Merin suddenly comes to a halt after three days of climbing the gravity mountain.
The air is thin, each breath heavy, yet his spirit remains calm. From the shadows of the jagged rock walls, three figures emerge, their skin black and glistening like polished obsidian, their eyes dull and stony as if carved from mountains.
They fan out, surrounding him.
"Give everything you have or die," one growls, voice coarse like grinding boulders.
Merin's gaze sweeps across them, sharp, unshaken. "I don't think so."
The three lunge at once, movements deceptively fast for their burly frames. Their auras blaze—each of them half-step Great Tao Lord realm.
The oppressive gravity hides their presence until now; even Merin's perception had slipped.
His body strains, his spirit compressed under the mountain's pull.
Against three men stronger than him, he should release the illusion space to suppress them.
But he does not.
Instead, he steps forward, destruction fist blazing. The first clash shakes the cliffside, shards of stone raining down.
He parries, strikes, evades—using only the raw power of his fists. Each movement is deliberate, each blow honing the destruction fist further.
The seventh move, Space Shatter Fist, crashes through the air, but against their combined might, it falls short.
He realises mid-battle that space will not yield him further insight without a deeper grasp of its law. But destruction—destruction can still be refined.
The path opens in his mind. The five elemental fists are incomplete.
To deepen destruction, he must first deepen the five elements, then invert them, sharpen them, and feed them into annihilation itself.
His fists grow heavier, sharper, each strike burning with layered intent.
The three attackers falter, forced back as cracks form on their glistening bodies.
With every exchange, his aura swells, the edge of devil energy seeping out like blood in water.
It coils around him, dark and suffocating, his eyes flickering with a crimson glint.
The three men suddenly freeze mid-step. Their stone-like eyes widen, and horror twists across their faces.
"Devil!" they scream, voices cracking with terror, but their terror hardens into grim resolve.
The three surge forward, their attacks doubling in ferocity, each blow carrying the weight of their intent to die with him.
Merin parries and strikes back, but the mounting wounds tear across his body, blood hissing under the gravity's pressure.
"Are devils… the public enemy of this race?" he wonders grimly between clashes. Their faces show no greed now, only hatred, only desperation.
Their race is unknown to him, but one thing is certain—they are not human.
Another strike hammers into his ribs, nearly caving his chest. His knees threaten to buckle. For the first time, the tide of battle leans against him.
Merin exhales slowly. His eyes flash cold.
The illusion field bursts forth.
The world shifts—the air thickens, sound dulls, colours warp.
Their strength plummets under the weight of his domain, every movement slowed, every strike weakened. Panic erupts in their eyes.
"Domain!" one of them shrieks, his stone-like face twisting. Fear replaces hatred as they stagger under the suppression.
Merin whispers to himself, "Domain…" tasting the word, anchoring it deeper into his Tao.
Resolve steels in his gaze. "I should keep one alive to search its memory."
He moves like a storm—destruction fists exploding, tearing through their defences. Bones crack, black skin shatters.
Two fall, their bodies breaking apart under his relentless assault.
The last one stumbles back, gasping, but before he can flee, Merin's fist punches through his chest.
His body convulses, then stills.
Merin's illusion space coils tighter, absorbing the flickering soul, dragging it screaming into his domain.
When the corpse collapses, it is no longer a burly figure but a sculpted human form of pure black diamond, light glinting eerily off its facets.
He stares at it, recognition flashing in his mind. He has read of this race before—the Black Crystal Race, an ancient, hostile people.
Merin wastes no time.
He melts into the shadows, travelling along the winding mountain path until he finds a hollow hidden by jagged stone.
He seals the cave with a palm strike, sits cross-legged, and lets silence fill the space.
Merin sinks deeper into the Black Crystal's soul, threads of memory unravelling before him like strands of fog.
Immediately, he encounters walls—hard, impenetrable restrictions.
Their presence is clear: to prevent foreign eyes from uncovering the most sensitive truths.
He tests them once, twice, but each strike of will threatens to tear the soul apart. If he forces it, the memory will collapse into nothingness.
So he lets it go.
Instead, he drifts through what remains open.
Images flow into his mind—mountains of shattered weapons, rivers of blood-soaked soil, countless races clashing within the Battlefield Realm.
The rules are cruel but strangely ordered: everyone is an opponent, yet battle does not always end in slaughter.
