Chapter 465: Peak C-Grade
Jack’s Dao Tree remained tall and solid. Eight fruits littered its branches—Fist, Space, Life, Death, Battle, Revenge, Brotherhood, and Time—all fully grown. Now was time to develop the ninth and final fruit. Before that, however, Jack wanted to do one more thing.
His gaze fell on his sixth Dao Fruit—Revenge. This was something he’d created back when his heart was filled with darkness, when he single-mindedly pursued revenge in a vain attempt to escape the grief of his son’s loss. It had worked well enough, but it was now purposeless.
Jack no longer believed in revenge. He believed in righteousness, and justice, but not revenge for the sake of it. He knew now it was an empty pursuit, simply an outlet for one’s inner darkness. This fruit was an imperfection of his Dao—if he broke through like this, the foundation of his inner world would be shaky, which would affect his battle power and future achievements.
Changing one’s fruit was not easy, but it could be done. The greatest hurdle was enduring the process—something which Jack was quite confident in. He was so far ahead of the curve in everything that even developing a new Dao Fruit was trivial. He could handle a little transformation.
He flew close to the fruit and grabbed it with both hands. In one swift thought, he cut off the Dao circulation to the fruit, enduring the feeling of wrongness which filled his being. Then, he poured his will into the fruit. Its dark red skull shape was perfectly in line with its inner darkness—this was a fruit built on weakness and hatred.
Jack poured more and more energy into it. The fruit burned between his hands but he endured. His soul was shaky, and his body was suffering from the volatility of the sixth fruit’s energy he no longer controlled, but both were solid enough to persist for a little while. Ignoring all the changes around him, Jack kept his full attention on the fruit, which was now boiling hot.
Its skin slowly melted. The dark red rose in columns of smoke, and its shape turned unclear as the fruit’s flesh began to melt as well. It had reached its most malleable state.
Jack stopped pouring energy into it—he didn’t want to destroy it, just change it a little—and used his willpower to shape it. He infused it with his beliefs of justice and fair punishment, the concept of enforcing discipline as necessary. The fruit began to wobble, slowly changing into a rounder shape.
Jack intended to make it into a Fruit of Justice, shaped as a shield. At some point, however, his Dao of the Fist kicked in. He watched with surprise as the fruit’s round shape changed again, elongating, turning slimmer. His thoughts and Dao moved in tandem, and he let the transformation happen, eager to see what would occur.