Chapter 458: Despair
The change came so abruptly, and seemed to confirm exactly what he had guessed. Yaoguang's pupils constricted sharply.
Is it real?! A storm of surging waves swept through his mind.
It really was! That high-energy site marked on the star chart really was a Gate of the Immortal Realm! A brand new Gate of the Immortal Realm!
"How is that possible..." The words came out of him unbidden.
What did a Gate of the Immortal Realm mean? It was the sort of thing that drove countless Dao Lords mad.
Countless Dao Lords left the North Sea Star one after another to seek opportunity in the depths of the starry sky, and the greatest opportunity of all was to discover a new Gate of the Immortal Realm, one with less competition around it.
The coordinates of such a gate could fetch a sky-high price in the hundreds of billions. And they could be sold again and again, the value only exhausted after a few dozen or a hundred buyers had paid and the secret could no longer be kept.
Depending on the seller's means and the weight they could throw around, a single set of such coordinates could be sold for trillions, even tens of trillions.
It was no wonder that the experience accumulated on the Merchant branch had suddenly leaped to more than ten times what slaying a Dao Lord had brought in.
After a long while, Yaoguang let out a long breath and recovered from the shock of discovering a brand-new Gate of the Immortal Realm.
"I don't know how many Dao Lords have already gathered around it. Though however many there are, it won't affect the value much, and if it's a gate that's only just appeared, tens of trillions won't cover it. If I could seize the gate and control it..."
Yaoguang hardly dared imagine it.
Still, the odds of monopolizing a Gate of the Immortal Realm were low. Back in the day, one powerful faction on the North Sea Star had tried to seal off the gate and claim it as its own, and the result was universal fury.
The Dao Lords swarmed it as one and destroyed that faction, turning it to dust and erasing it from the historical records. Since then, no sect had dared risk offending every Dao Lord alive by monopolizing a gate.
In the end, Yaoguang set the thought aside.
He looked at the star chart in his hand, then at the sites the Abyssal Ruins Dao Lord had marked to explore further if his lifespan allowed, and suddenly laughed. But the laughter soon turned into something rueful.
"Timing, and fate."
Fate, truly. The Abyssal Ruins Dao Lord had lived 120,000 years, all of it spent chasing entry through a Gate of the Immortal Realm and ascension to the Immortal Realm. And he had just missed it when he was only a step away from success.
Maybe this was some kind of karmic backlash. Yaoguang thought, feeling something click into place.
The Abyssal Ruins Dao Lord's pettiness had not come with old age. He had been overbearing in his dealings even in his youth. Age had only made him more unhinged; later in his life, whenever he had heard of a genius of the void Dao emerging, he had gone after them and killed them, leaving no one alive.
Yet every prodigy with the potential to become a Dao Lord was born carrying fortune. Strangling such prodigies in the cradle time and again had long since turned the Abyssal Ruins Dao Lord's own fortune into misfortune, and in the end, with the opportunity right in front of him, the backlash of fate and karma had made him miss his chance at ascension.
A gate like that, even with many Dao Lords already gathered around it, was worth far more than any top-tier Dao Artifact.
Had the Abyssal Ruins Dao Lord used those coordinates and hired Dao Lords to escort, protect, and secure his passage through the gate in exchange, he could have made over ten or twenty Dao Lords act.
Working together, they could have shut out every Dao Lord of the void Dao and seen him safely through.
But now none of it mattered. The Abyssal Ruins Dao Lord was already dead.
Thinking of him, Yaoguang realized something else.
Fiendish cultivators have lower odds of achieving Dao Integration than orthodox cultivators, and with what happened to the Abyssal Ruins Dao Lord... I believe it all comes down to karma and fate. Karma and fate must really exist. Is that why so many cultivators can't say precisely why their own Dao Integration succeeded? Are those unknown factors the Dao of karma and fate at work?
Yaoguang turned it over, his expression growing steadily graver.
The structure of this world was the three thousand Great Dao. Their power was everywhere, not only in the myriad things of the universe but in every living being. All life, all matter, was part of the three thousand Great Dao.
From here on, he would have to weigh his actions more carefully.
Having quietly warned himself, Yaoguang concentrated his psychic mind on the Merchant branch and its explosion of energy.
"This time, it really is overnight riches." He laughed softly.
The next moment, all of the Merchant branch's energy poured into the Dao Integration branch.
As it flowed in, the branch's progress advanced rapidly. 5/10000, 7/10000, 10/10000...
It crossed into the one-thousandth range and kept climbing higher. 15/10000, 20/10000...
In the end, the Dao Integration branch, which represented the core of his cultivation, settled at 81/10000.
Almost one percent. Yaoguang said inwardly.
With the progress, an ocean of information flooded his mind, and one part caught his attention.
