Chapter 437: Perfection
Inside the Heaven-Sealing Stele, Divine Sovereign Suoka watched it all unfold before his eyes, and in the end, he gave up every struggle in despair.
"That power... He's on the same level as the Destruction Divine Lord..." His eyes brimmed with anguish.
The Destruction Divine Lord he spoke of was a divine sovereign of the Destruction Divine Race, one who bore "Destruction" as his title because he was the most gifted member the Destruction Divine Race had produced in hundreds of thousands of years. He was also the strongest being in the divine race, other than those who had achieved Dao Integration, and ranked seventh on the Dao Lord Candidate Rankings!
The Destruction Divine Race and the other divine races had never accepted that ranking. They thought that in a battle fought inside a divine kingdom, not even the top three on the Dao Lord Candidate Rankings, Perfected Lord Tian Xiao, Perfected Lord Kong Xuan, and the Martial Paragon Perfected Lord, could hope to keep him down.
By right, the Destruction Divine Lord should have ranked first, or at worst among the top three.
The fact that Suoka now reached for the Destruction Divine Lord as his comparison for Yaoguang showed just how despair-inducing the strength Yaoguang had displayed in this battle really was.
"It's over." Yaoguang nodded to the Void-Piercing fiendish cultivator. "Thank you for showing me the way."
The fiendish cultivator went cold from head to toe, his heart plunging into a bottomless abyss, but the instinct to survive still made him try. "S-Senior... I..."
He never finished. Yaoguang swept with an empty hand, and a single strike of Great Annihilation Sword Qi annihilated the fiendish cultivator, along with the stretch of void he occupied. Not a single trace of his existence was left behind.
With the fiendish cultivator destroyed, Yaoguang's gaze turned to Divine Sovereign Suoka, who was still pinned beneath the Heaven-Sealing Stele.
Aware that, with a Dao Lord's cache at stake, Yaoguang would never let him leave alive, the divine sovereign didn't beg. Instead, he said coldly, "The divine race stands as one. We are the people of the great Light Divine Venerable. Killing a divine sovereign of the Light Divine Race will leave its mark on you. When the great Light Divine Venerable returns from the starry sky, he will never let you go..."
"If you have that much faith in your divine venerable, then once I achieve Dao Integration, I'll send him along to reunite with you," Yaoguang said.
"You dare blaspheme the Divine Venerable? Yaoguang, you deserve death..." The divine sovereign who a second ago had seemed resigned to his fate roared in fury. Dazzling radiance erupted from his body, forming an enormous divine seal that swept toward Yaoguang, intent on imprinting itself on him.
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Before the imprint could reach his body, Void Swords and Great Annihilation Sword Qi, driven by the Torrent of Time, shot together into the sealed space beneath the Heaven-Sealing Stele and devoured the divine sovereign in an instant.
Strangely, though, the two streaks of Great Annihilation Sword Qi aimed at that dazzling radiance passed straight through it, as if the brilliant light were nothing but a phantom.
Yaoguang's Void Flicker triggered instantly, and he vanished from the battlefield.
Not long after, his figure reappeared, and he frowned slightly. Sensing carefully, he found a faint mark of flowing light deep within his mind, and it surprised him. "Those streams of light never actually hit me, yet an imprint remains in my mental world. A method like this... Does it touch on the Great Dao of karma?"
He activated the True Spirit Light, using the power of his true spirit to dispel the flowing mark, only to find the process agonizingly slow.
Driving it out completely would likely take decades of continuous effort, perhaps a century. If he only chipped away at it in the gaps between cultivation, even spending between three and five hundred years might not be enough.
"Three to five hundred years..." Yaoguang shook his head.
In three to five hundred years, he could likely attempt Dao Integration.
Of course, he would need to watch for the Light Divine Venerable returning to the North Sea Star in the meantime. But never mind that the Light Divine Venerable hadn't returned yet; even if he did, and even if he was dead set on avenging those Divine Sovereigns, wasn't there still the Penglai Dao Lord?
Setting the divine mantra mark aside, Yaoguang turned to tallying his spoils.
Soon, he was shaking his head ruefully. "The Void Sword is a Dao Technique meant to break through defenses; nothing withstands its edge. But because it's so sharp, it goes through Dao Artifacts like a knife through melons... Each of those divine sovereigns carried at least three Dao Artifacts, and Divine Sovereign Suoka carried nine, a full matching set... Yet every last one of them got shredded by the Void Sword."
The shattered spoils still held considerable value, of course, and with some time and effort they could probably be repaired. But Yaoguang could forge new Dao Artifacts faster than he could repair broken ones, which naturally left him unimpressed with the damaged goods.
He collected the fragments all the same. If nothing else, they could be reduced back into materials and used to feed other Dao Artifacts.
"Now, then..." Yaoguang muttered.
Yaoguang's figure flashed, and he arrived at the so-called Dao Lord's secret realm, carved out inside the blue supergiant itself.
Shaped by a Dao Lord's power, the star was visibly different from other supergiantsβmore stable, with a staggering internal temperature.
Yaoguang studied it briefly and soon identified the last array shrouding the secret realm.
