Chapter 650: Ascension!! (Two-in-One)

Heart of Ascension.

Yan Jing gazed at the crystal-clear heart, completely oblivious to what the woman opposite him was thinking.

{Item Name: Heart of Ascension (Bound Item, Unique Item)}

{Usable Tier: All Tiers Usable (Cannot be used as a ritual offering)}

{Item Effect: Can elevate all your current and future ritual offerings by one tier}

{Item Description: One of the ultimate rewards from the system, granted only to those who have earned its utmost recognition. The strength you have displayed makes me willing to bet on you. I hope you can accomplish what I expect. PS: This item is no longer within the system's control; no after-sales support is provided.}

Elevating the tier of all current and future ritual offerings.

Yan Jing looked at the item effect column and couldn't help but marvel at the sheer power of the item in his hands.

A second later, weird energy surged in his palm and completely devoured the heart.

"Boom!!!"

Under the woman's horrified gaze, a terrifying black pillar of light erupted around Yan Jing. Several shadows shrouded in an aura of Chaos manifested from the pillar one by one.

A massive, twisted silhouette of a pitch-black tree. An old man clutching garments, draped in a coarse linen robe. A large bird constructed of pitch-black bones. A black stone constantly flickering between the mortal and the immortal. A piano bathed in moonlight, and seated before it, a man cloaked in a deep blue robe. A king wielding a heavy halberd, a laurel crown floating above his head. A heart pumping within a towering corpse. A great, blood-thick river where a sea of corpses drifted and sank. A compass whose turning pointer caused the shifting of the stars.

Mournful screams, melodious piano music, crisp avian cries, the cold snip of shears...

The cacophony echoed across the sky, rolling out toward the distant horizon.

A vortex materialized in the air. Countless streams of weird energy poured down from it, sinking one by one into the center of Yan Jing's brow.

Whether screaming, roaring, or smiling, the shadows began a drastic transformation.

This phenomenon did not just appear above the First Ring Domain.

It spread outward like a cascading phantom until it covered the entire sky above Yueyin.

Countless residents of Yueyin raised their heads, staring in shock at the magnificent, deity-like figures dominating the sky.

It took several dozen minutes before the anomaly finally dissipated.

The world returned to tranquility.

Inside the room, brilliant rays of light bloomed behind Yan Jing.

{Player Name: Yan Jing}

{Summit Ascender: Yi}

{Player Level: Eleventh Tier, Experience (???)}

{Ritual Offerings:

Day Selection Ritual: Fear Sapling (Orange)

Calming Rite: Lord of Execution's Silk Thread (Orange-Red)

Incense Burning Rite: Wings of Praying for Death - Chongming (Red)

Rite of Summer and Winter Sacrifices: Stone Immortal (Semi-complete) (Red-Silver)

Shaolao Rite: Moonlight (Mutated) (Silver with Gold Markings)

Tailao Rite: Peerless Laurel Crown (Sublimated) (Silver-Gold)

Rite of Four Seasons: Heart of God - Earth and Frost (Reshaped) (Gold)

Imperial Sacrificial Rite: Demon Blood (Gold-Iridescent)

Sheji Rite: Universal (Iridescent) (Unique)

Godhood Rite: (Pending Selection)}

The woman opposite him stared at the light radiating from Yan Jing's back. Her face trembled, her eyes quivering as she failed to utter a single word.

She wondered if her eyes were playing tricks on her.

Those ritual offerings... those ritual offerings...

The absolute lowest grade among those ritual offerings was actually orange!!!!

Orange Day Selection Ritual!!

Red Incense Burning Rite!!

Gold Rite of Four Seasons!!

Moreover...

That last ritual offering.

Gazing at the compass radiating a prismatic seven-colored light, the woman felt her head spin.

It was a legendary fully iridescent ritual offering.

Devoid of any gold or silver impurities, it looked exactly like a pure rainbow.

In the Central Region, a ritual offering of that color was treated merely as a fairy tale or a heroic epic. It was a color that only existed in theory, yet...

It had now manifested right behind the man standing before her!!!

The woman's face drained of color. She knew she wasn't going to survive this.

No one would allow another person to walk away after discovering the secret of a ritual offering of that color.

There was only one possible reason why he was displaying it right in front of her.

In his eyes, she was already a dead woman!

Her heart trembled with sheer terror, yet she couldn't force a single word past her lips.

Yan Jing looked at the woman with a smile:

"Are you scared?"

The woman shivered even harder.

Yan Jing smiled:

"Don't be afraid, I won't eat you."

