Time flew like an arrow.

Yue Yang saw a lonely figure who often sat quietly on the summit of Sorrowless Peak in the Valley of Life. Having lost her goal, she had sunk into a kind of bewilderment. She was no longer the Sky Tower’s foremost Supreme, but a fragile young woman who could not even find anyone to talk to. The loneliness of a Supreme standing where the air is too thin and too cold was nothing compared with being lost in a life with no direction.

There was no little sister running happily around behind her, and no little brother to carry on the faith and the inheritance of her mother and the other elders.

There was only her.

In her cultivation, she could no longer find the right direction. Her Sacred Codex had already reached its peak, with no possibility of further progress.

She fell into a lonely dread. No one could tell her what to do next. And yet she knew one thing all too well: she was still unimaginably far from the higher, far higher, divine realm…

What do I do?

Is it really impossible for a woman to become the strongest Supreme in the world?

Carrying that question, and lost about her future, she went to find the Sleeper for the second time.

“I knew you would come again, but I did not expect you to come so soon! Your talent, your progress, truly are the most astonishing I have seen. Not even the Prison Emperor of those days, not even the Serpent-Demon Empress of legend, the most gifted of all, grew as fast as you have… Compared with others, you are more focused, and you understand more.” The Sleeper seemed to have known she would come, and was very glad to counsel the new Supreme who had lost her way. “Your present state is in fact a threshold before a breakthrough. If you can break through it, you will find that there is a higher, entirely new realm waiting for you.”

“Then what do I do next?” She had no idea how to break through where she was.

“Perhaps you already know that the Sacred Codex is not the final state of the summoning grimoires we hold. It is the expression of a very high realm, but above it there is still the Divine Codex.” The Sleeper gave her a hint.

“A Divine Codex chooses its own master. No one can force one!” She knew about Divine Codexes, but she understood even better the fact that a divine artifact chooses its master, and that no one can force a Divine Codex.

“Let us talk about your state of cultivation first. I will tell you about the Divine Codex in a moment.” The Sleeper changed the subject with a soft laugh. “Now that you have Sovereign Intent, even though you have not set foot in the divine realm, you could just about be called a ‘Half-Divine.'”

“A Half-Divine?” She did not understand what the two had to do with each other.

“They say there are quite a few such ‘Half-Divines’ in the Heavenly Realm and the Sky Realm. To a certain degree they already have great strength and might, but they are still a long way from a true god, and from the strongest, the Sacred Sovereign. Of course, even in the true divine realm, the gap between one divine-tier power and another can be enormous. Between the strongest true god and the weakest, the difference is like a mountain against a grain of sand, the sea against a single grain of millet! So here is the question. Why is there such a great gap between them? Why is one divine-tier power the weakest of the divine tier and another the strongest? Plenty of them have cultivated for the same length of time — some have even cultivated for less time and less intensely than the other — and yet the one who worked hardest may be the weakest divine tier, while one who never had to work very hard may be the stronger. Why is that? And finally, knowing they are the weakest divine tier, why don’t they keep working to close or fill in the gap between themselves and the strongest?” The Sleeper’s string of questions left her baffled.

She could not answer. These were things beyond the divine tier. She had neither comprehended them nor set foot there, and she had no right to speak on them.

But she knew one thing: there had to be a reason. It could not be that the one who worked hardest would turn out the weakest.

The Sleeper’s voice was as gentle as a mother’s, and as clear and wise as her little auntie’s had been when she taught her. It was soft, yet without her noticing it, it stamped itself deep into her heart.

“The reason is very simple. Once you rise to the divine tier, it becomes very hard to cultivate any further, and very hard to make any great progress. Even over a very long time, what you gain is tiny. Those gaps can never be filled by effort made after reaching the divine tier. That is the truth.” The Sleeper told her a truth that an ordinary warrior could never have known.

“Why is it so hard to progress after rising to the divine tier?” She did not understand at all. Wasn’t a higher level supposed to be easier to cultivate in?

“Humans are the easiest to cultivate,” the Sleeper said with a smile. “Only a human body is the easiest to cultivate in.”

“But aren’t humans the weakest kind of life?” she asked, puzzled.

“They are. Humans are the weakest living things — not only the weakest, but the most burdened and the most weary. Birth, age, sickness and death shadow a human all their life. Their fragile bodies are governed by all kinds of laws they cannot resist. When they are hungry, they must eat; when they are thirsty, they must drink. Beyond that, there are all the torments of the body’s own workings. When they are tired, they must sleep; when desire rises, it must be let out; their moods run high one moment and low the next, and whether they laugh out loud or wail aloud or sit silent and alone, it is all part of a human life. In this short, unpredictable life, they grow up at great speed, and then age just as fast, and finally die in old age and sickness. You could say that a great many people, in all their lives, never escape this invisible fate — unseen on the surface, but real, and present every moment… And in this process, painful enough already, there are countless ties of desire and love, all kinds of gratitude and grudges and love and hate, all kinds of selfish attachments and even wicked thoughts and bad habits, all pounded together into one mass that troubles their hearts, never giving them a moment to catch their breath, so that they are steeped in it, drowned in it. And the societies humans build swallow the people who live under them and belong to them like a swamp. No one can get free!”

