Within the sea of inheritance, the fair weather of days past was gone. Only layers of mist congealed, like thick condensation on a car window.
Looking out from within, the world was close at hand yet impossible to glimpse, as though time itself had stopped.
Ren Tao traveled through the mist along a familiar mountain path. He knew this was the sea of inheritance's self-preservation mechanism. Having suddenly received divine power containing immense might, it had now sealed off all its fluctuations. Only this could keep that divine power calm.
At the slightest disturbance from him, the divine power would overturn seas and rivers, shattering his sea of consciousness and leaving him dead without a grave.
Still, the spiritual connection between Ren Tao and the sea of inheritance remained active, slowly guiding him toward "decoding" the divine power.
Something like a faint, hazy memory carried Ren Tao back to the past.
It was his first year in the Imperial Capital. A match between Guoan and Shenhua had caused a massive traffic jam around Workers' Stadium.
Sitting in a taxi, Ren Tao had seen the same condensation. It had been his first encounter with such a scene. He had no idea what all those cars and pedestrians filling the streets were doing, and felt as though he had entered an unfamiliar world.
The driver had asked him with a smile whether he wanted to get out and walk. Otherwise, whether he waited half an hour or a full hour, he would still be stuck right here.
Ren Tao had chosen to walk. Fine rain drizzled from the sky, and the Imperial Capital's lights glowed through the haze.
He had even felt a little relieved. The fare back to Xicheng would have hurt his wallet, so being able to walk home instead had been a kind of release.
He had walked for over two hours like that. By the time he reached his dormitory, it was already midnight.
Yet Ren Tao had been cheerful all along the way. Even wandering alone far from home, unable to see where his future lay, he still had dreams, and a future worth looking forward to.
It was that strange!
Even thinking back now, he still could not understand why he had felt happy then.
Later, he had become his company's top salesperson and bought his own car. Occasionally, he would remember that night at Workers' Stadium, but he could never recapture how he had felt.
Until one day, while driving on the highway, a heavy truck had inexplicably charged toward him from the opposite direction, driving against traffic.
Its dazzling headlights had filled him with panic.
And there, within those lights, Ren Tao had actually seen a sea!
The vehicles had collided with a thunderous crash. A deafening roar filled his ears as glass shards and scattered parts flew everywhere, yet Ren Tao had arrived in the sea and become an Evil Spirit Orca... King.
He had never had time to think these things through before. The struggle to survive had left him almost no room to breathe: from "forming an alliance" with the Deep Sea Demonic Whale King, to evading the Shrek Seven Devils' pursuit, then absorbing the Whale Pearl and storming Sea God Island, to stopping Tang San from obtaining the Eighth Soul Ring, beginning his second stage of evolution, confronting the Sea God Phantom, and finally arriving at this moment.
When he had first crossed over, Ren Tao had nearly resigned himself to his fate. He had thought his life was a mistake from beginning to end, and that everything was fate playing tricks on him. Yet at the crucial moment, the Evil Spirit Orca Group had rekindled his fighting spirit.
Yes, those cruel, bloodthirsty, foolish giants. Though their reputation was terrible, they had virtues ordinary people could not see. They dared to bare their teeth at the Deep Sea Demonic Whale King, dared to assault Sea God Island, and dared to fight any enemy to the death, while remaining absolutely loyal to their companions and their own kind.
They had made Ren Tao understand that he could not die. He had to live.
As the Evil Orca King, even if every member of his clan died, he would still have to avenge them.
Now, Ren Tao had done it.
After being blasted apart by the Sea God Phantom and pieced back together, after facing the Sea God head-on, he finally felt an unprecedented exhaustion and relief.
It was in this state that the grand show of "decoding" divine power began.
Ren Tao seemed to witness a battle between gods. Cloud-sized flames, golden in hue, exploded layer upon layer, spreading from the sky to the sea before sweeping across the land. Before such vast, mighty power, the real world seemed as illusory as a two-dimensional world and as fragile as paper. Continental shelves collapsed in an instant, mountains caved in, and an enormous white dome of light rose from the horizon, spreading at a speed beyond human comprehension until it covered the entire planet in the blink of an eye.
Countless blue or golden threads appeared as well, like Tang San's Blue Silver Grass or Ren Tao's own Devouring Golden Threads, only indescribably vast and dense, winding from one side of the planet to the other.
Enormous blue and purplish-black figures appeared within his mind once his naked eyes ceased to function, unleashing thunderous sounds that shook the world.
Though this scene existed only within his consciousness, it carried an irresistible pressure that bore down on Ren Tao like something tangible.
Then his body began to shatter.
More precisely, the pain of his body shattering moments earlier returned.
Previously, his body had shattered and then been reconstructed by forbidden power through genetic memory. It had happened so quickly that he had barely felt any pain. Now that process was being "replayed," and not the slightest thread or trace of suffering was missing. Every organ and every cell endured it exactly as it had happened.
Blood sprayed, organs shattered, and flesh and bone flew apart. Every stage unfolded before Ren Tao's eyes.
The pain left him unable to make a sound or even lose consciousness. It drove him to despair.
