Time passed in an instant for Tianyi as he concentrated on compressing his inner cosmos beyond its limit. He no longer paid attention to the lightning, even as it scorched his skin. It didn't matter anyway since his core was the primordial egg.
His body was but a shell.
Then on the ten thousandth lightning bolt, Tianyi knew darkness. The world around him faded into obscurity with no color, matter, or space. He couldn't even sense his inner cosmos. The only thing he could sense was himself.
'Has the Inner Devil Tribulation begun?' Tianyi thought as he waited.
Almost every cultivator had to undergo the Inner Devil Tribulation during the Immortal Ascension Heavenly Tribulation. If only ten percent of them passed the lightning tribulation, then ten percent of that passed the Inner Devil Tribulation.
You couldn't use any of the techniques, concepts, or laws you mastered to combat it. The only way to overcome the Inner Devil Tribulation was by relying on your willpower.
What Tianyi feared the most was the Inner Devil Tribulation. Reality had already proved that his willpower was woefully weak compared to his other attributes, but he couldn't temper his willpower using special areas like the Paradise Agony Abyss due to his unique cultivation method, so he tried to anticipate what his Inner Devil Tribulation would be.
The first possible tribulation Tianyi conceived of was his mom from Earth. Before he had begun to cultivate, he had already sworn that he would find her. That didn't change after Daoyi's and Xi Ri's account of Earth's apocalypse. If their souls could be reborn, there was no reason why he couldn't find her after gaining enough strength.
The second possible test was Mengfei discovering that he was a reincarnator. The person closest to him in this new world was his new mother, Mengfei, even if she failed poorly as a mother. That was okay, she had the heart.
Tianyi could still recall the chaos fruit she found for him while he was suffering from the Sole Yin Core, Eight Trigram Yang Core Formation Revolution. She did not blame him for ruining her chances with the Sovereign Nine Yin Lotus, nor did she ever require anything of him.
Mengfei expected great achievements, yes, but she never forced it. In her eyes, Tianyi was a peerless treasure that even a divine artifact could not measure. It was challenging for her to express her love, but Tianyi felt it. Genuine sincerity will find a way.
That's why Tianyi was deathly afraid of Mengfei rejecting him. She was his anchor in the new world and the reason why he hadn't gone crazy during his first years.
Aside from those two possibilities, Tianyi didn't think he had any other fears. He stared into the formless void and waited, and waited.
"Why isn't anything happening?" Tianyi said, but there was no sound either. "Could it be that my cultivation method also affected the Inner Devil Tribulation?"
The vacuum of silence occupied Tianyi's eyes, and the depthless void blocked his vision. There was simply nothing.
"Don't tell me something went wrong?" Tianyi said aloud again. "Ha! Figures that the Heavenly Dao would screw up with me. Or maybe this is its scheme to get rid of me with extreme boredom. Guess what? You're gonna fail!"
Absolute silence. Not a hint of sound, not even his own.
Tianyi tried to stand up, but he discovered that nothing existed below, and he couldn't stand. He simply existed in this space. He tried to say something, but he heard nothing. Tianyi started to even doubt if he had spoken correctly.
With only the colorless space and his own thoughts to accompany him, time drifted. Or at least he thought time passed. Tianyi couldn't tell.
"Hello? Anytime now. Some Inner Devil Tribulation this is."
Still no sound.
Tianyi sighed, or at least he attempted to. He tried looking at his hand again, but his heart thumped when he realized that he couldn't see his arm anymore. He couldn't even feel it.
He could do nothing but panic. After the panic attack disappeared, he began to rationalize. "So this is in my Inner Devil Tribulation?"
Tianyi didn't know if he said it since he couldn't ascertain if he still had a body. Before, he at least felt his body move. Now, it felt like he was a bodiless blob of existence.
'What am I doing? How long have I been here? Do I even exist?'
Such thoughts ran through Tianyi's mind. He began to wonder if he had been a brain in a jar, and everything he had experienced was a simulation, and his cultivation method just so happened to break the simulation, resulting in his current existence.
The only thing preventing him from going insane was the phrase, "I think, therefore, I am," by a philosopher Tianyi remembered. Like a mantra, he kept repeating it over and over again, just hoping that it would end.
Perhaps a few months had passed, or maybe even hundreds of millions of years passed, but he wouldn't know. He couldn't. Time seemed to cease to exist.
In fact, what is time?
Time doesn't exist. It was only an idea created by humans to help them measure shit.
Time does not exist. It is stupid, and no one uses it.
