I kept the two characters floating right in front of my face, the golden one and the silver one, and I looked at them closely. I didn't just look at how they looked though, I was looking at what they actually ant on a basic fundantal level.
The Xuan Yi character on my right was pulsing with pure conviction, and it only existed because Du Yanze just believed that it should exist. This energy didn't flow naturally like normal qi does and it didn't circulate through any ridians, it just forced itself onto reality using sheer willpower. The character basically scread that it was real and so reality had to bend to make room for it.
The dream qi character on my left side was different. It existed since I imagined it, yes, but the process felt a lot more collaborative. Dream qi worked together with the natural laws of the dream realm and followed the patterns and principles that were already there. It acted like water finding a path through channels and adapting to the terrain while keeping its main nature.
I pushed the characters closer to each other, so I could watch how their energies interacted with each other. The Xuan Yi character stayed rigid and didn't change at all since its form was locked in by conviction. The dream qi character shifted around and its edges beca softer as it reacted to the proximity of a foreign energy.
That was interesting.
I focused my mind on the dream qi and pushed so more energy into the character causing it to grow brighter and more solid, and then suddenly I noticed sothing that I didn't see before. The dream qi was trying to copy the absolute certainty of the Xuan Yi. It wasn't doing it perfectly though, but it was doing it enough so that the two energies started resonating with each other instead of just existing next to each other.
"Now that makes sense," I murmured.
Lu Chenyang shot a glance, but he kept his mouth closed. Good man.
The connection between the two energy systems was now obvious to .
Both systems worked on similar principles; they just ca at it from different angles.
Xuan Yi started off with belief that forced reality to match it, while dream qi started with imagination that gently coaxed reality into accepting the imagined thing as a real thing. The result ended up being practically identical since both of them could rewrite the rules of their realms using pure ntal conviction.
World-Writ Sovereigns, living in the Realm of the Chosen, used Xuan Yi calligraphy to write their beliefs straight into the fabric of the world. They made up techniques by declaring them to be real with absolute certainty, so the realm literally didn't have any choice except to accept what they declared.
Oneiric Sovereigns, over in the Dream World, used their dream qi to manifest whatever they imagined so completely that nobody could even tell it apart from reality. They built constructs by believing in them so thoroughly that the dream realm just treated them like permanent fixtures.
The chanisms were different and the source energies were different too, but the underlying principle stayed the sa: absolute conviction backed up by spiritual power ant you had the ability to reshape reality itself.
I had spent days learning all those World-Writ Sovereign techniques while I was possessing Du Yanze during my first trip here. I'd internalized exactly how Xuan Yi calligraphy functioned, how to write my beliefs into reality, and how to keep up that absolute conviction even when I was facing pushback. Those exact sa principles could be applied straight to dream qi, I just needed to translate my ntal state from one energy system over to the other one.
The Crown of Clarity that marked Oneiric Sovereign cultivation wasn't just a simple symbol of power, it represented a fundantal shift in how you understood things. Dream Architects could make permanent constructs and open Dream Gates, but they still had to work inside the established rules of the dream realm. Oneiric Sovereigns broke completely past those limitations. They didn't just work with dream qi, they commanded it around with the exact sa absolute authority that World-Writ Sovereigns used to command Xuan Yi.
I had already figured out how to command Xuan Yi through Du Yanze's cultivation base. The only reason I never managed to achieve Oneiric Sovereign before was just because I didn't realize there was a connection between the two systems. Now that I finally understood it, breaking through was inevitable.
I closed my eyes and reached out for my dream cultivation. I didn't do it tentatively and I didn't do it respectfully either, I did it with absolute certainty. Dream qi belonged to to command. This wasn't because I was super powerful or anything, it was because I understood it completely. The energy responded to right away and surged all the way through my spiritual channels with an intensity that I never felt before.
The familiar feeling of cultivation advancent washed right over my body. My spiritual foundation expanded as new pathways opened up, and my understanding of dream qi deepened down to a level that felt almost instinctive to .
Above my head, I felt sothing starting to materialize.
The Crown of Clarity which was the mark of an Oneiric Sovereign ford itself out of pure dream qi.
When I opened my eyes again, the whole world looked different.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.
The silver light of dream qi was visible everywhere now instead of just in my imdiate area.
I could sense the flow of the dream energy going through this entire region and I could see how it interacted with the Xuan Yi that completely saturated the Realm of the Chosen. The two energy systems were constantly fighting in tension, the dream qi kept trying to maintain the natural order while the Xuan Yi kept imposing fake artificial beliefs all over it.
I dismissed both of the characters with a single thought and turned around to face Lu Chenyang.
"Thank you, Senior Lu," I told him. "Your guidance was exactly what I needed."
The old man was just staring at with his mouth hanging wide open. I had seen that exact expression before on other cultivators who just witnessed sothing that shouldn't be possible at all. He looked like he really wanted to say sothing, but he couldn't quite form the actual words.
