Pursuit of the Truth

1

Su Ming was silent. He sat in the white ring and stared at the galaxy beyond. It looked boundless when he cast his gaze on it. With countless whirlwinds rampaging around, he could not see a single planet. There were only stones floating in space.

Occasionally, some large ones would sweep past them in the whirlwind. The stones had once been part of the planets in True Morning Dao World, but most of them had been destroyed, filling the galaxy with stone fragments and dust.

There were also fragments from quite a large number of Enchanted Treasures. In fact, there were even some torn pieces of flesh and blood, which filled the galaxy of True Morning Dao World with a bloody stench.

As he stared at the world outside quietly, Su Ming felt like he had returned to the Barren Lands of Divine Essence. In fact, even that place was in a much better shape than True Morning Dao World at that moment.

The white ring charged forward with a howl, and the whirlwinds in the world outside looked like they had been cut apart. The instant the ring touched them, they crumbled on their own.

And it was able to do that when Su Ming had only activated one-hundredth of the ring’s power, which was all that he could use so far. Su Ming might want to make the white ring bring forth even stronger power, but he lacked the strength to do so.

The power of this treasure was something that not even the black-robed old man and Xing Ji Dao could fully bring forth. They could only use their power to activate the cultivation base left behind in the ring. It was a type of indirect control.

This was why it had been so difficult for Xing Ji Dao activate the treasure. He had used up all of his power, and the pressure on him had also been incredibly great. Because of it, Su Ming had gained a chance to Possess and devour him.

Su Ming’s method of controlling the supreme treasure was different from that of Xing Ji Dao. He did not activate the cultivation base contained in the treasure to indirectly control it… but was having the bald crane for that.

“How is it?” Su Ming delivered a divine thought flatly to the bald crane in his heart.

“I’m still a little off. Darn it all, this thing is really quite hard to deal with,” the bald crane answered with a pant in Su Ming’s mind.

“Are you sure that the method you mentioned will work?” A barely noticeable glint shone in Su Ming’s eyes as he delivered his thought.

“Of course it’ll work. Heh heh, don’t worry, when I saw this treasure, a memory appeared in my head. It’s definitely not wrong.

“Mortal Refinement Art was a famous Art used to refine treasures in the past. It has been lost for many years, but thankfully, I still know it. You only need to refine this based on what I said. I can’t promise that you’ll be able to perfectly control this treasure, but you’ll certainly be able to use at least one or two-tenths of its true power.” The bald crane’s smug voice echoed in Su Ming’s mind.

When he devoured Xing Ji Dao and was about to control the white ring, the bald crane had suddenly sent him a thought and told him about the Mortal Refinement Art. This method could allow Su Ming to use his own power to perfectly control the supreme treasure, but the process of refinement was a little problematic.

“With Mortal Refinement Art… you will enter the cycle of reincarnation as a mortal and refine it during the cycles of reincarnation. Once you go through nine cycles of reincarnation and refine it nine times, you can form a connection through the cycles of reincarnation with this treasure, and with that connection, you can control its Essence. You won’t need to have a matching level of cultivation to control it.” A glint shone in Su Ming’s eyes, and he nodded quietly.

“You said that this Art was once very famous? Since it’s so peculiar, why was it lost?” Su Ming suddenly asked in his head. He had a vague bad feeling about it. He had a constant, nagging sense that the bald crane did not seem to be too reliable…

“I don’t know about that. I just know that in my memories, this Art looks very powerful… Huh? I seem to have remembered something. It seems like there is something lacking about, but I can’t remember what it is. Hey! Are you going to use it? Su Ming, if you don’t use it, then I’ll stop making the preparations. This is too tiring,” the bald crane mumbled under its breath.

Su Ming fell silent. In just a few breaths, determination appeared in his eyes.

“Continue with it,” he said faintly.

Another seven days passed. When the seventh day arrived, Su Ming finally saw a planet in the whirlwind-filled galaxy.

It was the first planet he had seen in seven days. It was a cultivation planet which had been mostly destroyed, but a part of it still remained.

As he stared at the broken cultivation planet, a glint shone in Su Ming’s eyes.

‘This disaster affected the entire True Morning Dao World, but there are still planets remaining. That means that there are definitely cultivators who survived the disaster!

‘True Morning Dao World has already been destroyed. I wonder what happened to Morning Dao Sect, and what about… my senior brothers? Was Yin Death Region affected?’

The light in Su Ming’s eyes darkened. After a moment of silence, he sent a divine thought to the bald crane. Immediately, the white ring turned into a white long arc that changed direction to charge towards the cultivation planet. It instantly approached it and flew straight inside.

