Grand Ancestral Bloodlines
chapter-1841

1841 Three Begets All.

Ryu stared off into the distance, and he felt something stirring up inside of him. Across all his lives, his Temperaments were different, his thoughts, his dreams, his aspirations, they were all different. He had attempted to go against the Heavens many times before, and to varying degrees of success.

Sometimes he never left the Mortal Realms at all. Sometimes he would manage to become a Dao God and die many billions of years later.

Sometimes he would be a force for good, bringing brightness to the world. Sometimes he would be the greatest evil, doing things that even the current him would never dream of doing.

However, in all of these lives, there seemed to be certain things he could never do, no matter how many times he reincarnated.

Before, he had wanted to latch onto these things, trying to find a common line between them all that made Ryu, Ryu.

For example, he had never managed to rise above a monk and follow the Buddha Path. He was simply unable to lay down his selfishness, no matter how many millions of lives he waded through.

But then he understood that there was nothing to find. There was nothing to find because these people weren't him.

Even mortals struggled to fight against the Heavens in some sense, so even mortals were fighting to forge their Temperament.

Maybe there was something to find, and he was giving up too early. But there was a reason he had chosen to do so, regardless…

It didn't matter.

Even if he managed to narrow it down until he found one character trait, one through line between all his lives… if the scope was so narrow, who was to say that someone else didn't have the exact same inclination?

If he managed to find it, would it then be countless trillion souls that were the same as him, as opposed to countless trillions upon trillions?

But then there was the other path, the path of cultivation, the path of accepting the process, the path of understanding that even if it was the Heaven's intention to make all beings the same… it was then the duty of these very beings to forge something different for themselves.

Those people were no longer him. No, they were never him.

In this world, there was only one Ryu Tatsuya, and there would only ever be one Ryu Tatsuya.

And that wasn't because he was granted something, or blessed with something, or was lucky enough to receive something, but rather because he planned to take each step up that mountain with his own two feet.

By the time he reached the end, whatever influence the world would have had on him, whatever influence his environment or his circumstances might have granted him, would all be shed one after another.

To forge a Will. To forge a Temperament. To forge a Dao.

This was the process of cultivation. This was what it meant to slowly rise to the standard of a Dao God. What it meant to leave a lasting legacy that waded through time and existed throughout space. To be ubiquitous in all things and suppress even the Heavens themselves.

Ryu's eyes didn't glow like he had made some great achievement. If anything, his eyes were still a bit dim.

This didn't feel like all of his other breakthroughs because it felt like he had an impossible road ahead of him. To build a Temperament that truly existed beyond the Heavens themselves was a tall task, and it felt like the mountain before him had grown even taller.

However, while his eyes didn't grow brighter, they did grow sharper.

What Ryu hated the most about this situation was the lack of control.

He hated when others tested him because it felt like they were trying to pass judgment on his Fate without his input or his ask. He hated to explain himself because it felt like people were waiting to pass that very same judgment on him.

But in this case, the only one passing judgment on himself was him.

Was he scared to face that judgment? Or would he face it head-on?

Ryu's gaze became sharper and sharper, his intent growing to a point that was infinitesimally small and capable of cutting through everything.

He gazed down toward his body below through the eyes of his [Third Perspective]. He calmly faced it, his thoughts unreadable.

And then, his hands began to move. A complex array of hand seals moved with the fluidity of a master.

Ryu rarely used hand seals, but that didn't mean that he was incapable. And hand seals with his soul seemed to resonate with his body itself.

He had yet to complete the technique he had learned from those nine statues. Or, it was more accurate to say that he never truly accepted their legacy. He had grasped it all on his own, and now it was his turn to veer it toward the path he needed.

To separate himself from the influence of the Heavens… to rise to a point where his Temperament lay beyond his experiences and became the product of the man he wanted to be rather than the man he was designed to be…

His hands moved faster and faster as the world trembled.

One begets Two. Two begets Three. Three begets All Things.

'I will call this technique… [One Above All].'

The skies quaked, and the Holy World suddenly split in two at the seams. A power the likes of which Ryu hadn't felt since he gazed into the maw of the Phoenix Sky God appeared above him, but his gaze remained firm. In his focus, he didn't seem to notice at all.

His souls were odd, pulling him in all sorts of different ways and trying to control his body.

In that case, he would take his Three Incorporeal Souls and separate them, forming the Clones that he needed. However, they would remain one in the end… and together, they would be above All.

By keeping them separate, he would be able to feel the influence his Ego and his Dao Heart had on him simultaneously and steer them both.

He would create the first known technique to forge his Temperament.

And with it, he would rise to the top of the world.