Sage Monarch (Sage Emperor)

The junior superintendent very nearly coughed up a mouthful of blood. After making the difficult decision to go back on his word, he had ordered the attack on the sectlord of the Will Manifestation Heaven Sect and got his hands on Yang Qi. But now he felt like a mouse trying to pull a turtle, with nowhere to get a good grip. He couldn’t shatter Yang Qi’s heart, couldn’t harm his sea of consciousness, and in fact, was only helping him temper his body with the repeated assaults.

What was he supposed to do now?

He felt completely out of options.

"Stop hitting him,” he said, convinced that further attacks on Yang Qi would only help him get stronger.

“Is this the boundless power of the True-Devil Unspoiled-by-Myriad-Kalpas-and-Tribulations Body?” the junior superintendent murmured. “If so, it's really far too fear-inspiring.”

“There’s no need to get anxious,” one of the executors said. “He might be too tough to hurt right now, but there are experts back at headquarters who can handle him. Think about it. The stronger he is, the more he’ll benefit your cultivation base, Junior Superintendent. Considering how many magical treasures we have back at headquarters, such as the Adjudication God Furnace, I refuse to believe that we won’t be able to figure out a way to deal with him. Worst case scenario, we could even think about using poison to erode his defenses. We have poisons that not even gods can resist.

“Regardless, we have to figure out a way to get that Unspoiled Body. Sir, you’re a royal, but there are a lot of royals in the Executors of the Ancient Road who are just as important as you. If you eventually want to take the throne, you’ll need to push your cultivation to a much higher level. And that’s not going to be easy.”

“You’re right,” the junior superintendent said. “That's exactly what I was thinking. If I can cultivate an Unspoiled Body, I’ll definitely be able to crush my competition. I’ll kill anyone who defies me! That said, this technique really does surpass my expectations.”

“Agreed,” another of the executors said. “It's horrifying! It absorbs all attacks and turns them into tribulations that temper the body and cultivation base. The more we hit him, the stronger he gets. How did the True Devil of the ancient past even come up with a technique as amazing as this?”

“It doesn’t matter for now. Let's head back and worry about it later. Maybe we can soak him in some god acid. That stuff can melt gods, so I'm curious to see if he can survive that. Make sure to keep your hands on him; don’t let him escape.”

“Don’t worry, Junior Superintendent. This brat has an amazing fleshly body, but he’s actually quite weak. Too weak to fight back. It seems to me that he's entered some sort of zen ‘samādhi’ trance of nirvanic extermination, which is the only reason he's able to act like this.” [1]

“Let’s go....”

“Yes, let’s go. We can unravel his secrets later. One thing is for sure, he has a lot of profound secrets. If you can get them, Junior Superintendent, then our faction will be vastly stronger. With his technique, you’ll definitely reach the Terrifying level, and then you would be able to decimate anything and everything.”

“Our original mission was to destroy the Will Manifestation Heaven Sect, but who would’ve been able to predict that things would play out as they did? And how could we have guessed that the sectlord would be so strong?”

“That’s a good point. That sectlord is mysterious and unpredictable, to the point where we obviously couldn’t have destroyed the Will Manifestation Heaven Sect on our own. In fact, even if we had twice as many men as we did, we probably would have failed.”

“Damn it all. If it weren’t for that sectlord, we definitely could have destroyed the sect and taken the psychic scaling systems.”

With that, the junior superintendent and his men prepared to head deeper into the Great Necropolis. But before leaving, the junior superintendent turned and exhaled out a mass of Wretch God Ultimate's Obsidian Flame.

The black fire instantly engulfed the hundred and twentieth ranked immortal world they had been on. Its greyspace was destroyed and none of the cultivators who had lived there were able to escape.

Screams rang out as cultivators were burned alive. The top tier sect on this world had old-timers with power indexes of two thousand, but not even they were able to escape with their lives.

They were all burned to death.

Soon, the world was nothing more than a black husk, its essence damaged beyond repair. To the junior superintendent, it was nothing, almost like an ordinary child who poured boiling oil into an ant colony, just to see what would happen.

‘He really doesn't value human life at all...’ Yang Qi thought as he observed from within the Myriad Worlds Monarch Chart.

More precisely, his mind was in the chart. His body was tightly sealed, although it had just successfully passed the tribulation of the character “samādhi”.

That tribulation was a marvelous thing. Once passed, it was possible to enter a state of zen ‘samādhi’ meditation that was impossible for an outsider to penetrate. It would make the fleshly body completely impervious to any attacks.

Of course, Yang Qi’s mastery was shallow at the moment, but it was still enough to hold strong against the attacks of Terrifying experts.

