597 Transcends
A deep guilt weeded its way into the 25th White Mother’s heart. But, she grit her teeth and continued.
“This universe… Your universe… is the youngest left of the ten thousand remaining. The day it was born was a celebration for the martial world because it was the first of its kind so trillions of years. It was a sign of hope that maybe, the laws of the cosmos had not forsaken us…
“As you know, it takes time for a universe to be inhabitable, even for us martial artist. So, in the years it took, much debate took place on how to make use of this new universe…
“It was selfish and greedy… But, I’m ashamed to say that no one thought of you natives and how we would be encroaching on your rights. The hope of millions of populations rested on this one remaining universe because one knew how long it would take for the next universe to manifest…
“In the years leading up to the moment your universe would become habitable, many wars took place… Too many to name and much too many to remember… A cycle of endless strife over the right to take something that was never ours to begin with… We were fighting over the right to stifle the growth of yet another universe…
“…
“As grand teacher told you, there are two main paths in the martial world, both of which were spurred on by the destruction of the universes.
“There’s the chaos path. The path that assumes that the destruction of the universes is simply the will of their laws. This path seeks to seep further into anarchy and accept this fate, assuming that a new rise to martial arts will come as a reward.
“This path is filled with power… Although they claim to be in line with the laws of the universe, the very fact they wield the power that they do protests to that facts…
“You yourself had felt the domineering nature of that entity’s body. Even while being so far away and having will power as firm as yours, if it wasn’t for your deep seeded anger, you would have succumb to your fear…
“The only way to reach such a height in the martial way is by transcending the laws of the universe itself. By definition, they never cared about the way of the universe, they only want to seek an easier path to immortality, even if that means everyone else dies!” This was the first time the 25th White Mother truly lost control of her emotions, but she quickly tried to rein them in again.
What Dyon’s master had just said was the truth, but also not as clear cut as it seemed…
The truth was, even those who didn’t co-sign to the chaos path were trying to transcend the laws of the universe as well. It was just that their approach was vastly different…
If Dyon saw the true body of his grand teacher in person, he wouldn’t feel as though his one with heart was ready to crumble at any moment like he had when seeing the body of the entity for the first time…
In the path to cultivation, there were always those two choices… To destroy… Or to lift up…
The decision of the entity was clear. If you ever tried to go against him without a firm martial way, all of your cultivation would simply crumble in his presence… But, even worse, this didn’t just go for living beings…
If the entity wasn’t restricted as he was now… His simple presence would erode the all things as we know it…
“The path of chaos they take makes them vastly superior in the martial way… Through self-harm, debasing practices, and an overall lack of a moral code, they take the sanctity of cultivation and trash it completely.
“The create artificial wills. They experiment on their own people. They kill innocents for the sake of their own improvement… They ransack cultivation treasures, they horde legacies… They even set up fake worlds like the Timeless Library to stoke the hope of those who are selfless, simply to drain the universe of more and more of its resources…
“And they do this all in the name of Chaos. They pretend as though they’re following the path the universe set for them, when really all they’re doing is preying on the weak and stacking power in their favor.”
This was the simple truth of the chaos path…
Even when the dark phoenixes rampaged through the universes spreading death, they were simply doing so because it increased their own power… There was no ‘higher purpose’ for anyone other than themselves and their own disgusting values… Even the lives of the people of a completely innocent universe was seen as nothing to them.
Dyon’s master took a deep breath, calming herself. “I won’t try to feed you some lie about my Ancestors coming here to protect your people. Nor will I say that it was better for us to have come than someone else… Because the truth of the matter is that we came in order to make use of your universe as well…
“The second path that martial artists take is one of balance… The hope of this path is to treat every avenue of cultivation as sacred and put in place for a reason. To see every path as just as necessary as the one before it…
“As grand teacher told you, the eventual goal of our path is to help the universe… We believe that the reason why universes are dying isn’t simply because we are using the energy at all, but rather because we are using that energy incorrectly…
“We’re taking this sacred energy and using it selfishly, only seeking to increase the length of our lives. But, what if this wasn’t the true martial way?…
“The path we seek is one of perfection… A path that transcends all not by stomping out the rest, but by raising them all up and combining them…
“A path that transcends not by destroying the universes, but by creating them.”