Lightning Is the Only Way

"I meant to ask, but what is this resource war even? I have not heard anything specific about it," Gravis said. "It seems to be quite a big deal with what everyone has said so far."

Joyce was quite surprised. "You don't know what the resource war is about? Then why did you intend to help me?"

Gravis shrugged. "Lasar said that when I return to repay my debt, asking for my help in the resource war would be the likeliest scenario. It also plays perfectly into the old man's plan that I take part in it. Apparently, I am safe from the Heaven Sect in that period."

Joyce looked with confusion at Gravis. "Old man?"

"Old Man Lightning. That's what everyone calls him," Gravis explained.

"Oh, yes. I should've known that you meant him," Joyce said. "The resource war is not a traditional war. In actuality, calling it a war is pretty inaccurate since we won't be fighting against other groups."

"Oh?" Gravis asked with interest.

"Yes. We will go through many different trials," she explained.

"Trials? Who decides these trials?" Gravis asked suspiciously.

Joyce was first confused at the question but then realized that Gravis didn't even know the basics. "A couple of thousand years ago, an incredibly wealthy ascendent created an inheritance for the worthy. As soon as he reached the Unity Realm, he started building this massive area full of trials and treasures. He was also an unprecedented master in Formation Arrays. With all of this, he created an inheritance. Of course, he doesn't want to give his wealth to everybody, but only to those who manage to pass his trials."

Gravis furrowed his brows. A suspicion slowly rose inside his mind. "And ever since then, the inheritance opened every ten years?"

Joyce nodded. "Exactly!"

"And the winners always got some treasures out of this inheritance?" Gravis asked.

Joyce nodded. "Yes. That's impressive, right? Even thousands of years later, his wealth hasn't been used up. He must have been incredibly rich."

When Gravis heard that, his eyes narrowed in coldness. "Is there a place where I can be alone for a couple of minutes? I need to think about something," Gravis said evenly.

Joyce was surprised by Gravis' sudden change in attitude. Nevertheless, she complied.

Clank.

A key appeared in Gravis' hand. "This is a key to a guest room. It's down the hallway to the right. It's the key to the fifth guestroom. You can't miss it," she explained.

"Thanks," Gravis said and then left the room. "I will be back in about ten minutes or so. Please wait for me until then."

Joyce smiled and nodded. "Sure!"

Gravis quickly walked along the hallway and found his room. He entered and didn't even look at the décor. He wouldn't be staying in this room for long, so the looks of the room didn't matter. Gravis directly walked to the window and looked at the sky with narrowed eyes.

He also checked if any Spirit kept watch over him and saw that he was alone with no one watching. "After hundreds of groups of people passing the ascender's trial, there is still so much more wealth?" Gravis chuckled dryly. "Who are you kidding, Heaven?" Gravis asked.

Of course, there came no answer.

"Is this your last stand against me? You want me to take part in a Heaven's Trial?" Gravis asked with a smirk.

BZZZ!

Gravis saw a lightning bolt shoot across the sky. It was so fast and so silent that no one would have noticed as long as they didn't pay attention. When Gravis saw that, he knew that he was right. This was a Heaven's Trial.

"You really are full of yourself," Gravis said as he looked at the sky. "You actually have the audacity to create a Heaven's Trial in your lower world. You should know full well that those are rare even in middle worlds and only common in higher worlds. Yet, here you are, creating one in a lower world. I bet the highest Heaven also isn't the biggest fan of that, huh?"

Gravis didn't see it, but the highest Heaven had also snorted in disdain when it had noticed the Heaven's Trial in this lower world. Yet, it was just another failure in the highest Heaven's eyes. This lower Heaven had made so many miscalls and wrong decisions that the inclusion of a Heaven's Trial made no difference.

What was a Heaven's Trial?

A Heaven's Trial was an artificial inheritance disguised as an actual one. Heaven would create another High Priest, but that priest wouldn't show their status as a Heavenborn. This secret High Priest would then cultivate like every other person and accrue a lot of wealth. As soon as this High Priest reached the Unity Realm, they would create an inheritance and then ascend.

Of course, this was all only for show. In actuality, the High Priest only went through the motions in creating the inheritance. And ascension? As if! The High Priest would just silently be killed off by Heaven. Like this, everyone in the world would believe that an incredibly rich ascender had created an inheritance. Powerful cultivators would search for wealth and enter.

