“Is my Human Dao the unifying factor that enables me to enter this realm?” Yao Shen pondered aloud, his gaze sweeping across the mental landscape that he had found himself in. “A realm formed upon the clash of two sapient consciousnesses,” he added thoughtfully as he took a testing step forward.

In response, the very realm quaked in fury. The uneven, viscous surface he had been standing on betrayed his footing, reshaping itself into long blood spikes in the blink of an eye before they shot towards Yao Shen with blinding speed.

Even as he dodged the onslaught by taking to the skies, Yao Shen found his own senses compromised as overlapping words in the form of raspy whispers, high-pitched screaming and angrily barked orders flooded his auditory senses.

They asked. They raged. They demanded.

A call for destruction. A thirst for vengeance. A cry for blood to be spilled. Foul curses in a language he could not write or speak in, yet somehow understood. An overwhelming torrent of negative emotions that had been fermenting for centuries, culminating in a noxious mass that sought to corrupt everything it came into contact with.

“I see,” Yao Shen’s voice regained its domineering presence as he rapidly evaded one blood spear after the next. “This is the incursion you wage upon my consciousness, your attempt to overwhelm and corrupt my very soul. But, you misunderstand,” A roguish smile spread across his visage as his sword effortlessly phased into his right hand.

Yao Shen’s right hand moved, his sword unleashing a flurry of blows with ferocious intensity. The dozens of blood spears that had been hot on his tail were perfectly bisected in half, returning to the ground below in a rain of blood.

“While it is hard to quantify the nature of a soul, the phenomenon we are witnessing here does not require me to go to such lengths. If our clash was to be represented in an elementary Venn diagram, then the realm we are currently operating in is born out of the intersection of our two consciousnesses,” Yao Shen explained as he gave his sword a light flourish to shed the warm blood that was slicking its surface.

“Putting it simply,” Yao Shen willed it and his voice was amplified instantly, loud enough to be heard in the farthest corners of the mental landscape. “This realm does not belong to you. Not entirely. In the same way that I cannot claim ownership over it. It belongs to both of us.”

Human Dao Domain: A Slice of Heaven

In juxtaposition to the landmass of blood, there now stood an opposing force. A field of gold stretched out endlessly over the horizon, a light breeze causing the stalks of wheat to lightly sway with its flow.

Yao Shen was calmly seated in the veranda of a humble, dainty wooden house, his prideful expression akin to a farmer looking over the harvest he had toiled over for an entire season.

This time, when the blood spears tried to encroach upon his land, his domain, they found themselves entangled in a mass of wheat stalks regardless of the approach they tried to take.

“Now,” Yao Shen said. “Are you willing to parley, O’ mighty Artifact Spirit?”

The assault upon his Human Dao Domain ceased not long after.

For a long moment, there was silence.

Then the landmass of blood began to violently bubble and churn, eventually spiraling inwards into a vortex.

A shockwave rippled through Yao Shen’s domain as the blood vortex’s center erupted outwards with incredibly concentrated force. Strong gusts of wind lashed at random as the mass of blood began to shape itself into a vaguely humanoid shape, if a sixty foot tall structure could be attributed the term.

Yao Shen made no effort to interfere in the process, seeming content to watch from the sidelines.

Then, with a final earth-shattering roar, the transformation was complete.

A pair of deep-set eyes gazed down upon Yao Shen with contempt so intense that it was almost palpable. The stout build, a magnificent beard had been meticulously managed with the aid of half a dozen runic clasps and the rippling arm and leg muscles were all traits characteristic of the dwarven race. Except, the Dwarf towering over him was anything but ordinary.

Adorning his chest was a half-finished plate armor that, on a closer look, revealed a series of hexagonal plates that interlocked together to provide robust protection to the ribcage. On his right index finger, the Dwarf wore a ring that was layered in such an intricate series of shifting fractals that even Yao Shen couldn’t keep track of them without the aid of his divine sense. And finally, in his hands, he wielded the hammer and baton artifact.

“Puny Soul Emperor,” The Dwarf-Lord’s words were meant to be no more than a simple acknowledgement, yet the very realm trembled and quaked at his address. “Your kind has nothing to gain here. Leave peacefully or perish by my hand.”

The Dwarf Lord’s final words echoed thunderously— a thousand voices that assailed Yao Shen’s senses from all directions delivering the ultimatum.

“Puny?” Yao Shen’s amused tone rang out in challenge, though his expression seemed anything but. “Perhaps, if the one standing before me was truly the Dwarf Lord from a bygone era. But you are merely a fraction of his soul, are you not? The Nascent Soul Cultivator employs Divine Sense Brands to exercise control over an artifact, whilst the Soul Emperor imbues a portion of his own severed soul. An artifact spirit, to be more exact.”

“And yet,” The Artifact Spirit bellowed in response. “Too much time has passed. The Artifact your insatiable human greed has steered you towards is me. As am I, the artifact. Even if you were capable of bringing about my demise, you would accomplish little except the destruction of the very treasure you seek.”

“I see,” Yao Shen nodded along thoughtfully. “But you are no longer merely an insignificant part of a whole, either. The moment I stepped into the chamber, I felt the sheer magnitude of your hatred. Initially, I feared that Dwarf Lord’s soul still dwelled in the artifact, only to shake my head after considering the facts. For if that had been the case, the Divine Mountain Sect would not have survived to see this day.”

The Artifact Spirit remained silent.