Chapter 82 - Nascent Soul Breakthrough
Deep within his consciousness, his soul sea illuminated as the Twilight Nether Lantern shone brightly, stabilizing his spiritual sense. His mind calculated at extreme speed to analyze and understand the patterns of the Chaos. The sheer intensity of his internal comprehension caused the ambient Qi in the sealed cave to hum in quiet resonance.
He directed his gaze inward, inspecting his own Golden Core. It floated in the center of his dantian, a perfect, absolute sphere of Yin and Yang, dividing light and dark with flawless, mathematical precision. The core could spin, allowing Yin to push to extreme Yin and convert to Yang, and Yang to push to extreme Yang and convert back to Yin. Yet, the entire system remained static on a macro level, locked in a never-ending, closed cycle of Yin and Yang.
In this perfect state, it was a closed loop that could neither expand nor grow.
A Taiji without chaos can only spin, forever unchanged.
He contemplated the nature of order. A system that is perfectly ordered is a closed system. Without variance, there is no change. Without change, there is no life, only a beautiful, frozen monument.
Perfection is only a cage that binds the order.
Su Ming shifted his gaze to the Hundun core and the blood essence before him. Chaos was not destruction; It was the raw, unformed potential of the universe before definitions were made. It was the Wuji from which all Taiji emerged.
A profound realisation struck his mind. During their battle in the deep wilderness, the Mutated Abyss Earth Tyrant’s chaos aura had passively dissolved or slipped past every structured, normal attack he threw. Spells, spatial seals, and restraining talismans failed because they were already defined concepts.
Yet, his Yin-Yang Origin Qi had sliced through the beast effortlessly, acting as a conceptual divider that forced the chaotic energy to separate into Yin and Yang. Yin-Yang had the supreme authority to define and divide chaos.
Now, to break his own Yin Yang Golden Core bottleneck, he had to perform the exact reverse. His Golden Core was a closed loop, a static order of Yin and Yang that could not be forced apart from within. Only by introducing the formless, unformed catalyst of Chaos could he dissolve this static order.
Only the undefined chaos can undo the defined.
He realized the key. To split his core, he must not apply force. He had to introduce a trace of Chaos into the perfectly balanced core, returning it to the state of Wuji for a single instant. In that instant, Yin and Yang would cease to exist as opposites and become undifferentiated once more. When separation occurred again, they would no longer be constrained by the limits of the original Golden Core, but would be reborn into something higher.
Where the Wuji ends, Taiji is reborn into a higher order.
With a deliberate breath, Su Ming unsealed the jade vial. He extracted exactly three drops of the rich, chaotic blood essence. The drops hovered in the air before him, behaving like perfect, trembling spheres of red that warped the light around them, refusing to blend.
Simultaneously, he drew a thread of raw, unformed chaotic energy from the mutated Hundun core. He guided the chaotic energy and the three drops of blood essence through his pores, drawing them into his meridians. He channeled them slowly, guiding the wild energy downward toward his dantian.
The moment the chaotic qi collided with his perfectly balanced Golden Core, the change was violent. The perfect boundary of the Taiji cracked. The absolute stability shattered. An internal tempest of chaotic currents erupted within his dantian, threatening to tear his meridians.
As the chaotic qi invaded his pathways, the skin of his forearms rippled, and a faint, silver-blue frost energy of his soul clashed with the burning golden Yang Qi of his body cultivation. He could feel his very bones grinding under the pressure, the marrow screaming as the chaotic energy dissolved the barriers he had spent years perfecting.
The pain was sharp, deep, and searing, like hot iron pouring through his veins. The Yang fire of his body cultivation and the Yin cold of his soul path were forced to meet this chaotic third force. But Su Ming’s expression remained calm, his posture immovable. He activated his Yin Yang Origin Scripture, guiding the opposing currents of heat and cold qi into a revolving cycle of balance to ground the chaotic impact, while the absolute stillness of his soul held his consciousness steady amidst the internal conflict.
Outside the cave, the wilderness reacted to the breakthrough. Above the ridge, the sky split in a massive, spinning spiral: one half of the horizon turned into a pitch-black, starlit night, while the other half remained bright day. A colossal spatial Taiji Vortex formed over the cliff, drawing in the spiritual Qi of the entire wilderness and channeling it down toward the hidden cave. The surrounding beasts cowered in their dens, trembling under the sudden, terrifying weight of the celestial phenomenon.
Inside the cave, the Golden Core reached its limit and shattered completely. The chaotic, undifferentiated energy collapsed inward, returning his dantian to a state of pure, unformed chaos. For a fraction of a second, his lower dantian became a churning vortex of raw, undefined, limitless potential, his breath and pulse suspended in the turbulent storm.
In that silent space between death and rebirth, his perception expanded. He felt his Origin Soul resting safely within his upper dantian, his sea of consciousness. The Twilight Nether Lantern glowed with quiet strength, anchoring his ego, his memories, and his unique mind. It was a soul fully unique to him.
But down in his lower dantian, a different creation was condensing. It was the Nascent Soul, the essence of his Qi path. Unlike the Origin Soul, which held his true self, this infant form was a pure crystallization of his Qi and the Yin Yang Origin Scripture he practiced. It inherited the exact quality and principles of his scripture. Because of his Void Dragon Soul Constitution, the infant soul bore faint, translucent draconic nature, yet it remained fundamentally separate from his actual soul.
A quiet memory of his late master surfaced. The old man, the previous Peak Master of White Lotus Peak, had spent his entire lifetime reaching this very realm. Su Ming looked at the condensing infant in his dantian, feeling the sheer, terrifying weight of the power it held.
He had started as a crippled disciple with a broken foundation, yet now he stood where his master had stood at the end of his life. And he knew, with total certainty, that he was not going to stop here.