Wind and Fire

Chojusen recreated his water healing domain and steeled his heart, before starting the chant again. He said the first word again and stopped, as saying the second would most certainly kill him right then and there. He stood in the water domain until all the pain and damage to his body was gone and repeated the process.

Chojusen kept up this routine of chanting and recovering for a week, before seeing his recovery time get cut in half. The more he chanted and filled his body with pain, the better the results for tempering his Dao Heart. The chant was like a sledgehammer, striking his glass Dao Heart and every recovery would result in the glass Dao Heart getting reheated and compacted to be less fragile.

Chojusen might be a newbie to cultivation, but he had the values of cultivators ingrained in his very nature. Training for weeks, months, and even years at a time would not be an issue for him; if anything, seeing this progression brought him some sense of accomplishment that he would otherwise miss out on, if he had stayed in the lower planes.

However, Chojusen was all alone. There was nothing around him for countless lightyears and his personal dimension couldn't be accessed since Chojusen needed to ground his dimension's position somewhere with space. Chojusen was stuck in this perpetually state of loneliness for several weeks, but the crippling depression that should have appeared by now was kept at bay, by Chojusen's ever strengthening Dao Heart.

Weeks turned to months and months into years, and by the time Chojusen managed to complete the first level of the Daoheart technique, almost one century had passed. Now his Daoheart could compete with some strong Daolords; passing a mere Celestial Tribulation should no longer be a problem. Even if it was the strongest tribulation conceivable, the heavens would never force a Void Immortal into tests for Daolords.

Chojusen called out to the system and said "I guess my Dao Heart should be strong enough now, right?"

[Daolords are a full five stages higher than Celestial Immortals. If your Dao heart isn't strong enough... I can't imagine a single Void Stage cultivator passing the Dao Heart tests.]

"So… How do I summon the tribulation?"

[You should be able to absorb more elemental essence. Keep doing that until you sense the heaven's warning. If you ignore the warning and continue gathering energy, your Celestial Tribulation should descend fast enough.]

Chojusen was about to start creating another endless mass of elemental essence, when he suddenly remembered that the black hole in his Zifu had probably expanded his Dantian to several times its initial size. He took a quick peek with his Internal View and stood pale-faced in reality.

Did he just see his Dantian? How did it reach that size? You could easily compare the size of Chojusen's Dantian to a premature universe; it was Billions of lightyears in diameter. Still, the outcome wasn't anything unexplainable. Chojusen noticed that the black hole responsible for expanding his Dantian's space had also grown to supermassive-tier.

All this time, while he had been enduring the worst torture imaginable, the black hole had been at work consuming the endless nihility around his body and expanding both its own size and the size of the world it dominated.

Chojusen drew in a deep breath and gave an almost lifeless sigh. Now he would probably need Quadrillions of kilograms of elemental essence; and that was the most conservative guess he could muster. The black hole could use some remnants of the energy it absorbed to fill in the gaps of his increasing cultivation base while it was still "small," but at its current universe scale size, that was no longer the case.

Chojusen expanded his Dao of Nihility to as far as he could and flew across the zone of nihility, converting tens of thousands of kilometers worth of nihility into elemental essence every second. He flew around for a week and finally had 10 Quadrillion kilograms of elemental essence prepared.

Now that his body refining cultivation reached the Primal Stage and his soul had fused with his body, Chojusen could split himself into countless clones and merge back together. He didn't need any formal technique to accomplish this, as it was an innate skill he understood upon becoming a Primal Daoist. Thus, he used this skill to split up into tens of thousands of bodies and absorb all the elemental essence as soon as possible.

A couple hours later, a single Chojusen was left in the zone of nothing. Somehow, he had guessed correctly and he only needed 9.99 Quadrillion kilograms to reach the absolute peak of the Void Stage. He didn't hesitate to consume the remaining 0.01 Quadrillion kilograms, so as to not allow his black hole the chance to keep expanding his Dantian's space.

A Dantian, capable of holding 10 Quadrillion or so kilograms of elemental essence at the Void Stage? Perhaps even the strongest beings in this plane would laugh at such a concept.

Since Chojusen ignored the warnings of the heavens and consumed more energy than his Dantian could contain, his Turtlesnake grew just barely unstable enough to start the compacting process of a Jindan and the Heavens sent down a decree to bring forth the first of the four tribulations; the Wind Tribulation.

Chojusen stood like he had for the past century and watched as a wind came out of nowhere. Nihility wind of increasingly stronger grades kept assaulting Chojusen, but nothing happened to him. Slowly, the strength of the wind passed through all the grades talked about in the Dao Origins book of cultivation. Mortal grade, Earth grade, Heaven grade, and even Immortal grade Nihility winds stuck Chojusen as he stood still.

Regardless of the grade, none of the wind did so much as tickle him. But then, the world regained its complete silence and a Celestial Immortal Wind shot right through all Chojusen's defenses and struck at his Dao Heart directly. This wind didn't do any damage to his body and would only appear during the Celestial Tribulation.

Naturally, with Chojusen's Dao Heart, now at the level of Daolords — and strong ones at that — Chojusen didn't even flinch as the Celestial Immortal Wind danced around in his soulscape; it wasn't even strong enough to cause his Dao Heart the stress needed to improve. The wind eventually dissipated and a cloud of heavenly fire took its place right above Chojusen.

The next tribulation was the fire tribulation. However, since the wind tribulation did nothing to Chojusen, how could this fire tribulation accomplished anything when the two were roughly the same in terms of power? The needless show of firepower was so boring to Chojusen, that he actually started to play around with the heavenly fire that rain down from the sky; this action enraged the Natural Heavens and invited them to send down increasingly stronger blasts of fire.

But this was only a Celestial Tribulation, so even after the heavens sent down their most powerful "Pure Yang" flames of True Immortals, nothing happened to Chojusen after he waved around his Dao of Fire. Eventually, the heavens seemed to have given up and sent down the Celestial Immortal Flames which were weaker in strength when compared to Pure Yang Flames, but they did cause the instability of Chojusen's Turtlesnake to rise up another level as well as temper his body somewhat.

The next tribulation was the most difficult to surpass and the one that ruined the futures of countless Void Stage cultivators; the thunder tribulation. Now, the heavens would send down waves of thunder bolts at Chojusen in sets of nine. This would continue based on his foundation, the deeper and more stable his foundation the more sets of thunder bolts would be sent down. Considering that he had a premature universe as his Dantian, he could expect going well over the legendary nine sets of nine.

Chojusen watched as black clouds of thunder formed over his head. The clouds would expand and gain power based on how many sets would be sent down. You can imagine Chojusen's shock when he saw clouds cross over millions of kilometers wide and black Pure Yang thunder crack within its domain.