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Published at 30th of December 2018 07:44:06 PM
Chapter 57


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"It's talent in cultivating the spirit . . " muttered Daniel in realization .

He then sat in a lotus position, and before starting to cultivate, he activated 'Time is Precious' once again .

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The moment the last bit of beast core disappeared, Daniel session of cultivation had ended .

His spiritual cultivation had now reached the mid Moderate Spiritual Synchronization sub-stage, or mid rank 5 .

When Daniel opened his eyes, he found himself in the middle of a room filled with books . His first reaction was to take a look around, so he got back up on his feet, but after he turned around, he noticed a very old looking man sitting at a table, reading a thick book peacefully .

At Daniel's attempt to approach him, the old man suddenly shut the book, and said "What an amazing talent you have . . It's only been a few thousand years . . Has the world changed this much?" Said the old man .

This old man's body was completely covered by a large tattered old robe, and a hood hid his face entirely . The only thing that indicated his age, was the hoarse voice, and the wrinkly hands which slowly rested on the book's cover .

"Who are you?" Asked Daniel while sitting on the chair on the other side of the table .

The old man pressed his back against the wooden chair, and said "I shouldn't have come back to this place . . such an obvious mistake . . . " His voice sounded depressed and he couldn't help but sigh every now and then . He seemed to be talking to himself .

After a moment, he raised his head and looked at Daniel's face . "You look promising . . What happened to you? How are you this powerful at . . Wait . . " Shock grew on his covered face, and he jumped up from his chair .

He then looked carefully at Daniel, and said "You are a martial cultivator!!" his voice became more surprised the more he talked . "How is it possible for you to be here if you are a martial cultivator?"

"I am not a martial cultivator . . I've passed three tests for spiritual cultivators to get here . " Responded Daniel with as much calm as possible .

"You can deny it however much you want, and yet, I can smell your weird ki clearly . . " said the old man . Before the old man could calm down, his eyebrows arched in sudden realization, and asked "Are you an anomaly? . . Or has the nature of ki changed in humans recently?! Were you born like this?" one question after the other were thrown at Daniel .


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Daniel was slightly irritated, as the old man hadn't answered to any of his questions yet .

"Hold on a second, can you tell me who you are?" Asked Daniel with a louder voice than intended .

The old man momentarily stopped talking . He then sat back on his chair, and after what looked like fixing his clothes, he said "My apologies . I am called the Clear Mage . "

"Weren't you supposed to have . . Ascended to a higher plane reserved for those above the ninth rank?" Asked Daniel curiously .

From the strange behaviour of the old man, right as he finished asking his question, Daniel understood that the old man had no idea of what he was talking about .

"I've never ascended past the ninth rank . . I started a competition with an old enemy, the Dark Warrior . " He said in an explanatory tone .

Daniel was utterly confused . He didn't belong to this area, so he wasn't that attached to its history . What he was curious about, was how it was possible for such a large number of people's memory to deviate so much from what truly happened .

"What was the competition about?" Daniel asked to the old man .

The old man's voice became melancholic as he recounted the story of how the feud between him and the Dark Warrior had begun .

According to what the old man said, the Clear Mage and the Dark Warrior had been friends at first . But as time passed, the Dark Warrior started to change . His physical superiority started to twist his vision of the world . . To make him think that power meant everything in the world . As long as one was powerful enough, then, he had the right to decide the fate of others .

At first, the Dark Warrior had started to show no mercy to those who offended him, then he started to kill for mistakes, and misunderstandings . It had reached a point where, unable to find another solution, the Clear Mage had decided to terminate their friendship, and swore to himself to stop him from becoming a bigger danger to humanity .

After fifty years of constant battles, the Clear Mage had decided to conduct their final battle the day they met in this island .

Once arrived, the two battled to a point of near death .

The Dark Warrior, at this point of his life, had become a vicious human being, killing for the smallest reason, as if human's life was worth less than the breath spent to pronounce a sentence . But if there was something that the Dark Warrior liked, was a powerful cultivator . That was the reason why, regardless of how many times he had been challenged, he had never managed to bring himself to hate the Clear Mage .

Instead of ending their fight with both of their deaths, the two cultivators had decided to trap themselves into a formation, and after thousands of years, they would bet their lives on the nature of the human's heart .

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The next time a monstrous talent would participate in this tournament, he or she would be able to decide which moral path was the right one . The compassionate one, or the ruthless one .

Thousands of years had passed, and someone with a monstrous talent had finally arrived .

"I assume you have something to ask me . . " Said Daniel

The old man's hands closed in tight fists, as he said "Reach the treasury room, on the door, you will find a heart with a sword stabbed in it . . Remove the sword, and prove what compassion is to my old enemy . . Or twist the sword . . Put an end to his life, and prove me that he was right . . "

"Wasn't I supposed to reach your chambers, and take something from it with me in the treasury in order to open it?" Asked Daniel with a confused face .