Unless hatred is irreconcilable, combatants exchange blows, strip wealth, and then part ways.
The strong rarely stoop to erase the weak, for such action breeds enmity and wastes energy better spent on worthy prey.
The Black Crystals were no different.
At first, they only intended to crush him, rob him, and leave him alive enough to crawl away.
But then came the shift.
He sees their memory of the moment—the instant they perceived the aura of devil energy leaking from his body.
Their eyes widened, their blood quickened, their hearts turned to iron. Fear and hatred fused into a single conviction.
"Devil…"
In their belief, devils do not forgive, do not spare, do not bargain.
A devil is not an opponent—it is a doom that consumes all.
Once one reveals himself as a devil, he is marked for extermination, no matter his realm, no matter his strength.
That is why they threw away the thought of robbery and chose only death—his or theirs.
Merin exhales slowly, opening his eyes in the dark cave.
"So, that's it…"
His aura swirls faintly, black and crimson light pulsing.
The knowledge sits heavy in his chest—within this realm, his devil taint will not only make him a target, it will mark him as something beyond an enemy: something that must be destroyed.
They will die anyway, so why not take the devil with them while dying—this bitter logic repeats in the Black Crystal's memory until Merin recoils.
He learns of domains next: an application of Dao wielded only by those whose Dao has reached Saint rank, a kind of personal cosmos that rewrites law inside its boundary.
"Mine is not a domain," he tells himself, cold and precise, "but a release of the illusion space's power."
He continues through the soul's sequence and finds maps and road-logs—after crossing this mountain range, the path leads into Jinji City.
Entry is not free: the city exacts a toll of ten high-rank beast cores or equivalent resources from any who would pass its gates.
Now the old logic of the Black Crystals becomes ugly and simple: they looted not for cruelty but for survival and profit—beast cores buy you entrance, protection, place, and trade in the Battlefield Realm.
Merin's jaw tightens; to gather high-rank beast cores, he must hunt Tao Lord and Great Tao Lord realm beasts—same rank as the cores' value, but the purity and yield are far greater from those of higher cultivation.
He looks at the dim black diamond figure, the last residue of will bound in his illusion space, and the thought cuts sharp in his mind—what to do with it now?
He cannot absorb it; his cultivation is locked, and worse, every soul he devours feeds the shadow inside him, thickening the grip of the inner devil.
His imaginary eyes shine through the false sky of his illusion space, and an old saying surfaces: When one man believes a lie, it remains a lie. But when a thousand believe it, the lie becomes truth.
His gaze drifts across the barren landmass surrounded by an endless ocean—the shell of his Tao, beautiful yet hollow.
If I can make these souls believe… if I can convince them this space is real, if they act, live, and struggle within it as though it is their world… will the illusion itself cross into truth?
He doesn't know if it's possible. It might be madness. Yet without trying, he'll never know whether the path forward for his Tao lies not in shaping laws but in shaping belief.
So he turns back to the black diamond soul and whispers within the illusion, "Live. Walk. Believe this is the world."
The figure stirs faintly, not with awareness but with response, the first ripple in the empty sea of his imagined realm.
He thinks—one soul is not enough; I need many, and if enough minds accept this place as real, perhaps the illusion will stop being only mine and become theirs, and what they believe may reshape it into reality.
Interaction speeds belief—people who live, work, and argue together convince one another faster than solitary dreaming ever could—so he begins planning how to turn the illusion into a social world.
An idea flashes: borrow a familiar scaffold from Earth to seed roles, rituals, and emotional hooks—what about a story like Naruto?
He admits the truth to himself: he likes Naruto, and if he could translate its core mechanics into his world—no verbatim copying, only archetypes and systems—it might give the illusion instant coherence.
More than nostalgia, there is utility: a world shaped around the dualities of yin and yang, hidden lineages, and transformational techniques could help him pursue something like the Ōtsutsuki bloodline—not as literal canon, but as a mythic template that provides a path to a Yin–Yang transformation technique.
That technique would not directly make him stronger, but it could deepen his understanding of the five elements and the conversion of energy into matter, and the mythic bloodline motif could be used to justify improvements in his spiritual body.
He knows the risks—this is a scaffold, not a copy—yet the payoff is clear: a coherent social narrative will accelerate belief, and belief is the crucible that might turn his illusion into a living world.