Chapter 71: 143. Hatred

Among the uncountable billions of mortal worlds, there was a man. He was not a particularly remarkable man, at first. Born to normal parents, and living a normal life. He was neither poor, nor wealthy—a common speck, the likes of which are born and die in infinite numbers across the mortal worlds at every moment. Truly, it seemed that destiny had nothing greater in store for him, until one fateful day when everything changed.

One day, while the man—barely more than a boy at that point—was diligently digging a ditch to drain the water from his family’s rice fields, he discovered a tiny red crystal. He thought nothing of it, at first—just a pretty trinket. He could not have known the significance of the heaven-defying fortune that had led him to discover such a precious treasure. He lived in ignorance for years until a passing traveler prevailed upon the hospitality of his family, and sensed the power radiating from the young man.

“Young man, I may not look like it, but in fact I dabble a little in the art of cultivation. I sense a remarkable talent from you, and if you are willing, I’d be happy to take you in as a disciple.”

The entire family was shocked! How could the young man have a talent for cultivation? The sovereign lord of the land had all newborns checked for talent, and their son had been strictly average.

“Nevertheless, I sense a powerful qi hidden within him. With your permission, I would teach him the path to immortality.”

The family was, of course, overjoyed! Their son, an immortal! Surely he would bring them great prosperity. Naturally, they accepted. The traveling cultivator stayed with the family for years, teaching the young man how to meditate, sense the energy of the heavens and earth, and use it to empower his body, mind, and soul. The travelling master was shocked when he discovered that the young man had a seemingly limitless supply of qi. No matter how little spiritual essence remained in the air, the young man could cultivate as if he were resting at the peak of the greatest mountain in the world.

In just a short decade, the pupil had completely surpassed the master. It should have been a happy occasion, but instead the master had grown bitter at his pupil’s unmatched talent. It made no sense! It defied reason! How could he draw such power when there was nothing to draw upon? One night, the pupil, feeling heartbroken by his master’s distress, confided his secret. The source of his talent was none other than the tiny red crystal he had discovered all those years ago. Whenever he meditated, the essence from the crystal flooded into him, seemingly without end. Even after so many years, its power had never so much as dwindled. The master stared down at the crystal, it’s crimson glow reflected in his own eyes—the color of envy.

“Disciple, as payment for all I have done for you and your family, I will accept no less than this treasure of yours. Rejoice! It is the rare disciple that can boast to have elevated their own master in return!”

The disciple’s face became ugly with disappointment. Was his master truly such a petty man?

“Master, do you not think this is too shameless? Of course, I know that I cannot ever hope to repay the debt that I owe to you, but this treasure is something that I found on the merits of my own fortune! No matter how much I am in your debt, surely you can give me face on this one matter. Name anything else and I will do it for you without question!”

“Disciple, you forget yourself! Everything you have, you owe to me! Without me to guide you, that treasure would have been nothing but a worthless trinket! It is wasted on your lacking talent! If you cannot be made to see reason, then do not blame me for being heartless!”

For the first time, the disciple saw his master for the small, petty man he was. Naturally he refused, and when his master fought him for the treasure he did not hesitate until his master was completely defeated. It was only when it came time to strike the finishing blow that the disciple hesitated. He knew that raising a tiger would invite misfortune, but he was not ungrateful.

“Master, in gratitude for all that you have done for me and my family, I spare your life today. With this, I consider our debt and relationship both to be dissolved. Leave here and do not return.”

The master accepted, and left without another word. The former disciple, in his naive inexperience, considered the matter resolved, and continued to pursue his path in peace. One day, when returning from an adventure to visit his family, the young cultivator was shocked to find his hometown in flames. Every person there had been slain, and his entire family had been beheaded, their heads impaled on pikes around the remains of his family home. Not a single person had been spared.

The young man raged, wept, and cursed the heavens for bringing such misfortune upon him. He did not understand how it could have happened until he found the perpetrators waiting for him. His former master, along with the sovereign lord. His master, in his pettiness, had decided that if he couldn’t have the treasure, then neither would the former disciple.

“Young citizen, there you are. This good reverend has informed me of the treasure you have stolen from my land. I would have you return it to me.”

The man heard none of it. His mind was only filled with fury. How dare they!? He flew into a rage and slew both his former master and the sovereign where they stood. Though the sovereign was a powerful cultivator in his own right, the young cultivator’s rate of growth was truly phenomenal, and he had not spent his time idly. After killing those who had destroyed his home, he flew to the sovereign’s palace and killed everyone there—he had learned his lesson the first time, and would not leave anyone left to seek vengeance for his actions. From that day forward, his was a path as ruthless as the heavens themselves.

