The Modern Martial Immortal

In the mental world, streams of light flowed across the ancient tree.

Countless streams of energy, representing nutrients, poured into the Alchemist branch, and the branch flourished. As it grew, it swiftly turned crystalline and translucent, giving off waves of glazed luster.

When the branch finished its transformation, the glazed sheen enveloping the whole ancient tree fused into a single body. From that moment, anyone looking upon it would no longer see an ancient tree, but a divine tree, a sacred tree, an immortal tree possessing breathtaking, indescribable beauty.

Endless light spilled from the tree, scattering in glittering points in every direction until it filled the entire mental world, unfolding into a beautiful spectacle, so brilliant as to shake the soul.

Each mote of light seemed to hold information too vast to measure, as if the boundless galaxy overhead had been gathered into one place. Each one seemed to carry the entire accumulated record of a star from its birth to the present.

A single glance was enough to feel the sweeping history of that world; across billions of years, countless beings, peoples, and species had risen and fallen upon it, playing out epic after epic forged from endless time.

Yaoguang didn't immerse himself in the light to go through all the new information, but the mere sight of that star-filled expanse shocked him so much he couldn't put it into words.

After a long while, Yaoguang noticed something. Within the sky, among all that starlight, three thousand trajectories of differing forms seemed to emerge. They could not quite be seen, could not quite be described, yet they existed beyond doubt, and together they composed the glazed tree as a whole.

Countless nutrients, glowing green, flowed out along those three thousand trajectories into that starry expanse, and the starry expanse returned certain information back along the same tracks into the tree.

Between the two, it was like some mysterious living thing, inhaling and exhaling, carrying out an exchange that human understanding simply could not explain.

Yaoguang sank his psychic mind fully into it, feeling his heart emptying with each breath, as if he could sense the mysteries of every star in the vast expanse. It was incredibly intoxicating.

He felt like a prodigy who could grasp any knowledge with ease, swimming through an endless ocean of information, a flood of knowledge that included the very truths of the universe.

Every question about everything in existence seemed to have its answer here. The evolution of the universe's laws could be played out in a single thought.

The wonders he was experiencing exceeded the limits of what the senses could comprehend. Not even a breakthrough in realm or the transformation of one's essence of life could compare to a fraction of the feelings this mystery evoked.

Only once before had anything come close: the first time Yaoguang left Cangwu and stood in the boundless starry sky beyond it, a body of flesh and blood in the cosmos... Seeing the vastness of the universe with his own eyes had given him a similar feeling.

Standing in that limitless universe, he had felt just how small and insignificant he was, and, in the same instant, been staggered by the universe's grandeur. The violent collision of those two feelings had nearly moved him to tears.

But what stirred his heart now was not his own smallness against the universe's majesty. It was that someone had laid the answers of the entire universe before him. As if, so long as he looked, he could see every truth the cosmos held.

To stand face to face with truth itself, the truth of a universe billions upon billions of light-years across, filling his vision as far as sight could reach, flooding through his heart... The feeling left Yaoguang suffocated.

It was fortunate that perception in the mental world required no breathing at all. And in that moment...

"If eternity really exists in this world... then this sight, this moment, is eternity," Yaoguang murmured.

Just as the radiance reached its utmost brilliance, the sky full of starlight gradually began to condense. Each thread of starlight seemed to become a leaf, taking its place upon the tree's crown.

At the same time, the tree suddenly began growing again. From its original ten-or-so meters, wrapped in an aura of sacredness and etherealness, it shot upward: twenty meters, thirty, forty, fifty in the blink of an eye...

Just a few moments later, the tree stood over a hundred meters tall, its enormous crown blotting out the sky, countless stars flickering within it, everything growing vaster in area and reach.

Yet when Yaoguang gazed up through the crown, he found that its center connected to some special region, the way the summit of a mountain thousands of meters tall vanishes into drifting cloud and mist.

That mist was like a veil covering part of the crown, and even shrouding everything above it, leaving portions half-hidden and impossible to see clearly.

Understanding struck Yaoguang like a bolt of insight. His gaze snapped to the original cultivation branch.

At some point, the Immortal Dao branch had already changed, its inscription now reading Dao Integration(Void). And when his psychic mind sank into the freshly transformed branch, information he had never possessed welled up clearly in his mind.

"The cultivation of Dao Integration... is to merge the self with the Dao until one utterly masters a Great Dao, one of the three thousand Great Dao that structure the entire universe... and Dao Integration itself... is merely the qualification to begin seizing complete control of a Great Dao's power!" Yaoguang murmured.

Qualification. Authorization.

Compared to the Great Dao that actually formed the universe, one who had merely integrated with the Dao fell short by an unfathomable margin.

