Even in death, the aura radiating from some of the skeletal remains was so overwhelming that it made Stan seem no more significant than an insect.
He straightened and looked across the endless field of bones stretching through the ruined temple.
’This means others reached this inheritance before me,’ he thought. ’And nobody survived.’
The voice, which had remained silent since the golden chamber, spoke once more.
"Are you frightened by their number?"
There was a faint note of amusement in its tone.
The simple question sent a chill racing down Stan’s spine.
By now, he had half expected the voice to speak again, yet hearing it emerge from the silence was no less unsettling.
"Who are these people?" he asked, ignoring the voice’s question entirely knowing the voice is just teasing him...
Anyways, the voice answered without hesitation.
"They are those who came seeking my inheritance and attempted to defy its terms. They sought to circumvent the formation I left behind. They tried to force the trials to yield without earning them. So I used their cultivation as fertilizer to sustain the formation and stabilize this inheritance space."
Stan fell silent for a moment before letting out a low whistle.
"Damn... so they tried to steal your inheritance instead of doing it the normal way."
The voice gave a quiet sigh; "This inheritance was built upon the blood of countless beings. Their number is beyond your imagination."
"I once possessed an infamous reputation. For a time, I stood at the very peak of Earth. Eventually, the world itself became too small for me, so I began preparing this inheritance for a purpose I shall reveal when we meet."
"However, word somehow spread that I had established an inheritance. The strongest cultivators of that era assumed I was nearing death and seeking a successor. Greed clouded their judgment."
"They united to kill me and seize everything I possessed."
A trace of amusement crept into the voice.
"Little did they know that I had already stepped into a realm beyond anything they could comprehend. They never stood a chance."
"I killed them all."
"I used their cultivation as fertilizer to keep this inheritance alive and to power a formation that proved indispensable in accomplishing my goal."
"Because of the uniqueness of that goal, no cultivator was able to enter this place while I slept. Until now."
"You are the first."
"And... you seem rather interesting."
Even at its warmest, even when it openly approved of Stan’s progress through the trials, the voice remained terrifying.
Whatever this existence truly was, it had slaughtered thousands of peak cultivators from the four great races and repurposed their very cultivation to fuel its own domain.
The sheer scale of that massacre dwarfed anything Stan had ever imagined.
"Do not misunderstand," the voice continued calmly. "I am no saint. I have killed more people than you could ever count."
A brief pause followed.
"But every one of them deserved it and it’s for a just cause..."
Stan let out a dry chuckle.
"I don’t really think killing people and using them as fertilizer for your formation qualifies as ’just.’"
The voice sighed again. It was a weary sigh, the kind an ancient teacher would give after realizing a student had misunderstood the lesson.
"You cannot understand with only fragments of the truth."
"But you will."
"Then tell me the whole story," Stan said.
"I will... when you meet me."
"Do not judge the whole from the fragments I have revealed."
"The truth is far more complicated than it appears."
Stan silently filed the answer away. He didn’t press further, after all he was in no position to.
He was a guest, or more accurately, an intruder, inside an inheritance that had killed every other person who had entered it. The voice’s willingness to explain even this much was already more than he had expected. Pushing further would only risk eroding the goodwill he had painstakingly earned.
Without another word, Stan continued deeper into the ruined temple.
Sighing, Stan carefully made his way through the field of skeletons.
He did not disturb them. Nor did he touch the weapons scattered across the floor. Whatever spiritual residue still lingered within those remains was, his instincts warned him, best left undisturbed.
After walking for nearly fifty paces, he began to notice small, floating fragments suspended in the air.
They glowed with a faint radiance. Each was roughly the size of his palm, irregular in shape, drifting lazily at varying heights throughout the ruined temple. They caught the ambient light with a soft, glass-like shimmer, leaving delicate trails of light in their wake as they floated.
Stan stopped before the nearest fragment.
His mastery, still cataloging every unfamiliar phenomenon within this inheritance, failed to identify it immediately. Yet his instincts, honed by everything he had experienced over the past few hours, whispered that these were no ordinary objects.
They were memories. Compressed, preserved. Waiting for someone capable of unraveling them.
Stan slowly reached out. His fingers passed through the fragment without the slightest resistance.
The world around him dissolved. His vision changed.
He was no longer standing inside the temple.
He stood upon a hillside overlooking a landscape unlike anything he had ever seen, a world of impossibly verdant grasslands stretching to a distant horizon, where towering mountain ranges pierced the heavens. Above them, the sky glowed with a warm, golden radiance, as though bathed in an eternal dawn Earth had not witnessed in countless ages.
The air was saturated with Qi. It was so dense that it had become visible, flowing through the atmosphere in slow, luminous misty currents like celestial rivers.
It looked so real that it took Stan a moment to realize he wasn’t truly there, that he was just witnessing.
He had no body within this vision. He was nothing more than a viewpoint anchored to another’s memory, seeing through their eyes, standing where they had once stood, yet unable to move, speak, or alter anything.
Below the hillside lay a magnificent sect.
Its countless buildings rose in elegant tiers of white jade and gold, sprawling across the valley for kilometers. Thousands of cultivators moved through its grounds in disciplined harmony. Some walked along ancient stone paths. Others soared through the skies on their own power. A few sat cross-legged upon floating platforms that drifted effortlessly through the air.
High above the sect, dragons circled. Real dragons.
Long, serpentine creatures whose jade-and-gold scales shimmered beneath the sunlight. Two of them plunged through a sea of clouds, weaving around one another in what was unmistakably playful flight rather than combat.
Stan’s viewpoint shifted.
Time surged forward. The memory unfolded in scattered fragments.
He stood upon another hill overlooking a vast battlefield.