Chapter 244 - 243: Eight floor
The eighth floor was a realm of absolute, terrifying stillness. It was an endless, perfectly flat ocean of black, viscous water beneath a sky filled with falling, burning stars.
Peak Supreme Stage, Lin Yuan analyzed, feeling a pressure so heavy it threatened to snap his spine. Pseudo Half-Step.
The Guardian here was an ascetic monk phantom, sitting in a lotus position upon the black water. It did not wield a sword or a spear. It held a hollow, white bone flute to its lips.
As Lin Yuan stepped onto the water, the monk began to play.
The sound was not physical; it was a conceptual, spiritual attack that bypassed Lin Yuan’s physical body and struck directly at his Unshaken Stage Dao Heart. The melody attempted to forcibly drag his soul out of his body, weaponizing the karmic sins of his past and the profound weight of his attachments against him.
Lin Yuan gritted his teeth, blood leaking from the corner of his mouth as the intense psychic pressure sought to crush his mind.
My Dao Heart is anchored in her, Lin Yuan thought fiercely, closing his eyes to block out the falling stars. It cannot be moved by the echoes of a dead monk.
He forced himself to walk forward. Every step across the black water felt like dragging a continent. The monk played faster, the spiritual attacks manifesting as invisible blades of sound that sliced through Lin Yuan’s black and white robes, drawing thin lines of blood across his indestructible skin.
Lin Yuan endured. He walked through the storm of karmic sound, his Unshaken resolve acting as a flawless, conceptual shield.
When he was ten paces away, Lin Yuan raised his left hand.
He compressed the entirety of his Dao Intent into his palm and unleashed a devastating Palmstrike.
The blast of spiritual energy tore through the sonic domain, slamming into the ascetic monk. The impact shattered the bone flute and violently detonated the phantom’s spiritual matrix. The monk collapsed into the black water, dissolving into mist.
Lin Yuan dropped to one knee, panting heavily, wiping the blood from his chin.
He had cleared the eighth floor. But his cultivation was finally beginning to show signs of profound strain, and his physical vessel was bruised.
He looked up. A grand, towering gateway of pure, blinding white light pulsed at the far end of the black ocean.
The ninth floor.
Outside, the Central Continent’s Grand Court was in a state of sheer disbelief.
MERIT RANKINGS (CURRENT)
1. Xuan Mingzhe (Xuan Province) - 10100 Merits
2. Lin Yuan (Zhao Province) - 8610 Merits
3. Chu Kuang (Chu Province) - 7000 Merits
4. Jiang Wan (Jiang Province) - 6830 Merits
5. Ye Ao (Ye Province) - 6800 Merits
6. Feng Yao (Feng Province) - 6700 Merits
...
"The eighth floor..." Lord Zhao Shenming whispered, his hands gripping the stone railing of the Zhao pavilion so tightly that the rock began to crumble into dust beneath his fingers. Tears of absolute, overwhelming awe streamed freely down the provincial Lord’s face. "He cleared the eighth floor. He slaughtered a Peak Supreme Stage Guardian."
The other Upper Division elites were completely silent. The screaming had stopped. The mockery had ceased. There was only a profound, suffocating terror.
They looked at the names on the monolith.
Jiang Wan, the peerless sword genius, had been violently expelled from the pagoda minutes ago, materializing on the star-iron floor covered in blood, his sword shattered, having failed to clear his seventh floor. Ye Ao had been ejected shortly after, his body a mass of horrific burns and broken bones, permanently stalled at 6800 merits. Feng Yao had simply materialized, entirely unharmed, having voluntarily withdrawn his consciousness from the artifact at 6700 merits, choosing not to push his fragile mortal vessel any further.
And then there was Chu Kuang.
The heir of the Chu Province had raged through the floors, utilizing his Half-Step Transcendent aura to crush the lower tiers with blinding speed. He had rocketed up the rankings, reclaiming the third slot with 7000 merits.
But moments ago, Chu Kuang had been violently, aggressively spat out of the spatial rift.
He crashed onto the floor of the Grand Court, coughing up a massive pool of blood. His heavy armor was sundered in half, and his rusted halberd was missing its blade. He had encountered the Peak Supreme Guardian of the eighth floor, and his arrogant, unrefined ascent had been brutally dismantled.
The Chu Patriarch rushed to his son, his face pale with horror, feeding him supreme-grade healing pills.
Chu Kuang pushed his father away, his bloodshot, manic eyes staring up at the monolithic rankings.
"No..." Chu Kuang gasped, blood bubbling past his lips. "No, it’s impossible. He is an Early-Stage rat! How is he still climbing?! How did he pass the eighth floor?!"
The entire Grand Court realized a chilling, absolute truth.
The Six Peerless Geniuses—the untouchable gods of the younger generation—had all stalled. They had hit their fundamental limits and had been broken by the Nine-Tiered Sky.
All of them, except for two.
Xuan Mingzhe, the tri-Dao legend, sat comfortably at the absolute apex with 10,100 merits, having cleared the peak, the ninth floor.
And Lin Yuan, the anomaly of the Zhao Province, was the only other cultivator left inside the artifact. He was still climbing.
"He is entering the ninth floor," a Xuan Province grand elder whispered, his voice trembling as he looked up at the floating pagoda. "The ninth floor... that is the domain of Half-Step Soul Transformation. The artifact will manifest a Guardian that stands with one foot in the realm of true gods."
In the Zhao pavilion, Bai Qingyue leaned forward in her wheelchair, her hands clasped tightly over her heart. She could feel the faint, distant echo of his exertion through their karmic tether.
You are almost there, my husband, she prayed silently. Unleash it. Show them the truth of your Dao.
Lin Yuan stepped through the blinding white gateway and onto the ninth floor.
The environment here was not a physical landscape. It was a literal platform of swirling, luminescent cosmic dust, floating in a vast, empty void of pure, white light. It represented the absolute boundary of the mortal dust, the very threshold where a cultivator either shed their humanity to forge a Primordial Spirit, or collapsed under the weight of their own ambition.
The physical and spiritual pressure on this floor was absolute. It was not a gravity that pushed down; it was an existential compression that sought to crush Lin Yuan’s very concept of self into nothingness.
Standing in the center of the cosmic dust platform was an old man in immaculate, flowing white robes.
He looked entirely human. He did not possess pitch-black eyes or an intimidating aura of slaughter. He possessed a long, flowing white beard and eyes that sparkled with the profound, infinite wisdom of the cosmos.
But floating just behind the old man was a massive, glowing phantom projection. It was a pseudo-Primordial Spirit.
Half-Step Soul Transformation, Lin Yuan confirmed, his Unshaken Dao Heart groaning under the sheer weight of the entity before him.