His immortal-slaying clone had recently been working hard at absorbing the power of the godhood stars, and his cultivation had been rapidly advancing. His power index was already past three thousand now, and was continuing to improve.

His will convergence was already at the peak of the Terrifying level, which meant that, other than his physical form, he was roughly as strong as Yang Qi’s true self.

More than ever, the clone and Yang Qi were actually two separate people.

The clone's mastery of King Immortal-Slayer's legacy medallions had reached an exquisite level, and thanks to his constant work with the godhood stars, he was getting closer and closer to being just like King Immortal-Slayer himself. The clone knew that he couldn’t allow himself to fall under the control of King Immortal-Slayer, so he constantly drew on the sealing powers of the God Legion Seal to keep the two types of true energy separate. Any other person would have already become a puppet of King Immortal-Slayer, focused on the resurrection of the king, enacting slaughters, carrying out sacrifices, and establishing a power structure for him alone.

But the clone knew all about that.

Furthermore, the clone could use the power of the Myriad Worlds Monarch Chart to create a tiny god formation within Yang Qi's true self that could easily channel attacks on Yang Qi into the chart.

The junior superintendent and his fellows had no clue about this, which was what led them to believe that everything Yang Qi was doing was because of the True-Devil Unspoiled-by-Myriad-Kalpas-and-Tribulations Body. But the technique wasn’t that amazing. If it were, it would actually surpass the Strength of the Hell-Crushing Godmammoth.

Under the repeated attacks of the junior superintendent and the executors, Yang Qi succeeded in passing the tribulation of the samādhi character. That meant that he had currently mastered eighteen characters. [2]

The sheepskin scroll had a total of ten thousand characters, all of them different. Each character represented a different tribulation, which meant that cultivating the scroll was about surviving ten thousand tribulations. According to the stories, not even the creator of this boundless energy art had fully cultivated it, the True Devil, sometimes called the Mahātmā True Devil. Supposedly, the reason was that the sheepskin scroll was not the result of his own personal wisdom, but rather the collective wisdom of millions upon millions of sages and mahātmās.

Obviously, the collective wisdom of so many individuals from the god world, people who could rebuke heaven and earth, was nothing ordinary in nature.

Even just cultivating a few of the characters from the scroll would put one in the position to be a domineering force on the Ancient Road to the Gods. And if one could surpass a hundred characters, it would allow them to ascend to the dao of gods. Of course, although Yang Qi was getting stronger by this type of cultivation, it came with side-effects. For example, breaking through to the Terrifying level would be very difficult. In fact, if Yang Qi had focused only on cultivating the Strength of the Hell-Crushing Godmammoth, he would have probably already achieved that breakthrough.

But now that he had two opposing powers within him, he constantly had to focus on maintaining the proper balance.

The upside was that he was getting vastly stronger, and once he did achieve that breakthrough, he would unleash unimaginable power.

Around this time, he began to emerge from the zen samādhi state. He had reached a higher level, but it was all thanks to the Myriad Worlds Monarch Chart. If his enemies knew about that, it could be dangerous.

However, there was nothing they could do to him now, so he wasn’t worried. In fact, he wanted them to just take him right into the heart of the executors’ territory.

He now knew that the Executors of the Ancient Road had a Three Lives Stone, which would be a big benefit to his cultivation of the Unspoiled Body. Obviously, the Strength of the Hell-Crushing Godmammoth was a big help, but the Three Lives Stone was specifically designed for that purpose. And there were certain aspects of enlightenment that only the stone could help with.

The junior superintendent was obviously dead set on using all of the resources at his disposal to unlock Yang Qi's secrets. Little did he know that Yang Qi could use the Myriad Worlds Monarch Chart to absorb any energy arts used on him, then use the absorption process to further his cultivation and head toward the Terrifying level.

‘I'm going to clear out the executors’ storehouse,’ Yang Qi thought. It was very similar to what he had done to the Joyflower Palace, except that the Executors of the Ancient Road definitely had far more treasure than the Joyflower Palace. Even the tiniest fraction of their treasures would be enough to found a top-tier sect. Then there was the possibility of forcing some of the executors into becoming believers.

The executors as a whole had been created by the legion of gods, with the purpose of governing the immortal cultivators on the Ancient Road to the Gods. In that respect, they were very similar to the godmammoths. One had been created to suppress hell, the other to govern immortals.

They clearly had to have some things in common.

1. Samādhi is a “real-life” state of meditative consciousness. More info here.

2. The author made some mistakes earlier in terms of how many ‘tribulation characters’ Yang Qi had cultivated. These mistakes were pointed out in the comments in Chinese, but the mistakes were never correct. I’ve attempted to fix the mistakes and standardize all of the math; hopefully I pulled it off and didn’t miss any outliers.