Chapter 182: Statue?
This room was about square and its sides were three meters wide. Lin Wu had a slightly difficult time moving around due to even the roof of it being short.
Unlike the previous ones, there were no carvings in this room except for one statue that was located in the middle of the room. Lin Wu found the statue familiar and realized that it was the same cultivator that he had seen in the carving on the previous floor.
Except the cultivator looked much more older in the statue. He was wearing long Daoist robes and had the taiji symbol on his back.
Just from looking at him, Lin Wu could feel a strange pressure.
“Hmm… so what am I supposed to do here?” Lin Wu wondered.
He couldn’t find any other exits, and even on the map, everything seemed to be the same. Guessing that the statue might hold the answer, Lin Wu probed it with his spirit sense.
“Oh? It’s impermeable to my spirit sense.” Lin Wu discovered.
He extended his tail and then carefully touched it. But the moment he did that, his vision went black and he felt the world spinning.
‘DAMMIT! What the heck is happening now?’ Lin Wu thought.
A few seconds later it calmed down, and he found himself in a new place. This time, he felt as if he had no body and was watching a movie from the third person perspective.
At first, everything was silent, but then a thunderous voice spoke.
“I AM THE TAIJI CELESTIAL AND THIS IS MY LEGACY!”
The scene in front of Lin Wu changed again and this time the cultivator who he had seen previously was standing. He looked old like the statue, but his gaze seemed to be a bit dull.
“If you are here, that means you have passed the trials that I set in the levels before.” The Taiji celestial spoke.
Hearing his words though, Lin Wu felt extremely confused.
“Huh? What trials? I just broke walls and the floor…” Lin Wu muttered to himself.
He had thought that the old man would respond to him, but there was no change in him. It seemed like a recording that would only play and could not be interacted with.
“I am the person who is praised by billions as the one who defeated the shadow calamity, but today I confess that it is not true. Rather… I am the part of the calamity itself.
At first, we had no conciousness and only knew how to act on instinct. We would only know how to take and not to give, our hunger never ending. We spread across millions of worlds and destroyed tens of thousands of them. Some worlds were able to resist us while some succumbed to us.
Some of them gave up in despair, while some staunchly defended for millenniums to come. Some took advantage of us and became ‘allies’ letting us spread even further at the cost of their kin’s lives.
No matter where we went, how many times we divided, we could always feel the presence of our fragments. Even separated we were one. We could tell which place we had been defeated in and which place we had conquered.
This continued for a time that even I do not know, until one day when we gained self-awareness. The cost of it was the separation of us into two beings. We had little knowledge of how things worked and thus we named ourselves Bai and Hei.
Back then the only thing we knew was to eat and thus that’s what we did. Even if we looked the same, we were different. Bai was aggressive and always wanted to eat while Hei was passive and wanted to rest. Still, we could not do what each other wanted as we only have one ‘body’.
Countless years passed like this, and we started gaining knowledge from the beings we consumed. We learned about cultivation, the world, humans, beasts, plants, demons, and countless other things. And with this we also learned what we were… the cultivators called us the Shadow calamity.
For us who never had a proper sense of emotions, we learned hate. The hate came from the beings who were consumed by us. They hated us for taking their worlds, but we did not understand why they hated us at the same time.
We were the same as them. They ate food. We ate food too. They ate other animals, we ate worlds. Nothing seemed wrong to us, and we felt this was the natural order.
More time passed, and we encountered a world that was unlike anything we had seen before. The cultivators there were a strange kind and believed in selflessness. They practiced it to such extremes that they would give up their very lifespans for others.
Their belief system was very simple and incredibly complex at the same time. To them, their lives had to be shared, and thus they created a world which they powered with their own life. Each being that lived there was connected and would have the same life span as others.
They would keep on living as long as the others kept on living, and every time a new being was born, their lifespan would be added to this pool as well.
They were also the first beings who actually welcomed us and thought of us as ‘beings’ too. They freely let us consume their world. But we did not know the change this would cause in us. Our consciousness started melding with the souls of the cultivators and theirs with us.
We had reached a strange equilibrium, and a cycle of loss and gain was born. This continued for thousands of years until the cycle could no longer be maintained. We had only taken over half of the world, yet for the first time, we felt ‘full’.
We didn’t know what this feeling was, but when we did; we changed forever.
That was the day ‘I’ was born.”