The moment Su Ming arrived, the cultivation planet shuddered violently, and more of it shattered. Several crushed rocks were swept away by the whirlwind, as if the cultivation planet had already been destroyed to its limit, and Su Ming’s arrival caused the stress it suffered to become greater, causing the edges to start crumbling again.

Thankfully, the crumbling did not last for long before it gradually came to a stop. When Su Ming walked out of the white ring, he stepped onto the ground of the cultivation planet. Above, he saw a broken sky filled with whirlwinds. Beneath him, countless layers seemed to have been lifted off the ground to reveal a bloody-red land.

There was no mountains in the distance, because all them had already been destroyed by whirlwinds. There were no seas either, because they had already been wiped off.

Heat spread out from the ground, and as it intersected with the cold chill in the sky, it formed a violent gust of wind which blew up the sand and swept it across the planet.

There was no presence of lives. In fact, all of them had also been extinguished a long time ago. This was a dead planet, a world with no life force.

Su Ming swept his gaze past the area, then lifted his right leg. Immediately, a huge vortex appeared with a bang on the ground. It lifted the sand and swept it outwards, but it was immediately blown away by a violent gust of wind, clearing the place. In just a few breaths, a gigantic basin appeared under Su Ming’s feet.

He cast a glance at it, then sat down at the bottom of the pit. When he lifted his head, he cast a glance at Bai Feng, whose life had already reached its end. Her presence was weak, and she was about to die.

At most, she could live for one more month.

Su Ming had saved Bai Feng had due to his sentiments. She was someone he had loved when he was still ignorant about love. Perhaps it was just a mere joke and the young love had already withered. However, when Bai Feng died, she would not know that the black-robed person beside her was Su Ming.

The invisible destiny connected the two of them, bringing one of them to the other’s side when they were about to die. However, the love had been blown away by the wind and turned into a single snowflake. It lingered, refusing to leave, and they could only lament at destiny as well as their lives…

Su Ming closed his eyes and waited for the bald crane to finish its preparations so that he could use the Mortal Refinement Art to refine the white ring with the will of reincarnation. The bald crane had began making preparations at the very start, but even then, it had yet to finish with them.

Su Ming sat silently as days passed. Gradually, another seven days went by. To Su Ming, they only lasted for an instant. It was a short period of time for him to familiarize himself with his new body, but to Bai Feng, the seven days were nearly three-tenths of what remained of her life.

She only had half a month left, only two cycles of seven days.

Humans were complicated life forms, but no matter how complicated they were, as long as they had emotions, then right before they died, they would find that those emotions were the purest things in their lives.

Bai Feng stared at the sky quietly, and when seven days passed, the aged look on her face became even clearer. Her presence was so weak that she looked like she had turned into a mortal.

“Thank you for saving me,” she mumbled her first words in the half a month they had spent together.

The sentence landed in Su Ming’s ears. He listened to the familiar voice and watched the woman whose figure he could still recognize even though she had grown old. He sighed in his heart.

It seemed like there were always sighs between the two of them whenever they came in contact with each other. He might have sighed just then, but it might as well have been her too. They had walked in circles in the past, gotten to know each other when the blood moon appeared, and it had determined this unchangeable and indefinable conclusion.

“I only have half a month left, but I still want to thank you for letting me die on this planet instead of the whirlwind,” Bai Feng mumbled.

Anguish could be seen on her face. It was not due to her life flowing away, but because she seemed to have remembered something. A faint light shone in her eyes when she immersed herself in her memories.

“In the past, to ascend, I agreed to Di Tian’s plan. To ascend, I could sacrifice everything…” Bai Feng stared at the sky while mumbling softly to herself.

“What about now?” Su Ming asked calmly. His voice had changed once he obtained his new body through Possession. It belonged to Zhang Ji Dao, not Su Ming.

“Now…” The anguish on Bai Feng’s face slowly disappeared, and a smile replaced it. That smile made it seem like she had seen through everything, and there was an air of freedom about her. However, there was a hint of regret in that freedom.

“It’s strange. Right now, I’m not thinking about trying to obtain life or dreaming about ascension. Instead… some of the memories of the past keep resurfacing in my mind. Perhaps this is a memory that belongs to my clone, but when it died, her encounters were buried in a corner of my memories eternally.

“Now… I think that those memories are of the incredibly happy and beautiful moments of my life,” Bai Feng said softly. However, her beautiful voice had turned hoarse due to the aging. Instead of dark locks, her head was covered in white, and her bones seemed about ready to crack.

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