Mirror Dream Tree

Merin looks at his palm as a faint heat radiates from it.

A few hours ago, he could only summon heat by using a flame, but that limitation is gone.

The Fire Ancestor has created the Rule of Heat and successfully merged it with the Fire Rule. Even though the world's laws are distinct, they all touch one another — merging one means gradually influencing the others.

The process will take time, but eventually, Merin and other spiritualists will be able to perform heat-based attacks without mastering the heat concept in the artistic conception realm.

That might seem like good news for everyone. Merin can feel the natural energy more vibrant than before. But deep inside, he knows this change benefits the Fire Ancestor most.

With the Rule of Heat merged into Fire, the Fire Ancestor's strength will grow, bringing unpredictable consequences.

Merin suspects the Blood Ancestor already knows this; he was the first to merge a newly created Rule into one of the world's nine fundamental Rules.

And if the Fire Ancestor succeeded, the other four Ancestors would inevitably follow.

After all, they've ruled for ten millennia — they've had more than enough time to understand the artistic conceptions under their control. Turning one into a Rule would have been just a matter of preparation.

Two years may seem short, but compared to their immense accumulation of knowledge, it's the blink of an eye.

And heat? It's forever intertwined with fire — for someone who governs Fire itself, creating and merging a Rule of Heat is as natural as drawing breath.

The other Ancestors will do the same.

It's only a matter of time before they all ascend further, shifting the balance of the world once again.

He hopes the Ancestors on the human side—the Dark, Water, and Wood Ancestors—will also merge a new Rule into the ones they hold.

But hoping isn't enough; strength is what matters most.

From tomorrow onward, he'll send a clone to watch the competition while he focuses on his own progress.

With a casual wave of his hand, a book floats over and settles into his palm.

Its title reads Corpse Transformation Technique, something he'd exchanged with the Decay Master.

In return, he gave the Decay Master his Vitality Mana Cultivation Method, a complete manual up to the peak of the True Core realm.

That exchange was more than just knowledge—it contained the core insights of their opposing Rules.

If Vitality is present, Decay cannot last long.

If Decay takes hold, Vitality cannot thrive.

He already knows the book by heart, but he opens it anyway.

Reviewing what he already memorised has become a habit—a careful ritual carried over from his previous life, and one he doubts will ever fade.

He flips through the pages at high speed to verify each detail.

The first stage of corpse-body transformation is the Stiff Corpse Body.

To practice it properly, he needs a place dense with corpse energy—usually only found on battlefields.

But he has his tower; there's no need to go anywhere.

He rises, enters the cultivation room, and settles cross-legged on the mat at its centre.

With a thought, he rewrites the array carved into the walls, switching its function from producing Vitality Energy to generating the Deathly Corpse Energy he needs.

And as the air grows colder and heavier with the scent of death, he steels himself to take the first true step down this new path.

With the array fully shifted, Merin catches the sickly stench of a corpse, and after a few minutes, wisps of black energy seep into the room like a slow-moving mist.

Yet none of it dares come near him—it merely drifts around at a cautious distance.

He knows why.

The vitality of his body is so dense that even this ocean of decay cannot breach it.

So he waits.

He lets the energy accumulate until the walls seem to sweat with darkness, until every inch of the chamber is soaked in corpse energy.

After a few hours, his skin tingles with its touch, the light itself choked out by the swirling death.

And still, it cannot penetrate his vitality.

At this rate, he might wait forever.

Finally, he opens himself, drawing the corpse energy into his flesh.

The moment a single wisp enters, agony explodes through him as though his bones have shattered and his blood turned to ice.

He bites down on the pain and absorbs more.

Every breath feels like knives.

Still, he presses on, forcing his body to drink deeper of the decay until cracks appear along his Rule Body and his lifespan itself begins to slip away.

By every instinct, this is where one would stop.

But he does not.

He endures as the Rule Body fractures further, and in that moment, he truly understands:

The Rule Body was never truly his — it was like a pattern stamped atop him, lent by the world itself, waiting to be revoked at any time.

