A Regressor’s Tale of Cultivation Chapter 802 Chapter 798: Future King (3)

I carry the torch candle, following the trail of the narrative.

At last, I witness the [First Light] manifesting in its full glory upon Mount Sumeru.

"First Light..."

Hong Fan gazes upon the gathered souls of the Chief Gods, whom he has hunted and slain.

Throughout countless eons of soul refinement, he perfected the mantra known as Immortal Cultivation, selecting the First Light as the central power source to fuel the entire Immortal Cultivation system.

Through the medium of the First Light, the fundamental truths of the universe were finally revealed to him.

'This world serves as both a tomb and a cradle.'

Within this reality, there are entities known as Creator Gods.

These beings possess omniscience and omnipotence within their own domains, birthing infinite worlds where they can manifest as anything they desire. They represent the ultimate truth, governing every outcome and the laws of causality within their creations.

Each Creator God resides within the unique world they have fashioned.

These distinct realms may mirror one another or influence each other, yet they can also remain entirely alien.

And yet...

Death is a foreign concept to such Creator Gods; it is merely a transition of state. Since they cannot truly perish, they have no need for parents or a primal source to bring them into being.

In their existence, there is effect without a preceding cause.

They simply emerge at a certain point in time, creating worlds and existing within them.

While they lack a traditional birth, there is a foundation from which they arise.

Known by many titles—the Cradle of Chaos, the Conception Palace of Omnipotence, or the Gestation World—this egg-shaped sanctuary is filled with the essence of creation and chaos. It is here that Creator Gods are born to forge their own realities.

And...

The universe where Hong Fan and the Chief Gods originated is precisely such a place.

However, this specific gestation world differs from others because it possesses something akin to 'causality'.

'A predecessor Creator God... once existed.'

While retracing the origin of that predecessor leads back to nothingness, the current state of the world was shaped by their influence.

Woo-wooooong—

Standing before the First Light, Hong Fan deciphered the lingering thoughts of the predecessor, accessing their wisdom, history, and intent through the light's power.

'Did the one who came before... seek to create a utopia?'

After observing the realms of other Creator Gods and wandering through infinite worlds...

They aimed to construct a different kind of Heaven and Earth.

A unique world where any entity could achieve completion.

A realm where a definitive answer to the meaning of life could be found.

Typically, a world accepts whatever its Creator God dictates as truth. Whether the creator possesses a personality is irrelevant; because they are omnipotent, the world simply acknowledges their decree as the absolute answer.

But ultimately, that is merely the subjective answer of a single God.

The predecessor sought a fundamental truth that would remain valid across any world, regardless of its creator.

To achieve this, they chose self-sacrifice.

By shattering their own form and authority, they reverted the world back to its gestation phase.

They refined their own soul using a brazier fashioned by a great divinity of their own making—a being nearly their equal who offered the vessel upon departing the world.

The soul was divided into three segments by the three legs of the brazier.

From their own essence, the Creator God forged the Three Daos.

These supreme Daos were named Fate, History, and Miracle.

Through these Daos, worlds and living beings could emerge and flourish even during the primal gestation period.

After refining their soul into three parts, the Creator God perished, leaving behind only a faint thread of continuity—a single lingering strand of consciousness.

—Find the answer.

They refused to believe that truth was simply whatever they dictated.

They sought an answer that remained constant everywhere.

To discover it, they believed that absolute beings of equal stature must clash, debate, and struggle together. They envisioned a truth that would bloom from the dialogues and stories shared between equals.

Such a truth, they believed, would be far greater than any decree issued by a solitary absolute being.

—Refine your rank, expand your existence, and attain the Three Daos.

This was the command issued by the great being's consciousness.

Every living thing in this world was meant to grow in strength, achieve divinity, become transcendents, and eventually earn the right to challenge the Three Daos.

However, it was forbidden for a single being to seize all Three Daos and become a true Creator God.

—Let each existence master only one Dao to become a Quasi-Creator. Thus, three absolute beings will forever coexist, sometimes in harmony and sometimes in opposition... and one day, from their stories, the truth shall emerge.

A genuine truth born from the interplay between three equal, absolute entities.

That was the grand design of the predecessor Creator God.

A universal answer that would hold true in any world.

That single strand of consciousness, etched into the spirits of all future beings, gained form and power through the Three Daos, evolving into vast existences.

Starting with Brightness, the first Chief God, the Chief Gods of Water, Fire, Earth, Wood, and Metal were born from that lingering intent.

