Chapter 26: Not Falling into Madness, This Is Called Enlightenment
"Mother, Mother..."
"No, don't… not my child."
"Kill me! I'm willing to trade my life for—"
Li Tianwei slightly furrowed his brows as he looked at the continuously appearing scenes before his eyes.
Under the condensation of that filthy resentful aura, scenes of what the ten thousand resentful souls had experienced appeared vividly before Li Tianwei's eyes.
He saw a mother being skinned alive, her bones picked clean, tortured, and hung to dry.
He saw another woman, pregnant for ten months and about to give birth, cutting open her own belly with her own hands…
All kinds of scenes condensed from endless sins, and most crucially—he was forced to view them from the perspective of the murderer.
He became the one those souls hated, as though all their pain and sin had been forged by his own hands.
"I want you dead! I hate you—!"
"Why did you kill my wife and children? We revered you as Immortals—why treat us this way?"
"I just wanted to farm my land—why did you seize it?"
"It rained! The drought is over! But our fields were already sold to them. Now that the rain comes, we've become serfs for life…"
Soft whispers echoed, one scene after another, like visions from hell itself.
Li Tianwei could hardly imagine such things being born of the world's spiritual energy.
But after thinking it through, he found it not entirely impossible—after all, this was a fantasy world.
Things like the collective will of living beings or the faith of all creatures influencing heaven and earth were quite possible.
From his current insight, Li Tianwei thought of a possibility—that the people of this world were mired in suffering, and that was why such anomalies appeared in the very aura of heaven and earth.
And comprehending Dao Intent was nothing more than grasping a flash of spiritual understanding.
Now, witnessing such heart-wrenching and horrifying scenes, Li Tianwei couldn't help but tremble inwardly.
"I hate you! Why did I revere you cultivators only to meet such a wretched end!"
As Li Tianwei's thoughts drifted, one of the countless phantoms suddenly lunged at him with a twisted face.
The instant Li Tianwei saw it coming, his heart went cold, and a chilling, hair-raising sensation spread across his body.
His originally pure Spirit Platform, under the influence of this dense aura, began to show mottled stains, as if mold were spreading across it.
Sensing the sudden change, Li Tianwei realized something was wrong. But those remnants of souls paid no heed to his thoughts.
"Die! Die—!"
"We want you dead—!"
Those remnants screamed as they lunged toward him again and again.
Soon, Li Tianwei's Spirit Platform was covered in a layer of filth.
Meanwhile, outside, Li Tianwei—who was sitting cross-legged in meditation—had turned completely black-faced, his body radiating ominous and evil energy.
That heavy, corrupt aura capable of polluting all things surged outward.
The Book Spirit, seeing this, knew that Li Tianwei had been thoroughly tainted by the filthy resentment.
He was beyond salvation.
In the era when it followed Immortal Tianyuan, anyone afflicted by such corruption had only one fate—to be completely transformed into a devil.
The Book Spirit even wondered if its earlier words had come true; it had just scolded Li Tianwei for being a devil, and now he truly was becoming one.
As for Li Tianwei himself, who had been assaulted by those remnant souls, his Spirit Platform had been completely corrupted.
The filth even began to spread toward his Spiritual Root. His already dull and dim Five-Colored False Spiritual Root became shrouded in a layer of gray mist.
If a powerful cultivator were here and examined Li Tianwei's condition, they would likely reach only one conclusion—there was no saving him.
A tainted Spirit Platform, a clouded Spiritual Root—forget cultivation, even his heart would fall into madness, turning him into a lunatic.
In this state of utter collapse, Li Tianwei found himself in a predicament unlike anything he had ever faced.
In an instant, he became those countless remnant souls, experiencing all that they had suffered.
The moments of being skinned and dismembered, the destruction of one's family, the helplessness in the face of a cultivator's slaughter—
Scenes enough to drive anyone into despair and annihilation.
Even a cultivator with a Dao Heart as firm as stone would find it unbearable.
This was no longer training one's heart—it was pure torture.
Yes, torture.
Personally experiencing the torment of ten thousand resentful souls.
It was evident from this that the cultivators of the Sacred Land of Baiyuan who forged the Soul-Corrupting Banner were truly ruthless, giving no chance of resistance to any cultivator affected by it.
At that moment, sweat poured down from Li Tianwei's forehead, his body trembling from the unending torment.
Even the surrounding spiritual energy began to churn and surge violently.
As the ferocious remnants lunged at him, Li Tianwei truly fell into an endless, nightmarish world.
Endless torment engulfed him.
In that moment, not even the most hardened devil cultivators, who had endured countless brutal trials, could have withstood such suffering.
Yet Li Tianwei was an exceptionally strange man—an absurdly self-assured one.
He could believe himself a genius, so obsessed with his own worldview that he even believed his False Spiritual Root to be a Heavenly Spiritual Root.
Self-deluded, arrogant, self-centered, and utterly serious about it.
Now, faced with this bizarre situation, he didn't think it was his problem at all.
Because in his mind—this was enlightenment.
Yes, he believed he was having an epiphany, a moment of enlightenment toward Dao Intent.
After all, he had read so many novels and knew how special protagonists were.
This kind of immersive torment, this baptism of suffering—it could only be enlightenment, couldn't it?
If not enlightenment, how could it feel so real?
So rather than fear or despair, Li Tianwei felt excitement—eager anticipation, even.
If it were any other cultivator, they would have already collapsed in despair.
But Li Tianwei instead regarded it as enlightenment.
Once he realized this, he was no longer afraid.
To achieve enlightenment, one must feel with one's heart.
For a man with a "Heavenly Root," wasn't enlightenment perfectly natural?
Thus, Li Tianwei fearlessly faced the phantoms head-on.
He not only experienced their despair and suffering but also savored it carefully—afraid to miss even the slightest detail.
"So real… so real… this is enlightenment!"
Feeling his body being torn apart once more, the despair of a broken family—Li Tianwei couldn't help but sigh in awe.
He refused to waste such an experience and immediately began comprehending within it.
Since he had attained enlightenment, he had to grasp Dao Intent within.
And so, amid this relentless assault, Li Tianwei, with his unwavering belief that this was enlightenment, remained lucid.
No matter how the filthy resentment battered him, no matter how stained his Spirit Platform became, he stayed conscious.
The life of ten thousand souls—ten thousand cycles of agony and despair—he experienced them all, savoring each one.
Under such accumulation, even a fool could comprehend something.
Normally, no cultivator would dare such a thing—it was far too risky.
Ten thousand lifetimes of torment…
But Li Tianwei dove deeper still, hypnotized by his own belief in enlightenment.
Greed, anger, delusion, hatred, love…
Every human emotion circled endlessly in his mind.
Among them, hatred, malice, resentment, venom, and suffering were the strongest.
Originally, Li Tianwei had intended to comprehend the Dao of Five Elements through his Five-Element Spiritual Root.
But instead, in this "enlightenment," he touched something entirely different—
The collective thoughts and will of all living beings in heaven and earth.
"As expected, I'm a genius…"
Li Tianwei felt no surprise at all—only that it was natural, inevitable.
After all, his talent was just that extraordinary.
And so, beneath the corruption of the filthy resentment, within his so-called "enlightenment," Li Tianwei comprehended what he believed to be Dao Intent.
In his mind, the Three Thousand Dao Intents—were nothing more than things easily grasped.