CHAPTER 50: LAYERS BENEATH LAYERS!

Chapter 50: Layers Beneath Layers!

Fighting for land and the right to exist...

Humanity has been doing so for thousands of years and was still doing it...

Was this the battle the spirit path cultivators are fighting for? A battle for humanity?

This was far more heroic than Ken imagined, but he had deduced some of it.

He knew about the species of the world; he read about the demon race and their countless sub-races. Some were huge in size and had physical strength no human in this land could hope to achieve.

Some were fast beyond words, some were invisible, and some had rule-based abilities, and these were the most annoying.

The rule-based demons weren’t impossible to defeat without clearing their conditions. A cultivator with a realm high enough could render them to mush with the environment’s spiritual energy alone.

But taking care of their rules would make them small fries, literally.

Some had contractors within the human race you had to kill or make unconscious; some just had to be discovered to show up. Some only moved and fought in a special terrain, and to defeat them, you had to take them out of it.

But so far these were some straightforward rules. There were more annoying ones.

Some you had to go to great lengths to defeat.

That is why cultivators, for the first few thousand years, defended the lands around their sects or hid in realms, then gathered information about the demons.

They created all kinds of professions and improvised on existing ones.

Then, when a sect leader of the Spirit Mountain Sect figured that it was good enough, he started to take lands away from the demons.

Demons were cultivators too, ones who used chaotic spiritual energy to feed their own advantages, and they had very weird ways of advancing, but the most useful one was eating humans.

Mortals were great nourishment; they were like blood pills for cultivators, healing demons and nourishing them enough as well as granting a boost in their cultivation.

But humans truly cultivated the spirit and focused on perception, to be precise, not power.

At first it seemed a disadvantage, but it was their forte, and they had to take the risk.

The mind, vision, and the core of the humans were taken as the stronghold to advance, and look and behold.

They gained the only key to be able to defeat demons in all of their forms.

But that was only against demons of a certain level. The sovereigns, the elite demons... those had to be stalled, and only stalled.

Their abilities were unfair beyond belief, and their understanding of their strengthened rules made them as impossible to defeat as the entities in the secret realms.

They were the main enemies of all humanity.

This was something Ken knew about, but some key details were missing, and he had to fill them.

To fill them, he had to become a cultivator, and since he was, he had to take the next step and actually live as one, take missions, and leave for the outside world, not as a mortal, but as a spirit path treader.

But he couldn’t wait that long. He had to know what and how they were fighting; that would help him lots in forming his future plans, and his battle tactics would also be centered around this.

But this was information only establishment realm individuals knew, and Providence had yet to tell him about it.

He could have gotten it the next day or within the week, but since he had access to an elder’s advice, he wanted to make good use of it and gain something else.

Something providence wouldn’t give him.

"But do not be mistaken, young man." The elder voice then turned heavy.

"The battles we fight, as we rise higher in realm, become more mystical." He said.

"At the level where I am at, I could fight a demon inside of their abyss realm from my own tiny land here." The elder stated.

"This is information far beyond you, but keep it in mind."

"Though your physical strength is surprising, what we value more is your perception and mind." The elder smiled once again, his hand going towards the teapot once again.

Ken didn’t speak after seeing him move, and he used this time to think twice about the words said.

Fighting across lands...

Was this why most elders were either in the sect or in seclusion?

They weren’t fighting for treasures and boons; they were fighting for something more important, with weapons... he had no idea about.

At some point it made his chest swell, and a fire burned deep in his eyes.

Fighting from afar... it meant nothing more than using one’s mind to fight.

Strategizing, playing real-world chess... the allies and army... are the weapons... the enemies.

Ken stopped. Sure, he had gotten an idea; he could deduce something.

But he had no way of knowing if what he guessed was true.

He had only used what he knew so far to form a temporary map of what was actually going on.

But as the elder said, unless he reached the foundation establishment realm, he would have no way of knowing.

Whatever transformation happened in that realm, no matter how providence and the elder explained, he would never understand.

The sheer possibility of being able to perceive things beyond mortal senses made Ken almost breathe fire.

It was a level of control over his surroundings that he had thought about many times but could in no way even achieve a semblance of it.

But in all that could be said, he was sure it was a unique fighting method.

By now, he had completely crossed out the idea that the cultivators of this world were anything similar to what he previously knew.

And this world... had layers beneath layers.

The more you think you know about it, the more you realize you don’t.

But he was fine with that. He had yet to start the main plan, but once he did... things would be vastly...

Vastly different from now.

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