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Fates Parallel Chapter 569 - Superior
🕑 Added 2024-10-04 18:06:00 +0000 UTCIn the war between Yan De’s faith in his allies, and confidence in his own strength there could only ever be one conclusion. The seal around Yoshika shattered like glass, and the surrounding elders backed off warily. By then, Yoshika’s backup had arrived—Ienaga Yumi, Lin Xiulan, and Hwang Sung all stood at a remove, ready to intervene at a moment’s notice.
Despite the clear advantage in numbers, the Qin elders were wary. Yoshika had already held off half a dozen of them on her own, and their faith in Yan De was as broken as the seal he’d just dispelled. Qian Shi eyed Ienaga Yumi warily, having clashed with her before, and many of them recognized Lin Xiulan as the grandmistress of the empire’s greatest sect of healers—before it had been folded into the Flowing Purewater for their own safety.
The revelations of Yoshika’s technique had left them all uneasy, questioning things that they’d been taking for granted over the centuries. Even the army below had stopped their rioting, and though not nearly all of them had experienced the Twin Harmonies of the Dreaming Crescent Moon, the uncertainty spread through the army camps like a wildfire.
Every soldier present stopped to stare up at the momentous confrontation in awestruck fascination. The one thing everyone could be certain of in that moment was that they were bearing witness to history.
Yan De shook his head as his senses were restored. Unlike Yue, Yoshika’s melody always brought her into the illusion as well. The lack of malice that allowed her technique to bypass the defenses of the gathered elders also prevented her from taking advantage of their helpless state.
She was going to have to fight Yan De directly.
He regarded his allies with naked suspicion, the confidence between them shattered.
“Yan Ren, with me—no, all of you stand back and protect the bystanders. It seems my absence over the last two decades has led you all to forget who I am. How quickly even immortals can forget. I will deal with this myself.”
His disciple hesitated, then flew back. Just as Yue had suggested, the other elders were more than happy to let Yoshika and Yan De face off against each other. Yoshika was still their enemy, but they didn’t trust Yan De.
Yoshika glanced back and called out to her own people as well.
“Do not interfere with our duel or engage Qin’s elders unless they attack first. We will settle this without any more unnecessary bloodshed.”
The xiantians dispersed to create their own barriers and protections to keep the army and city safe. Yan De shook his head slowly as he glared at Yoshika.
“Truly, the arrogance of youth knows no bounds. You’re like a toddler with a spear. No understanding whatsoever of the power you wield, yet convinced that it makes you invincible. Do you know how many thousands of years I’ve lived?”
Yoshika shrugged dismissively.
“I once took lessons from a being older than the entire universe. Age and experience are only valuable as long as you continue to learn and grow. In the last thousand years, how many times have you truly challenged yourself? Did you actually learn anything after spending sixteen years meditating on top of a mountain?”
“The insights I seek to advance my path are more profound than anything you could ever hope to grasp, even given a million years, child.”
“Or maybe you’re just wrong, stupid! That’s what I mean! You spend centuries running in circles, hoping that one day the groove you carve in the path will lead you to a new discovery. Just go in a different direction! Or at least dig with an actual purpose.”
He snorted and waved a hand.
“I will not be lectured by little girls.”
“Then I’ll just have to explain it in a language you can understand. I beat you once, Yan De, and I will do it again.”
“You defeated a mere shadow of my power. That you would even gloat about it shows how little you understand. Today I will remind the world why they fear the name Yan De and the Great Awakening Dragon, such that they will not forget for another thousand years.”
Yan De held out his hands and moved them in a slow, deliberate pattern, leaving after-images behind as they formed a spiral inwards, towards his dantian. He spoke, his words echoing with such power that Yoshika could feel the fabric of the world warp and crack under the strain.
Divine Art: Ascension of the Three Heavenly Dragons
The aura of fire surrounding Yan De exploded, the shimmering aurora of Plasma erupting from his form as it snaked through the air around them like a giant serpent. The nature of the fire shifted, growing hotter and brighter as Yan De’s domain intensified its pressure against hers. Just from witnessing the first moments of his transformation, Yoshika realized a mistake that she and Yue had both made many years ago.
Dragonfire was not just another name for Plasma. True Dragonfire did not just burn essence—it was the essence of pride and superiority. It burned anything. The air around Yan De ignited, setting the sky ablaze, and even as the empty air burned away the flames still continued, burning nothing—not even the Void was safe from the all-consuming blaze.
For a terrifying heartbeat, Yoshika thought that Yan De had unleashed flames of Destruction itself, but Dragonfire was greater still. It did not merely destroy—it consumed. It claimed dominion over all it touched, fueling itself to greater heights. Unlike Destruction, it burned with purpose.
The blaze was not indiscriminate. Yan De controlled what burned and what did not. Indeed, as he reached the end of his transformation, the flames coalesced together into the form of an endlessly coiling serpent—a dragon so large it claimed the entire sky.
