The will to become the strongest.

Chapter 8; The will to become the strongest

"Where am I?"

A hoarse voice echoed across the endless void emanated from the body of a boy in his appearing-to-be-15 years old.

And this boy was no other than the Qiangu Qitian, who died in an accident.

He took in his surroundings and found that he had entered a dimension he had never seen.

Before him suddenly appeared a strong white and black light, rotating, releasing a powerful aura. In it was inlaid with a symbol-3D model merge of Swastika and Yin-Yang, harmoniously hooked into each other.

Qiangu Qitian stared bewildered at the two combined signs. He knew both the signs as ancient signs of Earth:

The Swastika symbolizes peace, good luck, and prosperity, while the yin-yang symbol is that of cosmic balance, a sign of duality.

Now, before his eyes, two ancient symbols interwove. Fascinating as it was, he felt something wrong in his heart.

"Am I alive or dead?" Qiangu Qitian wondered. He couldn't feel the fleshly body at all, whereby he doubted whether he existed now.

Qiangu Qitian struggled to his feet, his movements laborious. Finally getting on his feet, he went closer to the symbols in front, his feet heavy. He then lifted his hand, wanting to touch that flowy, shining form.

Before even his fingers could make contact with the symbols, there was a sudden, overwhelming suction force from within them. The suction enveloped Qiangu Qitian completely and tugged him into the abyss of the swirls in the blinking of an eye.

---

Azure Mystic World

Southern Domain

In a thicket, there was an inanimate body with many green vines wrapped around its pale body. These vines seemed as though they were alive, breathing softly, faintly, siphoning some eerie energies into its body.

Above the dead body, ominous clouds had been gathering and rumbled with suppressed thunder. The atmosphere around that body was heavy, laden with an abnormal form of energy so thick it almost choked but full of foreboding.

This was Qiangu Qitian's physical body, which lay in the very center of the forbidden zone. Vines were plugged into him like several lifelines; these drank deep into the surrounding essence of life, transmitting it through him.

Though his chest did not rise and fall, and his body did not show any signs of life, faint ripples of energy issued from far inside him. It was as if the essence of the forbidden zone itself was keeping and changing him.

And yet, the body lay there, unmoving. It just lay there, that strange enigma in a world full of perils.

---

Some Time Later

Then, without warning, Qiangu Qitian's finger moved-a slight tremble, weak, almost undetectable, yet it moved again to a faint, measured movement.

Countless vines wrapped around his body began to pulse much more violently, radiating a soft light as they poured the accumulated essence into his body. The energy gushed into his meridians and sent his pale skin regaining a trace of color.

His eyebrows, tightly shut, furrowed even deeper into his skin, as if caught in some torturing dream. The lips stirred and quivered, but the words did not.

Inside his mind, Qiangu Qitian felt himself being torn apart and remade at the same time. The forces of Yin and Yang inside him churned furiously, fighting for their balance. The whirling of the merged symbol of Swastika and Yin-Yang gave off waves of incomprehensible power, echoing within his consciousness.

"Pain. What is this pain?" Qiangu thought, his awareness fluttering like a fragile flame in a storm.

His chest heaved, pushing a breath from his body as it fought its way back to life. Dust and rubble scattered around his person while he pushed himself free, his movements labored, slow, deliberate, but filled with some kind of feral determinism.

Then, in a sudden spurt, fragments of his memory blew into his brain. His face contorted into a mass of anger and determination.

"You took my physique, my essence, my dignity at age thirteen for your selfish greed!

"You said, because of my physique, i would never be able to cultivate in my life. That I was a waste.! Hah. In this world, no one can call me a waste. Not even my so called parents!"

"You said I couldn't defy the heavens. Heh, maybe I am weak now, but not forever!"

"No gods, no demons, no immortals, no heavens, and no destiny will be above me. They will all bow to me, Qiangu Qitian!"

