Grand Ancestral Bloodlines

Chapter 2097: Choice (1)



Ryu's voice was frighteningly calm as his glazed-over vision seemed to slowly sharpen. As though a man waking up from a dream, his eyes seemed to be both open and brighten. And yet, they continued to carry an eerie calmness with them.

As expected, what he was chasing with his Dao was the very same roadblock that stopped him from finding what hidden, lingering danger there was in his body.

However, what he was more surprised about was that Old Wan was actually capable of such a thing. It was too bad that it simply didn't matter.

The reason he couldn't find the root of the danger was because it was hidden in a part of him that didn't even functionally exist anymore.

His Path of Reincarnation.

Long ago, after deciding the path for his Inner World and his future, Ryu had long severed his own Path of Reincarnation. But the danger that Old Wan had left behind was hidden away within it. Ironically enough, Ryu's own actions were the very reason Old Wan was able to hide from him for so long.n/ô/vel/b//jn dot c//om

Somehow, though... despite severing that Path of Reincarnation and accepting that this would be his final life, Ryu was still being influenced by something he thought he had long separated from himself.

This didn't mean what it seemed to. This would still very much be Ryu's final life.

The Path of Reincarnation was a two-way street and Ryu had severed the path that he would need to return to it. But the path moving in the opposite direction was still there. It was just that this path should have been under the complete and undisputed control of the Heavens themselves.

This was something that stood above Fate and Karma... because Fate and Karma couldn't even exist unless it was triggered first.

But it wasn't Reincarnation either. At the very least, that wasn't what you should call it. Trying to call it Reincarnation was like trying to call a vehicle by the action one could execute while using it: "driving." It simply didn't work, and it missed the big picture.

The Path of Reincarnation was important, but only insofar as it was the ultimate result of this special layer of hidden laws.

Ryu wanted to call it something like creation, but that didn't work either. Once again, that was more like describing the action than what the thing was itself.

It was such a fleeting and hard to grasp. And yet, the moment Ryu felt the slightest edge of it, he knew what it was.

Once again, everything had brought him back to square one.

In his vision, a delicate white flame that almost looked like a deformed cotton ball swaying in the air danced in front of his eyes.

For the longest while, Ryu couldn't even pronounce the name of this flame. But looking at it right now, he felt that he had the perfect summary of what it was.

Spark.

A Spark of Life, an impetus of creation, the starting fuse of reality and the dividing line between a world cascaded by an endless darkness and nothingness... and one filled with thoughts, hopes, souls, and aspirations like this one.

Without an understanding of this Spark of Life flame, Ryu's Dao would always be missing something; it would always be somewhat distorted from the strongest path, from the greatest route that he could take.

Trying to understand everything through Fate and Karma alone was like trying to understand a painting just by its grayscale and shades, ignoring the color or even more fundamentally, the shapes that decided its form.

The moment Ryu saw the state of the bodies of the Heavenly Warriors, he had grasped this... he came to understand the dividing line between a living thing and a walking corpse.

Sometimes, that line was often blurred. As early as Sacrum, he had run into individuals capable of breaking what he saw as fundamental laws, like the Path Extinction Realm expert that was able to make corpse puppets think and act for themselves.

Logically speaking, this should be impossible...

But now... it all made sense to him.

This white flame was the magic touch that separated the power of the Heavens from that of mere mortals.

There wasn't anything wrong with Ryu's Dao. It was fundamentally sound and built upon a strong foundation. But it was just lacking one very thing.

The issue was that... Ryu didn't have any method of incorporating this into his Dao.

This white flame was an external item, and if he could have comprehended this Spark of Life, The would have already done so.

Ironically, for the first time in his life, Ryu had received enlightenment on the fact that it was impossible for him to reach enlightenment.

Well... there was one way... and that was probably to take a step that no one wanted to see more than the Phoenix Sky God themselves.

If Ryu took this flame into his Perfect Blackbody Soul, his main pair of Mysteries of Heaven and Earth Pupils would gain this ability. By then, the things that were impossible to see through for him would become as clear as day.

But... doing so would completely eliminate his last path of retreat.

He had already relied on the Phoenix Sky God to rebuild his Bone Structure and rise to a whole new level.

But ultimately, his Bone Structure was just a piece of his body. It wasn't as integral to him as his soul was, and in the worst-case scenario, it could be abandoned.

His soul, however...

There would be no going back.

The real reason Ryu was standing in such a daze was because he seemed to stand at a

crossroad of two paths.

Down one direction, there was this white flame, incorporating it into his body and reaching the level of Dao that he had always been striving for.

Down the other direction... was to rebuild a completely new Dao from scratch down an entirely different path.