"I'm the only Divine Envoy in all of Yueyin, so if I want to test a few things, I actually have to rely on you."

"I won't just kill you."

Hearing his assurance only terrified her further.

She had absolutely no desire to relive that sensation of constantly hovering on the razor's edge between life and death.

Besides...

The current Yan Jing was completely on another level compared to just moments ago.

But Yan Jing clearly felt no obligation to coddle her emotions. He smiled faintly:

"Let's begin."

...

...

"Pretty good luck."

Ning An looked toward the distant phenomenon:

"At least we don't have to rack our brains searching."

"It's not bad."

Zheng Youlan said coldly:

"It's just that there are two problems laid out in front of us right now."

"First, we saw it, and others aren't blind either."

"Indeed." Ning An nodded:

"The only blind person is you."

Smack!

Zheng Youlan rapped him on the head.

Ning An clutched his head:

"Since when do you hit so hard?"

Zheng Youlan ignored his banter:

"Second, look at that anomaly. Do you really think we can win for sure?"

At her words, Ning An looked toward the sky.

Truth be told, he hadn't felt anything special about the phenomenon at first, but when his gaze swept over the figure shrouded in a coarse linen robe, his eyes narrowed.

His nose twitched. He caught a whiff of an incredibly familiar scent.

"It's a pathway tied to the [corpse]."

Ning An murmured:

"He's also walking a path related to the [corpse]."

"Could this be the opportunity to complete my path?"

"But that's not right. The corpse scent on that shadow is too faint. It doesn't look like he specializes in the [corpse] path."

Zheng Youlan spoke slowly:

"It's not just that he doesn't specialize in it."

"The problem is that he doesn't specialize in any path at all."

Ning An froze. He looked up at the shadows in the sky, and his shock only deepened.

It was glaringly obvious that every single shadow belonged to an entirely different pathway.

"He practices the miscellaneous path."

Zheng Youlan murmured, and Ning An sucked in a sharp breath.

The miscellaneous path.

It was a term from the Central Region.

By the standards of the vast majority of factions, all ritual offerings should stem from the exact same pathway. This not only ensured that a person's offerings harmonized with one another, but more importantly, it kept their overarching path pure and focused.

From the moment their candidates were children, many factions began charting their course for when they finally reached the summit. To those major powers, only individuals who managed to forge their own path were considered truly valuable.

If a practitioner's ritual system became mixed, their own path might gain more versatility, but it would also suffer from glaring flaws that were incredibly difficult to perfect.

Compared to a slight increase in versatility, major factions overwhelmingly preferred stability.

Such a path was called the pure one dao.

It meant that all ritual offerings came from the same Inner World Pathway.

Aside from the pure one dao, some factions experimented by combining ritual offerings from multiple pathways to arrange entirely new routes. They constantly innovated on these hybrid combinations in pursuit of a stronger path.

Such a path was called the hunyuan dao.

The divine path wielded by Shen Youran's father back in the day was exactly this kind of route.

Any route outside of these two was branded the impure path.

This meant a cultivator's ritual offerings came from several completely unrelated Inner World Pathways, making it incredibly difficult to coordinate them.

Logically speaking, those three ritual combinations accounted for the vast majority of practitioners.

But besides these three, there was actually another path.

That was...

The miscellaneous path.

It meant every single ritual offering came from a completely different Inner World Pathway.

What's more... the connections between them were extremely fragile.

Since such a path had emerged, there was naturally a reason for its existence.

First... the requirements were relatively simple.

As long as a person possessed a few Inner World items, they didn't have to rack their brains finding items from the same pathway. Instead, they could immediately boost their combat power. For people without any backing who just wanted to survive in the Inner World, worrying about their path after reaching the summit was out of the question, so they took this route.

The second point was... tremendous solo combat strength.

This was a very important point.

During the development of the ritual system, many people realized a flaw. If all their ritual offerings came from the same pathway, their specialization came at the cost of versatility and derived abilities.

For instance, someone specializing in strength would lack control, and a master of control might suffer from weak offense. Someone strong in healing and defense wouldn't be violent enough, while someone too violent would lack support abilities.

If a practitioner wanted to become a versatile solo combatant, the miscellaneous path might actually be the best option.

Even so, the number of people who deliberately chose this route was incredibly small.

Because among those who walked this route, the number of individuals who successfully forged their own path was truly minuscule.

Among the ten genius monsters currently presiding over the Central Region, only two walked this path.

Among the remaining eight, four were hunyuan dao, and four were pure one dao.

"No way..."

Ning An was completely dumbfounded.