"See? The price of evolution has finally come!"
A voice rang out in his mind. At first, Ren Tao thought it was a hallucination, then realized it was not. Under pain like this, hallucinating was utterly impossible.
"At the utmost extreme of pain lies calm!"
Ren Tao gave "him" this seemingly unrelated reply. This "he" was the divine power contained within his body. As an existence beyond the dimensions of the real world, "he" possessed his own originating consciousness and memories.
The process of suffering was also the process of Ren Tao and the divine power merging.
Though Ren Tao's body could not withstand such a burden, he had the sea of inheritance. As long as he endured the agonizing pain and the confrontation on the spiritual level, the sea of inheritance would claim all the divine power for its own use.
"Does calm exist within your heart as well?"
It does!
Ren Tao said nothing and proved it through action-his thoughts returned to that rainy night.
On the road south of Workers' Stadium, cars filled the streets like a sea and pedestrians wove through them like threads. The "he" who embodied the divine power's consciousness stood beside a trash can, smoking.
"I never imagined you had this habit..." Ren Tao said in surprise.
"These are sensations you gave me. They're quite rare. I suppose this counts as breaking the ice between us?"
Well... if you put it that way, this makes things easy!
Ren Tao took out a cigarette and started smoking too. Sure enough, it really did taste just as he remembered.
"Is this another dream?
The divine power looked at the surrounding buildings, clicking his tongue in admiration. "I never imagined it had been perfected to this degree. Truly breathtaking."
A dream? What does that mean?
Before Ren Tao voiced the question, the divine power already understood. He began weighing his words, preparing to give Ren Tao a proper explanation:
"What do you think the Divine Realm is?
Countless illusory dreams! The planets under the Divine Realm's rule are like dreams within dreams.
Mortals and gods alike live within these dreams.
They seem utterly real, but whenever an unforeseen variable emerges and all the dreams end, only then do they realize it was nothing but a dream.
Take Tang San of the Douluo Continent. He dreamed of becoming a God King. Unfortunately, you arrived, and his dream shattered ahead of time."
So dreams are equivalent to different timelines. Then what is an unforeseen variable?
"Just like the countless species throughout evolutionary history, they exist only to seek out that one correct direction.
And an unforeseen variable is a sliver of opportunity leading toward that correct direction. It brings entirely new changes, and boundless destruction as well. But what it actually is, no one knows!"
The divine power stopped there and gazed at the building across the street. His presence and figure both grew dim, as though he were about to dissolve into the city's night.
"You left no trace here either. Nothing but an unremarkable life, so ordinary and trivial it scarcely bears describing. How could someone like you wield divine power and seize that single thread of true possibility between heaven and earth?"
Are you really from the Douluo World?
Ren Tao was genuinely puzzled. The Douluo World and the real world were overlapping, but in the end, was this still just disdain for him being an ordinary person?
"You know, I get up at seven in the morning, go downstairs for breakfast, and take the subway to work. The door-to-door trip takes an hour and fifteen minutes. Once I reach the office, the first thing I do is list my tasks for the day, review yesterday's work records, and draw up a schedule for client visits..."
"What are you trying to say?"
The divine power was a little bewildered, because Ren Tao had poured a whole flood of "daily work routines" into his perception.
"I'm saying that I work very hard at living. That's my role in the real world. No superpowers, no system, no cheats. I... am simply me. It's the same in the Douluo World. I'm the Evil Orca King, but I'm still me. What about you? Do you know who you are?"
"I..."
Caught off guard, the divine power was drawn into Ren Tao's logic. He suddenly discovered that he had no place in society!
That's right. Only the ordinary can defeat the great!
Ren Tao chuckled coldly. Watch me defeat you with social anthropology~
"Tang San proclaimed himself sect master of the Tang Sect, but in his previous life, he was merely an outcast disciple. Later, he transformed into a God King, yet he never understood what had brought about his downfall in his previous life. He always craves things that don't belong to him and forgets his place in society. Even as a God King, he'll bring disaster upon the Divine Realm.
Sounds cruel, doesn't it? But it's the truth.
I don't know whether I'm an unforeseen variable, but as long as I remain true to my own place, what I do will certainly be more correct than what you do. Do you have any doubts about that?"
"I... feel as though I've had an utterly inconceivable dream!"
The divine power's figure began to dissolve. Amid intense self-doubt, his sense of self weakened, and he was gradually assimilated by Ren Tao.
Power began flowing back, and the scene before him grew illusory.
Ren Tao desperately wanted one more look at his dormitory. After all, he had lived there for three years, leaving behind his youth and beautiful dreams of love.
But he could no longer do it.
He returned to the sea of inheritance. The pain had vanished, and his body remained the same. Only everything that had just happened truly felt like a dream.
The sea of inheritance accepted the divine power and began its own "iterative upgrade."
Amid the earth-shaking changes all around him, Ren Tao felt immense gratification. He did not know what the divine power had thought at the end, but he felt that he had truly found his answer.
"My work's all done. I won't worry about the rest. Take care of it as you see fit, sea of inheritance!"
This chapter has been revised!
Hope you like it!
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