“If that’s so, then why are humans the easiest to cultivate?” She could not understand it at all.

“Perhaps it is the will of the ancient great gods. Or you might say, it is an extraordinarily rare opportunity!” the Sleeper explained.

“Becoming human is an opportunity?” She was astonished.

“Yes. Haven’t you noticed? Every war beast — whether a life-guardian war beast or an ordinary one — must evolve into a ‘human’ if it is to truly grow into a Divine Beast. Or take us, the Sky Stairway clan. Some of our powers could shed the human body entirely and appear in a higher form. Why don’t they? Why do they keep to the laws of humans instead, and walk through a whole life of birth, age, sickness and death? If they wished, they could have lives of a thousand years, several thousand years, even longer, with no need to suffer the way humans do, no need to rest every day, to eat and drink every day… Why do they choose their lives this way? Why do they pass it down to their descendants this way? Some of our people have even chosen to marry outsiders and bear children the human way. Why?” The Sleeper’s string of questions left her baffled once more.

That’s right!

Why?

If being human is this painful, this wretched, why become human?

Even after becoming human, why choose the same fate as a human instead of living free and easy?

Can becoming human really be the greatest opportunity any life can have?

What is the answer?

“Becoming human is very hard!” The Sleeper affirmed that first. “For any life, becoming a human is extremely hard. Whether in the Sky Tower, the Heavenly Realm or the Sky Realm, for the lives there, transforming into a ‘human’ is a very difficult act and a very long process. The vast majority of lives never manage it in all their existence. Some war beasts, for instance, have grown so strong they can shake mountains and fill in seas, yet they cannot become human. Or some top-tier powers of certain races — with a wave of the hand they can destroy a whole land, with a single thought they can overawe millions — yet they cannot transform into a ‘human.’ From examples like these, we can arrive at a truth: becoming human is in fact the hardest thing of all, and also the best. Though being human is itself the most bitter state, a human truly is the best kind of existence.”

“That seems a little contradictory.” Her thoughts were in some disarray.

“Yes. Life is contradictory like that. The strongest is not the same as the best, and the best is not the same as the strongest. The reason humans are the best is that humans can rise through cultivation and awakening, through learning and growth, advancing rapidly to unimaginable realms. For other lives, such a process cannot exist! Look at the Longteng Continent. Its human warriors are as many as ants. Among thousands upon thousands of them, perhaps not one will ever reach the Innate realm, let alone the higher Innate Sovereign… And yet no one can promise that among them there will not be one infant or one youth who grows up rapidly and becomes a new Prison Emperor or a new Conquest Queen! That is what a human is — full of the unknown. In pain and despair, if one person can awaken and walk out of it, then that person has succeeded. They will transform at once, and through constant effort they will surpass themselves, rising steadily to ever higher realms, until they reach heights no other life could even imagine!” The Sleeper gave her answer.

“Why can only humans do this?” She understood most of it, but some part was still unclear.

“Because what is comprehended and cultivated in the most bitter of conditions is the best, and the strongest…” With those words, the Sleeper seemed to untie the knot in her heart. In an instant she felt herself lifted up, and her confusion was swept completely away.

“The most bitter?” she murmured to herself. Compared with others, her cultivation truly had been the most bitter. Is that why I’m so far ahead of everyone?

“Exactly. And that brings us back to the earlier question: why is your cultivation so slow and so hard now? Because you, like many top-tier powers — including many at the divine tier — can no longer suffer very much! You now have Sovereign Intent. However lonely, however painful things are, your heart does not waver, and you can go on holding to yourself. Go a day without eating, and your body, full of energy, will not grow hungry; go a day without a drop of water, and your body, nourished by spiritual energy, will not grow dry… Go without sleep and you will feel no fatigue; move a mountain and you will feel no ache. Close as you are to Half-Divine, you have almost no suffering left, so you no longer comprehend and awaken more through suffering, and so your cultivation no longer makes any progress. And you are only a Half-Divine now. If you climbed to the higher divine tier, anything you wanted would be yours with a single thought. Eat, drink, play, enjoy — nothing would hold you back. There would be no pain at all, only pleasure. In a divine realm like that, where you can hardly suffer and even cultivation no longer tires you, if you wished to progress any further, I believe ten thousand years would not add much!” The Sleeper explained, clearly and wisely, the difference between humans and gods, and the change in cultivation that came with it.