Who even cares.
The Law of Time is just a law, time is just part of space!
The present is the current physical state of space. Past is just a memory, an idea recorded in the mind, and the future are just conceptual possibilities!
"Yi'er!"
Tianyi gasped as he breathed in heavily, taking in his surroundings. He almost couldn't recognize the color of the sky, skin, or even the vegetation. The next thing he felt was the sensation of something wrapping around him.
"Daoyi, Xi Ri?" Looking past the hair clinging to his face, Tianyi saw Daoyi and Xi Ri looking in relief at him. He raised his arms and gently wrapped around the person hugging him. "Mother."
Tianyi later learned that he had been stuck in the Inner Devil Tribulation for ten years. It took him a week to reorient himself from the effects. The first thing he did was invite his mother, Daoyi, and Xi Ri to have dinner together.
Mengfei didn't usually like outsiders intruding on their dinners, with the recent exception of Daoyi. So, Tianyi was quite surprised when she okay'd Xi Ri's inclusion. 'Either the relationship between the two closed, or Mother is doing this for me.'
Either way, dinner was a joyous affair.
Tianyi looked at Xi Ri and said, "Xi Ri, when did you recover? Imagine my surprise when I discovered you back to normal after I transcended my tribulation."
Xi Ri laughed. "You were transcending your tribulation for ten years. Of course, I'd improve. I'm more shocked that you and Daoyi got together."
"What's so surprising about that? I'm handsome, and Daoyi's beautiful. We're a match made in heaven!" As soon as Tianyi said that, he felt his face heating up, so he quickly added. "What about you? Don't you need to marry a wife? Since Emperor-Uncle abdicated the throne to you so you could form a Dragon Vein Core, you are the emperor now. You need to think about your inheritor."
"No rush," Xi Ri said. "I've just recently recovered my cultivation to the Core Formation Realm. Emperor-Father can choose my wife for me. As long as she has no personality defects, I won't care too much. The most important thing is being able to love compatibly."
"Speaking of which, we've only dated a year, but you just ignored me for ten years. How are you going to make that up to me?" Daoyi asked, putting Tianyi on the spot.
"I, uhh, I was busy?" was Tianyi's best reply.
Daoyi laughed. Even Xi Ri laughed. Even Mengfei laughed, much to Tianyi's shock. Then, she asked. "Yi'er, you've already become a true immortal. When will you and Daoyi marry?"
"Master, there's no rush. I think it would be best for me to enter the Immortal Realm before speaking of marriage," Daoyi said before Tianyi got the chance to.
Thankfully, Mengfei nodded and left it at that. A day later, Tianyi found Daoyi and asked, "Do you want to cultivate together?"
Daoyi gave him a strange look. "To be clear, you mean to cultivate physically near each other and not dual cultivation, right?"
"Okay, that came out wrong, but yes. That is what I meant," Tianyi said. Daoyi didn't see any reason not to, so they both sat on the lotus throne in the Jade Clear Lotus Pond, back to back.
Affirming that Daoyi was physically present and it was not his hallucinations, Tianyi closed his eyes. But before he started to inspect his cultivation, he asked. "Did Mother seem kinda strange to you?"
"No?" Daoyi replied. "She's always been like this."
"I see," Tianyi said and then entered his inner cosmos. Unlike when he was still a mortal cultivator, his inner cosmos had evolved. Countless stars filled it, celestial planets with even more rogue planets. The only thing missing was life.
The inner cosmos had become his dantian. His spiritual sense had transformed into immortal sense, and his true qi had transformed into immortal qi of primordial chaos. Tianyi even felt the illusion of unlimited power.
At the center of his cosmos was an invisible Daoseed that he had formed when he was still in the Nascent Soul Realm. Now, it had become more corporeal. It was as if Tianyi's dantian existed nowhere yet, at the same time, existed everywhere. When it pulsed, the inner cosmos pulsed as well.
Thanks to his near bout of insanity, Tianyi's mastery of the Spacetime Law had improved and was close to mastery. He had already mastered the Law of Mass and could use it to enter the Seamless Immortal Realm at any time, but he didn't.
Something felt… off.
Tianyi spent the next few months trying to master the Spacetime Law since he wanted to use it as his core law for the completed daoseed instead of the Law of Mass. During this time, the war between the Buzhou Immortal Sect and the Tripartite and Anti-Heaven Alliance escalated.
