Chapter 718 – The Human Emperor Realm, The Life Star Rekindled - Part 2

Later, Li Yuan's group arrived at the bustling heart of the imperial capital.

Li Ying walked silently behind, observing everything. He gazed at the peddlers shouting out their wares, the hawkers balancing baskets on shoulder poles, and the rising smoke and delicious clamor of street-side eateries. Somewhere across the water, the sing-song call of a vendor drifted in the air.

“Hot lamb flatbreads! Fresh lamb flatbreads!”

People clustered in groups. When they noticed the imperial carriage in the street, whispers followed like ripples.

𝘧𝘳𝘦ℯ𝓌𝘦𝒷𝘯𝑜𝑣𝘦𝓁.𝒸𝘰𝓂

Inside, the two children were pressed eagerly against the windows, eyes wide as they marveled at the bright and dazzling chaos of the market.

“Imperial Father! Eat! Eat!” The young prince pointed excitedly at a vendor selling sugar figurines.

Li Yuan called for the carriage to stop. Dressed in plain clothes, he took the children down and bought them each a sugar candy.

The little princess, however, grabbed an extra one. She tiptoed over and offered it to Li Ying, chirping sweetly, “Here, big sister, have one!”

“...?” Li Ying gazed at the little girl.

“...?” Li Yuan raised an eyebrow.

The two men exchanged a look, both stunned.

Then Li Yuan turned his gaze to Li Ying again. Only now did he notice, beneath the crescent-marked mask and under the grey cloak, Li Ying did look a little feminine.

Emaciated from torture and pain, his frame had become slender, and the way the cloak hung on him made him seem almost willowy.

His long hair, neatly combed, fell smoothly over his shoulders. And the crescent-shaped mask...well, its design had always leaned a bit toward the feminine.

“Big sister, eat~!” the little princess urged again, standing on tiptoe, eyes bright with expectation.

Still stunned, Li Ying took the sugar candy, then brought it up under the mask to slowly suck on it through the mouthpiece.

Li Yuan cleared his throat. “He’s not a big sister. He’s an uncle. His voice isn’t well, so he can’t talk.”

“Huuhhh?” The children gasped in perfect unison, blinking up at Li Ying with wide, astonished eyes.

Li Ying remained silent, slowly sucking on the sugar figurine through his dry, burned lips.

The young prince’s expression turned sympathetic. “He can’t talk? That’s so sad...”

But the little princess put her hands on her hips and said firmly, “You dummy. If he’s with Imperial Father, then he must be super powerful, way stronger than you.”

Not to be outdone, the prince puffed up. “I’m still little, okay!”

The princess cracked her knuckles with a smirk. “Then why can’t you beat me?”

˙·٠✧🐗➶➴🏹✧٠·˙

Several days later.

Back at the palace, in a hidden chamber, Li Yuan and Li Ying sat across from each other, both cross-legged.

“You’ve lost the darkness character,” Li Yuan said calmly. “In theory, that means you can no longer claim a second character. And from this moment on, darkness is a forbidden character. After me, no one may touch it.

“You know this, but knowing isn’t the same as practicing. You must never attempt to cultivate it. Because if you do...I’ll know. You’re smart. You should understand your task now is to find a way to forget that character. Not to remember it. Not to assume I’ve already forgotten you once held it.”

Li Yuan’s tone was level, not threatening, but the weight in his words was unmistakable.

“However,” he continued, “when it comes to transcendent power, I do have some insights to share. They might help you find your way back to the Greater Insight Realm.”

And with that, he began to explain using his own dusk character as an example.

“Both wood (木) and sun (日) find unity in dusk. The true insight of these two characters combine to form a new strength. That new strength may only contain part of the original meanings, but that’s to be expected. After all, the Lesser Insight Realm only ever grants partial access to a character’s power.”

“So what you need,” he said, pausing thoughtfully, “is to find a character that can combine with the unity (合) character.”

He dipped a finger in water and drew a strange form of the unity character on the ground, an ancient, primitive script.

