Grand Ancestral Bloodlines
chapter-1844

1844 Already Given Up

Ryu's aura quickly became as calm as a lake. Standing there, he could finally look out of the eyes of his own body and it was a feeling that he never thought that he would have taken for granted before. But experiencing it now, had it not been the life-death situation he had just been in, he might very well have laughed.

However, the current Ryu was unable to laugh. Looking into the cracked skies above him, seeming as though the world might fall apart at any time, he realized just how small and insignificant he was. The mountain before him was actually so tall and imposing, so grand and all-consuming that he couldn't even see the peak.

In the past, he had thought that the only difference between him and the experts he chased was time. For most of them, that was true. But he should have realized after seeing his master and the Phoenix Sky God that not all things were just a matter of time for him.

For the first time in his life, he felt that he had well and truly failed. If not for his wife's interference, if he even still had a right to call her that, he would have fallen into a pit of absolute, no return.

He couldn't remember having ever felt this way before. Or maybe he had and had just been too arrogant in the past to admit it.

No… he truly had.

What was his first life if not that very same pit of despair? The only reason he stabbed that dagger through his heart was because he had given up. He had given up on relying on himself, given up on ever becoming the expert he dreamed of becoming, given up on his very own life…

There was no other way to describe it.

He had killed himself in hopes that someone else would save him, that the Phoenix Sky God would take pity on him and give him that path forward that he couldn't find or take himself.

He had shed tears back then not because he was so scared, or at the very least, it was not entirely because of this.

Instead, it was because somewhere deep inside, he knew that he had already lost… that he had become someone he disdained the most, someone who relied on others to take their next step, to give them the courage to fight.

And what had happened in his absence?

His grandparents died one after another. His father was separated from his wife and livelihood just to look for his unimpressive, pathetic son. His mother had sacrificed millions of years of her life just to seal the Shrine Plane and give them just the smallest bit of breathing room…

And for what?

There were mortals that managed to become Dao Gods in a single bound, and yet he, born into the Tatsuya Clan, given all the wealth and care in the world, felt that he couldn't do it?

He had a thousand years that he just completely and utterly wasted, while those mortals often had a hundred years at best to make that breakthrough.

They had succeeded where he failed despite the fact he had ten times the time. In fact, he gave up before he even started.

The day he entered the Tatsuya Clan Library, that day that he shut himself off from the world and chose to become an Herbologist, an Alchemist, a Ruin Master, a Formation Master… was the very same day that his path of cultivation in his first life was entirely cut off from him.

It took until today, and over a thousand years of life experienced, before he realized that.

He had spent so much time researching how to help others, how to improve their Spiritual Foundations, how to find Shrine, trying desperately to make himself useful in the eyes of a family who already saw him as the world… and all because he had already decided deep within his heart that he would never be able to cultivate.

The world he had seen in just the few years since he gained the ability to cultivate was so wide and expansive that he found it all laughable.

If his current mind was transferred into the body of his first life, he had a hundred different ways he could think of right this moment that would allow him to cultivate.

But was he really so stupid that he couldn't think of them back then?

There was only one reason.

He, Ryu Tatsuya, the man who claimed to have an iron will, who claimed to be above all things and superior to all life form, had given up long ago and he was so pathetic then that he hadn't even realized it.

With the path he was on, he never would have had the right to catch up to the Phoenix Sky God. He could have run as hard as he wanted, pretended to be as arrogant as he desired, and it still wouldn't have changed a single, solitary thing.

He was destined to be beneath their shadow for as many lifetimes as there were.

Ryu pressed a hand to his lower belly, still seemingly not noticing the world collapsing around him. He sensed the White Phoenix Spiritual Foundation, feeling every breath and essence of it.

"One day…" he said softly.

He removed his hand and then shot into the skies. His momentum was valiant, but his actions were even more so.

He grabbed out at the skies, and just when it seemed as though he would hit nothing but empty air, his fist clutched and the skies warped. As though he was pulling at the tarp of the skies, it folded and bent.

At that moment, his Inner World thrummed to life and everything seemed to be pulled into his embrace.

All the Faith of the World bent to his will and the Holy World was forced into submission.

There was no other path but obedience.

And then the bubble burst.