Grand Ancestral Bloodlines

Ryu's mind felt like it was filled with fireworks, one thought after another linking together in ways he never thought of in the past... or maybe he had and he had simply ignored them.

He was a Ruin Master, maybe the greatest Ruin Master of this corner of Existence, but it had colored his perception of the world in ways he hadn't truly seen until recently.

He had such flexibility when he looked at language and how they were used, but his thoughts themselves were filled with such rigidity. When it came to things outside the bounds of normal cultivation, it was as though he was no less foolish than others.

Never in his wildest imaginations could he have thought that mere mortals could display such feats of power, and yet it had happened, it was true.

All his life he had been so obsessed with cultivation. One way or another, even if it meant driving a knife through his own heart, he wanted to reach that goal one day. And he had eventually gotten it...

But the result caused him to abandon everything else. What good were the arts, were games, were enjoyment to his path of cultivation? They were just distractions, deviations from his true purpose and things only designed to slow him down, weigh him down.

All he thought about was the next breakthrough, the next cultivation realm, the higher Dao-nothing else mattered.

And those sort of thoughts had stifled him.

He wasn't just Ryu Tatsuya the cultivator.

He was Ryu Tatsuya, the Herbologist who created a method to improve one's Spiritual Foundation when even his mighty Tatsuya Clan had thought it impossible.

He was Ryu Tatsuya, the Ruin Master who found the location of the Death Shrine when it had always been the stuff of myth and legend.

He was Ryu Tatsuya, the man who as nothing more than a mere mortal, found the thread of the mighty Phoenix Sky God's Faith and ripped it out from its tapestry.

His Dao flourished and poured into the Sightless Eyes formation. At that moment, it became more than just a disorientation of the senses, but instead became a disorientation controlled in Ryu's very palms. What had once been a random action, beset by the whims of the volatile energy in the air, was gripped like a writhing snake in Ryu's palms.

At that moment, the avatars in the air shifted and their focus moved from Aika to Sovereign Black Worm. The man who was already unable to match Aika's strength on his own was simultaneously besieged by large swaths of enemies, shocking him to no end.

His intention moved and he shot out a palm toward Ryu's formation, realizing that he had to break it as soon as possible. But in an irony of ironies, it was actually Aika who stopped it this time, barring his path. To make matters worse, the avatars likewise took up arms to stop him from descending toward the formation and causing him to retreat again and again away from Ryu.

Ryu didn't even look up toward the skies. He could feel the rage of a Dao Sovereign boring holes into him, but the indifference painted across his face was as hot as a searing iron on Black Worm's own.

Pushing off the ground, Ryu suddenly accelerated. He could feel that his Focus Qi was draining far slower with his Dao Vessel taking the brunt of his Dao activation and wielding the formation as well, but his time was still limited.

The survivability of the former Dual Radiance Sect members were off the charts. Their Constellations were like different tools in their toolbox, each perfect for any given situation.

Black Worm was even worse as Ryu was quickly beginning to understand why he had chosen such a ridiculous name. The man didn't even seem to care how many pieces he was chopped up into, and to make matters worse he seemed to carry some of the same control over Karma and the like that Starlight had.

Ryu could only deploy his throne in hopes of helping more, but from the looks of it, Black Worm was already out of his range.

But how easily he was able to survive had little to do with Ryu now. So long as the man stayed away, he could accomplish what his real goal was.

He appeared near the gateway, his eyes flashing like lightning. He ran over the runes, cobbling them together in his mind and building one model after another before tossing them away.

Ultimately, he realized after just a few seconds that understanding the runes weren't going to help him. Insofar as they were important, they were really just incredibly solid and almost stiff. It wasn't overly complex, but they were reliable, something you might expect from a teleportation platform designed to go across the Heavens.

There were no loopholes to take advantage of, and even if there were it would hardly matter because the largest failsafe here was the sheer girth of and tonnage of the pillar hidden beneath the earth. Any slight deviations or mistakes there could be was more than absorbed by it and there was no easy way to "crack" this thing.

Flickering tears of space spun around the region, pumping out with what Ryu assumed was probably the Ethereal Qi everyone was going crazy about. It should have been dangerous to even stand in this region, but with his Soul Nature, spatial tears were the last thing Ryu feared. In fact, he found it lamentable that there weren't more.

'More...? It's possible, but only as a last resort. It would be too hard to control that. Aika, Old Wan and Samson might get swept up in it... They're all powerful, but no one is above space, especially not space created by an object so powerful and well-constructed.'

Ryu gave the battlefield a glance before turning his focus back to the hidden pillar.

His mind churned, trying to think of a solution. But the longer it went on, the more he felt that it wouldn't work. He was running out of time, his Focus Qi would definitely run out before Black Worm died.

Suddenly, his eyes shone with a bright light.

It was a wildly unorthodox idea. Ridiculous, even. But given the new streak he was on, he couldn't help but smile at the thought.

'It really has been a long time since I've painted anything...'

Ryu sat down abruptly, his mind slowly entering a state of incomparable peace.

The Four Arts. Calligraphy, Painting, Music, and Domain.

He could once be considered a master of them, at least by Sacrum standards, but much like most everything else, he had directly abandoned them.