Only one of the three arrays that had been worn down first by the Golden Lion Fiend Lord and then by the Light Divine Race's divine sovereigns remained, and that last one had been badly weakened, its range now confined to just about five hundred kilometers around the stellar core.
Having understood the array's characteristics, Yaoguang slashed a Void Sword straight into it. The array seemed to sense the threat and immediately focused its power on defense.
"An array spirit?" Yaoguang quickly saw what was happening.
The Void Sword swept up the power of the void and slammed into the array. With a deep hum, the array that would have cost three divine sovereigns of the Light Divine Race a decade, even decades, to grind away visibly shuddered under a single Void Sword.
The mighty Dao Technique that claimed first place in breaking defenses lived up to its name, dismantling the array's structure on contact. One strike, and the array's stability had already dropped visibly.
"The Void Sword is truly worthy of its name!" A smile crossed Yaoguang's face. "For breaking arrays, forget other Dao Techniques; even the Great Annihilation Sword Qi falls far short of it. One Dao Technique from me probably does this array as much harm as a full day's effort from three divine sovereigns."
And crucially, that strike had been a mere probe, not even aimed at the array's weakest point. Nor had he used the Torrent of Time to land two or three Void Swords on the same spot in a single instant, which would have made the damage even more serious.
"Half a month at worst. And in the best-case scenario... ten days will be plenty," Yaoguang concluded.
He no longer hesitated. Void Sword after Void Sword fell in succession, rocking the array while he kept searching for its weak points. The deeper he went, the smoother the assault became, and in the end it took just eleven days for his Void Swords to breach through the array.
Seizing the moment, his figure flashed inside the secret realm and went straight to the array's core.
As he swiftly retracted the array shrouding the realm, azure streams of light across hundreds of kilometers around drew together rapidly , condensing into a banner that fell into Yaoguang's hand.
The banner seemed inclined to resist even then, but Yaoguang pressed it down directly with the power of the Limitless Sword.
"Not bad. This portable set of array banners alone is worth no less than a high-grade Dao Artifact." Yaoguang smiled.
His psychic thought spread out in every direction. The secret realm's outer and middle layers had long since been stripped bare by the Golden Lion Fiend Lord and the Light Divine Race, but the best treasure had always been inside the array's inner layer. For instance...
The core of this cave dwelling is a mobile palace! Yaoguang realized.
Yaoguang's psychic thought fanned out, quickly enveloping the palace, which measured over 150 kilometers across. As for its tier...
Another high-grade Dao Artifact. That's at least twenty billion in hand.
Whether anything else remained inside the palace, he would see clearly enough once he had refined it.
He set about analyzing and deciphering the Dao Artifact palace, and with his attainments in the Refiner and Array Caster branches, it took him only three days to devise a method for refining it.
The Wheel-Turning Palace. Yaoguang identified the high-grade Dao Artifact's origin, and with it, the identity of the Dao Lord who had passed in meditation.
So it was the Wheel-Turning Dao Lord of the Dragon-Elephant Temple. He sighed inwardly.
The Dragon-Elephant Temple had been one of the preeminent Buddhist temples of a hundred thousand years ago, back when the Buddhist school still had eight great temples. But a hundred thousand years ago, the Dragon-Elephant Temple's greatest pillar vanished without a trace.
Over the following twenty thousand years, others worked out the Dao Lord's remaining lifespan and concluded that he had either passed in meditation or entered the Immortal Realm. What followed was the settling of every grudge and every score. The Dragon-Elephant Temple was divided among other factions, and vanished into the river of history.
Passed in meditation eighty thousand years ago, and only discovered now...
Yaoguang extended his psychic thought, tracing the palace's forging methods and array traces, seeping in and taking hold.
The process cost him little effort; within a month, he had established preliminary control over the palace, and with control came a much fuller understanding of the high-grade Dao Artifact.
A fitting signature treasure for a Dao Lord. This high-grade Dao Artifact's defenses are astonishing, a superb vessel for roaming the starry sky. Its value runs higher than I first estimated, probably as much as thirty billion.
That was the price of the finest among high-grade Dao Artifacts.
Yaoguang's figure flickered and disappeared into the palace's interior. With the palace refined, all its secrets lay open before him. Pills, Dao Artifacts, refinement materials... Everything together was likely worth no less than eighty billion.
Just short of a hundred billion... A little short of a Dao Lord's status. But a Dao Lord nearing his end would have poured out his entire fortune on one last desperate gamble, meaning his resources were spent in that final struggle. Most of this eighty billion is what the Wheel-Turning Dao Lord accumulated in ten thousand years at most. Yaoguang mused for a moment. Eighty billion in under ten thousand years... Not bad at all.
After all, this eighty billion had cost him nothing.
Wait. Eighty billion for nothing?! Eighty billion?! The equivalent of eighty Dao Artifacts?!
Add to that the Daemon Hunter experience from the three divine sovereigns he had just slain...
Yaoguang's psychic mind snapped to the Merchant branch. The experience accumulated there was so vast that even taking the Alchemist branch from nothing to max level would likely pose no problem at all.
So... the experience is full?