This Young Master is not Cannon Fodder - Chapter 657

The Tengri Divine System entered a state of silence. It was as if the entire world had entered a period of stillness. Time slowed, and space halted. For the denizens of the Tengri Divine System—those whose souls had managed to stave off destruction upon hearing God King Tengri’s final cry—they noticed none of this. Their thoughts and very existence followed the state of the Tengri Divine System.

During this time, Tianyi took full control of the newly renamed system. Even his other conduits entered a period of hibernation to facilitate the process, except those in charge of merging the various Spacetime Divine Systems.

When Tianyi regained clarity, his eyes held a hint of understanding. “No wonder God King Tengri seemed so strange.”

Perhaps it was right to call that existence a god king. The correct title should have been World Will Tengri.

Yes, Tengri was not a divinity but a World Will that developed its own sapience. Tianyi didn’t know the exact progress. Maybe Tengri originally only had a little bit of self-consciousness and imprinted its original personality after observing a natural divinity or influential figure in the system’s history.

Tianyi didn’t know for sure. Tengri’s last act erased almost all traces of his existence in the Tengri Divine System, so he could only piece together the story from the bits and clues left behind.

As a World Will, Tengri did not have the ability to incarnate into another life within itself. Although it controlled an entire system like Tianyi and the Trimurti, it was ultimately an existence fully tied to it. Tianyi and the Trimurti were different. If needed, they could exist separately, and this distinction allowed them to possess greater abilities and options.

Since Tengri couldn’t incarnate into life within his system, his avatar was also suspicious. The World Will likely created his avatars by assimilating and controlling the native lifeforms with great potential. Either he wanted their bodies to make it easier for himself to act physically, or Tengri saw them as a threat and wanted to eliminate them.

Death was a fear for every life. Some may overcome the fear of death, but even so, many would not voluntarily seek it. World Will Tengri was no different.

Although many people, immortals and divinities alike, would not choose to merge their divine world with an entire system, the risk would always remain. No matter how much Tengri aided them, many people would forget the grace they received because of their self-interest or selfishness. As a World Will, Tengri had been backstabbed countless times for profit, and he did not want to become one of those so-called victims.

The denizens of the system might not even know it was possible to conquer it, and that was something Tengri made sure to maintain. Once a divinity successfully merged their divine world with the system, the existence known as Tengri would disappear—death in all but name.

Even if someone had learned about the benefits of merging with the Tengri System, the World Will had already taken steps to nip the threat in the bud. The faith system it propagated was highly invasive for the practitioner. Tengri could possess these faith shamans at any time, just like when he caught Tianyi when he first snuck into the Tengri System.

Ironically, the people most resistant to possession were the regular mortals. The more powerful the practitioner of the faith system was, the more susceptible and less resistant they would be to Tengri’s possession. The mortals believed that the greater the faith, the more powerful they would become, which meant that this cultivation method did not have any requirements for willpower. And even if they had high willpower, the precepts instilled into them from a young age would make them feel it was an honor to have Tengri grace their mortal flesh—even if it led to death.

The best way to maximize this was to train some potential divinities by granting them power. It wouldn’t matter if they didn’t believe in Tengri. They were vessels and sacrifices. Not only would Tengri have been able to obtain a powerful avatar to execute his intent, but he could absorb the newly formed divine world as nourishment. However, it seemed that Tengri was too cowardly, and he strangled any potential divinity, which explained why all ninety-eight Tengri were so weak—at least in Tianyi’s eyes.

Perhaps Tengri feared that their willpower would overpower his. If that happened, not only would he disappear, but he would have personally nurtured the source of his demise.

That still begged the question: why would such a cowardly World Will attack the Pangu System? Tianyi could sense that Tengri must have absorbed other systems before, owing to the presence of marginalized lifeforms that did not conform to the vast majority. So, devouring other systems should have been a way Tengri increased his power, but even Tianyi found it puzzling why he would challenge the powerful Pangu System.

Unless there was something incredibly alluring about the Pangu System that made Tengri willingly risk life and death?

Tianyi didn’t know. Perhaps he would only know once he initiated his plan.

He didn’t dwell on Tengri for too long. After all, the latter had already ceased to exist. Tianyi worked hard to repair the mess his clash with Tengri had caused. The first thing he did was to return all the planets from his Nine Heavens Universe.

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The inhabitants of the fourth planet were much luckier than those of the second and third planets. Because they were in Tianyi’s inner universe, they were not affected by Tengri’s last act, and ninety-nine point nine-nine-nine percent of their population survived.

If Tianyi wanted to, he could also reverse spacetime and reassemble around half of those who had their souls shattered. But he saw no point, and it would take a massive amount of effort just to reassemble one soul. Furthermore, he could not guarantee what the results would be until the very end. For all he knew, the soul he reassembled was already impossible to save, or it might have defects from the process.