Unlike the transformation his shadow had used within her soul realm, Yoshika could no longer see any sign of Yan De’s original body. No core or weakness to target. It was no mere aura—Yan De was the dragon. His technique transformed him, body, mind, and soul.
It was not a unified technique, yet it had unified the three. Flesh, spirit, and aura all became one—a singular being of absolute power, made entirely of the element that Yan De had spent his life pursuing. That essence which claimed dominion over all others.
Dragonfire.
His head loomed over her, large as the nearby mountain, with flaming eyes, antlers like the branches of a tree, and long whiskers fluttering elegantly in the air in contempt of gravity. Yan De’s voice boomed from every direction at once.
“Look upon your end and despair. My flames will consume you until not even a memory remains. Now do you understand that you are a mere pebble trying to mock a mountain?”
Yoshika swallowed nervously. Though her domain had grown such that it covered most of the southern continent, Yan De’s still pressed in on her such that she could barely extend a small bubble of awareness around herself. She felt as though she was back in the academy, when her domain had first developed, standing before Qin Zhao himself as he taught her what it meant to have one.
She didn’t think she’d been underestimating her foes. She knew that they stood at the apex of xiantian, and she herself was approaching divinity. Had she been naive to think that meant that she was their equal?
“Yue, did you know he could do that?”
Within Yoshika’s soul scape, her best friend started at the sound of her voice, then chewed on her thumbnail.
“No! I—I’ve never even heard of a technique like that!”
“I thought so. This is going to be difficult...”
Yan De’s gargantuan head snapped forward like a viper, deceptively fast for his enormous size. Even with Absolute Awareness and Lightspeed Traversal, Yoshika barely dodged the strike by a whisker. She slashed at his neck with an artifact blade to counter, and was left with nothing but a smoldering hunk of molten metal for her troubles.
The grandmaster twisted back around for another bite as a massive claw came up on her from the opposite direction. Yoshika dove out of the way of both attacks and straight into the path of his tail. Before it could strike her, she hastily cast one of Haeun’s teleportation talismans to blink out of the way.
Even still, she was caught up in the vortex of the tail’s wake before it snapped like a giant whip and caused a sonic boom that rattled Yoshika’s bones. The deafening shockwave sent a visible ripple through the air that churned up the earth and rendered the surface of the nearby mountain to dust, triggering an avalanche.
This was what she’d always been warned about. Xiantian duels would rend the earth and shake the heavens, flatten mountains and carve out valleys, empty lakes and redirect rivers. Even with the protection of the other grandmasters, Yan De was a living cataclysm.
Sacred Art: Sixth Arm of Asura—Star Sundering Slash
Yoshika tried her most destructive technique, aiming her slicing wave of destruction to cut straight through Yan De’s serpentine body. She watched in frustration as the essence of raw Destruction rolled off of his fiery scales like water from a duck.
He laughed, and even his voice felt like it was trying to tear her apart from the vibrations.
“Hahaha! Pathetic! Did you think Destruction was indomitable? Dragonfire is greater still, and your mastery is too shallow! Come now, Empress—you wanted to challenge me, didn’t you? Show me you’re worthy of divinity!”
The draconic figure writhed and the sky ignited once more, pressing in on Yoshika from all sides as it greedily burned away at her domain and any barrier she could conjure to resist it.
He was right that she couldn’t hope to defeat him with conventional attacks, but there was a reason she hadn’t attempted any divine arts of her own. Yan De claimed to be next to divinity, and he was not boasting. She had no idea how he suppressed his power normally, but after his transformation, his presence alone was such a weight on the world that it creaked and cracked with his every move. He was walking a razor’s edge before divine ascension—perhaps even already well past it.
Yoshika recalled the story of the Bloody Sovereign, and how he had consumed all the essence of his world before ascending. It had never occurred to her to ask how such a thing was possible. Was Yan De deferring his ascension in order to gather more power?
It didn’t matter—however he was doing it, the fabric of their world strained to support Yan De’s existence. The difference between Sacred Arts and Divine Arts was that while both were fueled by divine essence, a Sacred Art was mastery of a certain universal law, while Divine Arts wrote new laws into existence. Mortal realities could only handle so much power before they were rent asunder by such conflicts. It was why true deities could not exist within mortal realms.
Yoshika doubted—even with her power and Yan De’s combined—that she could completely shatter reality, but there was plenty of room between a minor rift in space and a total apocalypse, all of which would be extremely deadly. Even if either Yoshika or Yan De could survive such an event—their surroundings would definitely not.
Jianmo had once confided that they’d intentionally created such a rift once, by seeking out a place where the world was weaker, and reality grew thin. It had been a rough tear, but still the smallest that Jianmo knew how to create.
