CG Chapter 187: The Blood and the Path
Arrogance is often one's greatest enemy. Whether it is mighty generals or great emperors those who are not willing to admit their own wrongdoing are not worthy of being labeled as great. Some refuse to heed the wisdom of the old, believing they could bear the mandate of heaven in one hand while ruling the world with the other. These, however, inevitably lay the seeds of their own downfall. To be prideful without arrogance is the character of the superior man.
Holding the manual closely Aretius began to quickly flip through its pages. His gaze was locked on each line, the transformation, the refinement, and the smelting materials of the corpse puppet as he did the same to his own understanding of the rules that govern this world.
More importantly, he was tempering his insights into the rules and regulations present beyond the limits of a single world. During this process, he was leveraging the knowledge he had acquired through his countless lifetimes, attempting to close a growing flaw.
He was in a race with time, with the vast starry sky, and with entities that were far beyond his current understanding. If he wanted to obtain the tool needed for the throne, he must be willing to walk a path full of stones.
"The seven nether and nine supremes welcome those who follow. To defy the rules of life and death, to shed the mortal foil that binds one's own being, and to grasp life in its most fundamental form, one must first cross the threshold of death, for only by understanding utter death, can one truly know the sublimity of life."
These few lines were the most fundamental of the Jade-Nether Puppet sutra. To transform that which is decaying and wilting into that which is living.
The pages continued to fold into each other. Suddenly, Aretius stopped and turned the pages back. His gaze stopped at these lines once more. 'Life and death, life and death, life and death.' These lines guided the practitioner to refine the decaying corpse into a living puppet but what if… he used the same method to transform something else?
As this thought crossed his mind, it became the center of his focus. His pupils dilated, and a wide demonic smile stretched across his painted face, as if he had finally found his answer.
This body of his was no different than that of a corpse in his own eyes. He could refine his own dilapidated and timeworn body, into a living puppet. For just as the manual stated: from life comes death, and from death comes life. These rules, however, weren't restricted to only corpse refining but were a set of supreme rules and regulations that governed over all worlds of the starry sky and beyond.
Nevertheless, there was a huge gap in the manual that needed to be amended first. This gap, was not due to a lack of talent on the part of the original creator. It is more likely that no one in the Li clan dared to think of such a deranged idea, except for the elder whose handiwork was playing with joy outside.
The reason Aretius was able to think of this unorthodox path was not due to pure talent. But that he had never viewed this body as anything more than a lowly, temporary vessel with no sense of attachment.
To him, these bodies were akin to fireflies believing their light rivaled that of the luminous moon. They lacked even the fundamental wisdom to pursue their dream.
In addition, once a corpse is refined its grade is fixed to a great extent. A puppet can not cultivate on its own, and as such the only way to advance is through pouring countless resources to re-refine it.
To complete this step, Aretius needed to find something to lock his Ki and vitality as he undergoes this process. A way to defy the rules of life and death, rather than just this world.
Time passed, and Aretius stood motionless in place. His eyes appeared glued as if they were looking at the lines of the page, yet his mind was far away. Countless ideas clashed through his mind, a thousand thoughts and a hundred paths appeared in front of his eyes only to be disregarded one after another.
Some were too lacking, others had major flaws. If any of these paths were to be laid in front of any member of the Li Clan, they would have been viewed as supreme, ancestral teachings but to Aretius they were only that… Flawed lesser paths.
Witnessing the paths he worked so hard on all come to fruitless conclusions Aretius did not feel any sense of heartache. Instead, a smile was continuously growing on his face. The taste of facing a grand wall he attempted to overcome, finding and deciphering a riddle, such a joy belonged to the few, those who did not shy from failure and thought of themselves as no more than travelers alongside the grand path of the Dao.
It might have been because of this sense of relentless pursuit, or it might have been a mere accumulation of knowledge, but Aretius' gaze flickered with a shining light as he found a path that stood supreme compared to all others. At the beginning, he was chasing a complex solution. But after looking at himself as an outsider he remembered that he possessed a component within him that already ruled over a fragment of life and death.
This object had accompanied him since the very start of his journey, and had been transformed by him into the essence of his current power, a gift, that was the fragment of samsara that was now part of his bloodline.