Tianyi paused. He held his chin. Although the effort was not worth it, it seemed to be a good experience for him to better understand the soul and improve his mastery of the laws related to the soul.

Once he had this idea, Tianyi couldn’t stop. He immediately quarantined a certain area, transported all the fractured souls and fragments into it, and froze everything. He would focus on this later, after everything in the Tengri Divine System had gotten back on track.

After the Tengri Divine System returned to stability, Tianyi controlled it to fly toward the same destination as the other systems he conquered. Because of the battle, the cloaking technique had vanished, exposing the Tengri Divine System to prying eyes.

Tianyi did not feel the need to further conceal it. After all, it was originally set up to hide from the Pangu System—or rather, the current Three Thousand Immortal Realms System.

In total, Tianyi spent nearly seventy thousand years to fully conquer the Tengri Divine System. He didn’t know whether Tengri had fully recovered or not. If he hadn’t, then the difficulty had dropped dramatically. He was inclined to believe so, since it still felt a bit too easy. Granted, he understood the reason behind Tengri’s relatively weak willpower, but he still felt a bit of disbelief.

In these seventy thousand years, most of the Spacetime Divine Systems arrived at the location. That wasn’t all Tianyi did—he conquered more systems that he discovered. During his search, he found that some systems had perished but left behind remains. Although these remains could not form a new system, Tianyi kept them in his inner universe to bring out and use as nourishment for the systems he had conquered.

Contrary to Tianyi’s expectations, when two systems of similar size merged, the total increased mass of both was only around ten percent of each one before the merger. If one of the systems was not of equal quality or size, the merger would only allow the more powerful system to increase by a few percentage points at most.

It dampened Tianyi’s enthusiasm, but his actions did not stop. He continued to merge all the divine systems in that area. He wanted to merge as many systems as possible before the Tengri Divine System arrived. Then he could merge the Tengri Divine System with the Spacetime Divine System and save as much time as possible.

Of course, he did not forget about the shattered souls inside the quarantined area. Tianyi knew himself. He didn’t think he had the patience or the time to reassemble all those souls. And even if he did, his improvements would likely stop before he got through all of them, so he invited Daoyi.

When Daoyi heard about it, she was quite speechless. However, she did not reject Tianyi’s offer. She had long reached a bottleneck, and even touring various systems only gave her more accumulations. She still had not reached the divine-level Law of Life-and-Death.

Tianyi and Daoyi didn’t immediately appear in the soul quarantine. Tianyi wanted to continue, but alas. His heart was willing, but his mind was tired. He needed a break. So, the two spent a few decades experiencing life in the Avalon System before entering the Tengri Divine System together.

Once inside, Tianyi found a relatively complete soul and worked from there. He would only tackle the more fragmented souls once he felt he had gained enough proficiency. The soul he chose had most of its torso and limbs, but its fringes had disappeared.

The first step was to naturally locate the fragments that had disappeared. When Tianyi teleported all of these to the quarantine area, he had specifically kept their placements. Of course, he couldn’t guarantee he hadn’t missed anything, especially the soul fragments that had already decomposed into soul essence.

Speaking of soul essence, it reminded Tianyi of the Soul Emperor from when the Primordial Realm was still the Huang Realm. That guy also collected soul essence in order to resurrect his love.

With the abundant soul essence, Tianyi used it to replace the missing parts of the soul. It was far less tedious than he expected, but the results could only be considered average. The soul lost much of its memory and showed the intelligence of a child. Perhaps it was the soul’s way of protecting itself by resetting.

Tianyi even kept the soul for observation, but the memory loss did not show any signs of recovering. The soul was like a specimen encased in amber, showing no signs of degradation or growth—highly unnatural. Wanting to see if he could change it, his first thought was to stuff the soul back into the body.

He preserved the bodies of the dead as well. It didn’t take much effort, and he knew that the body was a shell to protect the vulnerable soul. To Tianyi’s surprise, the soul entered and adapted. It still showed a childlike intelligence and innocence, but it no longer stagnated and started to grow. After a few more observations, Tianyi teleported it back to its original location.

For the second soul, Tianyi did not use soul essence. Although it could heal the soul, it was not what Tianyi wanted. He wanted to reconstruct the soul back to perfect—or near it, at the very least. Although the injured one was very similar to the first one, Tianyi ran into his first roadblock.

Because of the countless number of souls that shattered and their proximity, their soul fragments intermixed, making it difficult to ascertain which fragment belonged to whom. Not to mention that although each fragment had a source, that didn’t mean they were exactly the same. He had to judge which fragment belonged to the broken soul.

It took a long time, and Tianyi found himself with an abundant number of soul fragments, far too many for the second soul he was attempting to reconstruct.

Tianyi glanced at Daoyi, who was focusing seriously on the soul in front of her. He sighed and went back to work.