197. Spirit's Fists Overcoming Evil

“Holy shit!” Evangeline held Alistair’s hands, shaking in excitement. “I knew you were close, but this doesn’t feel real.”

“I know,” Alistair said. “Adept is a whole different ballgame. Foundations are barely considered real cultivators. This is where our journey truly begins.”

Dev’rox snickered. “You sound like one of those sect teachers giving a motivational speech to their students.”

“Are you going to do it right away?” Evangeline asked. “Didn’t Jindor wait a long time? And there were all those Peak Foundations like Haley and the people we fought.”

“That was for his mission,” Alistair said. “At least I think so. I think for the other cases, they waited for legitimate reasons, like not knowing what you want your Domain to be like, or not understanding the future of your Dao path well enough, but those don’t apply to me.”

“So you’ll just do it right here?” Evangeline raised an eyebrow. “I guess the tribulation lightning should stop any zombies. It just feels funny that it’s going to be on this random zombie-infested winter planet.”

“True, I had always imagined some grand Buddhist temple or the bottom of an ocean being my spot, but this will have to do.”

“I’ll guard you, just in case,” Evangeline said, hand on her hip. “From far away, of course. I don’t want any lightning messing me up. I just got level 95 a few minutes ago.”

His sister gave him a parting hug. She knew how tough his body was, and she tried crushing him with all her Strength. To Alistair, it felt like a soft embrace. One full of warmth and love that sliced through the freezing cold of Nuevo Invierno.

Alistair remembered the last time his family had a good hug. It was a year before the initiation, at his grandfather’s funeral. That was the first time he had seen his father cry.

His dad was the shortest in the family but his arms had felt like a giant’s when he had embraced them all. His mother and his sister were sobbing. Alistair didn’t shed any tears.

When was the last time he had cried?

He knew well what it was. When he had learned his sister was alive, he shed tears of joy. Not even when he had learned of his mother’s death, nor when they buried her picture, had he cried.

“Dev’rox, what must I do?” Alistair asked.

“The Domain is the Dao become manifest. You take your internal space and make it the world. Your soulcore contains your Domain, and when you open it, you are flipping the membrane of your soulcore inside out.”

Dev’rox had told Alistair those exact words before. Alistair breathed in deeply, ignoring the frost in his nose.

The imp continued. “Now that your soulcore is fully saturated and all 361 of your meridians have been cleared of impurities, you may begin. You must visualize your soulcore in its entirety. Every last nook and cranny. You must take your complete vision of your Domain and form it out of your Dao energy. This shall initiate the Heavenly tribulation, which shall both assist and prevent you from progressing.”

Alistair obeyed Dev’rox’s words.

What did his soulcore look like? The soulcore was both physical and spiritual. It was a real organ within his body but also the physical embodiment of his soul, as in the very core spiritual essence that would return to the cycle of Samsara after his death.

Möbius strip torus, outside serrated, hyperflow variant, double-chambered. Those were the descriptions that the system gave, and they were accurate.

His soulcore transcended color. It was both rainbow and blank at once, a mobius toroid that had only one side. The surface was uniformly rough and layered to infinity, creating that serrated appearance. If it were a real object, Alistair imagined that rubbing a hand over the surface would be like feeling thousands of sharp pages stabbing you.

There were two chambers of Dao energy running through the soulcore’s interior at once, each in opposite directions. There was balance even within his soulcore, a testament to Alistair’s even-tempered personality.

At a basic level, what flowed inside his soulcore was Mana. But that was just the surface. In a state not unlike quantum superposition, his Dao energy sat within his soulcore, along with the etchings of his proto-Domain.

His proto-Domain was simple. A sphere of blood and bloodwraiths, representing the vengeful dead victims of any evildoer that dared step forth in his territory.

There was much to improve on. Alistair was not afraid of complexity. His Domain would be created exactly in his image.

Thanks to Spiritual Fighter’s Echo, he believed he had a much better understanding of the immanentization of Dao energy than most. Thus, the process began.

The moment in which he first tried altering his proto-Domain was the moment the lightning struck.

Alistair had seen what happened to Jindor, yet it was still majestic beyond all belief.

The sky itself parted as the tiniest crack into the Heavens opened. Now that it was his Domain that was being created, he glimpsed just the tiniest piece of the hidden Heaven.

It almost broke his mind. It was pure avarice that motivated Alistair to look beyond the veil. Every instinct in him said to look away, but he refused.

One million flaming eyes surrounding an infinite forest of sapphire trees that soared through space into the mouth of a majestic golden dragon that terminated into the symbols that rotated through a sacred inkbowl—

The rainbow lightning came down, blocking his vision and ending his madness.

That was when the agony began.

The sky became celestial rainbow as all the corners of the Earth felt the tribulation lightning. Alistair remembered his thoughts when he saw it strike Jindor. He was vindicated. There were two distinct currents within the Heavenly lightning.

The first current was the raw, primal wrath of the Heavens—nature’s fury incarnate. It was the righteous outrage born from the unnatural theft of power by cultivators. This was the Heavens that the masters spoke of when they warned that cultivation defied the natural order.