The mountain there was long gone, and even nearly a decade later the area around it was uninhabitable. A treacherous storm of spatial distortions and imperceptible voids that would shred anything foolish enough to enter the area to ribbons.
She desperately dodged another combination of attacks, pushing her superlative speed to its absolute limits and leading Yan De higher into the sky. His Dragonfire chased her wherever she went, constantly exhausting her essence as she tried to resist it. Yoshika let it burn—she had essence to spare, thanks to the Sovereign’s Tear, but she wouldn’t last forever, and she couldn’t fight back without risking a cataclysmic tear in space.
Yoshika flew higher still, trying to get as far away from the bystanders as possible. If it was between letting Yan De bring ruin to the surroundings as he killed her, or potentially dying to a spatial rift, then she was just going to have to take her chances.
Just as soon as she could make sure nobody else was harmed.
“You think you can escape me, child? I can survive well past the sky’s limit, but the void’s dangers are not to be underestimated. You only give me an even greater advantage!”
Yoshika ignored his taunting as she flew higher, higher, until the sky began to fade and she could see the curve of the world below. Yan De’s warning proved to be true, as the void tried to tear the air from her lungs and boil the blood in her veins. Still, she flew, drawing on the life-giving essence of Wood to sustain her. Eui’s Tranquility of the Verdant Marsh once more proved itself to be one of Yoshika’s most invaluable techniques.
But even drawing from the Tear, Yoshika began to slow as the cruel and merciless Void essence stole away the Light upon which she flew.
Yan De’s coils surrounded her on every side as she came to a halt, sweating. She’d be panting for breath if there was any air to fill her lungs. That would have to be far enough.
She looked up at the brightly shining moon as the draconic head moved to block off her last line of retreat. It didn’t seem any closer at all. No wonder Do Hye said that nobody had ever managed to fly there—it must have been unimaginably far away. She wondered how the moon spirit’s former mistress had ever ended up there.
Even on a dragon’s face, Yan De’s smug grin made Yoshika want to throw up. Or maybe that was just every liquid in her body trying to sublimate.
“An impressive flight, but if you hoped to use my daughter’s domain against me, you’ve a long way to go. I’m afraid this ends here, little empress. Any last words?”
Yoshika thought about that carefully. She couldn’t respond. There was no air to carry the sound. Come to that, how was she hearing him? Yoshika felt a little bit delirious, but she had a plan. They’d come far enough. They had to have come far enough.
Yan De had fused his body and soul with his domain. That was a good idea. It made him harder to kill. And also easier. She could see why he didn’t go around like that all the time—aside from the fact that it would instantly kill any mortal in proximity. He was much stronger against attacks, but any damage dealt would strike at his very being. Too bad he was invincible.
Yoshika had a long history with the Great Awakening Dragon’s Yan family. Their conflict had started when she’d ‘stolen’ Zhihao’s ring, and the techniques within. Yue had taught her secrets of the clan that Yoshika now suspected she’d never been meant to have in the first place. The entire foundation of her cultivation was practically built upon secrets and techniques stolen from the Yan family.
Well, there was no sense breaking with tradition.
Yoshika reached within and called out the essence of her Foxfire avatar. She drew on as much of the Sovereign Tear’s strength as it would allow, and flooded every aspect of her being with the essence of Unity. The world shuddered around her as the transformation began to take place. Yan De’s eyes widened in alarm as he realized what was happening and lunged forward.
He was too late. The words wrote themselves across the fabric of reality itself as Yoshika’s mind, body, and soul fused into one singular being.
Divine Art: Unification of the Sixfold Paths of Ascension
Yoshika erupted into shimmering flames of every color. The rainbow colored fire filled her to the core, not just engulfing her form but replacing it with the divine essence of Unity. She had become, like Yan De, more than just a living avatar of her domain’s essence. Her heart, her aura, her very soul blazed with that scintillating flame.
Only one tiny imperfection marred her graceful new form—a little red teardrop nestled into the place where her collarbone would be. It gushed with endless power, fueling and sustaining her new form. Even the void around her no longer sapped at her strength, joining its power with hers at the slightest touch.
Before Yoshika could worry about what it meant that the Sovereign’s Tear was no longer within her soul realm, Yan De’s giant draconic jaws crashed into her with the weight of the heavens and sent them both tumbling backwards through a tear in the fabric of reality. The portal closed rapidly behind them as they fell from the void of space into a true Void so complete that even space itself ceased to exist.
Comments
Pride mystic artificer
Ok, so her components are, jia, eui, Kaede, eunae, li Meili, and the old queen/foxfire avatar… seems to me like they are missing their seventh in their seven (curently) seven fold path (and their final form Omni-fold path with everything (not everyone everything in all existance) being part of yoshikia as they realize they are the rencarnation of the demiurge)
CringeWorthyStudios
… wow? That was awesome. :) Thanks for the chapter!