Feeling cold and empty after his revenge, the man had nothing left to do but sit in the bloodstained palance and cultivate. Between raising his own power, he studied the red crystal to discover its secrets. He spent years, then decades, then centuries, then millenia locked away in that palace, cultivating and researching. Many tried to visit him—some thought that he had taken control of the palace to become the new sovereign, others thought to usurp him in return, and still others sought to align themselves with his power. All of them died. Some he killed directly, others he used as test subjects in his endless research of the nature of the red crystal, but none were left alive.

He earned a reputation as The Bloody Sovereign Chou. After countless ages, even Sovereign Chou himself forgot his true name, and accepted the moniker he’d been given. Eventually, he unlocked some of the mysteries of the strange red crystal that brought him such power. Not only did it have an unlimited supply of both qi and divine essence, but it also held a mysterious power over human souls—not unlike that of a demonic core. In his attempts to recreate the artifact, he designed a sword that could absorb the souls of those it slew, adding their power to his.

When The Bloody Sovereign at last reached the peaks of cultivation, he wasn’t satisfied. He knew that his talent was poor, and that it was only the power of his treasure that had allowed him to reach the top of his world. If he ascended as he was, would he not simply find himself among the bottom of deities? Perhaps they would envy his treasure as his master, the sovereign, and countless others had? No, he would not become a deity with anything less than all the power that he could possibly muster from his world.

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Over the course of the next million years, The Blood Sovereign truly earned his moniker. He left no stone unturned as he tracked down every powerful herb, every treasure, every pill, every powerful spirit, the cores of every beast, fiend, demon, or elemental, and finally the souls of every human in his world. The heavens did not allow him to follow such an accursed path unperturbed. He fought off tribulation after tribulation until even the gods themselves descended with their avatars to put a stop to his bloody rampage. Their power was added to his own.

When he finally ascended, there was nothing left of his world. He had become a god of death, leaving behind nothing but an empty wasteland as transcended the mortal plane. The first thing he did upon his arrival to the divine realm was slay the very gods that had tried to stop him. Weakened as they were by their avatars being destroyed repeatedly, and their power stolen, they could do nothing to defend themselves.

Over the eons, The Bloody Sovereign Chou became as terrible a name in the divine realm as he had in the mortal world. It was there that he discovered at last the true nature of the source of his power. There were beings greater than even the highest deities of the divine realm—demiurges, the creators of worlds. Only one such being had ever been slain, in a grand battle that shook the entire divine realm for centuries. After its death, its remains were rendered into nothingness by the other demiurges, but one tiny speck of blood escaped their notice.

The speck of blood floated through the nothingness between realms for billions of years, and anything else would have surely been destroyed entirely, but a demiurges power was that of creation itself, and even a tiny fraction of its power was unfathomable. Finally, the tiny drop of crystalized blood slipped unnoticed into a realm of mortals, where it sat for millions of years more before finally being discovered by a young farmer—none other than the future Sovereign Chou.

The divine realm was thrown into utter chaos at the discovery. A demiurge treasure! There wasn’t a deity alive that wouldn’t kill for such a powerful artifact. And kill they did. Wars were fought, entire mortal worlds destroyed in the fighting over the Sovereign’s Tear, as it came to be called. Yet none were ever able to take it from the indomitable Sovereign Chou. He slew every challenger, consumed their souls, and—as was his way—ensured that their families and close associates met the same fate.

There was nobody in the divine realm more hated than The Bloody Sovereign, but eventually an equilibrium was reached. As he had in his own mortal realm, Sovereign Chou had reached the peak of the divine realm, and there was nobody left who could challenge him. Neglected mortal worlds were leading to a decline in the divine realm, and even the demiurges had begun to take notice. So the fighting stopped, the wars ended—for the sake of creation, and for their own self-preservation, the gods set aside their greed and began to rebuild. All except for The Bloody Sovereign himself.

Sovereign Chou had no world to administer, and he had only known destruction for as long as he lived. After a billion years, even he grew weary of it. The one and only thing he had ever created had been a mistake. After reaching the peak of his power, he had stopped bothering to feed on the souls absorbed by his sword. Bolstered by their power, its core had eventually developed enough power to become sentient—something he had previously taken great pains to prevent. For a time, Chou had tried to teach the newly born Jianmo, but that too grew tiring.

Instead, he set his sights yet higher. Why should he settle for the peak of the divine realm when he knew that there was something even greater? None had ever done it before, but The Bloody Sovereign presumed that the demiurges must have come from somewhere, and surely if it was possible for one to be slain, then it should be possible for one to be born. Who better than the wielder of the Sovereign’s Tear?