Death, entropy, and the frailty of the human condition were woven into the very fabric of the multiverse. The youngest child, no matter how bright, would one day grow old and wither—falling into the grave as all had done since the dawn of time.

But the immortal cultivator—the Truthseeker—was an aberration of the highest order. Even if you multiplied the population of the Final Frontier Empire by a trillion, you might never find a single soul capable of reaching the pinnacle of cultivation.

Were they truly immortal? Could one truly transcend the mortal coil and violate the ultimate taboo?

To the furious Heavens, even the possibility was blasphemous. The natural order was sacrosanct. Those who dared defy it would be punished without mercy. Like overgrown poppies, they had to be cut down.

Yet, within the tribulation lightning, Alistair felt a second current—one not born purely of wrath. It wasn’t joyous, but it carried the weight of judgment more than destruction, a trial rather than an execution.

Its essence echoed the Supreme Daos. The trifecta of Samsara, Karma, and Virtue resonated through every bolt that tore through Alistair’s being.

The Dharmic side of the lightning, as Alistair decided to call it, soothed some of the absolute anger of the primal side. With the former as his seal of approval, Alistair began to paint his masterpiece.

But before he could paint his masterpiece, he had to survive.

The primal lightning ravaged him—body, mind, and soul. Energy flooded his cells until they threatened to burst. His thoughts splintered under the strain, and his soul dangled on the edge of annihilation.

“AAAARGHH!” Alistair cried out, his voice echoing for miles. He had to remember what Dev’rox told him. Focus. Focus on what? Focus on your Domain.

That was right. His willpower was not enough to survive the lightning on its own. What he needed to do was channel the lightning. The lightning was not an ingredient that the Heavens provided for a new Domain, but more like a paintbrush to help contour and improve the Dao energy the cultivator already possessed into the building blocks of a Domain.

The first stroke was the hardest. Alistair removed his proto-Domain from his soulcore, bringing it out into reality with the help of the Dharmic side of dyophysitistic lightning.

And so his remaking began. He kept the core basis of the sphere of blood and swirling bloodwraiths. Using the lightning as a conduit, he poured his Ghost and Justice Node into the blood until it had a volume six times greater than before, with a radius of fifty feet.

If it wasn’t clear before, the bloodwraiths were formless. Any man or woman who dared step foot within his Domain would be assailed by the visions of their regrets and victims. Those that they had killed and betrayed.

At the center—low and grounded—he shaped a statue. It stood fifteen feet tall, magnificent and overwhelming. But it was not a god, not a legend of the past. It was himself, or rather, the future version of himself he aspired to become.

This was no act of arrogance. If anything, it was an act of devotion. Devotion to his path, to his ideals, and to the version of himself that might one day earn the right to stand shoulder to shoulder besides the great heroes of the multiverse. A mirror cast forward through time, sculpted not from pride, but from unrelenting hope shining back on the past.

A violation of the natural order at its finest, to throw salt on the wound of the Heavens all the more. If he was going to piss them off by stealing providence, why not go all the way? It wasn’t literally time travel, but his invocation of the concept was profound in and of itself.

The statue bore a thousand arms, layered in impossible harmony, fanning out in impossible angels. Such a creation could not exist in the mundane world. Only the Dao could express it.

The figure shimmered with a triadic nature—at once pure golden energy, pure coral energy, and pure sky blue energy, shining with compassion, radiating warmth. Its light reached even the shadows pooled in the blood-soaked corners of his inner world.

No evil could hide from those hands.

Alistair added a single deviation. He didn’t fully understand his own motivations, only that it felt right.

Among the thousand open palms, he gave the statue one final arm, raised high above all others. This hand was different: it was not open in mercy, but clenched in defiance. A fist burning with golden lightning, radiant beyond the rest.

It was the fist raised against the Heavens.

Not in rebellion for rebellion’s sake, but in solemn resolve: to challenge the unjust, to protect the weak, to become strong enough to bear the weight of the multiverse and never yield.

It sparked with fury and purpose.

For one day—those rulers of the age, the suzerains of earthly creation, those wardens of the multiverse that stood atop their lofty thrones and castles and mountains and heavenly pillars, those vile scoundrels that hid as golden angels and pulchritudinous goddesses, those Beast Suzerains and Truthseekers that held onto their sectors of the stars and horded their riches, and even the Jade Emperor himself—if they refused to change, if they refused to see the errors of their ways and the vileness of their ultimate sins of allowing the misery of the human condition, they would be dealt with like all the other villains Alistair had disposed of.

They would punched until something stopped—their life, or their evil.

Like his proto-Domain, his Domain contained the “weakness” that a decent portion of its power attacked the heart. Alistair didn’t care. This was his path, and he would follow it until the end.

However, his magnificent creation wasn’t finished. Alistair had read about so-called “conditional Domains” on Grand Imperator Praetei’s ship. The idea was that the Domain changed based on certain conditions being met.

