they almost lashed out like real whips as they lashed out at the air.

Like the tendrils of a puppet master’s strings, they attached to his body, forcefully yanking him up from the ground as though they wouldn’t take his state into account.

Who said he was injured if they said he wasn’t?

The world bent and twisted, large clouds of complex runes jumping into form and then vanishing, only to appear again with slight tweaks.

Rewrite it.

The words seemed to be the only thing driving him. Again and again, he pulled on the core of his being, ripping through the doubt, the shame, the weakness.

He tore it all to pieces.

Solara’s eyes had widened more considerably than maybe any other time in her life. She wasn’t even sure what she was looking at.

Hadn’t Ryu already failed? What… was this? What was she looking at right now?

What was this feeling? How was he even doing this? What was that flame? Why did it make her feel so… so…

She couldn’t say the word. Her Dao Heart suppressed it so furiously that it was snuffed out along with the feeling before it could even fully form.

But then there was that howl.

Ryu’s body was completely obscured by those thick flames. Honestly speaking, they hardly looked like flames at all anymore; they were more like thick shadows, dense obsidian without the slightest hint of the rock’s reflective properties.

Every single bit of light that fell into it vanished. If not for how bright the rest of the region was, Ryu might have vanished entirely.

A tendril of line grabbed Ryu’s head and his body was finally pulled up from the ground entirely.

BOOM!

Rippling waves of a mysterious might spread out in all directions as though a new energy was being formed in real time.

Ryu’s White Phoenix Spiritual Foundation became a sea of black, his soul appearing at his forehead with the very same dense blackness.

Perfect Blackbody.

Maybe there was a very good reason why this was his soul. Endlessly flexible, endlessly hypocritical, able to take in everything and deal with anything. It could rewrite what it was any time as though it had never been anything else in the past.

It was what embodied who he was the most, the soul meant for a man like him, a man who cared for nothing more than the pinnacle of cultivation.

When he said that nothing would stand in his way, he meant it with every fiber of his being.

When he said that he would have his cake and eat it too, he meant that even more.

He wouldn’t sacrifice a single thing. He would be a hypocrite not just with his own emotions, but the laws of the Heavens themselves.

And what could it do to stop him once he had the strength to turn his nose up at it?

Rewrite it.

Ryu’s body began to rise into the skies. Everything was encased in a deathly black, wings spreading from his back. The only things that carried the slightest hint of light at all were his eyes…

All three of them.

One foggy, unformed mass at the center of his forehead, and two silver stars shimmering even in the depths of darkness.

Claws grew from his hands, black tendrils forming his hair.

His chest beat, the echo of an oppressive Dao Heart spreading out in all directions.

Some geniuses still working their way up the platform of clouds froze in place, their own Hearts shattering in place. Their eyes dimmed and they fell to their knees, their paths of cultivation coming to an end right then and there.

Ryu’s howls peeled across the skies like arching strands of lightning.

And then his gaze locked onto Solara, who still stared at him in abject shock.

He moved.

She had a hard time even reacting before a fist drove into the gut.

Her eyes bulged, her tongue flying out so fast it looked like it might disconnect from the base of her jaw.

She sputtered and her body shot out in a shockwave, her back slamming into the Title Stele so hard it trembled.