The difference between a Heaven's Trial and an inheritance was that an inheritance wasn't remotely controlled by someone. After all, they weren't part of this world anymore. Yet, since this "inheritance" was administrated by Heaven, it could be manipulated and changed at any time. The wealth could also be refilled whenever necessary. Basically, the whole thing was a testing ground under the control of Heaven. It had the final say in everything in there.

Yet, why do all this work? Why would a Heaven work so hard to produce something like this? What did it gain out of this? The answer to that was two-fold. One was powerful cultivators. The other was Energy.

It worked like this:

Everything, be it a cultivator or treasure, had Energy, and there was only a finite amount of it. In this explanation, the effects of treasures will be converted to Energy Points.

Let's say that one Seed Stage cultivator is equal to one Energy Point.

They would enter as groups of five, and twenty groups in total would enter.

Like this, 100 Energy Points would enter the Heaven's Trial. The winning group of the Heaven's Trial would get a reward equal to about 15 Energy Points bestowed by Heaven, which was an incredible reward for such a group. Theoretically, with the reward added, the group that initially only had five Energy Points would exit with 20 Energy Points. Obviously, they would exit stronger than when they entered.

Yet, what about the remaining 95 entrants? Well, they were dead. Their corpses would decompose, and the Energy would return to Heaven. This would be equal to 95 points of Energy. If one subtracted the reward of 15 Energy Points, it would still be a net gain of 80 Energy Points.

If one looked only at the result, then one would see that 100 Energy Points entered, while only 20 Energy Points returned. Yet, these 20 Energy Points were distributed among five people. If the reward were distributed equally, those people would have entered with one Energy Point and returned with four. So, one could say that their strengths had quadrupled.

With that, 100 average people would be "refined" into five very impressive people while the leftover Energy could be used on the world by Heaven.

Yet, why was it stupid for this lower Heaven to create a Heaven's Trial? With that explanation, it only looked like a net-gain for it.

The issue was that this world was at the bottom. Numbers were still very important at this stage. The more people ascended, the better. One could say that it was not this lower Heaven's job to filter the cultivators to this degree.

On top of that, 99% of all cultivators never went through the tenth Stage of Energy Gathering. Therefore, nearly everyone that ascended from this world could be considered as a mediocre piece of trash in the middle world. What does it matter if those people were incredibly outstanding and powerful? Due to their weak foundation, they would never reach a higher world.

Heaven didn't care about powerful people in the middle world. It only cared about powerful people in the highest world since one peak cultivator in the highest world brought more Energy than several higher worlds combined.

As long as someone wasn't able to reach the highest world, they would remain a piece of trash in Heaven's eyes. Theoretically, even if they could fight three major Realms above themselves, which was impossible, they would still be trash in Heaven's eyes. Due to that, having two pieces of trash instead of one powerful piece of trash was better. They could, at least, still function as tempering for the talented cultivators.

Another issue with powerful pieces of trash was that they could kill cultivators that actually went through the tenth Stage of Energy Gathering and had the talent to reach the highest world. Like this, a cultivator that would never achieve another ascension would kill someone that could. This could be compared to a fertilizer killing a plant.

So, all in all, with this Heaven's Trial, this lower Heaven created powerful cultivators with no promising future while reducing the numbers of ascenders. This was the complete opposite of what it was supposed to do.

"As soon as I enter this Heaven's Trial, I will be completely under your thumb," Gravis said. "You can give me the hardest trials and even create completely new ones. This wouldn't even go against the rules. Like this, you can go directly against me again, even if the highest Heaven is watching. You probably already have a lot of insane ideas, like, making me fight a priest, or forcing me to kill my own team and similar things."

Gravis wasn't sure, but he could swear that he could feel Heaven's nervousness. This had been its best plan until now, and Gravis had noticed it already. There was still the tribulation of when Gravis would reach the Unity Realm, but at that point, Gravis would be powerful enough to put up a fight against Heaven. Right now, he still couldn't put up a fight. Heaven needed to stop him before he was powerful enough to directly resist.

And for the first time ever, this lower Heaven became genuinely afraid of Gravis.

If Gravis didn't accept, then the next time they would fight, Gravis would have a chance of actually killing it!