The Domain he had imagined so far was perfect for those who had shunned the light, but what about enemies that walked a dual road? What if they weren’t even an enemy, but just someone that Alistair needed to fight? Not everything in life was black and white.

His Domain shifted as he drew upon his remaining Dao energy. Lightning coursed through his body and helped paint the new image.

A golden paradise in the sky. The sphere of blood became the open blue sky, surrounded on the four lateral sides by a golden palace. Like the bloodwraiths circling in the dome, there were blue spirits in the sky, frozen yet free. These were the deceased family and friends of those who entered. Their happiest memories and long-gone relatives encapsulated in spiritual form.

In many ways, he could feel that this Domain was less powerful than the evildoer version. But that was to be expected. You didn’t fight your brother the same way you did the man that killed your family.

At the bottom, where the sphere’s border appeared to be the open firmament, there was an almost identical statue of himself—the only difference was this one’s fist pointed downward. A protector of paradise, now and forever.

Alistair derived his dualistic concept from conditional Domains, but there was a vast difference. He was so proud of his idea, and he hadn’t even been sure it would work until now.

Instead of having two separate Domains, the bloodwraith version and the golden paradise, they were the same. They only were different to each individual. The same reality, interpreted through two lenses.

Alistair screamed in pain once more as he tried to implement this profound concept that was at the heart of much of existence. He realized that the more complicated and profound he tried to make his Domain through the assistance of the Dharmic lightning, the more the primal lightning destroyed him.

“HOLD ON ALISTAIR!” Dev’rox shouted, his voice so muffled and soft despite how loud he was screaming. “THE MORE LIGHTNING YOU WITHSTAND, THE MORE YOU’LL BENEFIT!”

His Domain flickered between the evil and non-evil version over and over, faster and faster. Reality was what you perceived. Justice was terrifying to villains, yet satisfying for those aggrieved. But Justice was Justice. Two realities were one reality. And so was his Domain.

His cells screamed for mercy. That was done. There was only one part left.

Dev’rox knew his role. He joined Alistair in basking in the tribulation lightning.

The imp’s life briefly flashed through Alistair’s eyes.

The moment of his conception where spiritual energy coalesced into a baby imp. The bickering between his spawnmates under the tutelage of Yalarik the Wise. The brutality of a demon’s life, where 90% of his brothers and sisters died before reaching Adept. His best friend Zyron, a fellow imp that worked with him for ages delivering packages for more powerful demons.

Alistair was impressed by how resourceful Dev’rox was. He wasn’t the biggest or possessing the largest Mana reserves or with the most talent at spatial magic—yet he still progressed faster than everyone else in his litter, except Zyron.

Then, he met Kyraxadon, the demon that would one day kill him. They were both in the Profound realm, but as a balrog, Kyraxadon outranked him by a significant degree. The greater demon had sold him on the promise of finding treasures on the frontier. If they could reach Visionary, they could transfer to one of the Eight Cold Hells like Arbuda or Hahava.

A few thousand years and an argument later, and Kyraxadon killed Dev’rox in his wrath. A sad end to a standard life.

In the end, there was nothing about Dev’rox that was extraordinary. Being the most talented of his spawn wasn’t anything crazy. He was an imp at the end of the day. To a human on the frontier, a Profound realm was like a god, an impossible to reach state of unlimited power, but for a demon, it was standard. They were born closer to the Dao.

Who decided that being ordinary didn’t matter? The world itself wanted to arbitrate that, but Alistair refused to agree. Every single being in the multiverse had their own story, from the loftiest Truthseeker to the lowest Foundation.

Alistair would tell those stories. He wouldn’t forget a single face or name. He would be the light in the dark, the keeper of memory.

As his body reached its limit, he painted a new scene, underneath his Domain. Dev’rox assisted him as they recreated Dev’rox’s own Domain.

The universe took shape. Alistair hadn’t known the imp to be a stargazer. His Domain was a miniature version of the universe itself, replete with galaxies, black holes, quasars, nebulae, and stranger cosmic phenomena like Mana Storms and cosmic strings and Dao divergences.

There was barely any of the typical darkness of space in Dev’rox’s universe, almost every corner filled with celestial splendor.

All this was metaphysically underneath Alistair’s Domain. At his command, he could “flip” it over and reveal the Dev’rox’s universe.

This was just the beginning. As he accumulated more wisdom and ghostly power, he would instantiate more and more in the underbelly. Enough to recreate the multiverse in a more perfect image, carrying the bonds of the unbroken chain of descent.

With his Domain finished, Alistair spoke its name, that he had known for quite some time.

“SPIRIT'S FISTS OVERCOMING EVIL!”

His Domain flipped inward, entering its new home in Alistair’s soulcore. The feeling of having an entire space comprised of Dao energy was odd. It was as if he had a permanent feeling of depth and fullness at the base of his stomach.

The darkness came. He had pushed himself too far getting enough energy to level up to 100, plus he suspected his tribulation was unnaturally long because of how complex he made his Domain.

On to the next journey.