With a new, fresh strength, Qiangu Qitian pushed himself to his feet. His aura then flared with fierce intensity in golden and black streams, intertwined as if by cosmic forces. He looked up to the stormy sky with his loud, fierce voice ringing without yielding an iota of weakness.

"I swear upon the Heavens and Earth, I, Qiangu Qitian, will be the strongest! The whole universe will shiver with aghast when mentioning my name!"

The ground cracked, streaks of lightning flashed across the sky as if Heaven was roaring its recognition.

Qiangu Qitian took a deep breath, his body strange and yet so familiar. Each of his movements felt slow, while the raw energy running through his body kept him up. The weird silence of the forbidden forest enveloped him, with only rustling leaves and a faint humming of energy still hanging in the air to break the stillness.

As his gaze wandered, he noticed that something was off-a sprinkling of corpses, their lifeless bodies contorted in impossible ways. Their faces were frozen in shock, fear, or defiance, their facial expressions telling the tale of their futile struggle against such overwhelming power of this zone.

"What happened here?" Qiangu muttered, his hoarse voice barely audible.

The other closer corpses now showed him the vague glimmer of a storage ring on a finger. Storage rings were very rare treasures; they would contain resources, artifacts, and knowledge one had.

He looked around and saw that several other corpses were also adorned with storage rings on their hands. Immediately, his heartbeat quickened as, among the dead, there must have been some cultivators who had come into the forbidden zone due to greed or ambition.

Qiangu knelt beside the first corpse-a man in worn-out armor. Qiangu carefully took the storage ring from the man's finger and closely examined the carvings on it.

"Locked," Qiangu muttered, raising an eyebrow. He could feel a spiritual restriction on the ring, essentially locking the contents away to any person without enough cultivation or with the blood essence from the original owner.

He went from corpse to corpse, taking all the storage rings with cold, methodical efficiency. The four most senior cultivators' corpses were also discovered; due to their cultivation bases, one could easily tell their status from the residue left in the air. Wearing robes embroidered with patterns indicating which sects and clans they were from, these once-powerful people now lay as lifeless carcasses.

Qiangu approached one of the four-a man whose stern face was twisted in anguish. On his finger was an especially ornate storage ring, its aura radiating a faint golden glow.

"This one must hold something extraordinary," Qiangu thought. He slipped the ring off and studied it closely.

However, as he tried to probe the ring with his spiritual sense, he got backlashed with a sharp surge in power. The restriction of the ring lit up brightly, refusing his attempt to break it and sending sharp pain to his mind.

"Argh!" Qiangu stumbled backward, clutching his head.

Of course, recovering, his cultivation was still far too weak to break such advanced seals. Frustration bubbled inside him, but then cooled down quickly as he regained his composure.

"Not yet," he muttered, his tone unyielding. "When my cultivation grows stronger, these treasures will be mine."

Continuing the grim harvest, he managed to collect over a dozen storage rings in total. Apart from the rings, he also found several weapons and talismans lying here and there on the battlefield, remnants of the fierce battles. Although most of them were damaged, a few were still intact, and their sharp edges shone coldly in the dark.

Qiangu Qitian secured his finds and took a moment to oversee desolation at every turn. Such a cultivator of the height of power came to fall in such a place. They agreed for their own, but in the end, that greed turned them into razor-sharp fangs and became the leftovers of their bloodline.

"This place is not just forbidden. It is a graveyard," Qiangu whispered, even his tone filled with awe and unease.

He looked toward the edge of the forest. The tall treetops stood as sentinels of silence; their gnarled limbs were stretched out in long, wide shadows across the path forward. The heavy atmosphere within the forbidden zone weighed hard, but Qiangu Qitian's determination did not sway.

"I must leave this place," he said to himself, clenching his fists. "If I stay here, I invite more danger."

With the storage rings collecting, Qiangu Qitian emerged from the forest.

[Happy New Year, Guys..... Hoping that, this new year will bring better life, for you all guys, as well my self.]

[Please remember to add it into the library list.]