Myriad Rivers to the Sea

The seemingly endless and dizzying spin of borrowed lifetimes eventually faded. It left behind a silence so profound it felt heavy enough to crush the cosmos itself.

Li Yu floated in the vast and lightless expanse of nothingness. He was no longer a hot blooded spearman, a paranoid young master or a tired wolf. He was simply himself. He was Li Yu.

Yet, the concept of "himself" felt stretched. It was worn thin like a piece of silk pulled over a mountain. A bone and soul deep fatigue settled into his spirit. He had lived as part of their lives for far longer than he had lived his own.

In the span of his own physical existence, he was merely a young man who started cultivating, built up a few forces along the way and was exploring the much larger than expected cosmos. But spiritually, he had just endured tens of, if not hundreds of thousands of years of warfare, betrayal, creation and loss.

Thankfully for him, he always had a powerful soul. With that strength he was able to endure all those lives he had lived and come out not completely comatose. He closed his eyes and drifted in this place. He was letting the exhaustion wash over him.

He tried to recall the specific face of the elder brother who had ordered his assassination in the Whispering Tide Clan but the features were already blurring. He tried to remember the exact layout of the subterranean forge he had built as Tie Zheng but the corridors and crystal lights were melting into a vague impression of heat and stone.

'I cannot hold onto them,' Li Yu realized as he was feeling the memories slipping away like water through cupped hands.

It was a strange and paradoxical sensation. Each memory was becoming vague. If he tried to focus on the specific details, such as the names of the minor disciples, the color of the banners and the exact words spoken in ancient courts, he couldn't.

It was as if he had lived those lives and simultaneously as if he hadn't. They were retreating into the deepest recesses of his subconscious and fading like the remnants of a fever dream upon waking.

But what remained was the essence. The muscle memory of the soul. The intricate and instinctual understanding of dozens of laws and the heavy, unyielding wisdom that only came from dying so many times.

If someone were to ask him a specific question about the technique or laws he had learned, he wouldn’t be able to answer them. It couldn’t tap into that knowledge and wisdom. However, because he had spent those countless years, he was subconsciously now much closer to each one of them. They seem to welcome him back as if he was an old friend.

It took him a long and silent while to process the weight of his thoughts. The fatigue threatened to pull him into a slumber from which he might never wake. Slowly and deliberately, he anchored himself. He pulled his consciousness back to his real and current life. The memories of the other lives faded away, their instincts, their regrets and passions all melted away.

He opened his eyes and he was once again Li Yu, just himself. The lightless void of his mind gave way to the physical reality of his prison.

He was suspended in the ten foot iridescent bubble of the Temporal Dao Stone. Just inches from his face, the resonance of his Koi Soul continued its agonizing battle against the crushing pressure of accelerated time. Beneath the golden light, his Devouring Abyssal Leviathan Physique was working endlessly, devouring the leaking temporal laws to force his flesh to adapt. He couldn’t see past the bubble at all.

'I have probably lived for eras in this place,' Li Yu thought while gazing at the struggling Koi inside him. 'Thankfully I have not been overly affected by it. But outside... barely any time has passed at all.'

The realization struck him with immense clarity. The spiritual experience had been vast but physical time had barely moved. The leaders had actually just finished the construction of the hidden chamber around him right now. He was buried deep within what would be Fortress Hope. Only the vault and hidden chambers were completed at this time but Li Yu didn’t know that.

He flexed his fingers. The movement was infinitesimal.

'The Koi is buying me time and my physique is adapting but it is not enough,' Li Yu thought as his newly forged instincts evaluated his situation. 'If I just wait here, the Koi will eventually shatter. I must become stronger. I must possess the power to break free from the inside. Perhaps when I get stronger, the Koi will become stronger as well.'

With nothing else to do and isolated from the rest of what he has known, Li Yu focused entirely inward. He forced his frozen body into a cross legged position. It took an agonizing amount of effort and time but the willpower he had subconsciously inherited from his other lives refused to yield.

Once seated, he closed his eyes and sank his consciousness into his inner world. Floating at the very center was the radiant sphere of compressed Qi and life essence. It was from all the various treasures that Lian, the Veil Lotus and Khaos had given him during his breakthrough, along with the five vaults from the demon kings of that realm.

It was then further enhanced by the Xylarri that the mountain from within him had destroyed when they invaded with the Termite King.

Before the Temporal Dao Stone, attempting to consume this entire sphere would have taken a very long time. He would have potentially faced bottlenecks, needed time to ponder the next step forward and time to refine the Qi.

But now?

Li Yu had lived multiple lives to their absolute peaks. While those peaks were not the peak the cosmos had to offer, it was already well past his own level. He had mastered the defensive stillness of the earth, the explosive wrath of lightning, the shifting illusions of water and the quiet persistence of life among countless others. His understanding of the laws was vast, wide and terrifyingly deep. While he couldn’t remember exact details, it was still enough for him to understand the overall path forward.

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There were no bottlenecks left. Knowledge and understanding of the path forward, he now had in abundance. Time to refine the Qi, there was no end to that here unless his Koi Soul gave out. Resources to use, he had plenty.

'Open,' Li Yu commanded his inner world.

He tapped into the massive ball of essence. The floodgates shattered.

A torrent of Qi roared through his meridians like a cosmic Leviathan. The sound of his cultivation rising was a physical hum that vibrated against the walls of the temporal bubble. His Devouring Abyssal Leviathan Physique eagerly swallowed the surging energy. It was refining it instantly and integrating it into his bones, his blood and his very soul.

His cultivation base which had been resting at the middle of the Divine Transformation realm began to skyrocket.

