Myriad Rivers to the Sea

The defensive lines of the war shifted. It was not through grand strategic realignments but through the wrath of two grieving parents.

Li Canghai had been known as the immovable shield of the realms. He was someone who fought with the burden of survival. To preserve his troops, defend and hold the line. Zhan Tielan had been more like a sword, a demon of war who struck where the enemy was weakest but always within the parameters of a defensive campaign.

That restraint vanished the day their son was sealed in the Temporal Dao Stone.

They were not satisfied with simply holding Fortress Hope. The thought of sitting behind heavy walls while all the forces they have been fighting against reorganized made their blood boil. Their son was trapped in a relic of certain death because of those forces. A blood price had to be paid.

Instead of waiting for the enemy to strike, the armies of the Li Clan and the Zhan Clan erupted from their borders. They abandoned the defensive doctrines that had governed them for centuries. They went on the offensive but it wasn’t the kind that three legions had done earlier. They would still conserve their forces but they would begin taking the fight to the enemy.

They were not alone. The Leviathan Smashing Vanguard and the Golden Shell Phalanx officially joined this crusade. Their thirst for battle was overwhelming. Because their existence had been revealed during the rescue operation and rage filled offensive afterwards, there was no longer any point in hiding in the shadows.

The two fanatical legions restructured themselves to maximize the slaughter. Taking a portion of the forces that came for the rescue, they divided that portion into four permanent and autonomous battle groups. One division of the Leviathan and one division of the Golden Shell attached themselves directly to Li Canghai’s command. The remaining two divisions swore themselves to Zhan Tielan’s vanguard.

While they primarily synchronized with the parents’ offensives, these legions often broke off on their own to execute brutal and surgical strikes deep within enemy territory. They dragged the enemy from their hidden realms, shattered ancient sects and burned resource worlds to ash.

The cosmos bled. While the void burned with the fires of his retribution, Li Yu floated in a lightless abyss. Inside the hidden chamber of Fortress Hope, within the prison of the Temporal Dao Stone, a terrifying paradox was taking place.

The Dao Stone was a relic of time. It sought to age those trapped within its radius. Behind his closed eyes, the Koi Soul hummed with a desperate and blinding light. Tapping into its innate understanding in the Dao of Time, the ethereal fish continued to project a protective resonance over Li Yu’s physical body and his soul. It was a direct and conceptual buffer. The temporal laws of the Dao Stone crashed against this shield like a tsunami striking a breakwater.

But the Koi was outmatched. The Dao Stone was a naturally forming treasure. There had only been two known stones since the beginning. The barrier from the Koi was fracturing and slowly being ground into dust by the weight of accelerated time. The Koi was losing the war of attrition.

However, this desperate defense bought Li Yu the one thing the Dao Stone sought to take away: time.

Beneath the fading shield, Li Yu’s Devouring Abyssal Leviathan Physique was performing a miracle. The physique, designed to consume and assimilate the harshest laws of the universe, was slowly devouring the infiltrating temporal laws. As the Dao Stone’s pressure leaked through the Koi’s shield, the Leviathan Physique ate it. It agonizingly and imperceptibly adapted his physical vessel to survive the accelerated aging.

Under normal circumstances, this physical adaptation would be far too slow. He would age to dust long before his body could adjust. But the Koi Soul was holding the floodgates.

This created a bizarre and impossible state of existence. Time was rushing around him at an incalculable speed, yet the barrier and his physique prevented the aging characteristics from taking hold.

Because his physical body was locked in this agonizing tug-of-war, his consciousness could no longer remain anchored to the present. The pressure of the Dao Stone severed his mind from his flesh and cast his soul adrift into the spiritual residue trapped within the relic.

The Temporal Dao Stone did not just kill; it recorded. Every elite soldier, every grand general and every supreme entity that had ever perished within this stone and the ancient stone detonated eras ago left behind an echo of their life, their Dao and their memories.