And now he grasps why they say that, once a Spirit Master's Rule reaches ten per cent of a Fundamental Rule, their Rule Body is finally sublimated into something real—something no longer borrowed.

Yet even then, when he'd observed Haruto, whose Illusion Rule had already reached that level, Merin had felt no such difference.

And so he presses deeper into the pain and the dark, determined to make this path his own.

He knows the sublimation of the Rule Body will mean its full integration into his true body — a state where the world itself can no longer control or reclaim it.

That is why he feels no regret as cracks creep across his Rule Body while he absorbs the corpse energy, even as his extra five-hundred-year lifespan burns away like dry tinder.

He knows that, once this is over, a single drop of Origin Energy will restore his lifespan and rebuild the Rule Body entirely under his control.

But worry gnaws at him as his natural lifespan — the 222 years he truly possesses — begins to drain faster and faster.

He could stop at any moment.

But if he did, all this agony would be meaningless.

And later, he'd have to spend another priceless drop of Origin Energy just to repeat the process.

So he holds on.

He endures until his lifespan reaches zero, and yet he is not dead.

His soul remains bound to what was once his body, even as it stiffens and darkens into a full corpse under the flood of corpse energy.

And the change is rapid.

He slips seamlessly into the Stiff Corpse stage, his soul reshaping his dead flesh with practised willpower.

When that process settles, he does not stop.

He feeds more corpse energy into his body and reaches for the next stage — Grey Corpse.

The Grey Corpse stage is equal to the Spiritual Core Realm in raw power, but that matters little to him.

Even at the Stiff Corpse stage, his physical strength rivalled the True Core Realm, and now, it will only grow monstrous.

And so he continues deeper into this deathly path, carving a future that belongs to him alone.

He finally stops after reaching the third stage of the corpse transformation, not because two days have already passed, but because the technique itself goes no further.

His body feels almost indistinguishable from a living one — equally flexible and responsive, yet noticeably tougher.

But this corpse is not what he truly wants.

He changes the array back to its original form and begins reversing the transformation, drawing on the Rule of Vitality.

It's difficult — his corpse body was resilient, but it could not stand against the Rule itself.

First, his corpse mana is purged and replaced by vital energy that slowly restores the senses in his body.

He feels his flesh returning to its proper warmth; he had lost the sense of touch, taste and pain after he transformed into a corpse.

As his lifespan replenishes and then extends by two years, even his Life Origin grows more stable.

His Rule of Vitality advances to 0.21%, and a new drop of Origin Liquid forms in his core, bringing the total to two.

He consumes one drop of Origin Liquid.

The moment he swallows it, his Rule Body fully restores, and his Life Origin ascends to Rank Four.

At Rank Four, his Life Origin is supported by the world itself.

According to his classification, he is still classified as a White-rank lifeform, but the changes in his strength have already touched the Bronze-rank level.

In terms of Dream Mirror's power scale, Bronze corresponds to ranks 11–15, and though his cultivation realm in the main world is only Spiritual Master at rank 10 (Black), his power under the Rule of Vitality is nearly a hundred times greater than his base body.

This discrepancy between life level and strength is expected — one is difficult to raise, the other can surge with cultivation — and strength cannot be inherited, but life level can.

If he and Yanli, both Rank Three lifeforms, have children, they would be born at Life Origin Rank Two at the very least, possibly even Rank Three with luck.

That would make their children naturally high-ranking spiritualist apprentices at birth, with a smooth path to the True Core Realm and virtually no obstacles.

If he were a character in a D&D-style game, his status would look something like this:

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Name: Matsuda Kanoru (Merin)

Life Span: 18/242 (500)

Life Origin: White (4)

Cultivation Realm: Spiritual Master–10 (Black)

Rule: Vitality

Artistic Conceptions:

High: Wood, Blood

Medium: Water, Earth, Dark, Metal, Wind, Thunder, Strength

Initial: Heat, Cold, Ice, Paralysis, Poison, Decay

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With his strength so vastly exceeding his current realm, Merin knows that careful planning — and continued advancement — will be key to surviving the conflicts yet to come.