He couldn't fathom that the person sitting at rank one on the Player Leaderboard actually practiced the miscellaneous path.

"He probably relies on the sheer complexity of his abilities to maintain such high performance across all his missions."

Zheng Youlan spoke slowly:

"My advice is to sit back and observe for now."

"The factions arriving today are packed with geniuses from the Central Region. We can let them test the waters first."

Ning An thought for a moment and finally agreed with Zheng Youlan's suggestion.

He steered the Bone Bird high above the clouds, and several corpses that looked like chunks of rotting meat manifested around them.

These corpses looked nearly identical. They were extremely gaunt, just skin and bones, with freakishly long tongues and arms that dangled past their knees.

Upon their appearance, weird energy radiated from them and linked into a ring. The auras of the Bone Bird and the two people on it gradually faded until they practically vanished.

The two flew swiftly toward the center of the anomaly. Several minutes later, Ning An lowered his head to peer downward.

"Someone's fighting."

Relying on the feedback transmitted through the Bone Bird, he spoke softly.

"Who is it?"

Zheng Youlan asked quietly.

"That homicidal maniac from [Shura]."

Ning An frowned slightly:

"The one fighting him seems to be a corpse puppet."

"No, I need to take a look."

Zheng Youlan sighed, choosing not to stop him.

She knew Ning An's temperament well. The moment anything corpse-related was involved, he simply couldn't walk away.

Ning An leapt off the bird's back. He grabbed one of the hovering corpses, using it to mask his aura, and plummeted straight down.

Before long, the scene below came into view.

A man dressed in blood-red brocade robes was frantically swinging two long blades at the space in front of him.

Opposite him stood a tall figure shrouded in a black robe.

With just one look, Ning An recognized the identity of that figure.

It was a corpse.

That was absolutely a corpse.

But strangely, he couldn't sense any "weird energy source" on it.

A weird energy source was a concept entirely unique to the [corpse] pathway.

By all logic, a corpse shouldn't possess its own weird energy. To enable it to use weird energy, it had to be controlled remotely through a weird energy tether.

The only difference was that sometimes the weird energy tethering the corpse was glaringly obvious, and other times it was incredibly faint.

But...

Regardless, there should absolutely be a connection.

Yet, looking at the situation below, Ning An couldn't find the source of the weird energy on that corpse at all.

Which meant...

This was a completely independent corpse.

How could this be?!

Such a spectacle stoked his raging curiosity, and clinging to the corpse, he descended even further.

"Slash—"

The man in blood-red brocade struck first. With a swing of his dual blades, a domain-sized phantom of a mountain of corpses and a sea of blood manifested. Two bursts of blade qi formed a massive cross, violently sweeping through the upper limits of the battlefield.

The corpse immediately blinked upward.

Its speed was staggering!

Ning An couldn't even track the movement with his eyes. By the time his brain registered the shift, the corpse had already materialized directly above the brocade-clad man.

The long blade in its hand cleaved downward with crushing force.

"Swish—"

The man in blood-red brocade threw his hands up, answering with another heavy, crossed slash.

It was a prediction.

Ning An could see it.

The man in blood-red brocade hadn't actually kept up with the corpse's speed at all. He had relied purely on combat experience to predict where it would strike next.

Ning An glanced at the man's shoulders, noticing two glaring slash wounds carved into the flesh.

By the looks of it, the two had already been trading blows for quite some time.

The brocade-clad man had suffered from it earlier, so he immediately learned from the combat experience.

Rumor had it that the [Slaughter] pathway allowed a cultivator to grow stronger directly through battle. Clearly, this man was walking that exact path.

As the second-ranked among the nine Shuras of the current generation's Shura Horde, his strength no longer needed to be proven through battle. When this strike fell, if the corpse puppet before him was hit, the battle would effectively be over.

But...

To Ning An's utter shock, the corpse puppet leapt the very instant the counter-attack came, blinking high into the sky.

And then... beneath the hood of its black robe, the corners of its mouth curled upward.

Ning An's eyes trembled.

The impact that smile had on him was no less than when he first saw the anomaly of the miscellaneous path.

Because...

This smile.

It wasn't a mechanical movement.

He understood corpses, so he could clearly tell what a normal corpse should look like.

But...

This was clearly not one.

And then, just as he was immersed in this shock, the next instant arrived.

A dark shadow materialized directly in front of him.

The Hermit who had just leapt high into the sky.

Appeared right in front of him.

The Hermit.

In life, he hadn't just been skilled in speed, but also in concealment.

To be skilled in concealment meant being skilled in seeing through it.