Chapter 834: The True Power Of My Dharma Vessel (Patreon)

A/N

Only 1 chap today, enjoy!

Chapter 834: The True Power Of My Dharma Vessel

“Ha,” it spat out blood. “I must admit that was a good attempt. That master of yours is a persistent little insect, isn’t he?”

My heart dropped at those words. Dammit, my bet hadn’t paid off. The worst-case scenario had happened. The Otherworldly Being was still in control. Elder Molric had been shoved back down into whatever corner of his own skull the thing had left him in.

“You do not have any idea what surviving that cost me, do you?” Its eyes bore into mine, flashing an eerie purple. “I had to sell decades of my life to that thing, boy.” Its remaining fingers clenched. “I will not forget that. You will pay. You will all pay.”

“I told you,” Monroe muttered, shaking his head. “We shouldn’t have trusted the child.”

The other two Rank 8s didn’t say anything. I could already tell by the way that Head Monk Cairan and Kal were standing that they had already gotten past it. It had been a mistake, my mistake, but they understood that there was no point dwelling on it. All we could do now was give that final push.

But Monroe wasn’t done, he looked over his shoulder at me.

“Look, he can’t even hold his avatar up,” he whispered, his face paling. “We’re finished.”

I couldn’t blame him because he wasn’t wrong about that either.

Behind me, the avatar of Sect Master Yuan was fraying at the edges. Hell, the left hand had gone semi-transparent, and even though the face was still perfect and unbothered, the posture had begun to sag. It was clear that at any moment, it was going to give and dissipate into nothingness.

Had this been the ordinary form of my Dharma Vessel, then I would have been able to hold it for much longer, at least use it for three or four strikes before my reserves forced me to stop. But my Yuan form was the top of the ladder, so it cost me everything I had for every second I kept it up. Honestly, had it not been for the Eldest Tree feeding me Golden Sun energy, I probably wouldn’t have been able to land a full power Civilisation Realm strike.

“We’re not finished,” I replied, not taking my eyes off the thing in the air because I knew the second I did, someone would lose their head or their heart. “I don’t need my strongest form anymore. All I needed to do was weaken it, and I have. Now we can end this.”

The Headmaster of the Blue Sun Academy opened his mouth.

I knew what he was going to say, he was going to tell me exactly how stupid that was, but he didn’t get the chance because the vessel behind me came apart.

The robes unravelled into loose gold, the pin that was in his hair slid out, and the calm face gave me a nod like it had accomplished its purpose before it dissolved into light. For a fraction of a second, there was no towering figure in the Sacred Ring, but then it returned, and this time it was a luscious green.

Two hundred feet of it, thick as a temple pillar at the base, coiling up out of the earth in slow heavy loops with crimson threading through the veins and gold running underneath the crimson in a slow pulse. The top third rose and rose and then bent over at the tip, the tip turned and looked around the valley at all of us.

Behind me, Beric uttered a word that turned the cheeks of Lady Laelyn rose pink.

“You…you have two of them?” Monroe asked, eyes wide as he turned to the Head Monk. “Cairan, what kind of monster have you and your monastery been hiding all these years?”

The Head Monk just gave a helpless shrug, even he didn’t have the specific details about my Dharma Vessel, but the truth was, I didn’t have two Dharma Vessels, I didn’t even know if that was possible.

My Dharma Vessel was one, but unlike every other Golden Sun practitioner, it didn’t have its own form. And no, this wasn’t a defect, it was empty by design. When the Head Monk had explained that to form a Dharma Vessel, I needed to take the concepts that I already understood and use them to build the image I wanted, I realise that I wasn’t like the monks in the temple.

Sure, someone as talented as Cairan, who had lived for centuries, was able to spend countless years meditating on each discipline, turning one concept into an arm, another into a wheel, and so on until they had an eight-armed avatar.

As for me, I haven’t been alive for even a half century, there was no way I could have comprehended enough concepts to build a respectable vessel. In fact, the actual number was embarrassing to say out loud because at the moment, it was less like concepts and closer to ideas.

However, what I did have was genuine bonds with the people that I had met throughout my cultivation journey. My Dharma Vessel worked in a unique way where it specialised in the concept that I had the most comprehension of, and then used it to imitate concepts that I had no understanding of.

The concept was similar to a mycelium network.

My core cultivation was the Genesis Seed, a plant-based cultivation method.

So, I had thought since fungi were able to lay threads under a forest to let other trees pass nutrients and warnings between each other in an effort to survive together, then why couldn’t I apply that to my own cultivation.

Unlike plants in my home world, Earth, I didn’t require a physical thread, or even qi, what I relied upon instead was the Dao for connection, which was something that was still confusing even now despite having lived in a Cultivation World for over a year.

Even though the technique sounded absurdly powerful, it still had strict requirements that made it almost equally fragile. I wish I could summon anyone that I met as an avatar to fight alongside me, but the bond had to be real, and even I didn’t fully understand what the word ‘real’ meant in this context.

All I knew was that if we didn’t have a close bond, then the connection couldn’t be formed, and I couldn’t call for their help in battle. This also applied if the bond between me and that person breaks, let’s say if we were to fall out, then the form would leave me.

The way I liked to think of it was like this: if I lost the person, then I lost the power.

