Chapter 123: It Must Be the Old Devil Lan's Scheme

Emotion, soul, will, wisdom. There is another name for it: the Light of the Soul.

It is a unique form of energy—a high-grade spiritual power refined by sentient beings. It is even more advanced than the Gold-Radiance spiritual energy prepared by the "Old Devil Lan," often possessing power that can interfere with reality in ways that defy all logic. Does this description sound familiar?

Indeed! It is the "Void-Refining Force" of the Martial Way.

When one’s mental state reaches a certain level of attainment, one can violently impose their will upon the world, forcibly reshaping it into whatever form the mind dictates. Even space and time can be influenced and distorted, manifesting all sorts of rule-based phenomena. Its essence is the mind’s remodeling of reality.

During the first trial of the Artificial Divine Realm, in the ruins of the chimeric beast-infested Peach Blossom Village that Lan Yi encountered, the manifestation of Void-Refining Force was evident. Information remained stable and intact for millions of years without decay, and the same was true for the information within the Divine Mandate clusters. Distorting space-time, carving out small worlds, altering fundamental properties, and performing miracles of creation were merely trivial feats.

Of course, the Martial Way’s Void-Refining merely provides the possibility of unleashing the Light of the Soul alongside the liberation of imagination. To truly reach the level where one’s thoughts can empower the world, where a single command forces the entire universe to obey—such beings are exceedingly rare.

If a nation is a mortal’s omnipotent wish-granting machine, then the Void-Refining Force is the omnipotent wish-granting machine of the transcendent. As long as the quality of the Void-Refining Force (the Light of the Soul) is sufficient, theoretically, it can forcibly manifest any desire, even if that desire is completely beyond your control or if you do not even understand what you truly want.

Such power—what a marvelous thing! Everyone desires it. But the problem is that Void-Refining is not easily attained, and such unreasonable interference with reality must ultimately contend with the world’s self-correcting mechanisms, balanced against the practitioner’s own level of cultivation.

Artificial Divine Realm 2055 was either extremely lucky or extremely unfortunate to have met the conditions for accumulating this mental power.

Through ten, a hundred cycles, even if memory is reset, ordinary people can hold on, maintaining physical and mental health, remaining optimistic, and aspiring toward their dreams rather than anything else. The mental power contributed by these various extreme emotions was stored in the vast, unseen void, and this most chaotic and primitive mental energy began to converge.

At this stage, the spectral entities had not yet appeared. The emotional field of the subspace was merely accumulating.

But when the number of cycles reached hundreds of thousands, or even tens of millions, even if memories were wiped and the world reset, humanity was no longer "human" in the normal sense. They had become a jumbled, sticky aggregate, relying on inertia while suppressing countless extreme emotions.

If normal human beings are torches, the mental power they radiate represents infinite possibilities. Then, the vast majority of humans in Artificial Divine Realm 2055 had already become burnt-out ashes.

Even so, the ashes were not spared. Even when every sound life that descended into this world during the cycles had been squeezed into fireless embers, the cycles continued coldly and ruthlessly, like the river of time heartlessly scouring everything away. At this stage, humanity began to change. Although the apocalypse of spectral entities had not yet arrived, the apocalypse of humanity began to accelerate.

On the surface, the world was filled with malice; trust between people vanished, and minor incidents could trigger extreme violence. In reality, the forcibly congealed humanity was rapidly losing control of its mind. Beneath seemingly normal emotions lay increasingly chaotic and uncontrollable atrocities. The more cycles that passed, the faster humanity collapsed.

War broke out. Starting from the middle phase of the cycles, the outbreak of the Fourth World War occurred earlier and earlier. From the perspective of normal people in the main world, it was completely inexplicable: they fought, and it felt exhilarating! They attempted to resolve their emotional issues through war, only for the war to cause an even greater convergence of extreme emotions.

At this point, the first signs of the spectral entities emerged. It began on the battlefield. In places with excessive psychological pressure or where many people had died, people began to catch glimpses of strange black shadows flickering in and out of existence.

Soon, soldiers began to go missing in entire platoons. Unmanned machines on the battlefield would inexplicably activate, developing strange, alien limbs, while large war machines like tanks and aircraft began to behave as if they had lives of their own; their interior spaces shifted quietly, occasionally devouring bits of flesh and blood as snacks.

These spectral legions, which still required attachment to physical matter to manifest, tore through the veil between reality and illusion, violently pouring the mental power—now accumulated into a foul-smelling black sludge over countless cycles—onto the mortal world!

This continued until the next cycle reset everything.

Eventually, they no longer needed a physical anchor. As the spiritual cultivators were shocked to discover upon arriving at Artificial Divine Realm 2055, the level of spiritual energy in this world had gone off the charts. The spectral entities no longer needed to wait for a world war to break out; they could eagerly enter the physical world to enjoy a grand, exhilarating feast of emotions!

By this time, the cycles were in their final stages. One can imagine the terrifying level to which the mental power—or the Light of the Soul—accumulated through such merciless cycles had reached. Even if its quality was a muddled mess, the sheer quantity was enough to suffocate a spiritual cultivator, making it an entity that even cultivators from the main world, dragged into the cycle, found impossible to crack.

By then, the Demon King-class Great Horrors had already appeared.

Spiritual cultivators are not gods. Facing an Artificial Divine Realm that had become a cesspool, even for a "reborn" individual, reaching the Daoist Heavenly Palace or Martial Dharma Manifestation level was essentially the limit of their cultivation; combat power varied from person to person.

Logically speaking, an Artificial Divine Realm of this difficulty should not appear in a second trial. The Conquest Space is not a black-hearted monster; it does not set up spiritual cultivators to die in vain, nor would it create impossible missions.

It could only be said...

"It must be the conspiracy of Old Devil Lan!" Wang Aojia stood up in rage after hearing the explanation, waving his tangible, massive hands to accuse him.

He deeply suspected that Lan Yi had gone too far in the first Artificial Divine Realm trial and caught the attention of the Conquest Space, causing his second trial difficulty to be maxed out. Realizing this early on, the "Old Devil" had turned around and used it to trap the other spiritual cultivators.

Not to mention Juno, the top-tier reborn individual of the Ocean Civilization; Wang Aojia and Lin Yang were both staunch opponents of Old Devil Lan. This demon was bound to destroy the world sooner or later, so they had to gather strength to fight him! As for Lin Cheng, it went without saying—the sooner he died, the fewer disasters there would be.

Thinking about it this way, it really did seem like Lan Yi had used this massive trap to try to murder them all.