All Heavenly destiny reduced to ashes-Chapter 1618 - 357: Awakening of the Holy Demon (2/6)

An Jing frowned, lowering his gaze again to look at his own hand: "Every being with self and free will, in essence, is infinite, or even a higher infinite..."

Muttering thus, he had a moment of enlightenment.

——This is the essence of the path of cultivation.

At this moment, An Jing understood.

The power of Embracing the Void had indeed descended upon him, but in reality, the ’branch’ he saw earlier was his own arm.

Every True Spirit possesses this essence, and the process of cultivation is to elevate and restore the finite to the infinite power it originally possessed through various methods.

All previous cultivation was to accumulate power and take a step forward with the Heavenly Venerate.

The Heavenly Venerate is the first step—liberating the potential infinite through connecting with nature.

Union with the path is the second step—transcending into a countable infinity by connecting with the self.

The intermediate further steps can be omitted, with the ultimate peak of Unity, the level of Huai Xu Heavenly Dao... becoming the absolute nature, a higher-order infinite by becoming all.

Yet, that is still not the true power of the True Spirit.

"Yes, beings can intervene in the world through free will, and the uniqueness of a being is even larger than the world itself!"

Understanding the essence of cultivation, An Jing felt an unprecedented clarity in his thoughts, able to comprehend these words: "If a world is infinitely large, then the potential number of True Spirits is all possible combinations of infinite possibilities, endless ways of defining the infinite."

"True Spirit is not a power but a scale, capable of defining, limiting, and compressing the infinite—this is an absolute right of definition, originating from something higher, the Middle Thousand, Great Thousand, even from the Primordial that created all heavens!"

"Simply put, the essence of each person is far greater than the Small Thousand World itself; its true essence even connects directly to the Primordial—but this is incorrect, as the Heavenly Dao is not so simple and cannot be easily surpassed by True Spirits! The Heavenly Dao is not such a simple thing!"

"Indeed, that’s right." Thinking of this, An Jing also realized: "The Heavenly Dao is also a filter, the Heavenly Dao... Embracing the Void, you are the True Spirit of the Small Thousand World itself!"

"Right. The Heavenly Dao also has its own True Spirit." Huai Xu Heavenly Dao said calmly: "My essence is no higher than that of other True Spirits, yet it is exceedingly vast—I am the grandest and most mundane of all ways of defining the infinite."

"I contain all the necessary macro laws, only removing finite errors that collapse logically, while retaining almost all possibilities of infinity. Ordinary True Spirits, on the other hand, only need to follow the most basic axioms; simply put, an ordinary True Spirit defines details like whether a person is tall, short, fat, or thin, while my Heavenly Dao focuses on the macro definitions like all logic must be coherent, all causalities must have sequences."

"Any True Spirit that exists in the World must be a specification of me, the Heavenly Dao."

"The Heavenly Dao is not higher in essence than any being; I am just the foundation of all ’me’s; any being must accept conditions like logical consistency and the continuity of cause and effect to be born; otherwise, it would be impossible to be born into this world."

"In a sense, it can also be said that all beings must adhere to common sense, or else they would not exist."

"However, Embracing the Void, this only means that anyone, in essence, is equivalent to the Heavenly Dao, equal to you and cannot surpass you!" And An Jing continued his thought: "Moreover, according to this statement, the Heavenly Dao should never have possessed complete self-awareness from the beginning."

"For if a true self exists, the Heavenly Dao would be biased..."

An Jing thought of a terrifying possibility... perhaps that is the source of the Holy Demon, the Heavenly Dao inevitably tends toward being a Holy Demon.

But at this moment, a tremendous tremor was felt.

An Jing and the Huai Xu Heavenly Dao both turned, looking behind them, or rather, within themselves.

They saw, beneath the Netherworld of Embracing the Void, within the Abyss of Eternal, the multitude of Heavenly Demons being jointly suppressed by the Shangxuan Sect, Sword Court, and Jingming Sect, letting out an earth-shaking cheer, they were howling and calling as if in anticipation, or a kind of eager delight.

Thus, the land quaked,

Under this mighty tremor, the Heavenly Sea surged, the clouds scattered, Heaven Star hid, the Sun and Moon were unsettled, in massive, deep rumblings as if occurring within the world’s interior, time and space split like a torn piece of paper, the boundary between the Netherworld and the present world was breached, forming huge black fissures.

The Ten Directions Heaven and Sea flowed towards the Netherworld through the fissures, endless seawater whirled there, forming a massive vortex centered on the fissure, with endless thunder and gales emanating, spreading in all directions.

And this water of the Heavenly Sea, the tide of Youli, all converged towards the Returning Ruins, the end of ends, that Abyss of Eternal.

There, a great shadow was trembling.

During the time after the Huai Xu Heavenly Dao awakened.

The Huai Xu Holy Demon began truly to awaken as well.

"It seems."

Seeing this scene, the Huai Xu Heavenly Dao also solemnly sighed: "Has the time come?"

Its will gently enveloped An Jing, but there was no feeling of forced union: "An Jing, because of the small victories you constantly accumulated, the Ancestral Dragon awoke one step before the Supreme Heart Demon, and I also awoke before my Holy Demon."

"I told you these things, things that should not be visible to other beings—I am awakened from an event that originally did not exist within these possibilities, because you are unpredictable to me, a ’new possibility’ not in my past collection of possibilities."

"You’re right, I indeed should not let you become me; that way you would become mundane, assimilated into me, and become a predictable entity."

"Thus, for an unknowable future, I must alter my plan as well."

"What are you trying to say, Embracing the Void?" Hearing this, An Jing, who had been contemplating the essence of ’infinity,’ suddenly became alert, and Embracing the Void responded calmly: "That would naturally mean giving up existence."

"Previously, with doubts in mind, my preparation was to unite with the Holy Demon, suppress the other, and carry all demonic Qi out of Huai Xu, leaving a free and quiet world for everyone—perhaps due to degeneration, or after having self-born it wanted to continue existing and enduring, I wanted to live, so I had such a plan, hoping you could replace me, and I would leave some ’backup of me’ left within the Cave Heaven of You Ruhui who once possessed the ’new Heaven and Earth Core,’ as a seed, hoping for future revival, or as a primer, allowing you to awaken me from demonic degeneration."

"In this way, as long as you win in the end, even if the current ’me’ is completely eroded by the Heavenly Demon and becomes one of them, at least, there is a backup of ’me,’ or some kind of offspring, that can once again be born into the world."

"Simply put, An Jing, I am hoping for a good ending."