Chapter 457: Immortal Gate
Half a day later, Yaoguang verified that the two top-tier Dao Artifacts were still growing stronger and let out a small breath of relief. "They're fine."
Of the two, the Human Emperor Sword was to be handed over to the Penglai Dao Lord, the strongest fighting force on his side. When attempting Dao Integration in the future, he would need her power to counter the human tribulation.
As for the other, the Endless Tower, that went without saying. It would merge into his body, becoming a life-bound Dao Artifact.
Only once he was certain both Dao Artifacts hadn't been damaged did Yaoguang turn his psychic mind to the ancient tree in his mental world, the one gleaming with glazed treasure light.
Looking at the energy pooled on the Daemon Hunter branch, Yaoguang smiled faintly.
A Dao Lord! The experience gain was considerably higher than that from an expert at the Void-Shattering Realm.
His gaze lingered on the Refiner branch for a moment, but he quickly decided to pour every bit of it into the Dao Integration branch instead. He was about to attempt Dao Integration, and at a time like this, every bit of cultivation progress improved his odds of success.
As the energy poured in, the Dao Integration branch began to grow rapidly, extending upward as though to pierce the layer of mist at the top of the canopy and let him truly see the world wrapped within it.
He still could not view the scene hidden in that mist directly, but through what the branches had gathered, he received a great deal of information.
There were cultivation arts, immortal techniques, Dao Integration experiences and insights, and understanding of the higher stages of the Dao Integration Realm.
As the information flowed through his mind, the experiences and insights on the Dao Integration Realm made him frown.
It's all cultivation experience from after Dao Integration. Not one art or record explains what actually happens during the process itself. Maybe even the cultivators themselves don't know how they avoided Dao transformation.
Having no experience at all to draw on left him uneasy.
I will first complete the human immortal path. With three top-tier Dao Artifacts carrying my essence, qi, and psyche along it, I will have far greater resilience than other cultivators attempting Dao Integration. Even if I end up facing Dao transformation, I should at least be able to pull myself back out.
Yaoguang thought it over, then turned his attention to the next stage of cultivation along the human immortal path.
Cultivating that path meant continually strengthening and elevating his essence, qi, and psyche, or rather, continually strengthening and elevating the quality of his three top-tier Dao Artifacts, so that he could leverage more of the Great Dao's power. It was nothing like the ghost immortal, earth immortal, psyche immortal, or heavenly immortal paths.
This information gives an objective account of the five kinds of immortals. Among them, the ghost immortal has the easiest time, but unless one's backing is formidable, that road is very hard to see through to the end, so they make up less than twenty percent. The psyche immortal raises strength by deepening its fusion with the Great Dao, which is a relatively easy road to grow along, but what makes it also breaks it. Immortals with very deep comprehension of a given Great Dao can use that Dao to order psyche immortals to serve them. Because of that flaw, psyche immortals are few as well, somewhere around fifteen percent.
Reading that far, Yaoguang exhaled slowly.
Earth immortals and human immortals were the mainstream. Those two accounted for nearly seventy percent of all the immortals in the Immortal Realm!
No wonder there were so many earth immortal and human immortal arts when I first searched for Dao Integration.
As he went through the information, his attention settled on the heavenly immortal.
That road was the hardest and the rarest! It could not be measured in ten percent or even five. In the Immortal Realm, you might not find one heavenly immortal in a hundred.
Most of them lived clustered together in one place, high above everyone else, so few in the outside world ever met a true heavenly immortal.
Because heavenly immortals were so rare, and because their supernatural power was boundless and their divine abilities vast, such figures were also called Grand Sages of Boundless Power once they attained a certain level of achievement.
Ghost, human, earth, and psyche immortals all achieve the Dao through external force. The ghost immortal plunders others' cultivation, the human immortal uses immortal artifacts to carry essence, qi, and psyche, the earth immortal claims a stretch of land and builds a blessed grotto-heaven, and the psyche immortal merges its very body into the Great Dao, growing more indifferent to the seven emotions and six desires the deeper it cultivates, like a puppet of the Dao. No wonder only accomplished cultivators of the heavenly immortal path are titled Great Sages of Boundless Power.
Yaoguang felt the weight of that, although at this point he had no intention of switching paths.
The added progress had earned him two more heavenly immortal arts, but neither was a heavenly immortal scripture of the void Dao. He could understand why.
Heavenly immortals were fewer than one in a hundred to begin with, and obtaining a heavenly immortal art of the void Dao was even harder.
After all, the Dao of void was one of the four supreme Great Dao. He had yet to find even a single Dao Technique for karma or fate, didn't he?[1]
As he worked through the information, the ancient tree's branch gradually stopped growing.
Yaoguang glanced at the final tally. One Dao Lord, and only 4 points of progress?
The result caught him off guard. Far less than he had expected. At this rate, filling ten thousand points of progress would take 2,500 Dao Lords.
I wonder how wide the gap is between a Dao Lord and an immortal. If it's large, 2,500 Dao Lords isn't difficult at all, but if it's very small...