Humans suffered greatly, but they could learn, cultivate, comprehend and awaken, and progress at great speed.

The divine tier had no suffering, only joy.

Without suffering there was no advance; without awakening there was no talk of climbing to a new realm. So they stayed forever at the same level.

“Then why are some the weakest of the divine tier and some the strongest?” She had a new question. If they had all cultivated their way up, shouldn’t they all be at the same realm? Shouldn’t they all be the same? How could there be such a huge gap?

“Their ways of cultivating are different, the pain they bear is different, and so, naturally, the realm of their awakening is different too,” the Sleeper said with a smile. “That is exactly what I meant to tell you. For example, you have cultivated for a hundred years and are stronger than others who have cultivated for a thousand. Why? Isn’t it because you cultivated harder and more single-mindedly than they did? Your talent matters a great deal too, of course. But what matters most is that you paid the price, and so you got this return.”

“To rise to the strongest divine tier — to become a Sacred Sovereign — what do I have to do?” At last she had an entirely new goal: the strongest divine tier, the legendary Sacred Sovereign!

“Give it up!” the Sleeper answered.

“What?” She did not understand.

“What I mean is: give up the realm you are in now, including all the powers you have comprehended. Go back from the Half-Divine realm to the realm of a ‘human,’ and cultivate all over again.” When the Sleeper said this, she was stunned. Give up everything I worked so hard to cultivate? Really do that? And if I can’t cultivate my way back up, won’t I lose even the realm I have now? How can I know that cultivating again will be better or faster than this?

She thought about it for a long time.

The ultimate wish to climb to the strongest divine tier and to Sacred Sovereign, and her promise to her mother and her little auntie, freed her from her hesitation.

Only the best. Only the strongest!

Half-Divine?

Half-Divine is nothing. If I do this, I’ll be the strongest divine tier!

If I do this, I’ll be the Sacred Sovereign that exists in legend and that no one has ever reached!

She clenched her fists. The light that shone from her Divine Sight was cleaner and clearer than the bright moon in the sky… She drew a deep breath, and with her Sovereign Intent she made her ambition firm, and made her heart for cultivation firm. In that instant, though she spoke softly on the surface, her words carried the force to overturn rivers and seas and shake heaven and earth. And from that moment on, her fate changed completely and set out on the road to Sacred Sovereign, a road no one could predict!

“I’ll cultivate again from the start!” She had decided. She would be the best version of herself, and the strongest Supreme.

“To cultivate again, you must give up where you stand now — but that does not mean erasing everything you have comprehended. You only seal it away for the time being and keep it in another space, where it stands for one realm of yours, one comprehension, one cultivation. On the day you finally reach your great completion — the day you become a Sacred Sovereign — you can bring all of it out, join it together perfectly, and build a world that belongs to you! Only on that day will you understand what realm you have reached and what you possess. Only then will you be a true god, a true Sacred Sovereign… Cultivation does not succeed in a day or two, and it is not finished in one attempt or two. That painful process takes long and winding trials, until you reach the very limit of what you can bear. Only then will you make yourself whole!” The Sleeper comforted her kindly and set her mind at ease, explaining that whatever she had comprehended, wisdom or power, would never be lost.

“What do I do next?” She felt a gate of cultivation such as she had never seen swinging slowly open before her.

“First, turn your Sacred Codex back into a bronze-tier grimoire and seal everything you have inside it. Seal all your power into your life-guardian war beast and let her become the Half-Divine in your place, while your own true body returns to being human and cultivates upward again. The more often you cultivate again, and the longer and more bitter each cultivation, the greater and higher what you finally gain and achieve!” The Sleeper described a method she could hardly believe she was hearing, and at the same time engraved, forever, deep in her soul, an extremely precious secret art of re-cultivation that no one in the outside world knew.

“And if the re-cultivation fails?” A sudden worry came over her.

“Only those who break free of fate succeed. That is the final transcendence of being human! A human lives all their life under the rule of fate. Only by rising from human to Sacred Sovereign and taking fate into your own hands do you truly succeed… One who only destroys and cannot create is a pseudo-god. One who can destroy and can also create is a true god, but not a Sacred Sovereign. Only one who goes beyond fate and exists forever is a true Sacred Sovereign! This road does not allow failure at all. In the end, you must succeed. Otherwise, even if you reach the realm of a true god, it is failure! That is the greatest difficulty, and the greatest bitterness… A true god, too, will one day fall. Only an eternal Sacred Sovereign is eternal! Do you understand? If you do not succeed in the end, then everyone below Sacred Sovereign is a failure — you included, and all those divine-tier powers who think themselves so high and mighty… For a person, in the bitterest and hardest of places, amid every kind of desire and love pulling at them, still to want to cultivate into a Sacred Sovereign and keep striving toward it — that is the most precious thing there is, and it is the final will of the ancient great gods! All the ancient great gods, known and unknown, hoped that those who came after them would leap free of fate, rise out of the deepest bitterness and step into eternity… What we must do is carry out that will. That is why we can have summoning grimoires at all. That is why summoning grimoires exist!” The Sleeper told her a secret very nearly one of heaven’s own.

