Chapter 257: Not Everyone Reaches the Top (1/2)

No more issues cropped up during the tempering of the new disciples. After about a week, everyone had a powerful enough body to resist their future Destruction Lightning Seed. After some hours of rest, the tempering continued. Yet, this time, the disciples were absorbing the lightning into their Lightning Seed.

The creation of the Destruction Lightning Seed took nearly a whole month. None of the disciples had Elemental Synchronicity, which made this whole thing take so long. Yet, after the month, nearly everyone managed to upgrade their Lightning Seeds to Destruction Lightning. Though, accidents happen. Two of the disciples died during the cultivation.

Gravis had no idea how those disciples died. They just died from one moment to the other. Their bodies didn't explode. In actuality, the bodies were still in relatively good condition. Gravis had seen when they died, and it had appeared as if the Destruction Lightning inside them went crazy and destroyed their minds.

After a long talk with Lasar, they came to a conclusion on why this happened. The will of those two disciples had been too weak. This was the only conclusion that made sense, even though it also didn't make sense at the same time. The disciples' wills had been tested before going into the tower, and there were even people with weaker wills than the dead ones.

Initially, Lasar hadn't considered that possibility. After all, how could people with weaker wills still be fine while those two had died? Yet, the way that the lightning killed them was precisely the same as when someone created lightning that was too powerful for their current will.

In the middle of the discussion, Gravis had thought about something that made this whole scene make sense. ”What if they were Heavenborn?” Gravis had asked. The Heaven Sect had Heavenborn specifically created to be spies, and their wills appeared the same as the other disciples. Yet, their will actually wasn't that powerful.

Why did Heavenborn not need a will? That was due to their Heavenly Pressure, which borrowed the will of Heaven. The will would create a pressure powerful enough to compress their Energy and make them form their Spirits. Yet, the borrowed will didn't represent their own will.

Gravis guessed that over a month of tempering and pain, the Heavenborn had lost control over their own, personal will. They couldn't control the powerful lightning anymore, and it went berserk. A Heavenborn could borrow the Will-Aura from Heaven, but they couldn't borrow willpower. This was what killed them.

Lasar didn't really care. It actually made no difference if there were spies from the Heaven Sect in the Lightning Sect or not. What were they going to do about it anyway? On top of that, the High Priest could just use his Spirit to look into the Lightning Sect. The death of the spies made absolutely no difference. It just made it slightly harder for the Heaven Sect to gather intel on the Lightning Sect.

Typically, if a power found spies from another power in their ranks, they would become enraged and demand an explanation. Yet, what if the power was the supreme leader over the world? The Lightning Sect would demand an explanation, and the Heaven Sect would just say no. What then? Were they supposed to attack the Heaven Sect? That would be suicide.

The different power dynamics made killing or sparing the spies unimportant. It was the same thing either way.

Lasar and Gravis had had this conversation inside the Lightning Tower after the tempering of the disciples had finished. Every single one of those disciples had already felt the Energy in the air, which meant that they could reach the Energy Gathering Realm whenever they wanted. By the next day, the Lightning Sect would have 98 new Energy Gathering disciples with Destruction Lightning.

After over a month of tempering, Gravis left the Lightning Tower with a sigh. Initially, he had believed that his training speed would slow down while doing this, but that was not entirely true. Yes, his lightning was regenerating slower since he was using it up at the same time. Yet, the output that he kept up had been so small that Gravis' cultivation was only delayed by some hours. During the tempering, he still needed to unload his lightning into his Spirit.

As Gravis stepped out of the Lightning Tower, he saw the Freya's Birch unload some Life Lightning into the tower. The Life Lightning storages were low, so they needed a refill. Gravis watched the tree until it stopped. Then, he saw a lot of disciples entering a giant warehouse and exiting, carrying bodies of beasts.

The corpses surrounded the tree again, but when Gravis saw one of the bodies, he took a shaking, deep breath. It was a gigantic green bird. Gravis could see that it was a low-grade Spirit Beast.

The disciple carrying the body dumped it near the tree and then left. Gravis inspected it, and sure enough, it was Skye's parent. In the beginning, Gravis had feared that it was Skye, but it turned out that it was its parent. Gravis looked at the body with emotion. While doing so, he remained silent.

After a couple of minutes, he took another breath and looked into the sky. ”Not everyone can survive the journey to the top,” he muttered.

Was he angry? Yes.