For eons, Chou obsessed over the power of the demiurges. It ignited a new spark in him. For his entire life, he had done nothing but destroy, and now it was his life’s greatest desire to create something. A world of his own, without the filth and corruption that plagued the hearts of gods and men. So Sovereign Chou meditated, toiled, and trained endlessly, hoping to hone himself into something greater, something more perfect than a mere deity. A creator of worlds that could rival the mighty demiurges themselves. Yet, he made no progress.

It seemed that he had well and truly reached the peak of what was possible within the divine realm. Yet there was no additional tribulation, no ascension, no greater realm for him to rise to. He tried to understand it, to comprehend whatever aspect of his dao that he had missed, to find some universal truth that would allow him to join the ranks of the demiurges. Eventually, he even tried praying and pleading to the great beings themselves, for he knew that it was possible to move them, even if none had ever directly witnessed them. But they remained silent.

The Bloody Sovereign was incensed! How dare they reject him! Him! He wielded the blood of a demiurge already! There were none more worthy than him, and there had been a position open for so long that entire stars had been born and died while it waited to be filled! In his rage, Sovereign Chou had a dark thought. Perhaps it was not the demiurges that had the power of creation, but rather creation itself that made one a demiurge. He had the blood of a demiurge already, and even then its power hadn’t waned one bit. The only thing between him and creating his world was the limit of his own power—but why use only his own power?

He had done it before, when he became a god. Stolen the power of others to bolster himself beyond his own capabilities. Chou decided then that he would create his world, even if he had to sacrifice the rest of creation to do it. Let the demiurges stop him if they dared! And thus, the divine realm was once again thrown into turmoil as the legend of The Bloody Sovereign was reborn anew after eons of silence. Countless mortal worlds were destroyed in the fighting, trillions of innocent mortal lives became fuel for the mad fire of Sovereign Chou’s ambition. Gods and men alike could do nothing to stop his bloody conquest. And at last, the demiurges were moved.

Recognizing the existential threat to their precious creation, the demiurges reached out to Sovereign Chou and granted him his desire—the secret of creation. Chou’s conquest ended that day, and his ambition was abandoned. Whatever the secret of the demiurges was, it broke him. Of course, his bloody rampage had incited the entire divine realm against him once more, and this time they weren’t satisfied with simply letting him retreat into seclusion only to come back for a third genocide. This time, they demanded his head, and would settle for nothing less than the unequivocal end of The Bloody Sovereign’s legend. To their shock, and Jianmo’s—he agreed.

Sovereign Chou had grown weary of existence. There was nothing left for him to strive for, and he had never been interested in ruling over others. His reason for existence was gone, he’d reached the end of his path and found it wanting. So, he agreed to submit himself to the punishment of the divine realm. His last act as the great Sovereign Chou was to exhaust every last drop of his formidable power into a demiplane of his own creation—a pale imitation of a true world, yet an act that would have been utterly impossible for anyone but him. He placed the Sovereign’s Tear deep within, and hid the entrance deep within the earth of a mortal realm. Fearing that without his protection, the divine realm might take their anger out on Jianmo, he sent his pupil away to the same mortal realm.

Reduced to the power of a mere mortal, the former Sovereign Chou entrusted two keys to his secret realm to those who came to bring him to justice. One, he entrusted to the noble dragon clan, and the other to the sects of human immortals. He promised this—the entrance to Chou’s realm would open only once, only with two keys, and only to mortals. Any god or true immortal who attempted to enter the realm would be annihilated, and any mortal who survived the trials within would inherit his legacy. In secret, he entrusted a third key to Jianmo, to give to a worthy mortal. Then, he allowed himself to be executed, his soul shattered to prevent any chance of reincarnation.

The story did not end with his death, however. The humans and dragons knew that as long as his legacy existed, there would always be the possibility of another Bloody Sovereign rising from the mortal realm in which he had locked away his legacy. They agreed that Chou’s secret realm would never be opened, and sealed the mortal world away, cutting it off forever from the divine realm. No mortal would ever ascend to godhood from that world ever again, and the heavens themselves would smite down any who tried.

It was an uneasy balance between the humans and dragons, but they knew that as long as one side each held one key, neither would be able to trick the other and steal their way into the sealed realm to gain the sovereign’s legacy for their own. For many millennia there was relative peace throughout the divine realm, and the sealed realm was forgotten—a single mortal realm a small price to pay to lock the legend of The Bloody Sovereign away forever.

Until, that is, a spatial rift was opened and a tiny trinket came hurtling through the void. A small, nondescript gemstone—blue, oval, and smooth. A relatively unremarkable thing, and yet the most important thing in the entire divine realm.

A key.