Chapter 329: Enlightenment

Xiang Yu found himself floating in an endless expanse.

This was different from the void from before though, not empty darkness, but a realm filled with all sorts of concepts. Everything everywhere was happening and not happening all at the same time. In this domain, Xiang Yu existed as merely a tiny spark of awareness in a vast ocean.

Time stretched endlessly around him until he began to slowly gain comprehension. It started as just a tiny fragment, a simple understanding of his own existence.

But gradually, it grew.

As his awareness expanded, he gained a head, then a torso, then a hand, and eventually, his entire body materialized. Throughout this transformation, he continued to gain deeper understanding of the environment around him.

He slowly opened his eyes. He then lifted his hand, a dark sphere filled with blue stars materialized on his palm. The character for “space” appeared in his mind. He then raised his other hand, and a golden energy containing a clock face appeared. “Time,” the character appeared in his mind.

Then, another orb materialized before him. This one was absolutely dark, producing no light whatsoever, instead, it actively devoured all light around it. “Void,” the character appeared in his mind.

In his mind, Xiang Yu brought all three concepts together.

He pushed the space and time energies he was holding toward the center to meet with the void. He then released his grip on the two spheres.

The pull of the void as it actively consumed everything around it, created a makeshift gravitational force. As the two other energies simultaneously rejected this pull, they generated forces of their own. Slowly, the three began revolving around each other, beginning at a gentle pace but quickly accelerating while still maintaining their perfect balance.

Xiang Yu observed this with fascination, the characters for “law” and “order” appearing in his mind. He brought his hands together where the energies revolved around each other, then attempted to push the concepts even closer together. The concepts rejected this, their pulls pushing and pulling against each other in resistance.

Xiang Yu’s face showed strain as he struggled to merge them.

After trying and failing a few more times, he realized that although these concepts weren’t compatible, they were still somehow maintaining order. He needed to break this balance.

He concentrated deeper, and other orbs began appearing: fire, water, earth… all ten elements.

Surprisingly, the result wasn’t what he had anticipated. Instead of adding to the chaos to create disorder, the elemental orbs simply floated aside and began revolving among themselves. They didn’t seem to be accepted by the other concepts.

Xiang Yu found this intriguing. He wondered if the other concepts somehow looked down on the elements. Were the elements not of equal rank? Well, that was perhaps a foolish question, anyone could tell that the ten elements were extremely weak compared to something like space. When he compared his void domain to his fire domain, it wasn’t even a competition.

He wondered if there might be some higher underlying concept that unified them all. As this thought formed, something finally clicked.

“That’s right,” he realized.

He pushed the ten elements together. At first, they resisted, but he used the other concepts to force them to merge. When he did, space and time began tearing around the point of convergence and Chaos erupted everywhere.

But surprisingly, as time went on, order began to emerge from within the chaos. After an unknown amount of time, the energies finally settled into a new form, an orb displaying the yin-yang symbol.

…

Xiang Yu pulled the yin-yang orb to his side.

It made sense, all elements relied on yin-yang balance to exist as they were. When brought together, as long as they could balance the inherent chaos, they returned to order. This was the essence of the yin-yang dao.

“Dao?” he wondered, the character suddenly materializing in his mind.

“Truth?” These concepts felt impossibly heavy, their meanings too profound to fully comprehend. Just the characters alone weighed heavily on his consciousness, as if being pressed down by a mountain.

He decided to set these ones aside for now, he needed to make use of this time.

After his enlightenment had entered the heavenly stage, he had entered a state many cultivators called “enlightenment.”

In this state, cultivators could perceive and understand all sorts of things they typically couldn’t. Xiang Yu thought to himself that this moment was especially valuable because during enlightenment, one’s comprehension was boosted to levels far beyond their current enlightenment. Currently, he was experiencing above-heavenly level enlightenment, and he had no intention of letting such an opportunity go to waste.

He examined the yin-yang concept in his hand, then added it into the mix with the other three. The concepts continued maintaining their balance, merely readjusting to accommodate the new addition.

Xiang Yu thought to himself that a common misconception about yin-yang was that it merely represented balance. While it’s true that the concept embodies the most order of all that he knew of, one must also understand that there can be no order without disorder.

In the end, they were merely sides of the same coin.

The yin-yang symbol suddenly flipped, its dark side completely enveloping the light side. Xiang Yu was intentionally introducing disorder into the system, pushing against the natural tendency toward balance.

“Come on, come on,” he thought, he just had a little bit of time left.

The other three concepts struggled to compensate for the disrupted order, but Xiang Yu intensified the chaos. Now, while the concepts were unstable and vulnerable, he forcefully smashed them together.

“Chaos,” the character appeared in his mind – then he woke up.

When his eyes opened, the enlightenment effect had vanished. Xiang Yu felt as though he had been yanked from the most advanced realm of existence into the deepest pits of hell.

It felt as though he was back to being confined to a tiny bubble in an insignificant corner of the endless expanse. And he might as well have been. From what he had glimpsed during his enlightenment state, someone like you couldn’t even begin to imagine just how big and complex the world was.

Concepts of all kinds existed everywhere, he would have been easily overwhelmed by all this if he hadn’t set his mind straight with the help of the flame and chosen to just pay attention to what mattered most to him

…

A/N: The character for “space” : meaning the kanji, ig in this case it would be 宇, but I’m not so sure as the actual meaning is universe/cosmos

Xiang Yu day again

Mass Release (1/5)