Aspiring to the Immortal Path
chapter-712

In Tang Jie's second year in the grasslands, Tigerhead died.

It had been injured in a hunt, and the burden of its injury ultimately had it following in its mother's footsteps, starving to death, becoming the first failure among Tang Jie's countless adopted children.

Half a year later, an ape that Tang Jie had adopted became food for a fiend.

Spiritfang fared better. After becoming an adult, it found a partner and had two litters of cubs, most of which survived, all except one, who ran off in the middle of the night and never came back.

Tang Jie's three adopted lions also began to grow up.

They quickly separated and set up their own families.

In Tang Jie's fifth year in the grasslands, Sharpclaw died.

It had died in an internal fight, losing in a fight over mates with another lion. Injured, it had ultimately died in the wilderness, devoured by a pack of wolves.

Two wolf cubs that Tang Jie had raised also died in the same year. In the third year, Tang Jie adopted twelve different kinds of animals, and in that same amount of time, he lost eleven.

In the tenth year, the first eaglet he had adopted, Skyfeather, died.

It had died in a very theatrical manner. While hunting, it had rammed into a tree branch and crashed into the ground. It hadn't been badly injured and would have only needed a little rest to take flight again, but the heavens gave it no such opportunity—it had run into a lion.

Bladescar.

Bladescar had callously devoured it.

One of Tang Jie's adopted children had eaten another one of his adopted children.

At the time, Tang Jie had been watching from three thousand meters away. Even though he could alter the situation with a flick of his fingers, he did nothing.

In his twelfth year in the grasslands, Spotted Hide died.

It had died in the mouth of a fiend, becoming the second of Tang Jie's adopted children to go this way.

By this time, Bladescar's lion pride was the largest in the grasslands, but Bladescar was old. Lions didn't have short lives, and a wild lion could normally live to seventeen. But in reality, few lions lived this long. For Bladescar, the good times would not last for much longer.

Soon, it was challenged by a younger lion and died in the fight.

From that day, Tang Jie stopped adopting animals.

Spiritfang was still alive.

This cheetah cub that Tang Jie had come to know the earliest was still running about the grasslands, hunting and mating. Even though it was old, it was as hale and hearty as ever, swiftly hunting and bravely fighting. It fought against wolves to protect its food, even fought against lions once.

It was a smart, courageous, stubborn and tenacious existence.

Tang Jie had gone to see it once. Spiritfang still remembered him, excitedly running over and playing around in his embrace. It had even introduced him to its wife, a very beautiful mother cheetah.

Three days later, despite Spiritfang's reluctance, Tang Jie left.

In the fifteenth year, Spiritfang advanced.

It became a fiend, a lower-grade Spirit Sensing cheetah fiend. It had transcended the limits of beasts and started off on the road to intelligence. Age was no longer its limiter, and it became young and strong once more.

It was Tang Jie's first adopted child to become a fiend.

Through Spiritfang, Tang Jie came to understand how fiends came to be.

They were born from the world and didn't understand how to cultivate. But they struggled and fought to survive in the world, responding to the world in their own fashion.

And this was cultivation!

For the countless beasts, struggling in this world was a form of cultivation, as if they lived to cultivate.

In the process of struggle, their energies melded with the energies of the world, and their strength began to grow. When this melding reached a certain point, their power would surge through a bottleneck, and they would advance from ordinary creatures into fiends.

The scene at that moment was beautiful to behold.

Tang Jie saw with his own eyes Spiritfang becoming a fiend. Through his Eye of Insight, he could see every alteration to its body, understanding why and for what reason they came to be.

Few people observed the birth of a fiend in such detail.

But Tang Jie had done so, and when Spiritfang became a fiend, Tang Jie felt his own soul being refined.

He felt like he had comprehended something, but he couldn't describe what it was.

It was only when he had a call with Xu Miaoran that he discovered that his call was able to last much longer.

Planting willows without intention was perhaps the true way to comprehend and use Fate.

(TN: The opposite of "planting willows without intention" is "intentionally planting flowers", with the result being that the flowers do not grow while the willows create shade, the meaning being that intentionality can sometimes result in poor results while lack of intention can sometimes lead to a pleasant surprise.)

Starting from that day, Tang Jie changed his way of dealing with things.

He began to intentionally pluck the threads of Fate.

A small fox kit was left orphaned after the death of its parents.

Tang Jie didn't adopt it, instead quietly waiting. A pride of lions passed through the area and saw the little fox. In normal circumstances, they would eat the fox, but when Tang Jie plucked the string of Fate, the lions changed their minds and adopted the little fox, taking Tang Jie's place as the adopted parents.

Not long after that, Tang Jie encountered similar incidents.

He had a zebra adopt an antelope, an ape adopt a mole, and even a hippo adopt an alligator.

Of course, this random matching rarely resulted in anything good. Most of these parents didn't know how to raise their new children, trying their usual methods and ultimately losing these adopted children in various ways.

