Finding certainty, gaining clarity

Within the Rift, Chen Chuan sat suspended in midair. His Spirit Manifestation likewise sat cross-legged around him, its eyes half-closed as waves of platinum light radiated outward.

After these past few days of cultivation, his Spirit Manifestation had expanded a little further. He had not deliberately sought this; it was a natural consequence of cultivation. The Spirit Manifestation was the first to bear the external onslaught, so it would inevitably be the first part of him to transform.

This growth also came with contamination, like swallowing a potent drug that brought both benefits and harm. According to the cultivation method, within ten days, toxic, foul energy might take root in the practitioner's body, seep into the skull, and corrupt the mind.

Beyond external mutations, it might also fundamentally alter a person's character and perceptions. In the end, they might regard the contamination as a wondrous elixir, a source of blessings and longevity, while despising the normal body they had painstakingly honed.

Thus, practitioners usually had to find a way to stop after each stage, purge the toxins, and cleanse their desires.

There was a particular art to this. Besides medicines, the Old Sects used religious rituals and scriptures to preserve a practitioner's fundamental nature. But relying on these inevitably meant becoming dependent on them, making it difficult to forge one's own path.

The method used by the Old Imperial Household, however, seemed to resolve this problem through transformations of flesh and blood.

Although the manual offered no detailed explanation, the speed with which those remnants of the End Dynasty had integrated into the Convergence Zone suggested what approach they had taken. They might already have been entirely different from ordinary people by the time they took that position.

Chen Chuan did not need this process. As long as his Second