Chapter 53: Nascent Soul Realm!
"...is but a step."
The words left Lin Yuan’s lips as a barely audible whisper, swallowed instantly by the crackling hum of the lightning sphere. The imprisoned Xu Canghai, trembling in the wreckage of his shattered cultivation, strained his bleeding ears but could not decipher the murmur. However, the Heavens heard it. The Great Dao heard it.
Then, with a fluid grace, Lin Yuan smoothed the elegant fabric of his Daoist robes and immediately sat cross-legged directly in front of the sphere. Right there, in front of everyone, he closed his eyes.
"Calm your mind," Lin Yuan then said, his words instantly stilling the roaring winds.
"Gather vital energy."
A visible, swirling vortex of spiritual qi materialized above the courtyard, funneling the energy of heaven and earth directly toward his crown.
"Overcome hardships. Heal your inner self."
The dense spiritual qi of his golden core merged seamlessly with the tribulation thunder he had just devoured, creating a peerless aura that washed over the area.
"Bond with all creation. Guard your soul."
The thunder aura that had previously brought Bai Chen to his knees completely changed. Instead of being an oppressive spiritual pressure, it became a boundless, nurturing ocean of profound vitality.
"Comprehend heavenly laws. Attain true wisdom."
The vortex above him expanded,
"And finally... walk your own path without restraint."
As the final words left his lips, Lin Yuan began cultivating in earnest. The sheer volume of spiritual energy surging into him was catastrophic, something that should have instantly vaporized a Core Formation cultivator. Yet, he sat as unmovable as an ancient mountain. His aura swept outward in every direction, carrying a presence so incredibly calm, profound, and peerless that it defied the natural order of the world.
A few dozen paces away, Bai Chen gasped.
The young man had been clutching his shattered right arm. But as Lin Yuan’s peerless aura washed over him, a miracle occurred. The ambient, creation-filled energy of the Thunder Dao seeped into Bai Chen’s body.
Without Bai Chen needing to channel a single drop of his own qi, the bone of his right arm suddenly snapped back into perfect alignment. The ruptured blood vessels stitched themselves together. The torn muscle fibers rapidly re-wove themselves with a soothing golden light. In the span of three breaths, his arm was completely healed, stronger and vastly more resilient than it had been before the Xu Clan elder had broken it.
Bai Chen stared at his hand in absolute shock. He then looked up at Lin Yuan, watching the young man draw the heaven and earth’s energy into himself. Even though Bai Chen was merely a 9th level Qi Condensation cultivator, even though he lacked the foundational knowledge to understand the profound scene occurring before him, his soul instinctively recognized the sheer magnitude of what he was witnessing.
"Nascent Soul realm!" Bai Chen whispered, his voice trembling with reverent awe.
He was right.
In the ordinary path of cultivation, a practitioner had to spend years at the late stage of Core Formation, painstakingly nurturing their spiritual sea until their Golden Core was perfectly saturated. Only then could they attempt the perilous, often fatal process of shattering their core to forge a Nascent Soul.
But Lin Yuan was above that!
Thanks to the Origin Soul Revival Pill he had consumed within the Thunder Prison, his soul foundation had been elevated to an unprecedented, flawless extreme. The pill had bypassed centuries of bitter meditation, instantly establishing a soul foundation so incredibly dense and pure. He did not need to wait for the late stage of Core Formation. He was already forging his Nascent Soul straight from the early stage without a single trace of backlash!
"The Dao has no form, yet it gives form to all things," Lin Yuan’s voice echoed directly into the minds of everyone present. "The soul has no body, yet it is the vessel through which the Dao is understood."
The spiritual energy in his dantian began to boil, churning into a violently spinning whirlpool that radiated a blinding light.
"The body follows Heaven. The soul follows the Dao," Lin Yuan proclaimed, his purple eyes snapping open, blazing with an unyielding, sovereign light that challenged the stars themselves. "But my Dao shall follow my heart."
He looked past the sphere, his gaze locking briefly with the eyes of Bai Qingyue, who was watching him from the doorway of the main hall.
"My heart is to seek immortality!" Lin Yuan declared, the conviction in his Dao Heart solidifying into an indestructible fortress of will. "I shall be eternal, and my Dao companion shall be eternal beside me!"
The ambient energy of the world reached a terrifying crescendo. The vortex above his head collapsed entirely, violently compressing into a single thread of pure heavenly law that shot directly into his crown chakra.
"The river of life flows endlessly, carrying all beings toward death," Lin Yuan murmured, his hands coming to rest in a final seal over his lower abdomen. "Today, I shall become the stone that refuses to be swept away."
Then, deep within the boundless spiritual ocean of his dantian, it happened.
His Golden Core cracked.
It was not the sound of destruction, but the the sound of birth.
Rays of pure light shot out from the cracks, illuminating his internal meridians with the brilliance of a rising sun. Slowly, and deliberately, the shattered shell of the core peeled away.
From within the shattered core, a tiny figure slowly emerged.
It was a miniature, ethereal infant. Its features were indistinct, yet it carried the exact same aura as Lin Yuan himself. It sat cross-legged in the center of his dantian, breathing in rhythm with the universe, its tiny hands forming the exact same seals as its master.
The Nascent Soul had been born.
At that moment, Lin Yuan felt something change within him. His body was still flesh. His cultivation was still bound by Heaven and Earth. Yet, his soul had transcended. Taking its very first step completely beyond the limits of mortality.
The path to true immortality had truly begun.
From this moment henceforth, Lin Yuan was no longer a pawn moving blindly on the grand chessboard. He was a player. He had permanently escaped the bracket of the weak. He possessed the power to dictate life and death, to bend space, and to rewrite the destinies of entire bloodlines.
The sheer ecstasy of the breakthrough could not be contained within the small courtyard.
Lin Yuan stood up. Without bending his knees, he instantly teleported.
He vanished from the courtyard and reappeared thousands of feet in the sky above. Hovering amidst the rolling clouds, Lin Yuan fully released his newly formed Nascent Soul aura.
BOOOM!
The spiritual shockwave was cataclysmic. It swept outward like a hurricane of invisible force, crashing over the city and rolling into the distant wilderness. The sheer power of his aura slammed into the towering mountain peaks several miles outside the city limits.
The peaks groaned, fractured, and then violently shattered, the bedrock exploding into millions of tons of dust and debris under the sheer, oppressive might of his supreme birth.
Hovering high above the world, bathed in the starlight and the crackling of his thunder aura, Lin Yuan looked down below.
"Today, I shed the mortal shell," Lin Yuan’s voice echoed across the heavens, a proclamation that would forever be etched into the history of the realm. "From this moment onward, I walk a different path beneath Heaven."