Li Yu was no longer conscious in the present. He was falling into the amber of the past. Li Yu was able to open his eyes for the first time since being trapped inside the bubble.

He was standing on the precipice of a jagged and towering mountain. The sky above was a canvas of bruised purple clouds swirling with the violent and chaotic energy of an eternal tempest. The wind howled around him, not as a natural phenomenon but as a weaponized force.

He looked down at his hands. They were weathered, scarred and gripped a long spear forged from condensed and solidified air.

'I am not me,' Li Yu realized as a sense of duality settled over his mind. He retained his core identity but he also possessed the memories, the instincts and the cultivation base of the man whose body he inhabited. It took him a long time but he began to piece things together. Memories of him breaking through the temporal bubble and now he was all of a sudden here.

‘Did I succeed in saving those people? Or did I die in the process?’ Li Yu tried to think. He hoped he at least was successful before he died.

Li Yu was currently Feng Lei, an ancient cultivator standing at the peak of the Laws of Wind and Storms. He was a victim of the first Temporal Dao Stone, trapped eras ago during a cosmic war.

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In Feng Lei’s original life, this moment was the catalyst for a bloody conquest. Feng Lei had originally descended this mountain and led a sect of wind-riders to slaughter the surrounding valleys. He subjugated weaker sects to build an empire of the sky.

But Li Yu was in control now. He felt the terrifying and destructive potential of the Storm laws coursing through Feng Lei’s meridians but he had no desire for conquest.

'Did I somehow reincarnate into this person? Is this a memory of someone? If I must live this life now…' Li Yu thought while leaning on the spear of wind, 'I will live it my way.'

Instead of marching to war, Li Yu chose isolation. He turned away from the precipice and retreated to the highest and most secluded peak of the Azure Gale Range. He disbanded Feng Lei’s aggressive sect and sent the disciples away with warnings to seek peaceful paths instead.

For thirty years, Li Yu lived as a hermit. He spent every waking moment meditating on the violent laws within him and trying to soothe them. He learned to weave the aggressive Dao of Storms into the gentle Dao of the Spring Breeze. He used his supreme wind arts not to sever heads but to guide rain clouds to drought stricken mortal villages below his mountain. He experienced the intricacies of the wind. How it carried sound, how it eroded stone and how it could be both a blade and a blanket.

He was at peace. But the cultivation world abhorred a vacuum.

In his thirtieth year of isolation, the sky turned crimson. The Blood Cloud Sect, a vicious faction that Feng Lei had originally wiped out in his true history, had spent three decades growing unchecked. Sensing that the apex predator of the Azure Gale Range had gone soft, they launched a massive invasion.

Li Yu stood at the edge of his secluded peak as thousands of blood robed cultivators descended upon him. He tried to negotiate. He tried to erect walls of wind to deter them and fight them back.

But the Dao of Storms was not meant to be a shield. It was meant to destroy. Because he had spent thirty years domesticating a hurricane, his combat instincts had dulled and his lethal edge had rusted. Even though he had Feng Lei’s memories of his life up till then, he wasn’t Feng Lei. His instincts, control, personality and battle instincts were all wrong.

The Blood Cloud Patriarch, wielding a scythe of condensed blood, shattered Li Yu’s gentle wind barriers. The battle had begun and tried as he might, Li Yu could not get the upper hand.

As the scythe tore through his chest, Li Yu fell to his knees. His vision faded but his mind was crystal clear. He felt no anger, only a realization. He had mastered the laws of Wind and Storm to a degree Feng Lei never had, understanding their gentle nuances rather than its fierce nature. But he had forgotten the core truth of the cosmos Khaos had warned him about.

'If you hold a blade but refuse to strike,' Li Yu thought as the darkness claimed him, 'others will strike for you. Peace without the power and willingness to defend it is just a delayed execution.'

Li Yu’s eyes closed as death took hold of him. The pain was unbearable but it soon faded.

