Ashes of Ascension

Chaos consumed the outpost. Darkness swept in like a tidal wave. As Quancheng manifested, a deluge surged in all directions, only to slam into an invisible dam and screech to an abrupt halt. Beneath the gaze of the Heavenly Eye, every impact and wave froze. Stagnation. The Law of Tianyuan operated here, laying down an absolute decree: *Those belonging to abominations may not depart Quancheng.* Yet even for a Celestial-Human, confronting a flood of corruption gathered over an eternity stretched power to its limits. In an instant, the void rang with the sounds of countless fractures. Under the battering of reality, the absolute edict could barely hold, swaying on the brink of collapse. And so, beneath the Heavenly Eye's downward gaze, the flawless decree adjusted once more, taking on imperfection. It compromised with reality, yielding ground locally in exchange for overall resilience. It opened a channel through the blockade, like a spillway. A breach aimed directly at the outpost. Instantly, an endless torrent of corruption, calamity beasts, horrors, and lingering spirits surged forward like a mudslide, rampaging and closing in. Right until they collided with the outpost. Gunfire, muzzle flashes, screams, and roars echoed without pause. Airships lifted off as flares dropped through the night, trailing arcs of brilliance like streaks of tears. The head-on clash between fortress and flood shook the earth violently with its shockwaves alone. Deep underground, beyond the emergency command center, the corridor's pale lights flickered amidst the heavy tremors. Dust drifted down, settling into the streaks of grey throughout Lyu Yingyue's hair. The aging director hurried through the bustling, chaotic hallway, asking rapid questions. "Status report on the forward ramparts?" "Still within operational tolerance, but our resource consumption is climbing fast." "What about Lord Tao?" "Just woke up. He's on his way." "The other directors?" "They're en route, still hurrying over." Lyu Yingyue nodded, taking the file. Then she paused and asked, "By the way... is this really the way to the emergency command center?" A sudden hush fell. The aide beside her froze, lapsing into silence. A slight twitch rippled across his stunned face. He seemed to want to force a smile. Yet he could not utter a word... Because right at Lyu Yingyue's fingertips, the hyper-realistic illusion rippled like water. "Oh? Mirror Water Moon, cast by at least two Exaltation-rank experts... What a familiar scent. The Tianxin Society? And Wulou Temple?" Lyu Yingyue chuckled softly. "When did you two join hands? Lu Changsheng truly has a silver tongue." No one answered. In the dead silence, a fissure abruptly spiderwebbed outward from the ripples at her fingertip, branching into thousands of threads like a fractured pane of glass. It sliced open her finger. Perhaps this, too, was only an illusion. Yet was it real or false? Not even the soul could tell. "My, my... It's been a long time since anyone underestimated me like this..." Lyu Yingyue licked the blood from her fingertip. A self-deprecating smile touched her aging face. "Before we begin, do you have any last words?" No one answered. In the dead silence, there was no breath, no shout, no roar. Amidst countless phantoms crisscrossing in a flash, even death became completely soundless. Silence washed over everything like a tide. * * * At this moment, the heavens rumbled and the earth shook. Amidst the thunderous din, flickering firelight from outside the window illuminated a quiet corridor. As dust sifted down, the frantic crowd seemed to have forgotten this place—or perhaps they simply could no longer find where it was. Only a thin, gaunt figure stood at the window, quietly admiring the chaos outside while softly humming an ancient tune. Only after a long while did he pull his gaze away and continue forward. He pushed open an ajar door. The office beyond remained the same as ever. Only, lacking an open window for ventilation, the lingering smell of an old man had grown thick. The secretary stepped inside, reached out, and flicked on the light. The glow fell upon the drooling elder sitting across the desk. The old man sat dazed in his chair, muddled and out of his wits. The secretary smiled faintly, raising a hand to nudge his glasses up. "Is Lord Tao well?" "Fine..." the elder mumbled in reply, looking up at him. The face was so familiar, yet now felt utterly foreign—just like everyone else he had seen since waking. He simply could not remember. "Pardon me, I forgot your name again," he sighed with regret. "Who were you?" "I am your secretary." The man sat down across from him, tapped his badge and armband, and repeated the words for the umpteenth time—before introducing himself for the first time: "My surname is Lu. Lu Changsheng." He smiled warmly. "You may simply call me Xiao Lu." * * * *BOOM!!!* Beyond the quiet room, a blinding flare shot straight toward the night sky. Long after, a thunderous roar and a tempest surged over. Beneath that same fierce glare, the flames were snuffed out, ruthlessly eradicated. Thick smoke dissipated, leaving no trace in the tempest. The tower of flesh shattered and fell apart. Stench and crimson swept outward, showering down to paint grotesque patterns upon the scorched earth. Every trace and stain of corruption dissolved. Amidst that cruel, indifferent stripping... The entire ruin of the construction site was thoroughly purified in an instant. All it took was reaching out a hand and lightly tapping the ground... And then... Dissociation Art—operating far beyond Ji Jue's imagination—ignited! Material properties repelled one another like identical magnetic poles, forcibly insulating everything across this stretch of earth from corruption and contamination, and then stripping it all away! Even with the same Dissociation Art, the divide between