The Dao Lord is the foundation for becoming an immortal. Only upon setting foot on one of the five immortal paths does one become a true immortal, and immortality has four realms. Beyond the immortal itself, one whose compatibility with the Great Dao reaches one percent may be called an immortal venerable; at ten percent, an immortal king; and last comes the Dao Ancestor, who commands a Great Dao in full.
Reading that, Yaoguang felt no relief at all. What came instead was pressure beyond words.
And when he saw what the terms immortal, immortal venerable, immortal king, and Dao Ancestor actually meant, that pressure rolled in like a tsunami meant to swallow him whole.
"How could it be..."
Yaoguang's eyes lost focus, his psychic mind unsteady under the terrible impact of what he had learned.
"That can't be possible..." he murmured without meaning to.
The reason what he had just learned shook him so violently was that...
"Dao Lords are a fixed number!" Yaoguang said.
Across the cosmic starry sky and the vast Immortal Realm, every single Great Dao permitted only ten thousand Dao Lords, or one thousand immortals, or one hundred immortal venerables, or ten immortal kings, and a single Dao Ancestor!
Dao Lord or immortal, immortal venerable or immortal king, none of them could coexist. The pie was only so large. Each Great Dao's share amounted to a mere ten thousand portions!
A Void-Shattering cultivator's so-called advancement to a Dao Lord, a Dao Lord's so-called advancement to an immortal, all of it meant seizing a share of the profit from other Dao Lords and other immortals. Under those conditions, who would allow anyone from below to rise?
How would the Dao Lords permit Void-Shattering cultivators to become Dao Lords? How could the immortals permit Dao Lords to become immortals? For the immortal venerables, the immortal kings, and the Dao Ancestors, it was even truer.
Then a flash of light went through Yaoguang's mind.
So that's why every Void-Shattering cultivator is so vague about their understanding of attempting Dao Integration. Some Dao Lords who prepared thoroughly still fail because of Dao transformation, while others gamble on a sliver of hope against near-certain death and come out of it as Dao Lords. Even people who have already achieved Dao Integration wouldn't claim any real certainty if they had to do it a second time...
Shares! It was the Great Dao's shares!
Each Great Dao had only so many; a Void-Shattering cultivator might make his attempt with solid foundations behind him and break through smoothly, if he did so at the right moment.
That same cultivator, attempting Dao Integration at a different time, would fail all the same no matter how thorough his preparation if the shares had run out.
Dao Lords are a fixed number. The sentence resounded in his mind again.
The whole Immortal Realm, or rather the whole universe, could hold at most thirty million Dao Lords. Three million immortals. Three hundred thousand immortal venerables. Thirty thousand immortal kings. Or three thousand Dao Ancestors!
That number... It was far too small. Small enough to leave everyone who came after in despair, gasping for air.
It was precisely because he had seen this piece of information, which existed only in the Immortal Realm, that Yaoguang felt such a violent shock, leaving his psychic mind unsteady, his words and emotions beyond his control.
"Too few. That is far too few slots," he kept saying, over and over.
Ten thousand Dao Lords for an entire Great Dao. And if nine immortal kings had been born through that Dao, it would only allow a thousand Dao Lords to exist.
Something else occurred to him then. Is that why I have never once touched the Great Dao of fate or the Great Dao of karma? Could it be that both already have a Dao Ancestor, so that as long as those two Dao Ancestors don't perish, no one who comes after can cultivate either Dao to its end?
Two Great Dao with no shares left at all?
Then he understood why a cultivator's strength was essentially fixed once they broke through from the Void-Shattering Realm to the Dao Lord Realm, with little significant growth after.
Even the Penglai Dao Lord, the strongest on the North Sea Star, found it terribly hard going against more than three or five Dao Lords working together. The rest could manage one opponent, two at the very most.
And that was not the most frightening part. What was truly frightening was...
If every Great Dao has only ten thousand shares, then how cruel must the high-tier immortals be toward newly ascended Dao Lords, when seizing more shares is how they transform into immortal venerables, immortal kings, and finally Dao Ancestors?! Dao Lords don't just ascend to the Immortal Realm; they travel there through a Gate of the Immortal Realm. Once they arrive, is what awaits them really long life and eternal existence?
Yaoguang did not know. It was a mystery.
But for countless years, though word of the Immortal Realm had been passed down, not one Dao Lord who entered it had ever returned to the lower world. That alone was enough to guess something.
Every Dao Lord in the same category competed with the others. The immortals' method of raising their cultivation was to kill Dao Lords weaker than themselves and take their 0.01 percent.
Whether a Void-Shattering cultivator advancing to Dao Lord or a Dao Lord becoming an immortal, none of it came through cultivation. It was no more than their position in a queue!
Only when the Dao Lord or the immortal ahead died could the Void-Shattering cultivator or the Dao Lord behind them fill the gap.
If this is true, then that Immortal Realm every Dao Lord scrambles toward and dreams of... How despairing must that place be? Yaoguang thought.