5 Years later.

Wei An Pov. 

Being in the presence of the sect leader is something to never tire of. He was a comely man with pitch black hair, black eyes and a friendly countenance most of the time. As one of the few who had achieved the status of immortal, or as the westerners call it, tier 10, his every movement exuded profundity. 

His divinity, birthed from the concept afforded by the cultivation manual we practice, always left the room he was in feeling like a field of cherry blossoms. The smell, the light breeze passing by, the illusion of the falling petals….

‘Truly, a display of mastery. His very presence rewrites reality to the tune of his divinity.’ 

Not all that practiced the cultivation manual came to the very same conclusion, or ‘concept’, that the sect leader came to. People are different, hence they produce different interpretations and take the style to different routes, but none have come close to that of the leader. 

Some are born lucky, having cherry blossom constitutions, bodies tailor made specifically for the cultivation style. They had a parent or ancestor who went far with the technique and the blood runs true. Sorcery, the westerners call it. But they have the disadvantage of having to contend with how their predecessor understood the cherry blossom versus how they want to. The sect leader was one of those born with the constitution as his father and father before him cultivated the manual to a high degree. All that culminated in him. 

“You want to travel?” 

“Yes, sect leader.” I answered him immediately. 

I had received an invitation to Heartree and it would be a chance I had been waiting for. A chance to see my classmates. Those who I had spent quite some time with in that school. Were they strong, how had they advanced, was he still the strongest of us all. There were questions I wanted to know the answer to and thus, spurred my decision to go. 

“My daughter will go with you then. She is to experience life outside of the one we know.” He smiled genially. 

“And she has been asking to see the world tree that has recently sprouted. Since I can’t take her myself, I’ll leave that in your able hands.”

‘I wanted to avoid that.’ 

Yinghua, the sect leader’s daughter, was the most beautiful woman in the sect. She had the same hair as her father, pitch black and pin straight. Her eyes, however, were cherry pink with a cherry blossom petal shaped pupil, a trait she received from her mother. We had never seen the woman who had gotten past the sect leader’s wall of kindness and ignited his lust when many others had tried and tried to no avail, but he was kind enough to let us know. 

Apparently, a spirit beast who had grown in strength to the point of taking human form was her mother. Specifically, a cherry blossom tree. 

‘I can see why he would want to breed with that….thing, to birth the princess.’ And the breeding did work. She was supremely talented, the most talented in her generation in fact. She just didn’t like to train that much. Or at all, really. 

She was whimsical and well liked by all, but her easy going personality was the ultimate attractor for a certain type of person that would want to take advantage of her. Fortunately, her being kind does not equate to her being gullible. Still, her father has her protected at all times as she is the future of this sect, or at least one of the possibilities. 

Her distant ancestor is the sect founder and the subsequent leaders are all related to her as the leadership was passed from father, to son, to nephew, to niece and so on. The most qualified in their family in that generation is the one who will rule. Some of those past rulers have passed on while some are still alive today, spending the most of their time in meditation, looking for an opportunity to advance beyond the boundaries of this world. They were the last bastion of defense for the sect. 

‘Back to the point.’

The princess coming means that multiple high level covert operatives will be shadowing us. I wouldn’t be able to be as free as I normally would have without her presence, but the burden was one I was willing to take. 

“I’ll make sure to take care of her, leader.”

Solis Pov.

Time tends to move quickly when you’re a busy person. Everything had been going semi smoothly over the past few years and I had barely any hiccups in my life. I leaned back in my chair with a glass of Heartree wine, left to my own thoughts. 

‘Well, there is that one thing.’

 I found myself thinking about the time dragons visited and caused a ruckus in Treehome. That was during a period where the imperial family was essentially living here. Now though, they only visit a few times. Well, I should say the emperor only visits a few times as the empress along with her children come as regularly as they can to….’stimulate’ the fae side of their make-up. 

The princess and the prince, mainly the princess, had also taken the time to come visit me regularly, speaking to me about all things from the advancements in magic to the territory itself. 

I stayed by myself for a few more minutes, just screwing in my thoughts until I felt something shift. 

‘The time has come.’ I sighed. 

After my battle, if you can even call it that, with the dragon king, I swore to myself to advance to a stage where I would never be unable to even touch an opponent again. In order to do that, I need to spark my divinity. 

As a reminder, chi and aura had roughly the same stages of strength. Roughly, because while they are similar, there had to be some estimations to be done for it to be this way. It had been standardized millennia ago from the arbitrary names the stages had to make remembering and understanding things easier.  

There was tier one to three, the apprentice. Then tier four to six where you can internalize a concept and transform your aura or chi into that. You are normally referred to as a master once you have developed your own concept and most people stop at this stage. 

Tier seven and eight is the realm where most take and stretch their concept to see the limits of what it can do. During all of this, the truly diligent would have been saturating their auras or chi with their concept to make it truly your own. After all, no two concepts are exactly alike. The fortunate ones would have developed a domain for their concept by this time, if not, they would need a divinity to be able to do that. 

To enter tier nine, you simply have to take that concept and use it as a fuel to spark your divinity. Those that use chi have a different name for this, specifically, transcending mortality. Here, you gain an even greater control of what was once a concept but has now become a divinity. You begin to feel a certain….energy. That energy grows and wanes depending on if people love you, trust you, have faith in you-

‘Faith. The ‘energy’ is faith.’ 

That faith can then be used to speed up your growth, but at the cost of your strength from that point on being tied to faith. The emperor, for instance, has a vast reservoir of faith in the form of all the citizens of the empire, but he doesn’t use it to grow in strength. It would color his aura a certain way if he did. 

Tier ten. Godhood for aura and immortality for chi. This is the stage where your aura or chi has become a sort of divine essence and you are an existence that can contend with the naturally born gods. Most won't be immediately as powerful as the naturally born gods, though they do have the advantage that they can still grow infinitely. This is the stage where there is no definable level and you just keep growing in strength. This is the stage where the emperor has been for several millennia. 

‘This is the stage where I have to be.’