mastery was as vast as heaven and earth. Constrained by the differences between Non-Offensive and Moxie, Ye Xian could only impart the foundational principles and theories, leaving Ji Jue to grow wild on his own. Yet what manifested in her hands now was the pinnacle of skill, a craft uniquely hers! Whether a blessing of Sovereign Virtue or the taint of Vile Folly, whether spiritus or physical matter, all traces were washed away within an irresistible, sweeping surge. Severed, dismantled, degraded, bleached—restored to its pristine form! Including the being before her... The Celestial-Human! In less than a minute, the entire site was transformed beyond recognition. Thousands of towering pillars etched with intricate spiritus circuits had erupted from the earth, briefly bridging heaven and earth before snapping at the waist. Eerie, otherworldly light pierced the membrane of the realm and swept back and forth, incinerating everything, gouging deep trenches, and leaving behind lingering stenches of char. Frost and icicles tangled, collided, cracked, and melted; layers of swirling snow drifted sluggishly down, only to turn to rain within the scorching wind. Rain fell upon the colossus crawling from the mud, sliding down its cracked, crumbling face like tears. Severed limbs turned to ash and fell into the mire. At the very center of the ground, a crater collapsed downward by dozens of meters. Translucent blades crisscrossed through the void like a cage, piercing through the mutilated abomination's body and pinning him firmly in place. Surrounding the blades were colossal shadows made flesh. Circling and looking down. A six-winged, single-legged Black Swan, towering like an iron wall; a Gray Rhino fading in and out of the void, having neither beginning nor end; a Unicorn woven from pure radiance, hovering between being and non-being... and a Giant Whale providing boundless, inexhaustible spiritus to power all these calamitous creations. The phantom of the Giant Whale enveloped the entire ground. Though its form had not fully solidified, everything already seemed to have been swallowed into its belly. This was an assembly formed of multiple Celestial Craft-rank creations, a series found nowhere else even on the official registry of the Ring of Taiyi—the Omen Series! Right now, amid the translucent blades impaling him, the screech of friction and struggling never stopped. Harsh and piercing. "Celestial-Human..." Duan Mu stubbornly tried to lift his head, refusing to bow before Ye Xian. Viscous streaks of blood trickled down his face like tears. "I am clearly... already a Celestial-Human..." "Does this count as a Celestial-Human?" Standing upon the scorched earth beneath the fissures, Ye Xian lowered her eyes. "Why let yourself be blinded by such a hollow spectacle, Duan Mu?" A superficial power with an empty core. Aside from a bump in spiritus output and capacity, there was nothing else... At best, it was a hollow facade. She could even deduce the underlying mechanism... Using the gravitational pull of a high-tier abomination to forcibly elevate his own soul, finally bringing into view the scenery that had once been hopelessly out of reach. And the price? His original foundation had been ruined, the grand mansion collapsed into nothingness. Now he was like a prefabricated plastic-steel shack hauled into midair by a crane—suspended in the void, possessing nothing but altitude. He wasn't even a castle in the air. A single gust of wind made him sway; a storm of thunder and rain threw him into violent trembling. Even the Domain and chronowedge he had established suffered from innate flaws! Ye Xian did not believe he had failed to notice. He had to be fully aware. He simply refused to accept it... "The Aggregation lineage grew out of Transmutation, founding itself upon integration. Yet it suffers from impurity, lacking refined versatility. When that man dismissed your lineage's future back then, he wasn't speaking nonsense." Ye Xian sighed softly. "Why cling so stubbornly to your delusion?" "I wasn't wrong!" Duan Mu's eyes went wide. He roared, as if his sorest nerve had been struck, shouting with frantic madness: "We... were not wrong..." "The Aggregation lineage is obsessed with quantitative accumulation, never realizing that sometimes, the more you add, the farther you drift from your goal. The reason you stalled was not because your talent was meager, but because you had walked that path straight into a dead end." Ye Xian took off her glasses, carefully wiping the dust from the lenses. She asked suddenly, "Do you know about the 'mother machine effect'?" Duan Mu stiffened in silence, caught off guard by the abrupt shift. "...No matter how exquisite a component is, it can never surpass the precision of the machine that produced it. Such a phenomenon exists in modern manufacturing," Ye Xian said decisively. "And this is the fatal weakness of your Aggregation lineage." Even if the prospect seemed bright, the ground beyond that light was exceedingly narrow. Put to good use, it was a convenient stepping stone, but it stopped right there. Its theories were too closed and narrow, inherently constrained, reducing the craft's standard to mediocrity—forever bounded by the artisan's own ceiling. Most artisans never reached the point of challenging that ceiling; many would never encounter it in their entire lives. Yet it was precisely because an artisan as indomitable and persistent as Duan Mu had poured his entire life into it that the flaw once pointed out by Tianlu was laid completely bare! "If an artisan can only create things inferior to themselves, how boring would that be..." Ye Xian put her glasses back on and suddenly asked, "Do you want to see what truly defeated you, Duan Mu?" In that instant, she slowly raised her palm. Revealing the creation resting in her hand. That intricate, shifting puzzle ball! Beneath Duan Mu's