If memory served, it was the bone oracle version of unity.

The top half resembled a lid; the bottom half, a container. Put them together, lid and vessel joined, and one got the character for unity, the concept of fusion or combination.

In that moment, the written character shimmered and dissolved, leaving behind the simplest essence, the vessel itself.

Li Yuan had cultivated long enough to understand that a person entering a realm of power didn’t mean they truly saw character’s essence. They may grasp its force, yes, but not its truth.

He had been able to glimpse the source code behind dusk, to understand it as

sun

among the

woods

, only because he was, as he liked to joke, a

beta tester who saw the backend code before launch

. Others weren’t so lucky.

That was why Li Yuan now shared the ancient form of the unity character. Whether or not it matched the true insight version of the character, it might help Li Ying crack open a new understanding or at the very least deepen his experience.

“So, this box...what do you want to put inside it?” Li Yuan asked in an even voice.

Li Ying stared at the symbol, the lid atop the vessel, his eyes thoughtful. After a moment, he bowed silently to Li Yuan, then closed his eyes and began to meditate.

Li Yuan did the same.

At once, the Qi of Mountains and Rivers surged toward him, majestic and unstoppable.

The ancient, world-worn presence that always clung faintly to Li Yuan now could no longer be concealed. It spilled out and blanketed the chamber.

In this state, anyone beneath the Greater Insight Realm wouldn’t even think about attacking him. Their mind would collapse the moment they tried.

And within his body, the once-clear boundary between his dual golden membranes began to compress and refine, tighter and more intricate than before.

It was the influence of the darkness character. It carried an innate, mysterious gravity. And more than that, it seemed to share some deeper, hidden connection with the dusk character.

Li Yuan couldn’t see how darkness was truly written, not in its revealed form, but he faintly recalled that, before he transmigrated, the oracle bone script for darkness looked something like a sun within a gate.

A symbol flickered to life in his mind. Something close to the ancient character for eclipse (闇).

A sun hidden behind a gate, thus came darkness.

A sun falling behind the woods, that was dusk.

And after dusk, naturally...came night.

So then, what kind of gate could hide the sun?

Li Yuan pondered, meditated, and experimented.

From beyond the sealed chamber, the sound of footsteps broke his focus, the arrival of food.

The Empress herself had come to deliver it.

Li Yuan rose to collect the dishes, splitting the meal with Li Ying. The two sat together and ate, communicating as they always did now, Li Yuan speaking, Li Ying writing. Their exchange was quiet, fluid, and familiar.

Then they resumed their cultivation.

Time slipped by, soft as a breath.

Days blurred into months.

Months into years.

Together, in that secluded chamber, Li Yuan and Li Ying trained.

Li Ying, after all, had once been the darling of an era, an extraordinary genius. His mind was sharp, his talent unrivaled. If one believed in the concept of fate or fortune, it was him and not Li Yuan who truly embodied the

great destiny

of this age. In some respects, he was even more innately gifted than Li Yuan.

But Li Yuan had something Li Ying didn’t, tens of thousands of more stat points in life experience, drawn from a former world and a former age. His thinking often leapt beyond convention, offering either wildly imaginative insights or highly structured theories.

Over time, something surprising happened. The hatred between them began to dissolve, slowly and silently without either man speaking of it.

And in certain moments, those rare, unexpectedly enjoyable conversations, there was even a trace of wondering if they had met under different circumstances...

˙·٠✧🐗➶➴🏹✧٠·˙

Seven years passed.

And then, one day, Li Yuan felt a breath of pure clarity. His heart lightened; his spirit rose like a kite on the wind.

He let his Qi flow freely, and instantly, three layers of overlapping golden membranes shimmered into existence around him.

He recognized them at once.

From outermost to innermost were

wood

(木),

sun

(日), and

gate

(门).

And they weren’t stacked, they were interlaced. The sun character had been split between the wood and gate characters, sharing its essence with both. In truth, it was still a two-part fusion, just more intricate than before.

He stilled his mind and pushed further. The two fused layers began to compress, merging deeper.

