Pursuit of the Truth

Su Ming’s eyes sparkled. He allowed the runic symbol to approach him and fuse into the center of his brows. At the instant it disappeared into his forehead, Su Ming’s mind and soul jolted. His cultivation base instantly started circulating based on a particular trajectory, and only calmed down after a long while. When it did, he saw that the man and the woman in the sky had returned to the huge face and vanished into the air.

“Gain an epiphany from the runic symbol’s power, understand your thoughts, and turn them into your will, then with your will, produce your own creations!” The old man in white swept his gaze across the area. Once he spoke in a flat tone, he sat down and remained still.

The people meditating on the platforms in the area immersed themselves in a state of enlightenment.

Su Ming sat in the area as well and closed his eyes to understand what the old man had said so that he could learn Great Berserker Tribe’s strongest Art—Created in Antiquity.

“My thoughts are the God of Berserkers’ beliefs…” Su Ming murmured. This was when his very first belief appeared. At the moment he became the God of Berserkers, he had already determined his beliefs towards the Berserkers.

At the instant Su Ming affirmed the belief in his heart, he saw time begin to flow. The sun, moon, and stars moved, and some of the people on the platforms left and were replaced by new ones.

He also saw that someone seemed to have mastered the power of Created in Antiquity. A piercing light blasted out from them, but the time kept on passing. The elderly in the tribe died, those in their middle-ages became old, and children grew into young adults. An unknown number of years passed like that. Generations of Berserkers lived and had their offspring. The people on the platforms, too, changed, batch by batch.

As for the old man in white, he reached the end of his life and passed away. Others took his place one after another… and the Ancestral Spirits in the sky appeared time and again to pass down the Created in Antiquity Art.

As this continued, Su Ming noticed that the smiles on the faces of the Ancestral Spirits when they descended slowly disappeared, replaced by sullen looks and panic in their hearts. Their descent was no longer as frequent as in the past as well.

Even so, Su Ming could not count how many times he had inherited the Created in Antiquity Art. Then, one day, he saw the Ancestral Spirits in the sky vanish. He then saw that the growth of Great Berserker Tribe was no longer as swift as before. One day, the sky rumbled, and in the mid of all that ruckus, the sky collapsed…

While it was being torn apart, many Ancestral Spirits watched the ground, Great Berserker Tribe, the other tribes, and all the other races they had created. Su Ming, too, watched them.

Their expressions were gloomy. With a reluctance to leave, they created a huge hall to pass down their legacy in their place. Then, their bodies slowly vanished. Their presence… gradually turned into nothingness, and a red bolt of lightning descended. With just one glance, Su Ming could tell that it was nearly the exact same as the lightning bolt at the center of the brows of the face formed by the Arid Beasts.

The lightning bolt charged towards the hall created by the Ancestral Spirits, and booming sounds surged into the sky. The hall might not have collapsed, but it suffered a heavy blow from which it could not recover…

Su Ming bore witness to all of it.

He saw the races waging war against each other during the era after the death of the Ancestral Spirits. During the war, Su Ming saw the people from Great Berserker Tribe die one after another. He saw them turn the old Spirit Offering Platform to the Spirit Ascension Platform so they could perform the spirit ascension. He watched the Berserkers attempting to search for the order in the All Spirits Hall and witnessed far too many deaths.

He saw the children in the tribe forget how to play and smile in that happy and innocent manner of the past. He also watched the people in the tribe gradually dwindle in number…

“My will is the will to make the Berserkers rise to power.”

When he saw all of that, Su Ming mumbled to himself on the Spirit Ascension Platform. The words he spoke were his will. It had always existed within him, but at that moment, it became an incredibly firm resolve.

Su Ming closed his eyes. When he opened them again, quite a lot of time seemed to have passed again. Great Berserker Tribe looked like it was about to turn into an empty wasteland, but a person had come to sit on his platform at some unknown point in time.

It was an old man dressed in long robes. Before him was the spine of a ferocious beast. He stared at the sky with an unfocused gaze. In his right hand he held a stone piece, and he was scraping it against the spine. Cracking sounds came from it.

The sound echoed in the air, causing all those who heard it to feel sharp stabs of pain in their hearts, but at that moment, Su Ming only felt his heart tremble violently. He stared at the old man, and his vision became slightly blurry. The old man was blind. His appearance was the exact same as that of the blind xun maker Su Ming had seen in the land of Berserkers, but when he stared at him again, he looked exactly as his elder!

This scene caused Su Ming to remember… the Berserker’s Realm Mountain about which the elder had talked to him.

Su Ming sensed a powerful ripple from the old man. It signified his level of cultivation, and it was strong enough to even make Su Ming apprehensive.

His pupils contracted. It was not because of the connection this old man had with his elder or the blind old man in the land of Berserkers, but because he could sense the presence of an Antecedental Spirit on him.