The old man asked in a dismissive tone "What chambers? There is nothing important in the second floor, leave it be . . Now go, you have something important to accomplish . . And if you make the right choice, i'll take you in as my disciple . " As he finished talking, without waiting for an answer from Daniel, the old man disappeared .

Daniel found himself back in the hall . The doors to the sides had disappeared, and only the door in the middle of the two sets of stairs remained . He stood there, observing the dark corridor at the feet of the flight of stairs .

After a good minute, he decided to take a look at the first floor, so he went up the flight of stairs .

The moment he reached the first floor, two bluish silhouette appeared on the hall downstairs . One was a middle-aged man with a broadsword hanging to his waist and a long spear strapped to his back . He also wore what looked like a heavy plate armor . The other, was a younger man dressed in a light robe .

The middle aged man seemed to be shouting furiously at the younger man's back, but was ignored . The silhouette of the younger man rushed up the flight of stairs and walked on the right corridor .

Back on the first floor, the figure of the middle-aged man sighed in disappointment, and disappeared .

Daniel decided to follow the younger man .

He walked through the right corridor, and entered the door he had seen the younger man disappear into .

Inside this room, there was a single bed in the middle of the room, and nothing else .


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The wall on the left of the door was covered in scribbles and doodles which Daniel couldn't understand . They didn't seem to be the work of a mad man, so Daniel started to observe them closely .

The symbols were divided into groups, and some were repeated . They clearly described something, but this very alphabet was unlike any Daniel had glimpsed at .

Daniel checked the books inside the old alchemist's ring, but no other language he had found was similar to the one these writings had been written in .

He was about to give up, but then, he recognized a slightly variated version of one of the symbols from one of the books . The symbol in the book had sharp angles, and it joined the following one with an ondulated line, but it still looked similar .

According to this book, this language was ancient and alien to their continent . The symbol was the ancient sign for 'Mana' .

Thanks to the help of 'Time is Precious', it took Daniel twenty minutes to memorize and learn this language . He then read the writing in the wall once more .

It seemed to read the original with only a crappy translation as reference . The language on the book looked like a much younger and evolved version of the writing on the wall, and to Daniel, it felt like he was translating an ancestor's scripture with the use of a language, whose origin itself originated from this language .

Thankfully, Daniel had something that no historian had . The ability to correct his mistakes .

He tried to make sense of these symbols, and by process of trial and error, he was able to translate a few symbols per hour . . After ten hours, he had translated about five percent of the words present in the wall .

He could understand words and bits, but the more he read, the more appalled he became .

The concepts of sacrifice and consumption appeared over and over in the test . And it seemed to be a practice of magic which made use of another cultivator's ki and bodies to strengthen themselves .

When Daniel had managed to read through a fourth of the test, four more hours later, he turned around and saw a middle aged man holding his head on the corner of the room . The man was only a silhouette, but from the clothes, Daniel recognized him as the younger man from the previous vision .

The middle aged man stretched his arm, and picked up something from the ground . Daniel saw nothing in the man's hand, but his fingers were hooked around something invisible .

The man brought this round and large thing above his head, then, he opened his mouth and stood still for a few minutes . It looked as if he was making something drip into his mouth . When he finished, he threw that what he was holding in the direction of the bed, then, the silhouette disappeared from the room .

Daniel walked towards the bed, which was made with large embroidered sheets whose sides reached all the way to the ground .

He went down on his knees, then lifted one side of the sheet and looked under the bed .

Underneath the bed, he saw a small skull, which from its size, Daniel was sure belonged to a child .

Slightly nauseous, Daniel got back up on his feet and returned in front of the wall .

It took him another few hours to finish translating the text .

The test, was a method of cultivation . It was different from spiritual or martial cultivation, as it could be practiced on the side .

This method of cultivation described in detail, how it was possible cultivate by absorbing people's ki through direct consumption of their body . Ki was part of the body, and in it, it was omnipresent .

The most horrifying detail of this method, was that not only did it grant the cultivator to absorb one's ki, but also one's life essence .

Life and death essences belonged to living beings . A human would be born with a certain amount of life essence, which the naturally formed death essence would slowly consume, to the point where life essence would be exhausted, leading to a cultivator's natural death .

The amount of life essence that one could absorb from consumption of another person, was very little . At best, hours of life from consuming an entire body .

Unfortunately, there were methods to increase the amount of life essence that could be absorbed . . And that was consuming humans with richer life essence . . Like newborns and children .

The idea that millions of participants had stumbled upon this wall in the past thousands of years shocked Daniel beyond belief .

He immediately tried to burn the wall, but unfortunately, he was unable to interact with it in any way . It was as if what he was trying to burn didn't belong to his own time and space .

Daniel left the room, and as he was about to explore further, he saw another silhouette .

This silhouette was that of a very old man . He was standing in front of the door he had just came from . In his hand was his unsheathed sword, but it seemed like he was unable to bring himself to enter and do what he intended to do .

After a good minute, he dropped his sword and fell on his knees . His hand reached for his mouth, which he covered to mask the sound of his sobbing .

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