Mirror Dream Tree

Yellowwind Town

A whole day has passed since Merin rescued his family and brought them back to their home.

They arrived just as dawn broke, surprising many townspeople when a giant eagle and four dark gryphons hovered above the town.

The eagle finally landed in his yard while the four dark gryphons settled outside.

Upon returning, Merin found the house looted, as it had been uninhabited for two days after his family was captured by the Sky Sword Sect.

Thinking the family was gone, looters had raided the place.

He even found three hooligans occupying the house.

He had sensed them earlier with his mental field, but at the time, his focus was on rescuing his family, so he ignored them.

Now, instead of punishing them, he pressured them into cleaning the house and preparing a resting place for his exhausted family and the comatose first prince.

The dark guards helped enforce the task.

After settling his sleep-deprived family, whose mental energy had been consumed but not critically, he let them rest, knowing a few hours would be enough.

He placed the first prince in a separate room and ordered the dark guards to prevent anyone from entering the house, deal with officials, and sent one guard to Susa City for medical supplies and another to get daily necessities and food.

He checked the first prince again.

Though he hadn't known the prince's identity at the time, he had already healed him after defeating the Yao beast from the Blood Bat Clan.

He provided vital energy and sealed the prince's energy to prevent further loss caused by the forbidden technique.

Even after discovering the man was the first prince—and indirectly the reason his family had been captured and nearly killed—Merin didn't harm him.

In the final moments, the first prince had protected his family without regard for his own life.

Now, Merin slowly begins to understand the purpose of each of his cells.

With around eight trillion cells in the human body, he knows he could never fully comprehend them all in a single lifetime.

However, since many cells serve the same purpose, he has already grasped everything about his skin cells.

If he wishes, he can now gradually alter his skin colour.

Throughout a few skin cell life cycles—whose duration he doesn't yet know—his skin colour would change.

Assuming, as in his past life, that skin cells have a life cycle of four to six weeks, and estimating one month per cycle, he feels that within four to five months, the change would become visible.

Still, he has no intention of testing this theory, considering it a waste of valuable time.

Now, he begins to comprehend his muscle cells.

As in his past life, he identifies three types of muscle cells.

He starts with the skeletal muscle cells.

Within his mental scene, he begins to understand how to apply force so that his entire body contributes to a movement.

As he focuses, he senses a new magnetic field reacting, and in his mental scene, a version of himself begins to punch.

He practices the only boxing technique he knows—the Bull Boxing technique.

As he trains in his mind, he senses he could master it at any moment.

This mental scene is formed by his spiritual power in the sea of consciousness after advancing to the Spiritual Core Realm.

It allows a spiritual master to simulate actions before performing them in reality.

The accuracy of this mental scene depends on one's understanding of the world.

If someone comprehends every law and rule, the mental scene becomes indistinguishable from the real world.

In such a case, any experiment conducted within it would yield the same results in reality.

His, however, is not yet at that level, so he stops.

Standing up, he begins to practice the Bull Boxing technique physically.

Though he has already mastered the technique's moves, he now focuses on perfecting them for his own body.

Merin practices in the yard of his family home beneath the falling snow.

His younger brother and sister watch him with shining eyes full of anticipation, their gazes fixed on the figure of their brother Kanoru.

When they woke up yesterday, they found themselves safe at home with their brother beside them.

Kanoru vowed then that they would never have to experience something like that again.

Later, they talked about many things with their parents, and slowly they came to understand that their brother is one of the strongest people in the world.

They also realised that even elders from the same sect had betrayed each other just to gain favour with their brother.

Even the prince of the kingdom had personally come to help rescue them.

Inspired, they asked their brother to teach them how to cultivate.

They had already seen samurai control fire and wind in battle.

And just yesterday, after their repeated urging, their brother made flowers bloom in the snow.

From today, he promised to guide their cultivation.

So now, filled with awe, they watch him—bare-chested and wearing only pants—practice boxing in the falling snow.

Suddenly, they see a gust of wind burst from one of his punches, striking and damaging a part of the wall.

For a brief moment, they feel a pressure wash over them like a breeze.

Their brother stops his practice.

They look at each other, then quietly walk toward him.

Around two years later, Merin sits on the ledge of his house yard, watching his brother and sister as they train.

With every punch they throw, the wind howls with the force of their strength.

Now both have become middle-ranking samurai.

Under Merin's guidance and support, they advanced rapidly to this level.

Their bodies are like finely sculpted statues, shaped by tireless effort and careful training.

Merin crafted a new technique specifically for them, choosing not to let them cultivate the Life Qi technique.

Though the Life Qi technique offers healing, its combat strength is weak, and its growth is slow.

Merin's power never came from the Life Qi technique but from himself, his deep understanding of artistic conceptions.

After fully unsealing his soul, he doesn't even need to rely on samurai cultivation when fighting.

Because of this, he refused to let his younger siblings waste time on the Life Qi technique.

He possesses other techniques, including one capable of cultivation up to the beginning of the Ascendant Realm.

However, that technique requires golden lion beast blood—or any beast blood—which his brother and sister lack.

He holds other powerful techniques as well, but he wants his siblings to become undetectable by enemies in the same realm and capable of fighting across ranks.

Despite the Life Qi technique's weaknesses, its powerful healing abilities could be useful if they were ever injured.

So, he decided to create a new technique by integrating a modified version of the Life Qi technique.

Before doing so, he had already modified the Life Qi technique, refining its structure to serve as a stronger foundation for the new technique.

Originally, the Life Qi technique helped cultivators comprehend the artistic conception of wood's vitality.

Merin changed this, shifting its focus to the artistic conception of human vitality instead.

