Paragon

Chapter 2: Remembering

After chatting for a while, a time in which the baby had to hear absolutely everything the two talked about, provoking many cringes, the Manor Lord and his wife left their baby within its own lavish quarters, posting two elite guards outside of it.

So finally, after what seemed like years, Yishang Tian had some alone time. The baby closed its eyes, remembering.

The soul of Yishang Tian was not new. Anything but, in fact. It belonged to an ancient God, one of the more powerful ones, and thus contained deep, almost endless, power. Unfortunately, this soul that would have allowed him to dominate the planet he was n was sealed. Over ninety-nine percent of it was blocked, unable to be accessed. However, just this 0.1 percent made him a genius that was never seen before, a genius that was not expected to be born. Ever. But now he was.

See, his soul was sealed and his body was destroyed by an enemy as, if not more, ancient than himself. A god who named himself Sovereign, and was indeed the Sovereign among almost all Gods. Yishang Tian was one of these Gods who resided peacefully in their abode, pondering the universe, the laws, making use and fully exploring any insight that struck them. As such, considering Yishang Tian's power, the Sovereign decided that he was too much of a threat, lest he comes out and overthrows his base of power. It was foolish and paranoid. It was a power move no one else would dare to make. Except for Sovereign.

This was because all Gods, even the youngest, had countless lifesaving items, last-minute tricks, etc. This made it incredibly risky to try to kill a God. And Yishang Tian was one of the oldest of them all, within the first generation of Godhood. So why risk the lives of dozens of Gods and the loyalty of even more just for a minor fear of one God rebelling? Well, the Sovereign's answer was: "Whynot?"

And they came at the worst time too. Yishang Tian had just been struck with a great flash of insight, greater than ever before, and had halfway comprehended it. There was still half more to go, which, when fully comprehended, would have raised his power 20-fold. But then they struck. Left with no other recourse, Yishang Tian left his state of comprehension and fought ferociously, with rage and ruthlessness, both to his enemies and himself, no calm God could emulate.

But he had been overwhelmed. He killed a few tens of Gods, but the sheer number of the existences who one would be hard-pressed to find within the whole universe won out in the bitter end. There was only one thing he could do before he was destroyed in both body and soul. Using no technique in particular, and just hoping something would happen, he cast his soul out into the reality he had observed with his previous major insight.

He himself didn't know if it was going to work. Of course, it did, as one could see through his existence in a back-end planet.

But to understand how, one must first understand this insight that Yishang Tian had.

He had discovered the existence of a new realm. Not a new universe, but a new plane of existence. This discovery was the key point to many of his later findings. This is what Yishang Tian learned:

Everyone has a body, a soul, and a mind. Cultivators not only cultivate the body, but also the soul and the mind. When someone cultivates, they absorb the energy of the Laws, or if they have a poorer background, the Elements. This is known as Qi. Qi is a mysterious energy, and not even Gods understand all the mysteries of it. When used correctly, it can strengthen the soul, the body, and the mind. Methods to strengthen the soul are called Soul Tempering techniques. Methods to strengthen the body are called Body Tempering techniques, and methods to strengthen the mind are called Mind Tempering techniques. Simple. But like Qi, the mysteries of the body, soul, and mind are unable to be fully found. Thus, new techniques are developed every day. The body has been mostly explored, and a powerful God may understand 99% of it. The soul is less understood, but most Gods explore 75% of it. But the mind is different. It has to be, considering it can control both the soul and the body. One could say that the mind is the aspect which unifies the body and the soul.

  In the past, Yishang Tian was what was known as a Mind practitioner. That meant he focused on his mind, instead of his soul or body. And he had searched his mind, ransacked it, for any sign of Qi. But it contained some sort of power, some sort of energy, that the could not detect. But finding that new plane of existence opened the mind up fully.

It was chock full of a powerful energy, an energy above Qi. Yishang Tian decided to name it Yuan. And when his mental eye was opened up to it, he began to sense it within his own mind. It was the mysterious energy apart from Qi! It was within everyone's mind! The the only reason no one else could sense it was because there was too little of it, and they didn't know what to look for. But when his consciousness was transported to that plane of existence, there was too much of the energy to ignore, opening his mind's eye to Yuan.

But that wasn't all he benefited from. He also learned that the mind did not live in the body, as everyone assumed. Instead, the mind was inside the plane of existence he discovered, controlling the body like a puppet. The mind, the body and the soul were all bound with the tightest figurative strings in all of existence, strings so strong that they bound each other within life or death. As such, when the body died, so did the soul, and the mind dissolved into the realm it existed within, the energy it contained returning to the realm that birthed it. This energy was Yuan.

So in his last act of desperation, he focused all of his Qi, his effort into preserving his Yuan, keeping it in its current form, so that he would preserve his mind when his body died.

     Shockingly, it worked, and the lone mind was quickly attached to a new body forming. This was three months ago. Yishang's mind had been attached to a three-month-old fetus, giving him time to fully sharpen and perfect the cultivation method he had created with his insight.

    Indeed, he had created a cultivation method.