gaze, it hovered in midair, revolving without a sound. Its shell-like layers of camouflage and seals dissociated and peeled away, casting off its shackles. Dismantling layer by layer. The temporary workshop serving as its vessel unfurled along with it. The moment the final veil was lifted, thousands of spiritus circuits surged out from within. A matrix materialized, spreading like a colossal tree. Upon its branches and critical junctures, twelve triply-mutated blessings blazed with brilliance, radiating a magnificent aura! Like a scorching sun illuminating all things. Wherever the light fell, material properties blurred and fused together. Heaven and earth turned indistinct, as if before the dawn of creation, all forms blending into one primordial chaos. The Domain unfolded, and the chronowedge weighed anchor! This was Matrix Ganjiang! Or rather, it could be called... The Matrix Relic—[Ganjiang]! Bestowing a soul upon matter, granting transcendence to the mundane. Through the fourfold cycles of Ascension, Transmutation, Purification, and Integration, it breathed consciousness and a soul into an artificial construct, planted a matrix within that soul, blended blessings through modern alchemy, and finally, through intellect and craft far surpassing mortal limits, elevated it to the realm of a Celestial-Human! At this very moment, before Duan Mu's eyes, the rank of Celestial-Human—something he had yearned for his entire life yet could never attain—had been achieved by a creation he could never have forged! Fury, shame, despair, terror, disorientation... In the end, it dissolved into a hoarse, helpless wail. "Why... didn't you..." Duan Mu could not comprehend. He struggled fiercely, roaring: "Why? Why?!" With such genius, with such power, why go through all that trouble to bestow the seat of a Celestial-Human upon an inanimate object rather than take that final step forward herself?! That path forward, which he had chased his whole life and could never reach... "Just how much do you have to humiliate me before you're satisfied?!" "Because it's meaningless," Ye Xian replied coldly. "..." "Seven years ago, I stood before that door," Ye Xian said, shaking her head. "I haven't even figured out everything outside the door yet. For now, I have no interest in what lies behind it." She said, "What I want isn't there." Duan Mu said nothing. He only panted, muttering incoherent words. Choked with despair. Or laughing at himself in bitter misery. A lifetime of suffering and struggle had ended up a joke. Even his final death throes were nothing more than a clown's closing act, exposing his utter ugliness. He had nothing left to say. Yet Ye Xian's voice reached him once more. "Lord Duan, amidst all the petty schemers in the Association, you are the only one I hold in any respect. Relentless perseverance is not an empty phrase, nor should it be mocked. If those useless fools had even a fraction of your obstinacy, they wouldn't have degenerated into the mediocre wretches they are today." Ye Xian said, "I am not your equal." Duan Mu closed his eyes in silence, lacking even the strength to fly into a rage. "...Before the end, let's talk about something unrelated." Ye Xian looked up, gazing into the hollow heavens. "Recently, I took on a student... and suddenly realized that the cruelty of Embers falls equally on everyone. "On me, on him, and on you. "Only, narrow-minded as I am, had I suffered your circumstances and hardships, I doubt I could have endured for so long. "There is a project I have failed at for twenty years. There were times I wanted to give up—more than once... I have overreached far too many times. "I don't even know if I have the courage to endure any longer." She sighed softly. "This isn't to comfort you, nor do I seek any resonance. It's just that I suddenly realized that aside from an opponent like you, there's no one left to whom I can say these things." In the silence, Duan Mu managed a weary smile. "How lonely." "Indeed," Ye Xian murmured. A cracking sound rang out. From Duan Mu's face, broken limbs and severed flesh fell silently to the earth. His body collapsed into the mud. His eyes moved sluggishly, turning toward the sky Ye Xian was watching—so vast and distant, yet so cold. The stars were dim. Just as he had once seen them, completely unchanged. So in the end, he had never truly moved forward... He had merely chosen to fall. The wind blowing in his face had only come from stepping off a cliff; as the shifting scenery whistled past, he had already plunged into the abyss. Nothing could ever be undone. Yet even if it could be undone, even if everything could start anew, would he really have the strength to walk it all over again? "Ye Xian... the road is too far... I can't walk it anymore..." Amidst the unstoppable collapse, he wearily closed his eyes. "Just keep walking forward... alone..." Such was his final farewell. A curse or a blessing, the boundary between the two had blurred. Impossible to tell apart. The twin blades of Ganjiang and Moxie crossed and struck down. The abomination was beheaded, shattering into pieces. Only the final ashes rode the wind into the sky, scattering softly downward to melt into the sprawling flames of the mortal world. Like the final spark rising from the ash sifted from a furnace. A fleeting flash, a brief ascent. Fading into nothingness. Amidst the quiet, footsteps approached from afar. Ye Xian looked back, turning toward the bloody trail winding from the outpost. Stepping through countless carcasses of calamity beasts and the shimmering glow of lingering spirits, someone walked forward holding two notched, broken swords. Wherever she passed, blood swept on the wind, leaving a trail of ruined corpses. Lyu Yingyue. "Master Kong said there was trouble here. As soon as I took care of my mess, I hurried over." A smile appeared on her blood-stained face. "Am I late?"