Chapter 171: CH. 171 | The Saintess Soul
Lin Tian walked through the space between dimensions, making his way toward what he guessed was the saintess valley.
He passed through a stretch of stars until his feet finally touched solid ground somewhere new.
The earth beneath him was rocky and damp, the ceiling above shimmering like the surface of water, fish drifting past overhead, undisturbed by his presence.
He looked ahead and found a main river running through the entire space, its current flowing out from a large pool up front.
Three separate springs fed into that pool, each one marked by its own statue.
The statue on the left depicted a woman adorned with crescent moon motifs, wrapped in a beautiful gown, her features flawless.
The one on the right showed a woman marked with sun patterns, a sword in hand, draped in a long flowing gown.
Both statues stood at the same height, roughly fifteen meters tall. Only the third statue, standing between them, broke that symmetry.
The center statue depicted a woman bearing both crescent moon and sun motifs side by side.
In her hands, she held a vessel pouring out a clear blue spring, glimmering like starlight against a night sky.
Lin Tian could feel it immediately. The spiritual energy here was pure, impossibly fresh, so potent his meridians began drawing it in on their own, without so much as a single hand seal.
The air was clean and crisp, the whole space wrapped in a deep sense of calm, filled only with the soft rush of the waterfall feeding into the great pool ahead.
For reasons he couldn’t quite explain, Lin Tian felt completely at ease here, as though this place had been built for cultivation, for chasing enlightenment straight from the heavens themselves.
That pool... could it be a soul spring?
Lin Tian drew a deep breath and steeled himself, stepping toward the pool.
But without warning, a crushing wave of cultivation pressure slammed into him, locking his legs, his entire body refusing to move.
This pressure... it’s overwhelming!
He stood only five meters from the pool’s edge.
Yet with every step closer he tried to take, the pressure only intensified, until he grew faint and blood spilled from his lips.
"How dare a mere Nascent Soul cultivator like you come here and defile my sanctuary!"
A woman’s voice rang out, echoing through the space. Lin Tian dropped to his knees at once, unable to withstand the pressure a moment longer.
He forced his head up, straining to focus his eyes ahead. A small pavilion stood at the center of the pool, draped in thin blue curtains, radiating a powerful qi aura.
The curtains swayed as though stirred by wind, and through the haze, Lin Tian could just make out a woman with a body of blue soul light, sitting cross legged within, her back turned to him.
"If you’ve only come seeking the benefits of my sacred spring, you’d best leave now, before I shatter that Nascent Soul of yours!" the woman warned, her voice carrying none of the softness one might expect, only the sharp authority befitting a true saintess.
"That isn’t why I’ve come..."
"I’ve come seeking enlightenment of the dao!"
"And what could you possibly understand about dao?" the woman asked, still seated, still refusing to so much as glance his way.
Lin Tian fell silent for a moment, focusing what spiritual qi remained in him toward steadying his body and protecting his internal organs.
His attention stayed fixed ahead. Her question sounded simple enough, but the answer it demanded could stretch in a hundred directions, simple or endlessly complex.
"Dao is the path of life laid out by the heavens for every living being," Lin Tian answered firmly.
"If that’s true, then why has enlightenment eluded me for so long?"
"If the heavens have already written a path of fate for every being, then why am I trapped here?"
"Have they simply decided this is as far as I’m allowed to go?"
"If I die in this place, would that too be a fate the heavens decreed?"
Lin Tian said nothing for a moment, then coughed up more blood, his body weakening further under the mounting weight of her pressure.
He’d assumed, at first, that a saintess’s soul might guide him toward understanding the heavenly path.
But clearly, nothing here would come that easily.
The true meaning of the Saintess Spring Valley isn’t a gift at all. It’s a trial.
Not wanting to make things worse, Lin Tian chose to retreat, stepping back from the pool.
With every step he took backward, the pressure bearing down on him eased.
By the time he reached his starting point, he found himself fully free of the pressure’s grip.
He could still see the pavilion, though only from a distance now.
"You couldn’t answer my question. You have no right to stand here, no right to speak with me," the woman declared, her voice heavy with authority, echoing through the entire space.
A gust of wind brushed across Lin Tian’s face, his body still weak, still drained of much of its spiritual energy.
To reach any real understanding of the heavenly path, he’d need to be at his very best.
"Senior Saintess."
"This junior humbly requests your permission to cultivate within this valley, to restore my spiritual energy," Lin Tian asked, pressing his palms together and bowing his head.
No response came. She said nothing more after he’d spoken. He took her silence as permission, so long as he stayed clear of the pool itself.
Lin Tian settled into a cross legged seat, hands forming a seal, and began to cultivate.
Sure enough, no crushing pressure struck his body or soul this time. The spiritual energy of the valley flowed into him freely, absorbed at its fullest.
As he cultivated, his mind drifted back to the question the Saintess had posed.
All this time, Lin Tian had understood dao as the path a cultivator walked, one shaped alongside the will of the heavens.
He’d never questioned whether that will carry limits of its own.
But it struck him now as neither fair nor right for the heavens to dictate the very line between a cultivator’s life and death.
Cultivators were those who sought enlightenment to understand the heavens, to earn long life, to walk in step with fate.
No one, he’d always believed, had the right to decide when their life should end.
Except for one thing: cause and effect.
The heavens would never kill a cultivator without reason. That would violate the very laws of fate and death itself.
But they enforced a different principle, one that could still claim a life while remaining bound to that same law.
Cause and effect.
Lin Tian narrowed his focus onto that single idea, a concept rarely discussed, one most cultivators struggled to fully grasp.
But for a cultivator standing at the threshold of Soul Formation, as he now did, understanding cause and effect was essential to grasping how the heavens truly operated.
A cultivator who failed to break through in time would die once their lifespan ran dry. The cause: failing to break through. The effect: death by exhausted lifespan.
An ant, careless in its path, might be crushed underfoot and die. The cause: carelessness. The effect: death.
Cause was never punishment. The effect was never retribution.
Cause and effect were simply the balance holding all existence in place.
Could it be...
Lin Tian paused his cultivation. His eyes snapped open wide, fixed straight ahead, locked on the woman still seated within the pavilion, her back still turned to him.
"The reason you remain trapped here, the reason the heavens have bound you, isn’t a lack of understanding on your part."
"It’s because... an unresolved cause and effect still lingers, unfinished."
The woman heard his voice ring out clear and strong. Her eyes went wide the instant his words reached her, a Nascent Soul cultivator, of all people, speaking such truth.
Her soul’s heart pounded, her spirit qi surging in response.
That answer... that’s the very answer I’ve searched for, all this time.
People had come to her before, always urging her to understand the heavens, to understand nature, to understand dao, to understand herself.
But Lin Tian was different. He realized that her grasp of the heavens surpassed anyone who’d come before her.
And all he’d offered was a single truth: an unresolved cause and effect.
I never once considered it. Could I have been so consumed by chasing heavenly enlightenment that I overlooked something as simple as cause and effect?
Could it be... that something I did in the past is exactly what’s kept me from reaching the Immortal Realm?
The graceful woman rose from within the pavilion, stepping out and walking across the surface of the pool itself.
Now, for the first time, her beautiful, elegant face came fully into view before Lin Tian.
The moment her eyes fell on the golden mark etched into his forehead, shock swept across her features once more.
"That golden mark...?"
"Who are you? What is your connection to my husband?!"