Merin sits cross-legged inside a jagged rift, his figure half-swallowed by the writhing black mist around him.
The place is known as the Devil Abyss, one of the most feared forbidden grounds of the Shenyuan continent.
Dark energy seeps from every crack of the abyss, endless and suffocating, enough to twist even Saints into madness.
The abyss earned its name not only for its corruption but because it truly feels bottomless, an eternal descent into shadow.
Even Saint realm cultivators avoid stepping into its depths, for within lie not only the corrosive devil energy but also creatures born by it, monsters that should not exist in this world.
Merin is not immune either.
The devil's energy claws at his body and mind, whispering madness, seeking to unravel him from within.
Yet he sits steady.
With precise hands, he has drawn a formation that hums faintly around him, a layered net of runes that filters the black haze, holding back more than half of its intrusion.
Still, that is not enough.
What slips through gnaws at his thoughts, but here his spirit cultivation shows its worth, pressing down on the corruption, forcing clarity into his mind.
But Merin knows this is not a permanent shield.
Every moment the devil energy builds, slow and patient, and eventually even his spirit will strain to keep it at bay.
Yet permanence is not what he seeks.
He did not come here to dwell.
Merin came here to lick his wounds, to mend his injuries, and to carve out a sliver of silence to decide his next move.
He was able to kill the three elders, but their strikes also left him battered.
No wounds mar his skin as his body mends the surface quickly.
What troubles him are the injuries buried deep inside, wounds laced with the lingering mark of the elders' Tao.
His body cannot heal them while their Tao remains.
First, he must remove those foreign Taos; only then can his body's recovery begin.
The short path is to use his own Tao to erase them.
Without the support of their owners' energy, the elders' Taos would fade once crushed.
But that way offers no gain.
The long path is different—he must comprehend the enemy Taos within his wounds and make them his own.
If they become his own, then without even dispersing them, his injuries would heal naturally.
And from that, he would gain the opponent's understanding of Tao.
Merin has not yet formed his own Tao, the core magic power that defines a cultivator's path.
To comprehend these, Taos may grant him a direction to form his own.
He begins with one wound, sinking into the tangled mix of intent.
This Tao is woven from Sword, Lightning, and Jade principles.
He dissects and understands them, and from this insight, a new magic power is born within him.
One by one, he dives into each wound, comprehending the Taos sealed within.
Two years pass inside the abyss as he wrestles with foreign principles, stripping them bare, reshaping them into his own.
His gains are immense.
Among them is a Tao derived from the Four Elephant Jade Sutra, a scripture he was destined to practice next.
Through it, his understanding of the Four Elephants principle deepens sharply.
At the same time, he condenses four distinct wisps of source energy, each tied to one of the elements.
These four sources link and flow together, transforming his inner world.
Within him, the landmass floats vast and solitary, surrounded by a boundless ocean.
The soil is barren, yet steady, as if waiting for life to root itself.
Above it, winds begin to stir, faint at first, then swell into steady currents that sweep across the continent.
The ocean heaves in response, waves striking against the shores, rising and falling in rhythm with the winds.
Moisture gathers in the air, drawn upward by unseen force, and the first rain clouds form, heavy and dark.
Drops fall, striking the dry land, and the earth drinks eagerly.
Rivers carve themselves into the soil, carrying water from the clouds to the sea, and the sea offers it back to the sky.
Heat stirs beneath the surface, pushing the cycle onward, warming the oceans and drawing the winds into ceaseless motion.
The sky above shifts with colour and depth, no longer empty, but a canvas of changing weather.
Lightning flickers faintly inside the clouds, while thunder rumbles in the distance, marking the birth of energy circulation.
For the first time, the land, sea, and sky move as one, feeding and shaping each other.
The inner world is no longer still.
It breathes.
It circulates.
It begins to live.
But no light shines in his inner world.
No sun rises, no moons drift, no stars glitter in the vastness above.
He could weave illusions of them—phantom fireballs, borrowed starlight, silver crescents—but they would only decorate the sky, not enrich the world.
True improvement demands true comprehension—the principles of the sun, the moon, and the stars themselves.
Until then, his inner world will remain dim, sustained but incomplete.
He exhales slowly, turning his thoughts away from the cycle within and toward the storm beyond.
Now, he cannot return to the human race.
Every top sect has placed him under shadow; if they catch him, there will be no escape, no plea, only death.
"I also cannot enter the Supreme Battlefield realm," he murmurs to himself.
Without that crucible, breaking into the Saint realm will become difficult, and reaching the Supreme—impossible.
And without becoming Supreme, the portal he dreams of forging will remain beyond reach, an untouchable gate.
