Su Min still remembered every line of her face, the exact curve of her jaw, the subtle way her qi flowed, a pattern as familiar to her as her own breath. But now, after centuries, there was something undeniably different. It wasn't in her strength, which was at its peak, but in the quiet, relentless passage of time. The vibrant thread of Xie Yingying's life, once so strong and bright, was growing perceptibly thinner, like a silken cord worn by the years.
"If you can't break through," Su Min said, her voice gentle but firm, "there is still another path. I can create a sealed space for you, a completely safe and timeless place. You could sever your cultivation and start again from the very beginning. I can give you eleven years of guaranteed life, more than enough time to safely return to the Qi Refinement stage and begin anew."
Xie Yingying's breath caught in her throat, a soft, sharp sound in the quiet room. "You would make me start over? After all I have achieved?"
"I'm offering you a way to live longer, to have more time," Su Min replied. Her voice didn't waver, but her eyes, usually so composed, softened with a profound and ancient sorrow. "You won't reach the Transcendence stage. Not with your current physique. Not with the way the heavenly laws of this world are shaped. But you don't have to simply disappear. You don't have to fade away into nothingness when your time comes."
It was not just advice. It was an invitation. A promise sealed with a look.
A quiet, desperate plea.
She knew exactly how much Xie Yingying had already sacrificed for her, how many years she had spent waiting and guarding. She knew what it meant to ask for more. But she also knew with chilling certainty what would happen if she said nothing. Xie Yingying would stay by her side. She would burn through her remaining lifespan trying to keep pace with Su Min's impossible journey, pouring her energy into a vessel with a fixed limit. And she would die, her potential unfulfilled.
Su Min had never told her about the immortality talent, the secret at her core. Had never explained why she could disappear for millennia without a single fear, why she never seemed to be in a rush, even when the world itself was on fire. She couldn't say it. Not yet. Because if she did, Xie Yingying would follow her to the very ends of time itself, binding her mortal fate to Su Min's infinite one. And Su Min wasn't sure her own heart could bear the weight of that responsibility, of watching the one she loved most grow old and fade while she remained unchanged.
"And you?" Xie Yingying asked. Her tone was steady, carefully controlled, but there was a universe of emotion behind it. Fear, perhaps. Or a grief she refused to show, a sadness for the divergent paths that lay ahead.
"I will go further," Su Min said, her gaze turning inward, toward a distant, unimaginable horizon. "This is only the beginning for me. I have time, Yingying. More time than anyone else. I can wait through the long, dark nights of the cosmos. I can rebuild myself again and again, from the ground up, until I find the answer, until I break through every ceiling." Su Min stepped closer, closing the small distance between them. She reached out and touched Xie Yingying's cheek, her hand warm and steady.
"That's why I will prepare everything for you. You can rest. You can sleep in stasis. You can start again if you choose to. I won't force you. I just…" She stopped, the words catching. Words hovered on her tongue, unspoken. Not 'I miss you.' Not 'I need you.' Something quieter, deeper, and more vulnerable. "I don't want you to disappear," she said finally, the admission simple and stark.
Xie Yingying's lips trembled slightly, but she held Su Min's gaze and gave a slow, accepting nod. "Then let me stay by your side, just a little longer. Before I sleep."
Su Min gave a faint, genuine smile, a rare sight that lit her features. "That's all I need."
They didn't speak of love aloud. They didn't need to. It filled the space between them, a tangible, weightless, and impossible force. For now, they would simply walk together, sharing the same path. Until time itself pulled them apart once more. And when that day came, would they find their way back to each other? They would. As they always did.
Moreover, Mahayana stage cultivators couldn't be placed into simple stasis seals, at least, not with the current level of techniques and power available. Therefore, Su Min couldn't rely too heavily on Xie Yingying's abilities to protect her during her future severances. Besides, Su Min was more than capable of shielding her own presence from heavenly scrutiny and any other prying eyes. As long as she remained sufficiently hidden and careful, there shouldn't be any major issues.
"Great Desolate Martial Sage, Tian Hao, requests an audience."
Just then, Su Min paused slightly as a powerful, familiar aura descended from the sky towards the Immortal Gate. At the same time, she received a mental message from the current sect master informing her of the visitor. Lin Yao had already stepped down from her position as sect leader to focus entirely on her cultivation and was now at a critical stage of breaking through to the Mahayana stage herself. After all, the role of sect master was mostly ceremonial and administrative. With so many trivial matters to handle and no major crises at the moment, a capable Dao Comprehension stage cultivator was more than enough to manage the sect's daily affairs.