He also integrated the artistic conception of strength he had mastered through the Bull Boxing technique.

Using these two principles, he created a new technique—Life Strength Technique.

As for himself, over the past two years, he has fully comprehended the artistic conceptions of both human and wood vitality, as well as the artistic conception of strength.

His spiritual core has also fully virtualised, and he has formed prototypes of three magic powers, needing only to complete their formation.

What prevents him from fully forming them is the absence of a way to merge all three artistic conceptions.

Two years ago, he had planned to form a magic power using only the artistic conceptions of wood and human vitality.

But now, with the world in a delicate state, he realises that strength is essential.

After the Blood Ancestor was killed, the remaining five Ancestors—excluding the Dark Ancestor—declared war on the human race.

Though these Ancestors are filled with hatred, many Yao and beast clans still revere them.

Having lived for over ten thousand years and wielding god-like power, their influence remains strong.

Even Dharma Realm beasts continue to worship them.

So, just a few days after the Blood Ancestor's death, they declared war, and even enemy Dharma Realm cultivators prepared to take part in the assault.

Kanoru hasn't been summoned yet, but even without a formal call, he intends to fight.

If humanity loses this war, he knows he won't be spared.

He played a direct role in killing the Blood Ancestor and will undoubtedly be on the hit list of the remaining five.

To survive combat against Dharma Realm opponents, he must possess overwhelming strength.

His understanding of artistic conceptions alone won't be enough.

The Dharma Realm marks the beginning of understanding the world's rules, elevating their power beyond his current reach.

Even if he begins to grasp these rules, his strength won't differ much unless he chooses the right path.

If he focuses solely on the rule of vitality, his defence will be exceptional, but his offensive strength will be weak.

He may be hard to kill, but easy to defeat.

To compensate for this weakness, he must choose another rule to strengthen his combat ability.

Among the options, he chooses the artistic conception of strength because when strength is a flaw.

Then what could be better than the artistic conception of strength itself to erase the flaw?

So, he decides to derive magic power from all three artistic conceptions: human vitality, wood vitality, and strength.

With that, he would be able to advance into the True Core Realm.

But the thought of advancing from the True Core Realm to the Spiritual Master Realm makes him frown.

In the True Core Realm, reaching the peak of cultivation requires transforming magic power into True Magic Power.

The difference between magic power and True Magic Power is as vast as the gap between heaven and earth.

If a cultivator conjures fire using normal magic power and ignites a material that the fire cannot use as fuel, the fire will extinguish the moment the cultivator withdraws their mental energy.

But if the same fire is formed with True Magic Power, it will continue to burn by drawing fuel from natural energy itself, and over time, it can even evolve to burn the very material that once resisted it.

It might take decades or centuries, but the fire will eventually consume the target.

True Magic Power is rule-based; only another rule can extinguish it.

To evolve magic power into True Magic Power, the artistic conception it's based on—such as the conception of heat—must advance to the level of a rule.

This transition from artistic conception to rule is the next step in understanding the world, but the gap between the two is immeasurable.

In the True Core Realm, cultivators begin building the stairs from earth toward heaven, bridging the mortal with the divine.

If the rule that follows an artistic conception already exists in the world, it can be directly comprehended.

However, caution is necessary.

The Nine Fundamental Rules—Fire, Water, Earth, Metal, Wood, Air, Thunder, Blood, and Dark—are innate and wholly derived from the world itself.

Other rules, however, might have been created either by the world or by other beings.

If a cultivator builds their path on a rule created by someone else, they risk being influenced—or even controlled—by that being.

That's why it's better not to take shortcuts and instead construct one's own stairway to the heavens.

As for Merin, even if he wanted to take a shortcut, he couldn't.

In this world, vitality and strength still exist only at the level of artistic conception—they have not yet reached the stage of becoming world-derived rules.

Merin pulls himself out of his thoughts of the future and focuses on the present, as a bird enters the range of his mental field, which spans all of Yellowwind Town.

This is no ordinary bird—it flies in a slow arc before hovering directly above his house.

Merin says to his brother and sister, "Stop your practice for now and come here."

They walk toward him, and his sister, Nora, asks, "Why, elder brother? We only started an hour ago."

His brother, Kuro, notices a shadow stretching across the snow, looks up, and sees a large swan flapping high above them.

Kuro says, "Look up."

Nora glances at Merin and asks, "Elder brother, did you subdue another great beast?"

Merin shakes his head. "That swan is not a great beast."

Kuro now stands beside Merin, watching as the swan begins descending slowly. "Then what is it? Something higher than a great beast?"

Merin shakes his head again and conjures a shield as the falling snow thickens and wind whips around them from the swan's landing.

When the snow clears, the swan is gone—in its place stands a woman.

Merin says, "She's a True Core Realm spiritualist."

Nora and Kuro stare in awe as the beautiful woman walks toward them and bows. "Master Kanoru."

Merin asks, "Who are you, and what brings you here?"

The woman answers, "Master Kanoru, I am Minami, and I bring a message from the Illusion Master: the Holy Blood Master will awaken in a week."

Merin had instructed the Illusion Master to inform him when the Holy Blood Master emerged from his shell—he wants to witness the changes that occur as the master ascends to the ancestor realm.

He nods, then locates his parents at their clinic and sends them a message, letting them know he'll be away for some time.

He emits a frequency, and within minutes, the giant eagle hovers above their house and descends into the yard.

Turning to his siblings, he says, "Continue your practice—I'll come back and inspect."

Nora and Kuro nod, and Merin, along with Minami, leap onto the giant eagle as it lifts off into the sky.