I smiled since I was genuinely pleased with my progress. I hadn't even been in this realm for more than a couple of hours, yet I already managed to advance from Dream Architect to Oneiric Sovereign. Most dream cultivators spent centuries working towards making that breakthrough. Lu Chenyang had been stuck at Oneiric Sovereign for who knows how many years and here I was breaking into it in a single afternoon.
The logical thing to do right now would be to leave imdiately and dream walk to a whole other realm. If I could replicate this success and learn the fundantal principles of different inner world energy systems and use that knowledge to advance my dream cultivation, I could probably make way more progress in just a few days than most dream walkers achieved in their whole lifetis.
Doing that would be the fastest way to get prepared for my battle with Wu Kangming.
But doing that wouldn't be the moral thing to do at all.
Du Yanze was clearly struggling. The isolation of being in the ti loop was destroying him psychologically. Every single reset chipped away a little bit more of his sanity and left him more desperate and unstable. If I just left right now without doing anything to improve his situation, by the ti I eventually returned to this realm, I would find a broken shell of the person he used to be. He would be just another victim of my attempt to help.
The main problem was that I didn't know how to fix the underlying issue.
The ti loop was put in place to pause the corruption of the Realm of the Chosen and to stop the otherworldly entity from completely consuming this inner world. I couldn't purify the corruption by myself though. That seed like a problem for a Civilization Realm cultivator like Sect Master Yuan who was soone with the power and knowledge to address threats that operated at that kind of level.
Still, maybe I could learn sothing useful while I was here. I could gather information that I could pass on to Yuan when I finally returned to my physical body.
Lu Chenyang finally managed to find his voice.
"Senior Hou, that was... how did you... I've never seen anyone breakthrough to Oneiric Sovereign so quickly."
"I had so advantages," I said to him, which was true enough without revealing too much information. "Senior Lu, I wanted to ask you about sothing you ntioned earlier. You said the Xuan Yi in this realm is corrupted, what did you an by that?"
The old man looked confused like he wasn't sure why I wouldn't already know this kind of information. He masked his confusion respectfully though and settled right into his teaching posture.
"The corruption is... well, it's one of the greatest mysteries of dream cultivation," Lu Chenyang said. "So dream worlds over ti just begin to destabilize. The first sign is always the corruption of the realm's primary energy system, which in this case is Xuan Yi."
He gestured his hand over at the golden light that was still lingering around us from my earlier experints. "Normal belief-based energy systems are relatively stable. They operate on clear principles where conviction shapes reality but within reasonable limits. Corrupted systems like this one are very different. The energy becos more aggressive and more demanding, and it pushes cultivators toward increasingly extre beliefs and toward absolute conviction in things that don't even make any sense."
I nodded while I thought about how every single inhabitant of this realm believed they were the chosen one. That wasn't just normal paranoia or arrogance at all. That was systematic corruption affecting their ability to think rationally.
"The corruption spreads slowly," Lu Chenyang continued explaining. "It starts off with the energy system itself and then it gradually affects the inhabitants. Their thoughts beco more rigid and their beliefs more absolute. They lose the ability to question themselves or even consider alternative perspectives. If it's left unchecked, then the entire dream world collapses. All the cultivators living inside it will just return to base qi, and the dream world itself dissolves completely back into undifferentiated spiritual energy."
That was concerning. Very concerning, actually. If the Realm of the Chosen ended up collapsing then that would cause the death of countless innocent lives...
"What causes the corruption?"
"Nobody knows for certain," Lu Chenyang admitted with a sigh. "There are many theories though."
He held up one of his fingers. "So people believe it's just a natural decay process. Just like how physical objects deteriorate over ti, dream worlds might naturally break down if they aren't properly maintained by their creators."
He held up a second finger. "Others think that it's caused by spiritual pollution. Too many dream walkers visiting a realm and leaving behind little traces of foreign energy that gradually end up corrupting the native systems."
He raised a third finger. "There's a sect over in the eastern provinces that claims corruption is actually the work of primordial entities that exist beyond normal reality. They call them the Void Devourers, which are beings of pure entropy that feed on ordered systems and reduce them to pure chaos."
He held up a fourth finger. "And then there are the philosophers who argue that corruption is inevitable. They say that any system based on belief or imagination will eventually collapse under the heavy weight of its own contradictions, and that only realms built on physical principles can maintain long-term stability."
I nodded along to what he was saying, but inwardly I realized sothing important. The dream cultivators didn't understand what they were dealing with here. The corruption wasn't a natural phenonon at all. It wasn't decay or pollution or any philosophical inevitability.
It was the otherworldly entity.
The exact sa thing that had corrupted the Two Suns world was right here and it was affecting the Realm of the Chosen. And based on what Lu Chenyang was saying right now, it had clearly corrupted other inner worlds as well. The dream cultivators encountered this corruption frequently enough to have developed all these theories and response strategies, but they didn't realize they were dealing with an actual malevolent intelligence. They just thought it was a natural process that needed to be managed.
I decided to not correct them. Revealing the existence of an otherworldly entity that was systematically corrupting inner worlds would raise way too many questions that I couldn't safely answer right now. It was a lot better to gather information first and then report it to Sect Master Yuan later on.
User Comments
0 comments from readers