"I'll go meet him. He might have already guessed something about my long absence." With that, Su Min's figure vanished from the courtyard, reappearing instantly inside the sect's grand reception hall. There, a young man sat quietly in a guest chair, his mere breathing causing the spiritual energy in the entire hall to tremble in resonance with his power.
"Congratulations on reaching the pinnacle of this world. You're now truly invincible here." Su Min teased Tian Hao with a slight smile as she took the seat opposite him.
"And then the enemies come from the heavens, right? Besides, I'm no match for you, and we both know it." Tian Hao shot back with a wry remark. Su Min had disappeared for nearly a thousand years, and no one had known where she had gone or what she had been doing. He had only realized she had returned when the special communication artifact she had left him finally lit up again after so long. That was why he had rushed to the Immortal Gate immediately.
In truth, he felt somewhat conflicted. Su Min was the kind of existence that had left everyone in this era feeling speechless and inadequate. No one had dared to compete with her for the heavenly imprint, yet she had not even glanced at it. In the end, he had been the one to seize the opportunity after a brutal war. But now that he had ascended to this position of ultimate power in the world, he felt nothing but a deep sense of despair.
If he had never seen the true power of those immortals from the Nether Prison, it might have been different. But since he had, he couldn't help but feel deeply unwilling, knowing a higher realm was locked away from him. He had come to Su Min to seek the true path to immortality, hoping against hope that she had a method she hadn't yet shared.
"If you wish to become a true immortal, you must endure life after life of reincarnation in this vast mortal world, accumulating merit and power each time. Alternatively, you can seek out Yao Xian'er and try her method of self severance, but I warn you, it's a razor's edge." Su Min had no other, easier solutions to offer him. Since he had already reached the Transcendence stage, the slower, safer method of repeated rebirth she had used before wouldn't work for him anymore.
He would either have to continuously break through his limits, surviving lifetime after lifetime with all their inherent risks, or face complete annihilation if he failed. As for Yao Xian'er's method, it was far too dangerous for someone of his constitution and mindset. And if he dared to try and become a fallen cultivator to extend his life, well, that would be the end of him. Did he really think this was still the lawless era of decay? Anyone who tried to sever their cultivation in such a reckless, demonic way would be hunted down and killed by the united forces of the righteous sects.
Not everyone had the same capabilities as those from the mysterious Black Seal faction. Those individuals had clearly received direct support and power from the Nether Prison itself. But now, that passage had been destroyed by Su Min, using the corpses of the seven immortals as the core materials for the seal. Unless one became an immortal, and a high level one at that, no one could break that seal from the inside. Not even Tian Hao in his current state.
"Sigh..." After hearing Su Min's blunt and unforgiving words, Tian Hao simply sighed deeply, the sound full of resignation. He then turned and left the hall without another word, his figure disappearing into a streak of light.
As for Su Min, she didn't stay at the Immortal Gate much longer after that. In the end, after much quiet discussion, Xie Yingying had chosen the path of self severance. With her foundation and willpower, if she had been born in the energy rich environment of the Nether Prison, she would have had enough potential to ascend to true immortality. Now, she was simply waiting for a better opportunity, a safer time to make that ultimate leap. Thus, Xie Yingying became the first in the sect to voluntarily sever her cultivation and be placed into a deep, timeless seal.
As for the little Golden Crow, she wasn't in a hurry. Her divine beast lifespan was far too long, measured in hundreds of thousands of years, and Su Min had no intention of rushing her into such a drastic decision.
After carefully sealing Xie Yingying away with her most powerful Chaos Seal, ensuring her safety for millennia to come, Su Min continued her own solitary journey. This time, she was even more ruthless with herself.
A mere mortal physique was no longer the focus of her experiment. She stripped her own spiritual foundation down further, leaving herself with only a Five Element Mixed Spiritual Root, the most common and difficult type to cultivate with. Frankly, the difficulty of cultivating with this kind of chaotic, unbalanced spiritual root was even greater than that of a pure mortal physique with no spiritual root at all. Although all Five Elements Holy Physiques were theoretically based on a Five Element Mixed Spiritual Root, the moment a single attribute was activated and mastered, it would immediately elevate to a Heavenly Spiritual Root while completely suppressing the others.
