The Modern Martial Immortal

Yaoguang said no more to Li Hanqiu about the matter, simply attributing it all to a cosmic catastrophe.

Deep down, though, he had something like a premonition, and that premonition tilted his reading of this anomaly toward the energy released at the fall of a great being.

The energy scattered by that being's death had caused a cosmic catastrophe and led to the collapse of every spatial node within a billion light-years, which was why so many worlds like the Great Cangwu World had come into existence.

That said, the lifespan of a star was usually measured in hundreds of millions, billions, and even tens of billions of years. The Great Cangwu World was no different. So not even Yaoguang could tell how long ago this had all happened.

In the long eras that followed, the universe had evolved, a new generation of spatial nodes had formed, and civilization had gradually flourished anew. There was even a Gate of the Immortal Realm to lead the masses into the Immortal Realm, where one could truly attain the Dao, become immortal, and find eternal life.

***

Aboard the warship, now moving again, Yaoguang's mind kept digesting the information granted by the Immortal Dao branch.

There was far too much of it, and it was far too jumbled. It reminded Yaoguang of his days as an ordinary man, hunting for niche material through a search engine. The results would number in the millions or tens of millions, but finding anything actually useful was like looking for a needle in a haystack.

The Immortal Realm... Yaoguang thought.

At the same time, he sensed the glazed ancient tree, now on the verge of its complete transformation.

Once my high-dimensional cognition finishes transforming, I hope my 'searches' will get a little more accurate.

He turned his attention back to the material on the Void-Shattering Realm. Yet, after half a month of searching, his brow was still tightly knit.

Before, once a realm progressed to 80%, the information would start touching on the marvels of the next realm. This time, the Immortal Dao's Void-Shattering Realm has reached 100%, yet the descriptions of the next step, Dao Integration, are incredibly lacking.

That defied common sense. Of course, it wasn't as if there was nothing at all about what came after Dao Integration.

The concepts of ghost immortal, human immortal, earth immortal, psyche immortal, and heavenly immortal, for instance, clearly didn't belong to the Void-Shattering Realm. They had to be methods of cultivation for after Dao integration.

Yes, methods, not realms.

So after Dao Integration, you enter the Immortal Realm, and the next step is to choose one of these five types of immortals to achieve? Only then does your lifespan become eternal, making you truly immortal and unable to perish? Yaoguang speculated inwardly.

In the end, there was simply too little information. He sensed the Merchant branch, with only a sliver of progress remaining, and the Alchemist branch, which had to start from zero, and made up his mind.

Return to Cangwu, complete the transformation of my high-dimensional cognition, and push my realm into Dao Integration to glimpse the information about Dao Lords. That should be the task that matters above all else, the one worth my full effort.

With that, he turned his gaze back to the star chart. By the distances it displayed, the North Sea Star was still about...

"Hmm?"

Yaoguang suddenly paused, as if he had noticed something. He recalled the several aura coordinates he had obtained through the Source Tracing while refining and killing the Golden Lion Fiend Lord. They were, as it turned out, rather close.

Since they had already come all this way, Yaoguang said, "Hold on."

He pointed out several spatial node positions above and traced a line. "Take this route, cross these six spatial nodes, and get us to this region. There are a few people I need to find."

"Understood." Li Hanqiu executed Yaoguang's orders without a moment's hesitation.

They had already spent years out here, effectively cut off from home for just as long, yet he didn't doubt any of Yaoguang's decisions. They'd go where he wanted to go.

Besides, even if some force had moved against the southern domain in the meantime, it would never dare to completely slaughter the inhabitants.

Unless Yaoguang were dead, destroying the southern domain would mean shattering his bottom line and turning him utterly unrestrained. No one could afford that price.

***

Although the route crossed only six spatial nodes, the distances between them were considerable, and the journey still took a month. When the warship reached the region Yaoguang had indicated, he instructed, "Wait here."

Then, with a few Void Flickers, he descended onto a planet 1,500,000 kilometers from the void node.

The planet's oxygen content was extremely high. Enormous trees pierced the clouds, and giant beasts over ten meters, or even dozens of meters tall, roamed among them, much like the Cretaceous period.

Furthermore, a technological civilization seemed to have taken root there. Its beings resembled humans but stood taller, often reaching three meters, with deep blue bodies and tails for balance.[1]

Yaoguang paid them no mind and went straight to the summit of a high mountain. The Void-Piercing Realm aura he had sensed was hiding on that peak.

This Void-Piercing fiendish cultivator hadn't built himself any manor or palace to lord over the planet in luxury. After all, to a Void-Piercing cultivator, what did a crowd of mortal beings have that was worth his time?

Money was useless to him. Beautiful women? Creatures of flesh and blood whose every structure a Void-Piercing cultivator could see through at a glance. Power? Even more meaningless. If this cultivator wished for it, he could erase the planet in an instant.

It was like modern men aboard an advanced, highly automated sky carrier, sent back to primitive times for some survey mission and forced to stay a while. Would they have any interest in ruling primitives who hadn't even finished shedding their body hair?

So this Void-Piercing cultivator had marked off a region as forbidden ground and lived in seclusion, awaiting the Golden Lion Fiend Lord's next orders.

