Art of Creation [Eco-Cultivation Prototype]

Two weeks had passed since Devor's breakthrough into the Core Formation Realm, and already, the thrill of advancement had dulled into routine.

The initial burst of excitement, the stream of congratulatory messages, even the awe in the eyes of outer disciples—it had all faded like mist under morning sun.

Today, Devor was quietly tending to the Spiritual Trees that represented the five basic elements: wind, fire, water, metal, and earth.

Each stood in quiet dignity, rooted in soil blessed by the Azure Sky Sect's spirit veins. A gentle wind carried the sweet scent of spirit blossoms, and dew shimmered along leaves like crystallized mana.

Across the courtyard, Yulin was deep in discussion with Venom, her voice hushed, animated. Devor barely noticed—he was far too distracted by something else.

"…I completely forgot to test out Spiritual Perception," he muttered, smacking his forehead with a palm. "The system literally gave me a free gift, and I just walked away from it like a fool."

Curiosity ignited once more, he closed his eyes and focused inward, directing a single thought toward the dormant ability.

At once, his body responded.

A slow surge of energy gathered behind his eyes—steady, deliberate. His irises tingled as spiritual essence converged at his retinas. Intricate runes, too small for the naked eye and too complex for his conscious mind, began forming. They spun in microscopic spirals, glowing faintly with jade and violet light, painting an arcane lattice over his vision.

"No... not painting—etching," he realized. "These runes are alive."

He tried to memorize the patterns, hoping to study them later or recreate them, but the complexity was overwhelming. They were alien—drawn from principles beyond any formation script or talisman craft he had studied. It felt as though the runes obeyed a law from another world altogether. Another dimension.

Letting go of the futile attempt to understand, he simply surrendered to the flow.

The change was instant.

The world burst open.

Where once he saw a vibrant garden, he now beheld a universe of living energy. The Spirit Trees shimmered in translucent brilliance, their structures revealing circulating flows of qi that resembled glowing bloodstreams. Leaves pulsed gently, pulling ambient energy from the air in waves and channeling it down to their roots in a slow, graceful spiral.

His eyes burned gold now—pupils vanished, replaced by molten rings of insight.

"It's not just sight," he whispered. "It's… comprehension."

His skin tingled as unseen currents brushed against him. He could feel the qi in the air. Not just its presence—but its attributes: cold water essence, volatile fire, dense metal, flexible wood. Each flavor of elemental energy touched him like a note in a symphony.

He turned back to the Spiritual Tree of Earth and peered deeper.

What he saw took his breath away.

Its roots weren't just feeding—it was digesting energy, refining the ambient essence like a complex alchemical engine.

The leaves above, once just beautiful ornaments, were like antennae absorbing the sky's breath. Every vein, every node, every flicker of motion had meaning. He could see energy changing form within the tree's very cells, filtered through mystical organs unique to spirit plants.

"They're… not just plants," he murmured. "They're cultivators."

Then he looked outward.

The entire garden shimmered with hidden connections. Thin threads of golden light—almost like pollen, or dust—wove between plants. Dozens, hundreds of them, forming a living network. Qi didn't just move from root to leaf—it moved between trees, between bushes, even through the soil and air.

Harmony. Not just growth. They're... synchronized.

But then he saw more.

Beyond the golden dustlines, thicker strands of multicolored energy—red, green, blue, silver—flowed like rivers. And every current, no matter its element or origin, was being drawn toward a singular point of convergence in the garden.

There, at the very heart of his grove, the energies merged.

They fused into radiant white—a color of purity, but also of potential. It wasn't just the absence of color. It was the unity of all five elements refined to a higher state.

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At last, Devor truly saw it.

The garden he had nurtured—his sanctuary of elemental plants—wasn't just thriving. It was singing.

Threads of vivid color wove through the air like strands of silk in a loom, forming pulsing arcs of life and energy.

Red for fire, blue for water, green for wind, yellow for earth, silver for metal—each color flickered in harmony with the others. They danced between roots, leaves, soil, and sky in a continuous breath of spiritual resonance.

And in the center of it all, faint golden trails—a byproduct of the harmony he'd carefully cultivated between incompatible species—sparkled like motes of divine dust.

"It's alive," he thought, awestruck. "A true formation born of life itself… not constructed, but grown."

"This ability… it's incredibly useful," Devor murmured under his breath, his voice nearly reverent. "It might just help me take things even further…"

Driven by instinct, he opened his interface.

[ Spiritual Essence: 1703/2000 ]

His heart skipped a beat.

Not even a full minute…

And it's already drained almost 300 points?

"Damn, that's insanely expensive," he muttered, clicking his tongue.

No time to waste.

He vanished in a blur, reappearing beside the towering Venom Spiritual Tree—a grotesquely beautiful creation formed from years of toxic plant cultivation.