It had already escalated during his ten years of tribulation ascending, but it had reached the point where the immortal monarchs had been sent out. Mengfei should have been able to sweep the monarchs easily, but the Cloud Goddess had shown surprising strength in fending off Mengfei, preventing them from securing victory.
Now, it had reached a stalemate, so the sect was sending out all available personnel. Not even Tianyi was exempt.
Tianyi stopped his comprehension and left with a squad of Unity Realm elders. Since he had ascended to the Immortal Realm, he automatically became an elder.
Along the way, a thought occurred to him, 'Maybe I need to comprehend the laws in battle like all of those protagonists in the novels.'
"Elder Xi, did you discover something?" An elderly elder asked Tianyi, seeing him smile.
"No, it's nothing," Tianyi said as he focused once again on the task at hand.
The Buzhou Immortal Sect dispatched him to claim a spiritual vein and stronghold of the Tripartite Alliance. They had hunkered down and used the spiritual vein to form a formation that prevented the sect from advancing.
Once he arrived, Tianyi saw a wall of gray light that reached the heavens. 'So this is the Profound Leakless Formation.' Just by looking at it, Tianyi felt that he could see no end.
"Elder Xi, what should we do?"
Tianyi hid his growing smile behind his sleeve, but he still replied in his most serious voice. "Let's meet with the other elders first and discuss plans."
He wasn't the only one sent, he was just the most recent reinforcement. The group flew along towards the Buzhou Immortal Sect but stopped upon discovering something wrong.
They saw an empty camp without any signs of life. Although the formation still protected it, Tianyi couldn't contact the people stationed inside at all. Deciding not to risk it, Tianyi formed a stellar incarnation and sent it inside.
As he thought, he lost connection with the stellar avatar immediately.
"Elder Xi, what are you doing?!" One of the elders behind him cried out when they saw Tianyi form weapons of all shapes and sizes out of his immortal qi of primordial chaos.
Tianyi didn't answer and barraged the formation with his qi-formed weapons. Soon, cracks started to appear, and it shattered far sooner than it should have. Once it disappeared, Tianyi and the others saw the truth.
Inside, the fortress and strongholds were filled with holes and cracks, and instead of the Buzhou Immortal Sect elders, they saw Leakless Sect Elders lying in wait.
"I didn't think they would be so foolish as to send Sword Sovereign Xi's son to us." One of the immortals said.
"Haha, this is a grave miscalculation on their part. Since they sent us such a large gift, it would be impolite not to accept!" The second immortal said and charged toward Tianyi with the first.
Tianyi waved his hand and pushed the Unity Realm elders behind him a fair distance away before charging to meet them. He unleashed a punch toward one of the immortals, a martial immortal that had manifested a durable-looking armor.
His fist connected with the martial immortal's armored fist, and to the shock of the martial immortal, his gauntlet shattered under Tianyi's punch and shattered nearly all the bones in his hand. But he gritted his teeth and grabbed Tianyi's arm with his other hand.
"Now!" he shouted.
Tianyi glanced behind him to see the second immortal charging at him with a spear shrouded in mystical runes and frosty qi. He didn't try to escape or pry the martial immortal's hand off and instead turned around. The martial immortal couldn't resist at all and found a cold and piercing pain in his back.
The spear immortal, upon seeing this, halted his attack. His spear danced like a snake and pierced toward Tianyi's arm the martial immortal grabbed, intent on severing Tianyi's hand.
Clang!
Upon contact with Tianyi's arm, there was only the sound of metal hitting against metal. Tianyi ignored it and used his other hand to grab the spear immortal, and the spear immortal was helpless under Tianyi's brutish might.
The exchange only took a few seconds, and the Buzhou Immortal Sect elders that accompanied Tianyi only had the time to blink a few times.
Tianyi gazed at the two trapped immortals in his grasp. The two resisted fiercely and used all kinds of techniques and forces, but they couldn't escape. Nor could their attacks harm Tianyi's body.
"Tell me what happened here," Tianyi demanded.
"Heh, do you think we'll say it?" The martial immortal laughed as he tried to spit on Tianyi's face.
Tianyi rolled his eyes, and a blotch of his black qi emerged from his eyes and dissolved the spit before splashing on the martial immortal's face. His immortal qi of primordial chaos disintegrated the martial immortal's helmet and started to dissolve his face, causing him endless pain.
He turned towards the spear immortal. "Are you going to tell me?"
The spear immortal shivered as he saw the pain his companion suffered, but he still gritted his teeth and resolutely refused. Tianyi shrugged, but before he could do anything, a resounding shout halted his actions.
"STOP!"