The mole didn't eat the food provided by the ape, which made it uneasy, but the mole didn't starve to death. Instead, it fell from the ape's tree to its death.

The little alligator was trampled to death by the hippo, that large and clumsy fellow not even noticing that it had crushed its child.

The little antelope suffered the most unjust death. The herd of zebras had disregarded the difference in height when fording a river, so it had drowned to death.

Only the fox had lived to adulthood, but then died when hunting a large herbivore—a zebra had given it a kick, causing it to die within two hours.

Tang Jie's adoption plan ended in failure.

But he was not dispirited.

Since cross-species adoption was no good, what about cross-species mating?

Thus, the Hulunta Grasslands was swept by a storm of cross-species romance—wolves and hyenas, vultures and golden eagles, leopards and lions, even rhinos and hippos, yellow deer and giraffes.

A jackal fell in love with a female elephant. It desperately tried to get onto the elephant's back and get its tool into the elephant's body. But this was too difficult, and it ended up being stomped to death by the elephant before it could accomplish this challenging mission.

Most of the cross-species marriages ended poorly. Even if they succeeded in mating, they didn't produce any descendants.

But there were some successes.

By Tang Jie's eighteenth year here, the Hulunta Grasslands had become a world full of oddities.

The Web of Fate here had turned into a complete mess, almost every species being involved in some unusual relationship, resulting in all kinds of special friendships and romances, producing countless unimaginable results.

All kinds of never-before-seen and fantastical creatures roamed about the grasslands, turning the world into a dazzling and eye-catching place. Even Tang Jie, the culprit behind all this, sometimes couldn't tell what was what.

In this time, Yiyi came to see Tang Jie twice, and she was dumbfounded by Tang Jie's work.

This sort of nonsensical matchmaking actually tended to produce a kind of delight and thrill that came from the sheer unexpectedness of it all, so she caught a lion wolf as her pet and also took a leopard fox with her to serve as Lin Xin's pet. Alas, not long after they left the grasslands, they died.

So Yiyi went and got a few more, but none of them were able to survive.

This made Tang Jie realize that the creatures living on the grasslands might no longer be suitable for the outside world.

It wasn't because of some environmental factor, but something else: the Web of Fate.

A distorted Web of Fate covered the Hulunta Grasslands, making everything here different.

Tang Jie had spent twenty years weaving this web.

It represented Tang Jie's will, directly manifesting his will on the grasslands.

The moment this web was completed, if Tang Jie wanted to do anything, he simply needed to pluck a thread to have it done.

There was no need to take direct action.

Tang Jie was enlightened.

This was the Dao of Fate!

Comprehending the Dao had allowed him to see the Fate that was woven through the world.

But the threads of Fate were not unchangeable. They could be plucked, used, cut, twisted, even replaced.

Twenty years of wandering the Hulunta Grasslands, dancing with the wolves, had allowed Tang Jie to inadvertently weave his first Web of Fate.

Here, his will was all.

If he wanted to, he could even use spell arts as a Violet Palace cultivator could, lightly plucking the threads of Fate to instantly cast arts.

One could say that this was his home court. If he fought here, he needn't fear Violet Palace cultivators.

Of course, this didn't mean he was invincible.

The moment the Web of Fate was formed over the Hulunta Grasslands, it was under assault from the greater world's Web of Fate.

It was able to persist because Tang Jie was constantly weaving and had woven for twenty years.

If Tang Jie stopped or left, all this would dissipate.

Twisted Fate would gradually be righted and assimilated by the world's original Fate.

Fate was always moving in a certain direction. If you were not assimilating it, it was assimilating you.

If Tang Jie could weave his Web of Fate across the entire Verdant Cloud Domain, then he might really become the king of the world.

But this was too vast and too difficult, and even if he could do it, beyond the Verdant Cloud Domain was an even greater Web of Fate that would encroach upon it—the Great Stellar Chiliocosm's.

When the first Web of Fate over the Hulunta Grasslands was completed, a group of Dao Runes silently appeared on Tang Jie's heart.

Not one, but a group.

This was a sign that the Dao of Fate had been realized, not because of the Dao Standard, but because Tang Jie had entered the Dao through his own understanding.

But Tang Jie didn't care.

Transcendence did not seek results. It was about enjoying the process, with the result simply being something that appeared at the end of the process—Tang Jie hadn't even bothered to count the number of Dao Runes.

He continued to roam the grasslands.

He stopped trying to weave Fate, instead watching as it disappeared, as the Verdant Cloud Domain's Web of Fate invaded and restored everything back to normal.

The grasslands began to calm down, gaining back their former serenity.

There were rises and falls, losses and gains.

Tang Jie had weaved his first Web of Fate and watched it trend toward oblivion.

The twenty-third year in the grasslands.

The last friend Tang Jie had made in the grasslands, a mutant badger bear, died of illness.

After burying it, Tang Jie left this place, leaving the Hulunta Grasslands for other lands.