Su Min had faced and overcome this problem herself in her first life. The only saving grace back then had been that the initial Body Refining stage didn't depend on spiritual roots, and she had obtained the powerful Nanming Lihuo very early on, which had forced a fire attribute affinity.
But this time, deliberately using a pure, unaltered Five Element Mixed Spiritual Root was an enormous, self imposed challenge for Su Min. Her progress was excruciatingly slow, a crawl compared to her previous lives.
While the Body Refining stage only took her three months through sheer force of will, everything slowed to a painful crawl once she reached Qi Refining. Even so, she pressed forward, step by agonizing step, her progress measured in years where it had once been measured in days. In the end, it took her nearly ten thousand years to return to the Mahayana stage this time. There were even moments when she exceeded the normal lifespan limit for her cultivation stage, a testament to how difficult this path was.
Yet, after reaching Mahayana again and reintegrating her power, Su Min didn't linger or rest on her laurels. She chose to sever her cultivation once more, and this time, she was even more drastic, she cut off her very meridians, the pathways of energy within her body. She intended to reach the pinnacle with many different physiques, accumulating a unique and profound power with each iteration.
Every time she restored herself to the Mahayana stage, she was not just recovering, she was breaking through her own previous limits, building a deeper, more stable foundation. Over these ten thousand years, the world itself underwent its own dramatic rise and fall. After a glorious and peaceful reign of ten thousand years, the Great Desolate Martial Sage Tian Hao eventually disappeared from public view, seeking his own path in seclusion. No one knew where he had gone.
At some point, Yao Xian'er also arrived at the Immortal Gate, entrusted her partner, Jiang Xi, to their care, and then vanished from the world as well. Thus, the strongest figures of the golden age that had followed the end of the era of decay had all disappeared from the stage of history.
What followed was a new era of flourishing diversity and new powers. Each of these four individuals could have dominated an entire era on their own. But when they all converged in the same short period, they had completely overshadowed all other geniuses. Now, with their departure, everything returned to a relative silence, a new normal.
—
This time, however, Su Min's chosen path was even more arduous. She was now truly starting from a state of severed meridians, a condition most cultivators would consider a permanent crippling. It took her a full ten thousand years to painstakingly rebuild her meridian system and return to the Mahayana stage again.
But her journey didn't end there. Having mastered the three most difficult starting points, the mortal body, the mixed spiritual root, and the severed meridians, to their absolute limits, she turned her attention to various other special physiques. After all, the Chaos Body was said to encompass all things, to be the origin from which all other physiques were derived. She could theoretically strip away her own origin and restore herself to peak condition again and again, simulating different legendary physiques.
This time, she chose to evolve her foundational physique into the Spiritual Dao Body, Yao Xian'er's unique and powerful physique. This lifetime passed much faster, her profound prior knowledge allowing her to navigate its intricacies in only a thousand years.
Next came the Great Desolate Holy Body, which she mastered.
Then the Lunar Sovereign Body, which she already understood intimately from Xie Yingying.
And finally, she even successfully manifested the Solar Sovereign Body, the twin to the Lunar Sovereign, mastering all five major supreme physiques to their peak.
Her speed grew increasingly rapid with each iteration, especially with the Solar Sovereign Body, which took her only a few hundred years. This was because her internal power, her accumulated comprehension from countless lifetimes, had become overwhelmingly abundant, a deep ocean upon which to draw, especially after the first three most difficult lifetimes had restored her strength to its utmost limit.
Finally, this time, after mastering the fifth supreme physique, Su Min didn't choose to sever her cultivation again. She could feel it in her bones and soul, her power had reached its absolute peak, a summit she had been climbing towards for over twenty thousand years. There was no further refinement to be had through this method.
Now, Su Min knew with unwavering certainty, it was time to face those heavenly existences directly, to pass the final test. And so, on this day, a peculiar, primordial energy began to flow from the depths of the cosmos, gathering around her.
Every powerful being in the universe, every late stage Mahayana cultivator, widened their eyes in shock and awe. For they all sensed a vast, unimaginable heavenly might gathering above them in the void, a pressure that made their souls tremble.
It was Su Min's power, unleashed and calling forth its destiny. She had summoned the Heavenly Tribulation. The final ascent had begun.