Among these runes were runes of Heaven's Will. The moment Su Yan touched the Heavenly Dao runes on his gate, the idol of Heaven's Will sensed him. It had been wandering nearby, waiting for him to leave the Far Shore; it had not expected him to linger there for more than two months.
In that time it had been exploring the ancient battlefield, curious why the underworld would invade this already-ruined world. An idol was but a projection of a heavenly god, extremely powerful — yet even so it met danger again and again, nearly failing to escape alive, and discovered things that made even it shudder. "First catch Su Yan. The mysteries can wait!"
Beside the martial master who had refused to fall, Su Yan rose and began to display what he had comprehended. His essence, spirit, and qi mirrored his every form, assailing the Heavenly Dao runes that sealed his gate. He devoted his whole mind to breaking them; rune after Heavenly Dao rune he shook, flashing and dying.
He could read every rune, and their errors were all at his command — but his cultivation was confined to the Qi-Gathering stage, and no depth of knowledge could break them. His attacks came faster and harder. Suddenly he spat a long cry and struck the first form of the Eight Forms of the War God — the Form of Overturning Heaven, as if an unbreakable immortal artifact crashed from beyond the ninth heaven, overturning the firmament. *Dong!* Essence, spirit, qi, blood, soul, body fused into the form and struck his gate. *Hong!* Under that one seal a Heavenly Dao rune that had never yielded was shattered.
He changed stance — the second form, the Form of Subverting the Earth. His feet clamped the ground, his thighs like furious dragons piercing the Yellow Spring; the true onslaught lay in his right palm sweeping upward. *Boom!* A vast hand rode the thunder forward, while before his gate seven fused powers struck the broken runes. Ten thousand oxen bellowed within him. He turned his hand into a seal as if the sea were overturned upon the sky — the third form, the Form of Overturning the Sea — and the earth exploded to dust, even ancient broken artifacts driven into the ground.
The fourth form, the Form of Shouldering the Mountain, as if Gong Gong had slammed into Mount Buzhou. The fifth, the Form of the Dao Hammer: a radiant heavenly god taking the Dao as a hammer to smash the world. The sixth, the Form of Heavenly Drawing: his body a star-swirl, enemies caught and ground to powder like stars. The seventh, the Form of Slaying Gods, set sinew and bone resonating like thunder.
By now nearly half the runes were destroyed — most of them the wrong ones, breakable by slipping through their faults; the rest were mostly correct and exceedingly hard. Just then he struck the eighth form — the Form of Returning to the Dao. Heaven and earth resonated, the Great Dao sang in harmony; the underworld court's gloom, the slain warriors' battle-will and killing-spite, the grievance qi of the battlefield — all were marshaled by this one punch, and even the runes he had shattered became his power, the unbroken ones faintly stirring.
He drove the punch home, and the thunder of a hundred laws gathered into one earth-shaking sound. The Heavenly Dao seal shattered. The tailbone gate opened!
Divine light blazed from within him. The celestial river surged in, heaven-mountain after heaven-mountain lit up, water and fire tempered together, the Five Sacred Peaks shone, and a furnace rose with a golden core blazing a myriad rays. Behind him twenty-one retreat-caverns opened, bearing a stream of immortal drugs, and his power swelled until the gloom of days beneath the seal was swept away. His martial true qi soared from a thousand stages of Transcendence to ten thousand, the numbers churning until eighty or ninety thousand — he truly could not count them all.
"So powerful!" In the Far Shore, Master Yuandao and the others were startled by the aura of his unsealing. Earlier, his thousand Transcendent stages had made him an ancestral lord to the mortal world, but to them he had barely crossed cultivation's threshold. None had imagined the power behind his seal could be so great!
"Is this nuo, or qi-refining?" Beyond, they saw twenty-one retreat-caverns turning bright in the dim battlefield — ellipse, circle, crescent moon — immortal mountains drifting, a celestial river hanging upside down, a sea of Samadhi True Fire, an ocean of Samadhi Divine Water. "This is the Xiyi Domain he spoke of," said Zhai Wuxian.