Essentially, the Chief Gods who ruled the cosmos were the direct offspring of the Creator God.

Carrying that divine will, they dedicated their lives to ascending in rank, hoping to grasp the Three Daos and manifest a Heaven that reflected their own answers.

The Creator God's consciousness continued to weave laws to bring forth even more Chief Gods.

And it would have continued indefinitely, if not for a single anomaly.

"Is that the truth...? The Three Daos...!?"

Hong Fan laughed as he read the predecessor's will within the First Light he had fashioned.

"If I reach the Three Daos... will I finally find the answer...?"

The answer he sought.

The reason behind his misery and suffering.

The reason why all creatures are born to endure such fragile and wretched fates.

He needed to understand.

"So it is not the Chief Gods... but the Three Daos that weave the threads of fate...!?"

What he held in his hand, refined by the First Light, was the very will and consciousness of the predecessor Creator God.

"O Three Daos, if I attain you, are you promising me the answer...!?"

Hong Fan demanded to know the causality of it all.

Why was he forced to suffer?

Why were those he cared for dragged into his pain?

Why did suffering even exist in this world?

"Then I shall reach them. I will surely reach them... and I will be compensated for every ounce of my pain..."

Why must the world contain both light and shadow!?

Light alone should have been enough.

From that moment on, Hong Fan further refined the Immortal Cultivation system to fulfill his will and reach the Three Daos.

He rejected a world where Chief Gods were born into power and granted divinity to others through Seats.

Instead, he envisioned a system where even a mortal could become a transcendent equal to a Chief God through sheer effort and Cultivation.

"A world... where the light is accessible to all equally..."

He placed the First Light at the pinnacle of the Immortal Cultivation system, ensuring that any mortal who followed the path—constructed using Fuxi as the foundation—could seize ultimate authority.

"Never again..."

He drew an object from his robes.

It was a mother-of-pearl hairpin, his mother's keepsake.

It was also the same gift he had given to Yang Hwe in his first life. To make her smile, he had once left it with a merchant to add leopard patterns and lacquerwork.

Had he simply hurried to her side instead of waiting for that decoration, she might have survived that first life.

"Never again... shall a world exist where someone I love... dies so miserably..."

Her death hadn't been mythic or heroic.

She hadn't perished in a grand struggle against divine schemes.

With no cure for her leprosy, her body had simply rotted away in her home. While her husband was away, thieves had set the house ablaze.

Unable to flee because her legs had decayed, she died a wretched death in the flames—that was the fate of the first Yang Hwe.

Because a Chief God had named her, Hong Fan once believed her death was part of a divine plot. But in reality, the naming was only meant to stir the God of Light within Hong Fan himself.

Yang Hwe had just died a miserable, pointless death.

There was no grand purpose. It happened 'just because'.

That 'just because' was a truth so sharp it pierced Hong Fan's soul.

"If she is born once more..."

He resolved to create a world where everyone could become part of a myth.

"And if she finds me and suffers again..."

He had failed to protect her. If there was a next life, he couldn't simply promise to be her shield.

Instead, he would give her the power to protect herself.

"At the very least... so her end isn't so pathetic that she cannot even run away because her legs have rotted..."

He wanted her enemies to be more than just common thieves or local thugs.

He wanted to transform people into divine beings capable of wielding mythic strength and resisting fate until the very end.

"Let the world become such a place..."

The first Yang Hwe burned because she couldn't walk. The second died because the weak Heuk Sa Society and her villagers became a weight that dragged her down.

And now, as Hong Fan learned of the third cycle...

Because he had spent so long confronting the Chief God, she had again contracted leprosy. Driven out by the noble household's Elders, and with the Young Master who tried to help her sent away to a distant land by his own family, she had slowly starved to death in isolation.

It wasn't as sudden as the fire, but it was a long, agonizing tragedy.

"It doesn't matter who they are... I will build a world where anyone, instead of just weeping to the heavens, can ascend to the heavens by their own hand!"

That resolve echoed through the Sumeru Three Heavens Great Thousand World he had forged.

As he dreamed of a world where others could match his strength, he held onto another hope.

'There must be restitution.'

Not just for Hong Fan, but for everyone who had suffered.

The tale of the boy who stitched six Heavenly Domains together to create Mount Sumeru concludes here.

And the narrative moves to Chapter 9.

The very start was a method to reclaim his lost connections—Yang Hwe, his mother, the Heuk Sa Society, and all those who had endured pain.

