Chapter 551: The Truth
After thousands of years, even with the inherent insularity and ignorance of the Manghuang Realm's upper echelons, they still had ample time and energy to ponder everything about their world.
Long ago, a select few bloodline cultivators who had reached the absolute peak, infinitely close to Divine-level perfection, discovered that an unknown force seemed to restrict their ability to glimpse powers beyond the Divine, into higher echelons of strength.
They tried myriad methods, hoping to shatter this despairing blockade and forge a heaven-reaching path for themselves and their descendants. Yet, after nearly a millennium of attempts spanning an entire generation, all proved fruitless.
The first generation following the Star Beacon's appearance withered away in despair.
Countless theories were posited. In pursuit of greater longevity and more formidable power, the Bloodline Houses mobilized every available resource to seek answers.
The outcome, however, was the one they least wished to accept.
Both overt and covert evidence pointed to the truth likely resting in the hands of that "Old Ancestor"—that it might, in fact, be the mastermind behind everything.
...
Disaster soon struck. Just as the enraged bloodline cultivators deciphered the truth and meticulously prepared to "defy the heavens," those among them determined to resist suddenly vanished one moonless, windswept night.
This event struck terror into the hearts of all who knew the truth.
...
Due to the constraints of its original core rules, the Star Beacon was absolutely forbidden from harming any indigenous human within the Manghuang Realm.
This was the hidden hand left by its creator, Yuan Wu Chu. Although he had no knowledge of Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, he nonetheless considered the possibility of the sentient artifact losing control and and, in its madness, exterminating humanity.
To prevent such a horrific outcome, he had incorporated this supreme directive.
After all, he had positioned the Star Beacon as a public servant, tasked with protecting humanity through its perilous period after several god-level masters had successively departed, and to serve the human race.
A servant, by any definition, should not possess the ability to harm its master.
He simply couldn't have foreseen that the Star Beacon, even constrained by its rules and unable to personally kill anyone, still had a plethora of loopholes it could exploit.
For instance, this time, it exploited its spatial transfer ability to forcibly teleport all its opponents to the base camp of the fiendish creatures, leaving them to fight a bitter battle until death in the encirclement.
What it truly cared about was the golden age of humanity as a whole; individuals were irrelevant.
...
The inexplicable disappearance of their comrades confirmed for the "survivors" the identity of the true mastermind. Yet, they fell into deeper despair, for this was an existence they were powerless to resist and unable to confide in outsiders.
At its seven-stage level, capable of influencing the information plane, the Star Beacon, once it set its mind to monitor such matters, made even the act of revealing the truth to future generations a mere pipe dream for them.
In utter despair, they recorded their discoveries using every clandestine method imaginable to humanity.
Ciphers, maps, scrolls, ornaments... every medium capable of recording information was utilized by these people who had nothing left to live for.
With no path forward, they lost the motivation to continue cultivating. At this point, their sole hope was to "outplay the heavens by half a move," bypassing the Star Beacon's information blockade to convey their findings to future generations.
...
A large portion of these records were destroyed by the Star Beacon, but a minuscule few managed to escape, circulating into the hands of later generations.
Regrettably, not long after the second generation expended immense effort to decipher the fragmented words left by their predecessors, that transmigrator from the Nanxuan family burst onto the scene, breaking through to the Divine-level with lightning speed, then ascending through the void. This caused the second generation of bloodline cultivators to mistakenly view the painstakingly preserved words of the first generation as nothing more than the whines of defeated dogs.
They reasoned that since someone in their own generation could break through to the Divine-level, the predecessors' accounts of the so-called Old Ancestor blocking the path and forbidding all power beyond the Divine-level had utterly become a mere excuse for their own failed breakthroughs.
...
Duan De Huai recalled the tattered cloth, covered in blood-red characters, that he had found in a dusty, abandoned warehouse when he was still a child.
The bloodstains on the tattered cloth had long since turned black.
"I am about to die. I had hoped to leave behind my techniques, I was so close. I could already contend with Dragon-level cultivators, yet in the end, I was no match for It.
But I believe that if my life could continue, one day I would twist its neck.
That power is the roar of the ocean, the tremor of the void, the crushing weight of the earth... Only entirely new external cultivation, pure external cultivation, can defeat it.
Abandon the Source Seed, abandon bloodline power, temper the true body with an iron will, using the most brutal methods... only then can one obtain that which can truly defeat it."
He also remembered that, at the very bottom of that tattered cloth, some unknown predecessor had left two characters, also reddish-brown but in a distinctly different script: "Pitiful."
As a youth then, he had dismissed it. Being at the apex of a Bloodline House, a genius among the four great houses, only a fool would abandon the boundless power granted by their bloodline.
However, as his cultivation deepened, and he stagnated at Divine-level perfection, vaguely sensing the true boundary, Duan De Huai's perspective gradually began to shift.
But there was no turning back now. The watchful eyes of his peers and the heavy burden of his family would not permit him to abandon his cultivation and restart, to attempt that insane hypothesis.
He could only continue playing his part, portraying an unremarkable monarch, burying all his doubts deep within his mind, destined to carry them to his dying day, unless something unexpected occurred.
...
"I want an answer," he said, looking fearlessly at the Star Beacon.
"Is the Source Seed how you control everyone?" Duan De Huai continued, posing the question that everyone behind him most desperately wanted answered.
"The path of the Source Seed is a dead end. I do not wish for you to follow in my master's footsteps," the Star Beacon replied, offering an unexpected answer.
"Then why did you make us use the Source Seed to condense bloodline power?!" Duan De Huai retorted, even more enraged.
"As long as one does not break through to the Divine-level or higher, the power of the Source Seed presents no issue."
"Why was that person from the Nanxuan family able to succeed?"
"His soul is that of a being from beyond the heavens. I have no means to fully control him, and the life and death of a being from beyond the heavens are irrelevant to my mission." After a brief second of contemplation, the Star Beacon answered with complete candor.
It was, after all, a sentient artifact program devoid of emotion. The transmigrator, who had arrived inexplicably, was not within the scope of humanity it was originally programmed to protect.
Therefore, even when he embarked on the dead-end path of breaking through to the seven-stage, the Star Beacon offered no obstruction. It merely banished him to another spatial layer once his breakthrough succeeded, preventing a new Daoized madman from destroying the world.
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