The woman in red robes, Yu Yanzhi, murmured, "If one cultivated both wu and nuo, or both wu and qi, could one rise to the extreme realm?" Master Yuandao said softly, "First, someone must prove the martial path can reach immortality." Only by reaching the Ascension stage could it be called viable; then dual cultivation could follow. *The martial path's ascent — I will surely achieve it,* Zhai Wuxian resolved.
Su Yan's cry rang on. Cavern after cavern burst open behind him; the martial art reined in Yuan Qi and marshaled the Six Secrets, lifting his power beyond anything before. His golden core, tempered by Samadhi True Fire and Water, had achieved the Samadhi of the Three but never the Samadhi of Non-emptiness. Now both the martial path and the core had come to full success.
He steadied his breath, bowed to the fallen senior, and walked on — his trial not yet over, the arts not yet fused. He pressed deeper. The demon-things grew more dreadful; some had grown flesh clinging to ancient bones, and he fought all with peerless arts. Pools of undissolved ancient blood, polluted by evil qi, crawled with blood-phantoms; he drove the Great Sun Vajra Seal in savage battles to purify them. Artifacts still holding the essence of ancient strongmen slew men in all directions; corpse-piles formed a shifting corpse-abyss; corpses and artifacts whirled in a great sweeping wind. At these he fled at once, leaving their dust behind.
He passed the fallen bodies of master after master from the Far Shore, standing like monuments, pressing into peril in old age to carve a road for those who came after. Ahead, another master's qi and blood still wreathed the sky. He walked on — and found, amid piled corpses, a stone man busily sorting bones into mounds, with a triangular head, small eyes, a great nose, and caterpillar-scrawled brows.
"Su Yan. You have come at last," it said, still working. "I have been waiting here a long while."
"Which heavenly god are you?" Su Yan probed.
The stone man stopped and laughed. "I am the Supreme God of Heaven's Will — the one of whom men say, Heaven's will is hard to fathom, Heaven's will is a blade." It resumed its work. "You are a thorn in the flesh not because you are mighty or clever, but because in every life you never once were content to be ordinary. A creeping creature, struggling to survive, yet forever wanting to take wing as a butterfly. Fu Yi and Beichenzi were wrong: a man like you, thrown into a cesspit, would claw his way out; made a maggot, you would burst your cocoon."
"Is not wanting a better life every man's dream?" Su Yan asked.
"Under Heaven's will, what right have they?" It sneered. "In this world, every man's price is set and his future stamped before he is born! Some are born into riches, some into princes and marquises, some in stables and grass sheds, some to be oxen and horses, some to keep company with pigs and dogs!"
It loomed taller as it clenched its fist and struck at Su Yan; Heavenly Dao runes spun about its fist. Su Yan raised his hand to take the blow; the power burst and drove him back, step after step.
"The mighty sit high, never troubled by the next meal or a place to lodge! And you finish one meal and must wonder where the next lies!" Punch after punch it threw, beating his qi into decline. "You struggle in mud, you grub in cesspits, thinking effort and a flattering smile can change your fate and climb high —" The stone man's fist loosened into a blade and swept down. "Dream on."
Heaven's will is a blade. It fell like a squall, and in an instant Su Yan was covered in wounds — cut into his body, his Xiyi Domain, his divine sense, his golden core, his spirit. The stone man meant by the proper might of the Heavenly Dao to crush him, to destroy his Dao heart.
"You crawling creatures, whose fate was fixed before you were born — you too wish to ascend?" It swept one stroke; Su Yan, drenched in blood, every cavern cracked, tumbled backward like a torn bag. It sheathed the blade. "Su Yan. Do not defy the god who can rule your whole life."
Su Yan rose shakily, head bowed. "If one life cannot ascend," he said, "can a thousand?"
He raised his head, face running with blood, gaze unyielding beyond measure. "Body of a thousand lives, return!"
*Hong!* His qi and blood burst. Before and behind him appeared a huge word — "Prison" — written in the runic script of the immortals! And that Dao-side seal of containment began to dissolve, layer by layer.
Behind Su Yan, life after life of Su Yan appeared, as if standing in the depths of time and space — and each was unsealed in turn, merging one by one into his body!