Using his own Immortal Art of Light, Radiance, he possessed the power to return to the past whenever he wished. However, he chose not to turn back time now.

He knew that even if he regressed, history would simply repeat itself.

To truly break the cycle, he needed to become equal to History itself—one of the Three Daos. Until that moment, he would not move backward.

Instead, using the First Light, he extracted information from the depths of history. Through that data, he began to pull back the hearts that had been absorbed into the Dao of Miracle.

They say spilt water cannot be recovered, but if one can track every individual particle and bring it back, the vessel can be refilled.

Hong Fan possessed that very power.

He summoned the spirits of Yang Hwe and his mother in an instant, but he did not revive them immediately. He feared that a flawed resurrection might leave them in a distorted state.

Thus, he chose the Heuk Sa Society and the villagers as his test subjects.

Using history as his coordinates, Hong Fan pulled every soul from that village out of the Miracle Dao.

These were people he valued, yet they were also the ones who had failed to save Yang Hwe, becoming the anchors that doomed her. Using them as subjects was their penance for being a burden.

Though calling it a punishment was a stretch, given the blissful nature of their new existence...

Regardless, Hong Fan reached into the second cycle's timeline, extracting the spirits of the deceased and restoring them to life.

Empowered by his Immortal Cultivation system, these souls immediately reached the pinnacle of Cultivation upon their revival.

They pledged their eternal loyalty to him, and from their ranks, Hong Fan chose ten elites to serve as the guardians of the Immortal Cultivation system.

The Heuk Sa Society was reborn as the Heuk Sa Hall, following Hong Fan's decree.

Alongside them, he continued to delve into history, researching the perfection of spirit revival.

He needed to ensure his wife's soul would return perfectly, and using the others allowed him to verify the process.

During this time, his subordinates learned of Hong Fan's past and the many timelines lost to his regressions.

Filled with sympathy, they spoke as one.

"Honored Seat, your life has been truly cursed by misfortune."

"Do not pity me. It is unpleasant."

"Haha, as you wish. But... we truly hope the Honored Seat can find a way to leave those tragic memories behind."

They created a crest for the Heuk Sa Hall to honor Hong Fan.

[The Black Snake Biting Its Own Tail]

It represented the Heuk Sa Hall's work in unearthing the past, but it also symbolized Hong Fan himself, trapped by the agony of his history.

Furthermore, it served as a symbol for the Immortal Art of Radiance and its power to traverse time.

It was a mark that perfectly encapsulated Hong Fan's essence.

"...To be told I am a prisoner of my past is not pleasant. And... the design is quite hideous. I do not like this symbol..."

Hong Fan frowned, but he eventually relented after hearing his subordinates' explanation.

"We intentionally made it ugly so that the Honored Seat would dislike it. We want you to hurry and escape those foul memories so you can change the symbol to something better."

"You made it so that I would want to change it...?"

"Precisely. One day, please leave the pain behind and replace this with a new crest. Perhaps a snake that has let go of its tail, or even a dragon... something truly majestic. So, this symbol actually represents..."

The members of Heuk Sa Hall smiled at him.

"Hope. It is a symbol of hope. Though the Honored Seat is currently bound by past suffering... it carries the hope that you will one day find salvation and be free."

"Hope..."

Hong Fan found himself smiling at the word.

"The hope of the future, then..."

A snake that, while currently suffering, would one day release its tail and be free.

"Very well. I look forward to seeing that hope realized."

Hong Fan etched the concept of hope into his soul.

He realized that hope defined his very purpose.

'Hope... yes. I wish to grant hope to all.'

Wasn't that the logic behind his Immortal Cultivation system? He wanted wretched mortals to have the hope of shedding their limitations and seeking a better existence.

'I want to give it to those who died long ago and now sleep in the dark.'

With that singular drive, Hong Fan and the Heuk Sa Hall discovered that historical data also contained lingering grudges, and they sought a way to resolve them.

He provided hope to the living through Cultivation and cleared the resentment of the dead, offering hope to the past.

Through these deeds, Hong Fan realized he had ascended to a new state of being.

From the members of Heuk Sa Hall to those who gained divinity through his system, and even the forgotten souls lost in oblivion—they all looked to him as the bringer of hope.

They praised him loudly as the Zero King.

'Now, only the beings of the future remain...'

Those yet to be born.

The 'answer' was for them.

"...I must reach the Three Daos."

To ensure hope existed even for those yet to come.

For the sake of future hope.

For Yang Hwe, who would one day be reborn by his hand and receive her due recompense.