Usually, I wouldn’t feel comfortable building my combat strength on something so flimsy, yet throughout my time in these worlds, I had demonstrated time and time again that I somehow had an affinity for creating genuine bonds with the people that I met.

My strength had always been made up of the people who chose to stand beside me. This entire time that sounded like something I’d hear in an anime, but now that had become literal, and I was going to prove it by first tearing this parasite out of my master’s body.

“Head Monk,” I called out, noticing that the lich was raising its palm for another strike. “Use the chain now!”

Cairan didn’t hesitate. The Dharma Vessel’s second arm came around and threw the chain with all its might. The chain came off that golden fan in a long flat arc across the valley, the same heavenly restriction that had locked the lich's shoulders before and driven it a hundred feet into the floor.

The spell matrix that the being was forming shifted into three horizontal lines that floated in front of its chest. The volume of space around the chain simply stopped agreeing that a chain was there, making the restriction close on nothing and whip back.

The recoil travelled up the golden arm and into the vessel's shoulder and knocked a hundred and eighty feet of Head Monk backwards across the vale into the ridgeline.

“The same technique, twice,” the being scoffed. “You people have no imagination, you have no—"

“Beric!” I shouted. “Release it!”

The mark under the old soldier's ear went white and threw his shadow forty feet across the grass, and every scrap of power he had stacked came out of him at once. A massive silver sword manifested over the Sacred Ring and slashed down at a speed that I even couldn’t follow.

The lich’s eyes widened, clearly having not expected the old soldier that it hadn’t paid any attention to throughout the battle to be capable of such a strike. It moved faster than anything in this world had any business moving, but it still wasn't enough.

The blade cut through him just above the knees.

The lower halves dropped and hit the valley floor and lay there in the frost.

“Legs,” the being laughed, floating mid-air while looking down at the stumps. “I do not need to walk. In fact, I have not needed to walk for nine thousand years. But I must admit, it does look strange to float around without the appropriate appendages. I guess I will regenerate them after I finish devouring your miserable—”

It didn’t get the chance to finish its haughty monologue because that was when my Yggy avatar acted.

Every tendril I had went out at once from the top third and from halfway down the coil.

They wrapped the arms, the legs, the ribs, the neck, and pulled tight.

“Pathetic,” the lich spat, hanging in the middle of all that green and not bothering to struggle. “This is what you have been saving? I will snap this overgrown weed within a second, and then I will do the same to you, boy. But the time for talking is over. You were foolish enough to give me the time to prepare this spell. That will be your undoing.” A star, similar to the star of David, appeared on its forehead and burned white. “Hollow. Devour.”

The star turned once.

Every tendril touching it went black from the point of contact outward, the colour draining down the length of them toward the main coil, and the vale filled with a dry cracking sound that came from everywhere at once.

Whatever the spell made contact with stopped having anything inside it, and the hollow ran up my vessel toward the base with a speed that told me that I might only have two or three seconds before I was destroyed alongside my avatar.

“Master,” Azure said, “now would be the moment you’ve been building towards...”

I knew what he was referring to.

During my training, I hadn’t been able to summon the Genesis Seed as a Dharma Vessel despite having tried over and over again even though it was tied to my soul. Whatever the technique considered a genuine bond, it didn’t care for the Seed sitting in my inner world, or maybe the Seed didn’t care for me. I didn’t know.

But that didn’t matter because I had found a workaround, and that was Yggy.

Even though my buddy was a creature born of Red Sun energy, Blue Sun energy, and now able to channel Golden Sun energy, it had lived in my inner world and interacted with the Genesis Seed on a deep level.

Honestly, sometimes it even seemed to imitate the Seed like a younger sibling copied an older sibling. In its own way, Yggy was a small, cheerful, miniature Genesis Seed. So, although I couldn’t summon the Seed as a vessel, I could channel aspects of the Seed’s abilities through Yggy.

I reached into my inner world past the Ancient Oak, the herb beds, the confused hive of bees, and down to the bottomless presence in the centre.

“Come,” I whispered, letting it run out along the connection into two hundred feet of vine.

The black that was covering my avatar stopped halfway up the nearest tendril, shivered, and then went back the other direction as the veins under the green turned pale silver and something older than this world's suns came up through them.

The being's laugh cut off in the middle.

“What…what is going on?” It pulled, properly, with everything it had left, and the whole Sacred Ring shook, and not one tendril shifted a finger's width. “You…you tricked me. You’re a sorcerer!”

I didn’t bother to correct it. It could believe what it wanted.

“But what kind of Djinn is this?” its eyes widened so much that I thought they would explode from the sockets. “An Afrit? No…no, this is a Marid! A Marid spawn! What is it doing in a low level world like this?”

"I hate destroying souls," I said, ignoring its question as I tightened every tendril at once. The rage that had been consuming my heart ever since I saw what it had done to a person that I cared about was now bursting out as I uttered words that I never thought would come out of my lips. "But first, I'm going to tear you out of my master's body. Then I'm going to let my little Seed devour your soul. And I'm going to make sure there is nothing left over for you to reincarnate with. That…that is my promise to you."

A/N

Wow, that was an intense week!

Next week we will finish the arc!

Then I'll take a week break to recover and also plan the next arc, which will take place in the Cultivation World because there's still lots to do there, especially now that Ke Yin is no longer a junior power level wise.

Enjoy your weekend :)

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