The barrier to the next major realm, the Soul Transformation realm, was usually a long ordeal. A cultivator had to condense their understanding of the world, combining that with their soul and forcing it to mature and transform into a true spiritual entity capable of surviving outside the body if the body was destroyed.

For Li Yu, the barrier was as thin as wet paper. He didn't just push through it; he obliterated it.

The surge of energy flooded his soul space. The four Nascent Souls all resonated perfectly with himself. They absorbed the rising power, their ethereal forms becoming denser, more vibrant and undeniably powerful.

But the energy did not stop there. The light coalesced. The ambient Qi swirled into a localized vortex. From the blinding light, a fifth figure emerged inside him.

It was another Nascent Soul but unlike the beasts or the old man, this one was a pristine mirror of his current self, albeit much smaller. It was a Child Soul. The child possessed Li Yu’s exact features but its eyes held the ancient and heavy weight of the myriad lives he had just endured. It radiated a pure and unblemished aura of humanity, a balance between the primal beasts and the Fisherman.

The Child Soul floated downward and its small bare feet touched the island that the Fisherman and Muddy were always on.

The Fisherman adjusted his grass hat and offered a warm and welcoming smile to the newcomer. Muddy let out a low and resonant moo. It nudged the Child Soul affectionately with its broad snout. The Golden Koi was stuck in the air in its eternal battle with the Dao Stone but the Whale hummed a deep greeting from the abyss below.

The Child Soul smiled back and took its rightful place among the pantheon of Li Yu’s spirit.

Sitting on the edge of this spiritual gathering and still in the form of an elderly woman, was Xyphyra.

The ancient soul expert, a being who had once terrified empires with her mastery over the spiritual domain, was staring at the scene with her jaw practically unhinged. She rubbed her eyes and was entirely convinced that she had been caught in a nightmare ever since the Fisherman had taken her.

'What in the Dao is going on here?!' Xyphyra screamed internally as her hands gripped her cane so tightly it threatened to snap. 'Five?! He has five Nascent Souls now?! And this one is a human child that seemed to have lived several lifetimes?!'

She had spent her entire existence studying the soul. She knew the rules of cultivation. A human possessing a beast soul was already strange. A human possessing four was an impossibility that already defied the heavens. But a fifth? Manifesting at the exact moment of entering the Soul Transformation realm?

'Who is the real soul expert here?!' Xyphyra thought to herself as her pride completely shattered. It was replaced by a mixture of awe and disbelief. 'Me, the ancient terror of the dark realms or this boy that doesn’t seem to know or understand anything?!'

Li Yu was entirely unaware of Xyphyra’s existential crisis. His focus was absolute.

Entering the Soul Transformation realm had consumed a large portion of the essence ball but there was still a terrifying amount of energy left. His foundation was deeper than an ocean. He did not stop to consolidate. He rode the momentum.

He kept cultivating.

The Qi roared louder and was echoing like thunder within the temporal bubble. His physical body, already straining under the pressure of the Dao Stone, began to glow with a brilliant light. The temporal laws leaking through the Koi's shield were no longer just being devoured; they were being used as fuel to stoke the fires of his advancement as well.

He crossed the early, middle and peak stages of Soul Transformation in an unknown amount of time. There was no telling how fast or slow time was moving. The boundaries blurred. With a resonant crack that echoed through his entire being, he broke through again.

He stepped into the Half King realm.

It was not a massive or visually explosive transformation. The Half-King realm was a bridge, a period of stabilization where the newly transformed soul began to perfectly intertwine with the physical vessel. But for Li Yu, the enhancement was not bad.

His muscles grew denser, his bones took on the sheen of divine metal and his meridians expanded to be like rushing rivers. His physical strength multiplied exponentially. Yet, the ball of essence in his inner world was still not empty. The accumulated power of his physique, combined with the pure energy he had hoarded, demanded an even higher peak.

'Further,' Li Yu commanded himself as his mind was perfectly clear and devoid of the hesitation that had sometimes plagued him in his earlier lives. He drew the last and massive reserves of the essence sphere into his core. He aligned his five souls, pushing their combined spiritual weight into his physical flesh.

The true threshold of power in the cosmos was not measured in Qi capacity alone but in one's ability to command the fundamental truths of reality. The King Realm.

For an ordinary cultivator breaking through to the King Realm was a terrifying ordeal of preparation. It was the stage where the body had to be fundamentally altered, carved out and hollowed to prepare it to house the Laws within its very flesh. Without this preparation, attempting to integrate a Law would cause the cultivator to explode.

But Li Yu was not an ordinary cultivator and he had already taken this step before.

His Devouring Abyssal Leviathan Physique had been doing this since the moment it awakened. His body was already a bottomless vessel designed by the abyss itself to consume and house the most violent laws of the cosmos. He didn't need to painfully carve out space in his flesh; the space was already there, infinite and waiting.

The breakthrough was violent, seamless and unimaginably powerful.

The remaining essence detonated within him. A pillar of regal Qi erupted from within. His physical body underwent a qualitative change. His blood turned a rich, deep crimson with flecks of different light. His skin took on an immaculate resilience.

He broke through to the King Realm.

The golden resonance of the Koi Soul, which had been fracturing and failing for what felt like an eternity, suddenly stabilized slightly more. Empowered by Li Yu's new cultivation base, the five souls resonated in harmony. They projected a shield that forced the temporal laws of the Dao Stone back slightly more.

Li Yu sat cross legged within and was no longer a completely struggling victim. The immense power coursing through his veins was a promise. He was not just going to survive the temporal prison; he was preparing to conquer it.