Honestly, the only reason he had picked them up in the first place was because he had heard tales of mortal masters of these arts suddenly one day reaching enlightenment and breaking free of their mortal shackles through these disciplines alone.

Maybe those tales were nothing but nonsense, or maybe he hadn't reached a deep enough level of mastery to reach such a level, or maybe it was just that he never truly gave his all to these Four Arts.

To him, they were just a means to an end, he never truly loved them, he never truly gave them the focus they deserved.

But the Unbalance Art Sect was interesting...

Calligraphy was actually such a large part of this Sect's strength, and they were even able to use it to directly strengthen their bodies.

Even so, Ryu felt that it was a bastardized form of the Art. All it really did was use Runes, it wasn't true Calligraphy, it wasn't true Art.

Calligraphy was all about evoking an emotion. You could tell a lot about a person's character from their handwriting, even if it wasn't particularly good.

Were they rushed and impatient? Did they take up a lot of space, boldly proclaiming themselves? Were they small and diligent? Did they skip strokes for the sake of brevity or enhance them for the sake of emphasis?

Calligraphy was bold in its simplicity, and it was because of that it took a true master to truly see through its secrets...

And yet Painting was the exact opposite.

Calligraphy shed the extraneous for what was upfront and before your face. Mediocre painting, though, could easily be hidden beneath flashy colors and a radiant canvas.

Cultivators were existences with extreme control over their bodies and high observation skills. Even in the hands of a layman, they could perfectly replicate any scene placed before them or even from memory.

Ryu, though, had been a mortal. He hadn't had such control over himself when he first started to learn the Arts and he could only build himself from the ground up...

And that was what had allowed him to truly learn the difference between a good painting and a poor one.

An old wooden box suddenly appeared on Ryu's lap. Among the possessions of his Maternal and Paternal Clans, this had been among them, an item he had just ignored.

It wasn't too special, just an old brush. Well, it had been forged of Ancient Grade materials of a Sacrum level, but here it probably wouldn't even be considered an Earth Grade treasure.

He opened the box and the old brush flew into his hands.

It was a simple, glossy black with a brush that looked as though it was flowing in liquid silver. It vibrated in Ryu's fingers as though to welcome him back, a hint of a sad overture in its cadence.

'I didn't think that you would have gained some spirituality of your own... but after being stored in a Shrine for so long, maybe it was inevitable.'

Ryu raised the brush and the hair formed together until his qi, becoming as sharp as a sword.

His eyes flashed open and his brush glided across the air as though the downstroke of a resonating note.

What was surprising though was that he didn't bother to take out a canvas. Instead, he pushed his qi directly into the world itself and his paint...

Were the Spatial Tears.

The world of Ryu's eyes had been filled with bright colors ever since he mutated his eyes for the first time and created [Ephemeral Tapestry]. Now, he felt like he had unlocked a unique use for it.

He could see the world in ways others couldn't imagine. Each one of these Spatial Tears radiated a slightly different color, and when they were bent and folded beneath the stroke of his brush, they seemed to come alive.

He suddenly felt a peace the likes of which he hadn't in a long time.

He used to feel this peace back when he painted in Sacrum, but it never lasted long, soon replaced by agitation and anxiety, hoping that the next stroke of his brush would push him toward enlightenment and finally allow him to cultivate.

It had ended up being counterproductive and he grew to hate those moments.

But this time, that feeling never came.

Wide mountains, grassy lands, a sun that shone like rainbows and a sky akin to a pot of gold. It was a fantastical painting, the kind that only appeared in fairytales... and yet it was the way Ryu saw it.

And it also happened to be the scenery of the world directly on the other side of this teleportation platform.

At that moment, the combination of strong Spatial Qi and the aura of the painting became akin to an error in the pillar's programming. It suddenly thought that it had appeared on the wrong side of the platform and began to vibrate wildly, unable to understand what had happened.

A permanent teleportation platform of this kind was permanently tethered to a specific location. This meant that on the other side of this gateway, there should be an identical pillar and there was a great attractive force between the two.

But now, this side of the gateway suddenly felt as though the other side had appeared right above it, something that made little sense. And due to this, its extreme stability became its greatest weakness. It felt like something was wrong, and yet there was nothing it could do about it.

The moment Ryu finished the last stroke of the painting, the first crack appeared in the platform, then another.

Ryu slowly awoke from his peaceful state, a smile on his face. But he was already prepared to retreat, he couldn't be caught dead in this blast radius.

"RYU!"

That was when it happened.

Before Ryu could react, Hope had appeared to his back, her palms striking out against an overwhelming force.

She was unable to stop it completely and crashed right into his chest.

Ryu felt all the bones in his body shatter, his ribs skewering his organs. And yet, as the explosion of Spatial Qi took hold, he still looked up calmly, holding Hope's limp body in his arms.

Up above, there was a man standing in the skies with his palm stretched out, a hint of surprise coloring his gaze. It was one that only became deeper when he realized that Ryu had the wherewithal to note his presence and the fact that he wasn't surprised in the slightest.

There was a very good reason the man thought that Ryu should be surprised, though...

And that was because he wasn't Black Worm, nor was he some hidden Dao Lord of the other Sects.

He was none other than Old Wan.