Its bark pulsed like living flesh, and its leaves glistened with beads of hallucinogenic dew. Surrounding it were four auxiliary gardens, each one a unique ecosystem dedicated to an elemental aspect of poison: Paralysis (Earth), Corrosion (Water), Madness (Wood), and Burning Toxin (Fire).

Above the tree, the air shimmered.

There, suspended in the sky like a second layer of reality, was the Venom Domain.

It looked like a night sky turned inside out—black with pulsing threads of emerald and amethyst, stars twinkling with intent. But as he activated Spiritual Perception once more, the stars fractured. New shapes emerged. Strands—no, laws—began to show themselves.

They weren't just lights. They were the rules written into the domain's very fabric.

Devor's golden irises widened in wonder.

"I can… see them," he whispered. "I can actually see the rules within the domain itself…"

Some of the threads pulsed gently in familiarity. He recognized them—traits he'd already mastered: Binding Toxin, Photosynthetic Convergence, Dual-Root Absorption.

But the rest? They shimmered with alien logic. Some twisted in impossible geometries. Others looped and merged, creating temporary nexuses that collapsed seconds later.

"I can't even begin to understand the deeper ones," he said. "But I will."

Without hesitating, he pulled a large sheet of spirit parchment from his storage ring. Then he began sketching—rapid outlines, rough diagrams of the rules' shapes and movements. It wasn't about detail. It was about pattern recognition. He needed to capture the essence before it faded from memory.

Minutes passed.

Then, a sharp warning rang in his mind.

[ Spiritual Essence : 482/2000 ]

He cursed and immediately shut off the perception.

The world dulled. The garden dimmed. His vision returned to the mundane.

"This kind of consumption is outrageous," Devor thought grimly. "But for something that lets me see the rules governing a domain... it's worth it."

He tucked away the scroll of diagrams and let out a deep breath.

And he wasn't done.

There was still the entire circulatory structure of spiritual plants to explore. Meridian-like channels, essence cores within roots, the conversion of raw elemental qi into domain-affinitive essence… it was a world of undiscovered truths waiting to be dissected.

But most pressing of all?

The Poison Codex.

He grit his teeth.

He was still stuck.

It was the key to mastering the Venom Domain. A codified synthesis of every poisonous trait across his entire garden—condensed into a single essence. One that didn't just replicate existing toxins, but created something new. Something intelligent. Something dominant.

Devor leaned over the rough sketch he'd drawn earlier—his attempt to map the laws interwoven into the Venom Domain. The more he stared at it, the more it whispered back, its silent intricacies hinting at secrets just beyond reach.

"I can't force a trait to emerge in a spiritual plant," he reminded himself. "Only guide it. Influence it."

The process was delicate. One wrong nudge, and the trait would spiral out of alignment, forcing him to scrap the blend and begin anew.

But now—thanks to Spiritual Perception—he finally had a way to observe more than outcomes. He could watch the formation of traits. Track the rules that governed them. Understand how they layered.

"This power… the system didn't give me what I wanted. It gave me exactly what I needed." He turned back to the sketch. Lines wove across the paper in chaotic loops, some thicker, some thin, all of them spiraling toward the same focal point.

It resembled a mandala—or more accurately, a complex spiritual formation only half-understood.

Devor tilted the paper toward the sky, letting the light shine through it.

"It looks chaotic," he murmured. "But underneath it all… there's order. A structure."

Inspired, he pulled out a fresh sheet and began to draw—this time slowly, methodically. He referenced both his memory and the prior sketch, adding lines with far more intention. With each stroke, the pattern revealed itself more clearly.

The threads of law weren't random.

They spiraled into a massive circular structure. Near the center, they formed a dense mesh of overlapping dots and arcs—like stars clustered tightly in a galaxy's core. But around the perimeter, they became more dispersed, stretched into subtle arcs. Only one region stood out.

That segment…

On the outermost edge, one wedge of the circle contained almost nothing. Just a dozen faint points—isolated, simplistic.

Devor frowned.

"Why are there so few rules there?"

He stared at it, narrowing his eyes. Then he closed them altogether, reaching back to the moment when Spiritual Perception had been active—when the domain itself had opened its secrets to him like a living map.

"Not all the points were the same size," he recalled. "Some were large, prominent. Others… barely visible."

His eyes snapped open. "Larger points… more dominant rules? Or deeper ones?"

He leaned back, gaze distant as he stared into the venom-laced foliage swaying nearby.

Then his breath caught.

A visual echo hit him—something so mundane he would've missed it a hundred times before. The plants in the foreground appeared normal. But those in the back? They looked smaller.

It wasn't the plants. It was perspective.

"What if that's what I'm seeing in the law diagram?" A flurry of thoughts spun in his mind like falling leaves.

"What if… the size of the points isn't about importance, but depth? Like layers in a formation—or floors in a tower. The bigger the dot, the closer it is to the foundation."