A newly advanced Dao Integrator's control over a Great Dao's power amounted to a ten-thousandth at best.

The cultivation that followed was to increase that control, step by step, until one mastered the Great Dao completely and reached the ultimate realm of that path: Dao Ancestor!

"And the end point of Dao Techniques... is the Origin Dao Technique. That's the greatest difference between Dao Lords and everyone beneath them."

The Origin Dao Technique differed greatly from the Dao Techniques derived from a Great Dao.

There were many Dao Techniques derived from the Great Dao of void, such as Void Flicker, the Void Sword, the Eight Desolations Purgatory, Heaven and Earth Reversal... But the Origin Dao Technique was the result of fusing those many derived techniques back into one, forming the Great Void Technique that reached straight to the source of the Great Dao of void.

That Great Void Technique was the true expression of the Great Dao of void. It was said that once mastered, the Great Void Technique could seal away every Dao Technique except those of fate, and could even prevent any Dao Technique from manifesting at all.

After all, the void was the foundation upon which the three thousand Great Dao were carried and made manifest; without the Great Dao of void, no other Dao could exist. That was precisely why the Great Dao of void was counted among the four supreme Great Dao.

"The Great Void Technique..." Yaoguang let out a long breath.

If he could really master that Origin Dao Technique, he could sweep aside every Void-Shattering Realm cultivator alive. Those who merely wielded Dao Techniques wouldn't even have room to resist him. And what's more...

Many Dao Lords never actually transform their life-bound Dao Technique into an Origin Dao Technique! It seems only by entering the Immortal Realm and drawing on its special environment can the life-bound Dao Technique transform, which is why Origin Dao Techniques are also called immortal techniques... Yaoguang pondered, and found himself yearning for the Immortal Realm. What kind of scenery does it hold?

After a good while, Yaoguang turned his gaze to the Dao Integration branch. Its current progress: none. 0%! But Yaoguang knew the true figure wasn't quite zero, just lower than 0.01%, too small to register.

Maybe I should adjust how progress is shown? With a thought from him, the way progress was displayed changed, and the Dao Integration branch progress now read 1/10000.

At this rate, who knows how long it would take just to reach one thousandth. Yaoguang shook his head.

Fortunately, the tree's transformation had brought more changes than that. The branches previously raised to level 15 at 100%—Array Caster, Refiner, Alchemist, Daemon Hunter, and Merchant—had all transformed as well. Yaoguang briefly sensed each transformed skill, the Refiner skill above all, and immediately knew where he stood.

Delivery speed will rise dramatically, and forging high- and top-grade Dao Artifacts will become much easier. As for immortal artifacts, though... Digesting the refining knowledge, something dawned on him. Now I understand why the concept of a semi-immortal artifact exists. To forge a true immortal artifact, one must first transform one's life-bound Dao Technique into an Origin Dao Technique, an immortal technique! But at the Dao Lord Realm, very few ever manage to do that...

He quietly absorbed the information held within that one ten-thousandth of the Dao Integration branch progress. It consisted mostly of impressions of the realm itself, with surprisingly little on actual cultivation.

But it still included some methods for fusing an immortal technique, and those methods carried real weight.

To master an immortal technique is to truly become an immortal. But there are five paths to immortality.

Yaoguang quickly sorted out the ones described.

To plunder others without end, refining their Origin Dao Techniques into your own: that is the way of the ghost immortal.

To make yourself the vessel, refining your body and your essence, qi, and psyche into the Origin Dao Technique: that is the way of the human immortal

To borrow heaven-and-earth spirit roots and grotto-heavens, refining a whole territory into the foundation that nurtures the Origin Dao Technique: that is the way of the earth immortal.

To merge your body one step further with the Great Dao, sinking into partial Dao transformation to gain the Origin Dao Technique's power: that is the way of the psyche immortal.

And the final path, the hardest of them all: to fuse countless Dao Techniques of the same lineage into one, until one glimpsed the true essence of the Great Dao and cultivated the Great Dao of origin itself. That's the supreme path... The way of the heavenly immortal.

Dao Lord, Immortal, Dao Ancestor. Such was the path of cultivation after entering the Immortal Realm.

With the Dao Integration branch at a mere ten-thousandth progress, the information mentioned the path beyond Dao Lord but offered no concrete methods, and his understanding of how to practice an immortal technique remained half-formed at best.

It comes down to progress being too low. At two ten-thousandths, or three, I could probably tell which of the five kinds of immortals suits me best. Yaoguang raised his head. I need to push the progress up, and quickly.

A sharp whistle cut the void. Even as he internalized the revelations about the Dao Integration Realm one by one, five trillion kilometers from this region, a Dao Artifact warship unmistakably built in the style of the Light Divine Race tore through space and arrived at a spatial node.