Locking onto the fiendish cultivator, Yaoguang closed his hand on empty air. The space around the man swiftly froze and collapsed, as if a black hole had opened out of nowhere.

Under the precise control of Yaoguang's power, the black hole gouged a pit over a dozen kilometers wide into the ground, swallowing and annihilating the trees, rock, and lakes within, and stirred up nothing more.

In that simple exchange, a Void-Piercing fiendish cultivator became a prisoner in his palm, his grotto-heaven crushed flat and pulverized by the void power under Yaoguang's command.

"Senior... spare me..." the fiendish cultivator pleaded.

"I ask, you answer," Yaoguang said flatly. "Where is the Dao Lord's secret cache?"

The moment Yaoguang had struck without hesitation and asked that question, the fiendish cultivator had already guessed what this was about. He hurriedly said, "If I tell you where the cache is, Senior, will you spare my life?"

Never mind. Let me see if there's some reasonably efficient soul-related Dao Technique... That will be more effective. Yaoguang mused, quickly splitting off a portion of his psychic mind to search for soul-related Dao Techniques similar to a "soul search."

But the instant he fell silent, the fiendish cultivator felt a deathly pressure that promptly crushed what remained of his nerve. "I'll talk, I'll talk... I'll take you there myself, Senior... But a few decades ago, experts of the Light Divine Race suddenly arrived at the cache, seized it by force, and began hunting all of us down. We haven't dared to show ourselves since, and we couldn't even spare the time to send word back..."

"Experts of the Light Divine Race?" Yaoguang immediately thought of everything Zong Wenxian had been busy running around doing lately. What a coincidence.

"Lead the way." Yaoguang relaxed his hold on the fiendish cultivator slightly.

"Yes, this way, Senior... We need to travel forty trillion kilometers."

The fiendish cultivator hurried to point out the direction, and Yaoguang brought out a Dao Artifact flying vessel.

𝘧𝓇𝑒𝑒𝑤ℯ𝑏𝓃𝘰𝑣ℯ𝘭.𝘤ℴ𝘮

Forty trillion kilometers was a full four light-years. Without spatial nodes, that was no short distance. A Void-Piercing cultivator would likely need the better part of a year to cross it. Even Yaoguang would be traveling for days.

"Tell me about this Dao Lord's cache," Yaoguang said.

"Yes. The cache is a cave dwelling that the Dao Lord hastily left behind before he passed in meditation, and he even left his own inheritance inside... With his end so near by then, he couldn't make it back to the North Sea Star. He couldn't pour much effort into building the cave dwelling either; it was more of an offhand creation. That's exactly why my ancestor was able to detect it afterward..."

The Void-Piercing fiendish cultivator went on quickly, "Even so, a cave dwelling laid down by a Dao Lord still has defenses no ordinary cultivator can break, even if it was created offhandedly. The whole dwelling is wrapped in three layers of arrays. Back then, the ancestor spent over a century just wearing away the outermost layer, and all he got was some everyday-use talismans. He's ventured out into the starry sky several times over the years, but he's never managed to grind down the second array..."

Yaoguang considered this. At this rate, the cave dwelling's arrays had to be at least level 14. And within those arrays there were likely other things: Dao Artifact spirits, guardian divine beasts, battle puppets, and the like.

Backed by a level 14 array, such things really could leave Void-Shattering fiendish cultivators with no talent for siegecraft utterly helpless.

Of course, the cave dwelling had now fallen into the divine race's hands. How much longer the arrays could hold was anyone's guess.

With Zong Wenxian relentlessly tracking this Dao Lord's secret realm all this time, the Light Divine Race, even with all eight divine sovereigns taking the field, would have had their hands full holding off Zong Wenxian and his people. They shouldn't have had much time left for wearing down the arrays...

At the thought, Yaoguang smiled inwardly. Zong Wenxian's bustling about in the starry sky wasn't useless after all!

At the very least, it had bought enough time for him to come knocking on this Dao Lord's cache. Without Zong Wenxian, the divine sovereigns of the Light Divine Race, attacking together for decades, would long since have broken through and taken everything inside.

Three days later, an enormous blue giant star appeared in Yaoguang's field of view.

This time he needed no prompting from the fiendish cultivator; he had already sensed the auras of three Void-Shattering divine sovereigns.

The three of them were assaulting an array hidden within the blue giant star with everything they had, and by the look of it, another two or three years of assault would break the array completely.

But almost the moment Yaoguang drew near the blue giant star, the auras of the three attacking divine sovereigns seemed to falter, and in the next instant, the surroundings underwent a drastic change.

Only then did Yaoguang realize that while his attention had been fixed on the blue giant star, the Void-Piercing fiendish cultivator had, without him noticing, led him into a trap. A trap laid by the divine race, no less.

"So you betrayed the Golden Lion Fiend Lord?" Yaoguang glanced at the fiendish cultivator, but quickly decided it was only natural. Fiendish cultivators. Nothing they did should surprise anyone.

Feeling the two divine sovereigns closing in for the kill in an instant pincer, he looked at the fiendish cultivator in his hand. "Still... Aren't you putting a little too much faith in these three divine sovereigns?"

1. Editor's note: this is Pandora, 100%. Guess the author liked Avatar. ☜