Ryu's gaze sharpened. After a year of rest and a subsequent period of closed door cultivation to refine his Dao Heart, his mind was fresh and sharper than it had ever been before. In fact, his improved Dao seemed to have made his analytical abilities far faster and sharper as well. So after just a few breaths of silence, he already understood what was before him.
Where was the challenge? This, in itself, was the challenge.
The Favor Alchemy Sky God... To choose such a Dao Title, and to even place Favor first, it might be less accurate to think of this esteemed Sky God as an alchemist, and more accurate to think of her as a scholar of Faith who happened to dabble in alchemy.
Of course, it wasn't that exaggerated. Obviously, "dabbling" wasn't enough to describe her expertise. But this gist of it was that the Favor Alchemy Sky God wouldn't just want someone who was good at alchemy to get over her legacy, but would also want someone with affinity and comprehension of Faith, Fate and Karma, only then would they be a worthy successor of "Favor".
Standing here, with infinite pillars stretching out in directions, perfectly spaced and without even the slightest hint of deviation between them, the goal seemed obvious after some thought. You weren't meant to know which direction to go in, you would have to rely on nothing but yourself to figure it out.
Normally, Ryu would be annoyed. This felt a lot like yet another luck-based inheritance where the Sky God wanted to test their potential karmic ties and how strong or weak they might be. But almost the moment he had this thought, he threw it out.
A Sky God who dared to put Favor as the first of their titles wouldn't make such a choice. The life's blood of the Favor Alchemy Sky God was in gathering Favor to change her Fate, that was what she pursued even during the end of her life and it was precisely this pursuit that had resulted in her magnum opus, the greatest creation she had ever concocted.
If such a person were to rely on luck to pick a successor, they would be doing nothing short of slapping their own faces, spitting at all the hard work they had put into their lives. No, the Favor Alchemist didn't want Ryu to rely on luck to find her Inheritance, she wanted him to sense the strings of Fate and Karma, following them until he found the core of her inheritance.
Coming to this conclusion, Ryu directly sat down, taking a breath and exhaling.
He closed his eyes for a moment, shedding all distracting thoughts. When he opened them up again, each of his irises had a pair of eight trigram diagrams slowly turning in opposite directions.
The world before him shifted slightly. He could no longer see the Lines of Fate without his Heavenly Pupils, so reading them was far more difficult. However, he could see subtle shifts in the world down to the smallest details.
He could see the currents of the wind as though they were drawn out on a weather map. He could see the ever so slight deviations in the black pillars, while it seemed at first glance that they were absolutely perfectly spaced, this wasn't actually true on second look. Finally, he could see the shifts in the clouds, and interestingly enough, they didn't perfectly follow the flow of the wind either, almost as though there was something else influencing them.
After a while, the eight trigrams slowly faded from Ryu's eyes and his gaze carried a hint of coldness to them.
It seemed that he was more unlucky than he thought.
There were three paths, three perfectly identical paths.
Ryu didn't believe that this was a coincidence. Those three paths should be leading him right to the only other three that had entered this Legacy World with him. The Favor Alchemy Sky God must want him to get rid of them first, only then would the real path appear.
This made sense, in a way. But it felt somewhat... out of place.
The Favor Alchemy Sky God didn't seem to have many battle techniques in her inheritance, at least not in the portion Ryu had already received. Nothing in her memories seemed to note that she was a fan of battle either. Although this was the easiest way to clear out competition if many appeared at once, this didn't seem like something she would do. Unless...
Ryu's gaze flashed.
'I see. The point isn't to find them and battle them. The point is likely to use the tides of Fate that can be see to deal with them one by one, maybe even dealing with them all at once!'
Ryu fell into his thoughts once again. This was much more difficult than just battling them, and battling them would be difficult already. Trying to fight three Half-Step World Sea Realm experts while keeping in mind that he was on a time crunch would be like throwing himself into the fiery pits.
However, trying to manipulate the Line of Fate was also extremely difficult. The calculations required were exaggeratedly long, and given his time crunch, it would be extraordinarily difficult.
'These pillars... could be a lot like grid lines...'
Ryu's perspective shifted and he felt as though he had been transported into a game of Domain. His heart fluttered and the twin eight trigram diagrams appeared in his irises again.
'The slight deviations in the pillars, they aren't all created equal to begin with...'
The grid lines in Domain were the battlefield. However, on Domain, unlike a game like Go or Chess, the grid lines weren't all made equal. There were square spaces, triangular spaces, hexagonal spaces and pentagonal space. These deviations represented changes in terrain, certain advantages and disadvantages, and traps.
The key to dealing with these three as swiftly as possible would be these seemingly identical pillars.
However, the question was... where were the pieces he was manipulating?
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