Yaoguang thought that far and quickly dismissed the worry. Thanks to the Martial Dao Human Immortal Secret Cache, the immortal art in his possession, he could already see that the gap between a Dao Lord and a true immortal was not much smaller than the one between the Void-Piercing and Void-Shattering Realms.
It fell short of the leap from the Void-Shattering Realm to the Dao Lord Realm, but that advantage was still enough to make hunting down 2,500 foreign-race Dao Lords a fairly manageable prospect.
Of course, that's the ideal case. In theory, hunting lower ranks at a higher rank means diminishing returns, and I don't know how steeply the experience gain from the Daemon Hunter branch will go down.
After considering those matters, Yaoguang stopped focusing on the Daemon Hunter and Dao Integration branches and turned to the Merchant branch.
The Penglai Dao Lord had turned over every last piece of spoils from the Abyssal Ruins Dao Lord, and that fortune alone was...
"Hmm?!" Yaoguang froze, and then disbelief flooded him.
There was so much! Far too much.
On the Merchant branch lay a thin sheet of energy that filled the entire limb almost end to end. It was so much less concentrated than the Daemon Hunter energy that he missed it entirely at first glance.
What's happening here?
Yaoguang stared at that thin but enormously abundant energy, struggling to make sense of it. He quickly pulled back part of his psychic mind and probed the wreckage of the Abyssal Ruins Dao Lord's grotto-heaven.
Plenty of good things lay there. But an ancient Dao Lord who had lived 120,000 years would use every resource he had to extend his lifespan, sharpen his mind, or strengthen himself.
With the five signs of decline of heavenly beings liable to arrive any day, how could he leave precious supplies sitting unused?
The combined value of the treasures here didn't even match the Wheel-Turning Dao Lord's. There was no more than forty or fifty billion.
Nothing especially good here. Yaoguang turned it over and over. But if there was nothing good, that left the Merchant branch's behavior unexplained.
Unwilling to let it go, he looked again at the many items in the Abyssal Ruins Dao Lord's collection and, this time, examined them one by one, carefully.
The sorting went on for some time, and then, as he looked over a wholly unremarkable star chart, an odd feeling rose in him. His gaze drifted back to it of its own accord.
He unfolded the chart, and what lay inside was the record of the Abyssal Ruins Dao Lord's journeys through the starry sky across 120,000 years of life.
The Dao Lord had covered a great deal of ground in that long life. At its farthest, the marked range reached three billion light-years!
That three-billion-light-year zone had many blank stretches along the way, though. Yaoguang guessed he must have found a series of unusual void nodes that let him cross ten million or even a hundred million light-years in one go, which was the only way he could have traveled so far.
Most of the time, the Dao Lord's wanderings stayed within a billion light-years of the North Sea Star, and most likely within three hundred million. That was the sensible range most Dao Lords chose.
Within it, they had time to rush back if anything happened to the North Sea Star. If they traveled further, like one or two billion light-years out, and their sects on the North Sea Star ran into danger, it would take them centuries, perhaps millennia, to return, by which time the sect would long since have been leveled and turned into dust.
Or some wealthy Dao Lord might decide to pour in vast quantities of high-energy matter to open the Gate of the Immortal Realm early, and they would miss the chance entirely, and the only thing to show for their long trip would be ten thousand years of wait and regret.
"So this star region is what the Abyssal Ruins Dao Lord newly discovered during this ten-thousand-year cycle? He marked plenty of high-energy areas he never explored, and then, because the Gate of the Immortal Realm on the North Sea Star was about to open soon, he worried he might be delayed on the road back and set out early, without time to explore any further..." As Yaoguang spoke, instinct made him turn his gaze to a high-energy region marked three billion light-years away from the North Sea Star.
"What is this?" he murmured to himself.
Then he split off part of his psychic mind and focused it on the Merchant branch. More precisely, on a talent that had grown out of that branch.
The Merchant's Intuition. Even for an item or material he had never seen before, he could roughly judge its value.
"I didn't expect this ability to be so useful."
This talent had let him pick the star chart out of all those items at first glance, and it had driven his attention straight to that location three billion light-years away the moment he unrolled it.
So what exactly is there? Yaoguang said inwardly, deciding to test the limits of the Merchant's Intuition. An immortal art inheritance? A batch of immortal artifact materials? The place where some Dao Lord passed in meditation? A top-tier blessed grotto-heaven? Surely not an actual immortal artifact?
He ran through the possibilities one by one, then gauged the extent of that energy on the Merchant branch again.
Even a true immortal artifact probably couldn't account for energy on that scale. Which means... His intuition fired, and he made a bold guess. A Gate of the Immortal Realm?!
As soon as he correctly guessed what that high-energy region represented, the vast but thinly spread energy on the Merchant branch condensed rapidly.
And it exceeded even what he had gained from slaying the Abyssal Ruins Dao Lord by dozens of times!
1. Editor's note: I think the reasoning of the author is as follows: while the Dao of Void is the most commonly chosen by cultivators, only one Dao Lord per Dao makes it to the immortal realm, so it gets flattened. And then heavenly immortals are super rare... I'm not sure though; I was also confused. ☜