Su Ming saw a broken smile appear on the old man’s face. When he lifted his left hand, he patted the Spirit Ascension Platform, and it immediately trembled. The entire ground also trembled. At the instant the sky trembled as well, the entire world changed.

The bright sky turned into dusk, and snow fell from the sky. The entire ground became unfamiliar. Even the Spirit Ascension Platform turned into towering altars. Under them were hundreds of thousands of Berserkers dressed in black robes. All of them were kneeling quietly.

Su Ming could even see a huge palace in the distance…

At the instant he noticed it, his body shuddered slightly. He was familiar with all of this. It was… the Great Yu Palace he had seen when he was in the land of Berserkers!!

“Kala, kala…”

The sound echoed in the area. It drifted in the snow and wind, lingering for a long time and refusing to leave. Yet the blizzard grew stronger. Snow was swept up by the wind, and it surrounded the area.

“Is there still hope? Is there?” an ancient voice asked indignantly in the blizzard. There was a hint of grief in it along with a cry filled with the reluctance to admit defeat. That voice had tumbled out of the mouth of the old man next to Su Ming.

The blizzard wailed as if in answer to the old man’s question. At the same time, it caused his voice to be fragmented before it was drowned out by the snow.

“If there’s still hope then where is it? If there is no hope then why do you let me see it?!” The old man looked as if he had sunken into a state of madness, and he sounded hysterical. As his roars echoed in all nine heavens, Su Ming stared in a daze and did not say a single word.

The snow began to fall harder.

“If you’ve let me seen it then there must be hope, but where is it?!”

“Today is the day the Emperor returns, the day the gates to the Three Lands open, the day the blizzard arrives, and the day all was created. I will predict the Berserker Day once again!”

When the old man lifted his left hand and formed a seal, Su Ming saw the blizzard instantly gather before him and turn into a dragon that roared at the heavens before it charged at the sky.

But the moment the dragon of snow and wind rushed above, it seemed to crash into an invisible barrier. It was as if a will had descended on it, and the dragon collapsed.

The old man threw his head back and roared. He bit down on the tip of his tongue and coughed up a mouthful of blood. At the same time, the hundreds of thousands of Berserkers under the altar bit the tips of their tongues while kneeling so that their blood would charge to the sky together with the old man’s blood.

Once it fused with the crumbling blizzard dragon, it turned into a blood dragon that looked like it was drenched in blood. It bore the weight of the roars and thoughts of the hundreds of thousands of Berserkers and rushed at the sky again.

Booming sounds reverberated through the air. The blood dragon broke the invisible barrier and went even higher, but at that moment, its body suddenly froze…

At that moment, it looked like it saw the universe beyond the barrier and a picture contained within that place.

There was only one object in that picture… It was a butterfly, a butterfly flying beyond the universe…

Boom!

The blood dragon’s body collapsed while it cried out shrilly. It fell apart as blood-red snow that fell down from the sky. During that instant, however, the dragon let out a sound completely different from its roars!

“Death…”

When the voice echoed in the air, Su Ming’s heart trembled. Blood trickled down corner of the old man’s lips, and he mumbled that one word.

“Death…”

He placed the stone piece he held in his right hand on the thirteenth vertebrae of the beast’s spine and left it there.

“You cannot see the world that I see… You… cannot see… Hope…” the old man mumbled in anguish. With the stone piece in his right hand, he started scraping against the beast bone, making cracking sounds once more.

There was a desolate air about him. It fused with his voice, and a grief-filled loneliness as well as a bleak air surrounded him.

“Hope… is not here, but in the future…” the old man murmured.

Su Ming closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, the world had already changed. An unknown number of years had passed since what he had seen last.

The world roared at that moment, and fog filled the entire area. Forlorn cries made by people before they died filled the area. Su Ming stared at the land being reduced to a wasteland under a disaster. Gradually, when the area returned to dead silence, Su Ming stood up quietly. He looked around and found himself before countless souls.

They seemed to have been staring at him quietly since the time Su Ming chose to gain his epiphany, since the ancient world appeared before his eyes, and even since he had begun performing his spirit ascension. They seemed to have been there from the very start, but only at that moment had Su Ming seen them.

The souls were countless. Their numbers went past a hundred million, and they were all people from Great Berserker Tribe. The might have died, but they appeared because of Su Ming, existing only due to him. They witnessed him gaining his epiphany and watched as he became an Antecedental Spirit…

Su Ming stared at them quietly. After a long while, he murmured to them in a slightly hoarse voice.

“My creation will be to rebuild Great Berserker Tribe so that all of your souls will find rest! This is my creation, the creation of the God of Berserkers!”

When he finished speaking, all the souls in the area bowed to him.