Li Yu’s eyes opened once again but as before he did not wake up in his own body. The darkness receded and was replaced by the suffocating heat of a subterranean forge.

He was Tie Zheng. A master of the Laws of Metal and Ground.

The memories flooded in. Tie Zheng was a warlord of the deep earth. A tyrant who originally hoarded rare spiritual ores and enslaved entire subterranean races to build an impenetrable fortress for his own selfish cultivation.

Li Yu looked at the massive and glowing anvil before him. He felt the immense and patient solidity of the Earth laws and the rigid and unyielding sharpness of the Metal laws in his core.

Once again, Li Yu rejected the original path that the body’s true owner took. He would not be a tyrant.

Instead of hoarding the ores and enslaving the races, Li Yu threw open the gates of his fortress. He shared his supreme forging techniques with the subterranean dwellers. He used his mastery over the Dao of Ground to stabilize the collapsing caverns and created vast and beautiful underground cities illuminated by glowing crystals. He used the Dao of Metal to forge incredibly advanced automated defensive arrays to reinforce the structural integrity of their home.

He became a benevolent leader albeit reluctant leader. Under his guidance, the subterranean realm flourished into a wealthy and heavily fortified merchant utopia. They traded rare metals with surface sects in exchange for spiritual herbs and other things they couldn’t grow or create themselves.

Li Yu lived in this body for a hundred and fifty years. He spent his days in the forge and pushed the boundaries of defensive arts. He learned how to manipulate the magnetic resonance of the realm. Learned how to condense common iron into spiritual steel with just a thought and how to draw endless stamina from the ground beneath his feet.

It was a beautiful life. But then the Abyss opened.

A localized spatial tear erupted in the deepest caverns and unleashed a cosmic Beast Tide of subterranean horrors. These were not cultivators who could be reasoned with; they were forces of mindless consumption.

Li Yu stood at the vanguard of his utopia. He slammed his hands onto the cavern floor. The Dao of Ground surged and erected massive walls of compressed diamond. The Dao of Metal flared and created millions of hovering hammers that rained down upon the beasts.

The defenses he had spent a century perfecting, held. For three months, the Beast Tide crashed against his city and for three months, Li Yu stood unbroken. He drew power from the earth and acted as an infinite shield for the people behind him.

But a shield only delays the inevitable if there is no sword to slay the monster holding the hammer.

Li Yu lacked the supreme offensive capabilities needed to kill the leader commanding the tide. He had focused entirely on creation and defense. Eventually, his stamina reserves began to outpace the ground's ability to replenish him.

The diamond stone walls cracked. The leader, a colossal worm of corrosive acid, breached the gates.

Li Yu fought to the bitter end. He turned his own body into a statue of divine steel and grappled the Beast King to buy his people time to evacuate through the upper tunnels. The corrosive acid slowly ate through his metallic flesh.

As his vision faded for the second time, Li Yu smiled through the agonizing pain. He had failed to save the city but he had saved the people. He had mastered the defensive peaks of Earth and Metal, learning how to make himself truly immovable.

'Defense is noble,' Li Yu thought as his metal heart finally melted. 'It is the foundation of protecting what you love. But a wall, no matter how thick, will eventually fall if you cannot strike back.'

The darkness took him again and spun him through the endless carousel of trapped souls.

He would wake as a master of Fire and learn the difference between the warming hearth and the consuming inferno. He would wake as an adept of Water to discover the balance between the healing spring and the crushing depths of the ocean. He would explore Yin and Yang, Life and Death, Destruction and Creation.

With every life, he learned their techniques. With every life, he felt their Dao. And with every death, whether caused by his own naive mercy, his lack of aggressiveness or the simple and cruel inevitability of the cosmos, his soul grew heavier, wiser and stronger.

The paradox prison of the Temporal Dao Stone was meant to be an execution chamber. But for Li Yu, shielded by the Golden Koi and adapting through the Abyssal Leviathan, it had become the ultimate crucible with which to forge himself.