Yes, he can still force the portal into being, but only if his cultivation reaches the Saint realm first.
The path grows narrower, the choices fewer, yet each step must be precise.
Scarcity of resources tightens like a noose—most Source Stones and veins already claimed by the great sects or other races—so without a flood of Source Energy, his rise to Saint will crawl at a snail's pace.
Worse still, a born Supreme would end his chance to build the portal in secret, for a Fifth-Stage cultivator's perception would smell any nascent world-gate long before its keystone is set.
He needs Saint realm strength first, and he needs it fast, before a Supreme is born whose senses would make any portal impossible to hide.
Merin sits silent, mind racing through maps of supply lines, battlefields, the black market of salvaged Tao cores—every avenue is locked, every price extortionate.
As he turns plans over, a different sound threads through the Devil Abyss: a whisper, slithering and patient, the voice of the black mist itself.
His eyes catch the motion of the devil energy around him, a living night that pools like ink in the rift's veins.
The whisper grows, sweet and simple: let us become a devil.
Something inside him brightens at the thought, a dark calculus where cost and speed trade places—power now for ruin later.
The formation that held the abyss at bay shudders, runes flaring white and then cracking as the black haze pounds at them like a tide.
With a sound like glass breaking, the outer wards splinter.
The devil energy collapses inward as if a gate had opened, and a black hole of malevolent force surges into him.
It floods his channels like acid and honey at once, cold and burning, filling his circulation with corrosive power that tastes of hunger and forbidden strength.
Merin's spirit cultivation flares in reflex, runes rolling across his mind as he fights to refuse complete possession.
He does not succeed in keeping it out; instead, he wrestles and wrestles, guiding the dark torrent through his formations, forcing its law to knot with his own circulation patterns.
Piece by piece, he converts raw devil essence into tempests of Source-like energy, carving out a reservoir inside his illusion-space ocean that pumps black-source into his nascent tenfold cycle.
As it pours, his inner world wrenches—volcanic storms spike, the ocean blackens at the margins, the mountain's veins pulse with new, sulfurous light—and his Source counters swell with a speed no normal campaign could buy.
But every pulse leaves a mark: whispers coil deeper, suggestions threaded like veins through his thoughts, an appetite for more power that tastes of ruin.
He binds most of that voice under layers of formation and spirit-pressure, folding the worst of the corruption into sealed core-forges where it can feed the cycle without drowning his mind—yet a kernel of the abyss remains, warm and patient, tucked beneath his heart.
Merin knows this bargain's ledger: massive, immediate gain in Source Energy and the rare materials to leap toward the Saint realm, traded for a seed of devilry lodged within his core.
He closes his eyes and accepts it, because all other routes would take decades he does not have.
When he opens them again, the Devil Abyss hums around him, half-held by his formations and half-fed by the dark deposit inside him, and his aura has swelled into something vast and dangerous.
He stands, feeling the new circulation kick, a torrent of power ready to be directed—Saint-ward in potential but carrying a shadow that will never wholly leave.
Merin opens his eyes, pupils drowned in pitch-black, deep as the abyss itself.
He could have stopped the infection of the devil energy—his spirit cultivation and formations were more than enough to seal it away—but he had chosen otherwise.
It is a bargain, one he willingly struck: the devil energy hungers to make him its puppet, while he hungers to reach the Saint realm before the world closes its gates.
The abyss is filled with endless tides of demonic essence, energy as vast and primal as Source itself. To drink from it is dangerous, but to ignore it would be folly when time runs like sand through a clenched fist.
Advancement will not be the problem. The true battle will be keeping himself, keeping Merin, intact while the abyss claws to overwrite him.
He treats it as a challenge, as he has always treated impossible walls—another battlefield, only this one carved inside his own heart.
With that thought, he exhales, the black mist spiralling from his lips like smoke, then inhales deeper, dragging the devil energy into his inner circulation.
He closes his eyes.
Inside, the illusion-world trembles as the dark torrent floods its seas and skies, threading itself into the six sources already glowing at its core.
He drives it, not letting the abyss guide the flow but instead pushing it into shapes, bending it toward the framework of the Nine Principles—one by one, he feeds the corrosive energy into those patterns, hammering corruption into comprehension.
The ocean ripples. Mountains groan. Clouds thunder with unnatural storms.
But within the chaos, lines of order begin to appear—threads of nine distinct principles glimmering faintly against the black tide, as if carved from the abyss itself.
Merin sits at the eye of that storm, unshaken, forcing the infection to become fuel, daring the abyss to try and consume him while he forges it into the path toward his Sainthood.