“So that’s it?” She was stunned. And not only she — Yue Yang, who was living her whole life alongside her as if it were his own, was stunned as well.

So this was the truth.

The real goal of becoming the master of a summoning grimoire was not to become strong and use that strength to bully the weak and satisfy every kind of desire. It was to leap free of fate, and to seek the true self within eternity!

In that instant, both she — hearing this secret all those years ago — and Yue Yang — coming to understand the same thing now — felt their hearts open wide all at once.

Heaven and earth became small.

Some kind of wisdom flashed through their minds, a warmth like enlightenment poured into the head, running through their whole bodies and souls.

At last they understood. At last they knew the true meaning of life.

The final goal of cultivation was the eternal true self.

Not this self who had lost its way on the road of life, but that far, far higher self, eternal in the realm of the Sacred Sovereign… In that wholly eternal world there would be no more birth and age and sickness and death, no more suffering and misfortune of any kind. It was impossible to imagine, but surely it was a flawless existence — a world eternal and ruled by one’s own will, where everyone could return to their true selves and live on together…

Yue Yang wanted to roar out loud. He felt his whole life and his whole soul-world changing, rising to something higher.

He felt an urge he could barely contain to begin cultivating at once — no hesitation, no stopping halfway.

An eternal Sacred Sovereign. A fate that everyone would transcend together… Only then would he never again need to fear powerful enemies attacking, or partings of any kind, in life or in death!

“I don’t know how many times such re-cultivation must be done. For some, perhaps once is enough; for others it may take ten times, a hundred times, even more. But I know a secret: whoever reaches the final Sacred Sovereign will have a Divine Codex of their own, even without a Divine Codex choosing them! Of course, along the way there is far too much destruction and interference, and the elders who watch over us will surely help us. Someday a Divine Codex may acknowledge a new master, to help us and enlighten us, but no one knows when that will be. Cultivation is full of the unknown, and we have to strive within the unknown. Even without a Divine Codex, we must turn our own summoning grimoires into eternal Divine Codexes. That is what I meant to tell you at the very beginning!” The Sleeper also pointed out an unbelievable road to success.

“Every summoning grimoire could become a Divine Codex in the end?” she asked.

“Some cultivate from the bottom up, some from the top down, and some from both ends at once. Everyone’s talent is different, and so is their way of cultivating. Some are destined never to contract a grimoire, because they lack the qualities, or because they squandered and ruined themselves later on. Some contract a grimoire and are still destined never to cultivate upward, because they cannot bear hardship and cannot let go of the powers they have gained. They have let power make them lose themselves. They do not know of, and do not believe in, anything like the divine tier or the Sacred Sovereign, and they cannot even comprehend Sovereign Intent… Do not think about others. What I will say is this: only those who have at least comprehended Sovereign Intent are fit to set out toward the divine tier, and only those who work harder, give more, and possess the greatest talent and the greatest wisdom are fit to reach for the ultimate Sacred Sovereign! Do not think about others. Think only: are you that kind of person? Even someone as hardworking and gifted as you is not certain to succeed, let alone anyone else. Still your heart and cultivate again. When one day you have truly transcended yourself and look back, only then will you know how much sweat and effort you gave to become eternal in the end…”

“I will succeed.” As she took her leave of the Sleeper, an unshakable confidence took root in her heart — something beyond even her Sovereign Intent.

“One last thing I want to say,” the Sleeper suddenly called after her.

“Hm?” She was puzzled.

“Perhaps your future will not be as lonely as it is now… Because in the Hundred Flowers Clan there is a little girl with a talent as extraordinary as yours, and a gift for understanding even greater, who has thought of a secret art. If she succeeds, not only the Sky Stairway but the whole Sky Tower will rise again. Even I cannot see through that little girl’s wisdom! Perhaps one day you will find that behind you there is not only a little sister running happily about, laughing like a bell, but also a little boy with shoulders that can hold up all of heaven and earth… Perhaps it is only my dream. Perhaps it will come true. With a future of endless possibilities, who can say!”

“Really?” Her little face suddenly lit up with a joy she had never shown before. The radiance from her Divine Sight could have outshone every star in the sky. “Then let’s work toward that together!”

(End of Chapter 1276)