And in the heart of that compression, something new appeared, an ancient, strange glyph.

It was

dusk

(暮). Then, a second character emerged. The hidden one,

darkness

(暗), the sun behind the gate.

Both characters now revealed their true forms.

And in that moment, Li Yuan felt something shift, something vast and unspeakably profound.

He raised his hand. Between his five fingers bloomed a sensation, a swelling pressure, a kind of divine tension, as if some unknown force were beginning to bud between his fingertips.

It felt like creation itself.

Something was being born in that space. A new power, forming in the air between atoms.

He held perfectly still, letting the sensation unfold, studying it in detail.

Suddenly, he felt a flicker of familiarity.

The Radiant Treasure Buddha’s sarira.

The sealed space beneath the Ghost Sealing Pagoda.

The shattered void at the edge of the Outer Region.

The boundaries of a ghost domain.

The root of a flame god’s rootless flame.

All these things...they pulsed now within him, like echoes.

Without a word to Li Ying, Li Yuan stepped out of the sealed chamber. And as he did, the power he had kept suppressed for so long could no longer be hidden.

Li Ying opened his eyes and followed closely behind, only to stop in stunned silence beneath the blazing midday sun.

Before him, a golden figure over a thousand feet tall towered into the sky, radiating divine brilliance. Floating above its head were two characters so radiant, so overwhelming, they couldn’t be looked at directly.

He strained his eyes, blinking back tears, and only then did he barely make out two hazy characters

dusk

(暮) and

darkness

(暗).

But the moment he blinked they vanished from his memory, as if they’d never been there at all.

The golden body stood tall in the heart of the Tang Empire’s palace.

Li Yuan could feel it. This was more or less a recreation of what Ji Hu, the Human Emperor, had once achieved.

It wasn’t quite on the same level, but it was close.

Of course, to the untrained eye, it was just a spectacle.

But to someone who understood...only now did Li Yuan truly grasp what lay hidden at the core of this golden body.

It was a realm.

He had created an entirely new, self-contained realm, independent and rapidly expanding.

Once it fully stabilized, Li Yuan could see everything within it with startling clarity.

Roughly 20 kilometers across, it was a vast, empty expanse.

This realm clung to the Ancestral Land like a small bubble latched onto the surface of a much larger one.

If the Human Emperor had created a realm like this back then, Li Yuan mused that Polaris and Valley Obscura must’ve hidden themselves inside it.

And the so-called

Dragon Vein

...maybe that was just the fusion between Polaris’ internal realm and the Ancestral Land, which ultimately gave birth to the ancient ghost street, that eerie place that separated Yin and Yang.

So that’s how it works...

With that thought, Li Yuan withdrew his power and returned to his ordinary form.

He glanced down at himself, checking his stats.

As expected, his strength had skyrocketed, from a pre-breakthrough range of 9,000~90,000 all the way up to 180k~1.8mil.

There was no mistaking it.

He had broken past the Greater Insight Realm and stepped into the True Will Realm.

According to the path he had laid out for himself, this was the moment to restart the Life Star Art.

That way, he could attempt to observe the workings of the Ancestral Land and Underworld, then find the best possible place to link them with the Gate of the Beast Path.

Before doing so, Li Yuan made a brief round of farewells.

Xie Yu had already reached the Lesser Insight Realm and was now researching the Greater Insight Realm alongside Lady Yu.

The Church of Light was flourishing.

The body arts and meditative disciplines Li Yuan had spread were cultivating a new generation of transcendants.

He officially passed the throne to his ten-year-old son.

Then, with Li Ying in tow, he returned to the Church of Light and entrusted him with founding its secret counterpart, the Shadow Court.

A few months later, after settling all his backup plans, Li Yuan journeyed to a hidden site and began the full activation of the Life Star Art.

Author’s Note

To be honest, I’m itching to finally install the damn door. And yes, what’s happening in the Western Extremes is being dragged into it too. But as I write, some things just can’t be rushed or skipped over. I’m working on it as fast as I can!