Lightning Is the Only Way

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.

Was he sad? Yes.

Did he think Skye's parent deserved this? No.

Yet, was he supposed to kill the killer because they went out to temper themselves? The missions had been created as tempering, and the disciples followed that. He had told no one about Skye or Skye's parent, except for Lasar and Old Man Lightning. Yet, the elders who created the missions didn't know. Therefore, Skye's parent had become one of the targets for the mission and was killed.

'My creation of the tree has such far-reaching repercussions. My cultivation resulted in thousands of beasts dying. Is that bad? Is it good? I don't think it's anything. As I become stronger, my acts will create bigger repercussions. Am I supposed to think about everything I do?' Gravis thought to himself.

Gravis released a small, bitter laugh. 'I could have remembered that Skye and its parent would also fall into the range of targets. Yet, I totally forgot. Though, would it have been right for me to stop this? Skye and its parent wanted tempering, and it had been delivered to them. If I were in its shoes, would I fault myself?' Gravis asked himself.

Gravis slightly shook his head. 'I wouldn't fault the missions. I had a chance of winning, yet I was too weak to change this calamity into good luck. The death of Skye's parent has increased the power of someone else. This is just how the world and cultivation works.'

Gravis saw the body deteriorating at a visible speed as the tree swayed in happiness. The tree had already noticed Gravis and greeted its father with happiness. It was always happy to see its father, and Gravis felt its emotions.

'I am angry, sad, and frustrated, yet what will that change?' Gravis asked himself. 'The fights had been fair, and if Skye's parent had seen such a group of people, it would have probably attacked of its own volition. It is natural to temper oneself. That also holds true for beasts. Am I supposed to kill the disciple or group of disciples because they managed to survive?'

Gravis continued looking at the body neutrally. He remembered how it returned to the tree after the fight with the Fire and Lightning Guild. He remembered his time staying with the two birds. He remembered how it had pushed Skye forward to Gravis. He remembered Skye's reunion with it when they had visited the Wind Guild. Then, he also remembered his talk with it after he had reached the Spirit Forming Realm.

Back then, it had said that it would leave for the Core-Continent in five days. By now, multiple months had passed. It actually made sense that it would already be here. By being here, it obviously, also became a target.

After the body vanished, Gravis contacted the elder responsible for the missions. He asked him who killed the bird, and the elder answered. There was no reason to keep something like that private. Those were public missions, after all.

It had been a group of two Seed Stage cultivators while one of them hadn't returned from the hunt. Gravis asked around and quickly found out who the surviving person was. It was a relatively young man named Deryl.

Gravis searched for Deryl and found him drinking in a pub. There were some pubs around the Lightning Sect. After all, the disciples also wanted to relax and socialize from time to time. After finding Deryl, Gravis walked to the pub.

The pub was black since it was made with Balzar, but the furniture was made with expensive wood. Every single piece of furniture released some Energy, which meant they were probably made out of an Energy Plant.

Gravis found Deryl sitting alone in a corner, continually drinking Spirit Wine. One had to know that due to a cultivator's power, they couldn't drink enough alcohol to get drunk. That was where Spirit Wine came into the equation. It numbed the Spirit of a person, making it harder for them to think. It was mostly used to get a nice party started, but Derly was obviously not using it for that. He was drinking to forget.

This was incredibly rare since Spirit Forming experts all had a Will-Aura. The will of someone like that was hard to break. Gravis guessed that this was because of the other dead person.

"Can we talk for a bit?" Gravis asked.