Chapter 428: Pool of Tranquility (1/2)

“My friend, that was truly a… unique Discourse,” the ent coughed when Zac jumped up to the platform they shared. “I have never heard of such a, uh, masculine, manner of handling the Dao. And those insights… Scary, too scary. You are a walking paradox, both a child and a nemesis of the forest.”

“Thanks, I guess,” Zac snorted as he sat down.

“And congratulations on receiving the opportunity to bask in the Pool of Tranquility,” the ent said, patting Zac’s shoulder.

Zac initially only nodded in response, but he got confused when he noted that Thelim had surreptitiously dropped a small acorn that rolled into his lap. Believing it wasn’t a without reason Zac immediately looked at it with his Attuned Sight, and he saw that it contained some nature-attuned energies.

Curious, Zac instilled a minute amount of Cosmic Energy into it, and he suddenly received a short message in his mind, just like with the communications crystal he had gotten from Ogras before. There were only two words recorded, but it was enough to give Zac pause.

Be careful.

It was obviously a warning that things weren’t as simple as they seemed, and Zac wasn’t surprised. For one, the teleporter hadn’t appeared even after the matriarch conceded. That meant that the System still didn’t consider the quest finished. Hidden danger still lurked nearby. He was more surprised that the ent had gone out of his way to warn him at the risk of straining the relationship between his family and the Perenne Clan.

Zac still gave a slight nod in thanks to the ent before turning back toward the stadium. The Pool would only be opened at sunset, so he would have to wait for a few more hours while the battles continued below.

Due to Zac’s performance there were cracks all over the array, and it would take over an hour before it regained full functionality. Zac tried to figure out his next course of action while they waited, but he couldn’t do a lot apart from restoring his mental reserves.

Some trap was no doubt waiting for him in the Pool of Tranquility, but he couldn’t figure out exactly what it was. Openly attacking the winners was unlikely, since such an action would no doubt spread and sully their reputation. It would also become impossible for them to attract any more guardians from the wandering cultivators.

Thankfully he hadn’t shown any of his actual strength, so the dryads were still completely clueless about his massive pool of attributes. They only knew that he was someone with two early-stage Dao Fragments but also someone who had atrocious control over them. Perhaps they even thought he had fallen into some amazing fortuitous encounter that imbued him with the two fragments without having any skills in the subject.

Zac instead started to go over the insights into his path of cultivation gained during the Dao Discourse. He had arrived at the conclusions while pissed off about the cheating, but he still felt that they held true after having calmed down.

He would put his attempts at learning [Cyclic Strike] on hold for now, unless it somehow proved extremely easy to master after having gained a life-attuned Dao Fragment. But Zac felt the odds of that was pretty slim. It hadn’t worked at all while he had possessed two Peak Dao Seeds, so using the stronger Dao Fragment should only be more complicated.

There was also a need to formalize a new direction. Focusing on force rather than technique was good an all, but he needed to find a 'creation' based on force and his Dao Paths. The chaotic thundercloud created from Axe and Coffin was extremely lethal, but he was only able to summon that thing because of the [Dao Discourse Array].

He also needed to figure out a way to bring his future Dao Fragment into the mix. Right now he had unleashed a storm of Axe and Coffin, and this wasn’t the fusion of Life and Death he had envisioned. There were a lot of things to consider, and it was a bit hard to theorize what was possible and what was impractical, especially since he was still lacking one of the fragments.

There was also the issue of those flashes of light that had the color of illuminated bronze. They only appeared for a fraction of a second before disintegrating, but the destruction they caused had been far greater than either of his two Fragments. But even though the force was massive he had been completely unable to sense anything from them.

He had a connection to the thundercloud even if he barely could control it, but the same couldn’t be said about those lights. They suddenly appeared, and disappeared just as quickly before he had any chance to form any mental connections to them.

“Hey, what feeling did you get from the bronze-colored flashes of light from within the cloud I summoned?” Zac asked as he turned to the ent, curious what the woodland being was able to feel.

“Flashes of light?” Thelim said with confusion. “I did not see any? I only sensed a mix of two Daos, the first one sharp and forceful, perhaps the Dao of the Greatsword? The other one was cold and death-attuned.”

“Oh?” Zac said with surprise. “Nevermind then.”

Had those bronze lights not been visible to the normal spectrum? He had been using Cosmic Gaze the whole time, and he thought that the flashes were seen by everyone. But perhaps the bronze was just the color of the attunement, while the effect was indiscernible to the naked eye.

The most pressing question was what the light represented. Zac felt those sparks might be the clue to a way for him to increase his power, as there were only two reasonable explanations behind the sparks as he saw it.

The first possibility was that the flashes were related to the Splinter of Oblivion. It was a creation based on the Dao of Oblivion, which felt a bit similar to how the sparks simply disintegrated anything they touched. However, the only energy that Zac received from the Splinter was purified to pure spiritual energy by the miasmic fractals.

Another possibility, and the one that Zac felt was most likely, was that the sparks were the result of chance fusions between his two Dao Fragments. The two concepts had combined due to friction or something else, like a nuclear fusion reaction of the Dao.

This fusion in turn created a short-lived spark of some greater concept. If not oblivion, then perhaps something related of a lower tier. He really wanted to experiment based on this idea, because if that was that was going on then he’d have a terrifying ace on his hands. He could only imagine the power of [Deforestation] with the additional effect of that mysterious bronze Dao.