Chapter 1422: Primordial Lotus’s Blessing!

A/N:This Chapter brings us back to Phei’s POV and what’s happening than the ones watching him.

[Ding! Host has been anointed by the Primordial Lotus!]

[You’ve acquired: Primordial Lotus’s Blessing!]

[A Core is being formed!]

The System window had barely faded when Phei’s Soul Sea erupted.

The golden waters surged upward in a tidal wall that slammed against the boundaries of his Soul Realm, and the shock rolled through his body so hard that every meridian he possessed was wrenched open at once.

World Essence stampeded into them.

It came as a flood, thick enough that the air around his seated body bent and shimmered, and threads of golden lightning crawled across his skin in jagged arcs that hissed wherever they touched the light curtains.

Phei’s eyes snapped open, blazing amethyst.

Beneath his chest, a vortex began to spin.

It swallowed the Essence in his meridians in a single breath, and when that was not enough, it reached outward. The World Essence filling the sanctuary howled toward him from every direction, a golden maelstrom funneling into one point within his body. The light curtains of the Primordial Lotus bent inward like sails in a gale. Glowing cracks raced across the ground beneath him. Far below, the ancient trees of the Endless Forest bowed toward the sanctuary as though the whole land had been forced to kneel.

The vortex turned once, and his aura doubled.

It turned again, and the space around him splintered like struck glass before sealing itself shut.

It turned a third time, and the phantom of the Cosmic Dragon tore free from his back, its colossal body coiling through the golden storm, its amethyst eyes burning down at the world. It threw back its head in a soundless roar, and every drop of Essence in the sanctuary shivered in answer.

Phei clenched his fist, and the storm stood still.

’More, it was like something deep inside him was demanding. ’Give me more.’

Buried in the heart of the vortex, he felt a strand of power unlike anything he had ever touched. It was pure, blindingly so, and yet wherever it brushed his Essence, that Essence changed. Its law was rewritten from the root, as if something had reached into the truth of it and decided it should become something else, and the Essence obeyed without a whisper of resistance—

One word rose in his mind—

’Corruption!’

Phei’s lips curled. "And what the hell are you supposed to be?"

While the System gave no answer but the Primordial Lotus did.

The white-gold curtains blazed until their folds melted into a single wall of radiance, and the golden light beneath him gathered under his body.

Phei began to rise high.

He frowned; he had not willed it.

Flight was nothing to him now. The instinct sat in his bones, and his Essence alone would carry him in any direction at a thought without actual flying himself.

He attempted to stop, purely to see what would happen.

Nothing happened; he kept rising at the same calm, unhurried pace, as though his command had been a fly buzzing at the ear of a god.

Phei looked up, then down, and clicked his tongue. "Fine. Carry me, then."

The world fell away.

Gold swallowed everything. When he looked down at himself, he could barely make out the shape of his own limbs. His veins had become rivers of molten light, a web of finer threads blazing between them, and World Essence poured through him so densely that parts of his body had turned translucent, luminous to the core.

Strands of his long white hair caught the light and flashed pale gold as they drifted.

He reached out with True Void Sense—

—it struck a wall.

Phei’s expression changed. His sense had pierced mountains, seas and the Void itself. A breath ago he could have swept across the Endless Forest, through Eira’s barrier that stretched for hundreds of kilometers, and over half of Hell’s Paradise Island without effort. Walls meant nothing to his perception, and neither did darkness or concealment.

Now it reached barely past his own skin.

The Primordial Lotus had not drowned out his senses. It had sealed them, cleanly and completely so, as if a hand had closed over every eye he possessed.

A thread of cold slid down Phei’s spine.

He was used to knowing everything around him.

Thousands of presences rested in his awareness like stars in a night sky, hidden places betrayed themselves through ripples in the Void, and the faintest stir of Essence told him more than any eye could.

Now he was blind in every direction but one.

Up.

Phei raised his head.

The world snapped into perfect clarity, and his breath caught.

The Primordial Lotus filled the heavens.

What Eira and the others had seen from outside was a shadow of the truth—

Above him, the great flower spread across the entire sky, each white-gold petal built from countless translucent layers stacked in radiant depths, golden veins branching through them like the roots of a world tree, blazing near the center and thinning to threads finer than silk along the edges.

At its heart burned a white star of such purity that any other cultivator would have been blinded on the spot, yet the same power that had sealed his senses let Phei stare straight into it.

Curtains of white-gold light poured down from that heart in vast, slow folds.

One brushed his shoulder as he rose, and the touch felt less like power striking him than power recognizing him. Golden motes swam through the curtains like stars adrift in amber mist, and orbs of condensed World Essence hung among them like distant suns in a private heaven.

"So that’s the Primordial Lotus. What is it anyway?" Phei murmured.

Certainty answered him, and it sank into him so deeply that he never thought to question it.

His legs were still folded beneath him.

Being carried up to a celestial flower while sitting like a temple acolyte waiting for his blessing was starting to grate on him, so he unfolded them and stood on empty air.

It held him as firmly as stone, and the Lotus kept lifting him.

He glanced down. The ground was gone, lost somewhere below an ocean of gold. Eira, the Dragon Lady, the Undead Queen, Cassiopeia and his newest slave Marcus were all down there, and he could not sense a single one of them.

Only light remained.

World Essence still poured out of him in quantities that made his old reserves look like a puddle beside the sea. Golden currents spiraled up around him in great coils and vanished into the curtains. Smaller streams traced the lines of his arms and legs, and orbs of light kept condensing around him like newborn stars, lingering for a few breaths before unraveling into finer threads.

The vortex in his chest spun faster with every heartbeat, and each pulse came heavier than the last. Whatever Core the System claimed was forming there was feeding on far more than Essence.

As he climbed, the storm around him changed. The raging torrents fell into order, the golden spirals smoothed into perfect arcs, and the scattered orbs settled into fixed orbits until a whole golden firmament wheeled around him in slow, majestic circles.

All of it revolved around one still point—

Him!

—the Lotus opened.