Free Web NovelChapter 236: Void-Piercing Realm
The auction involved goods with a total value of over one hundred million, although, due to cost factors, their real worth was only thirty to forty million... Still, that's no small sum. Yaoguang focused his psychic mind on several branches.
He focused on Martial Dao and Qi Dao. More precisely, on the Martial Dao branch. Over the past five years, although he had not taken on much additional income, the annual dividends from the spirit-gathering arrays had been considerable. Thanks to those, his Qi Dao branch had already reached 99%, a threshold that was nearly impossible to budge further.
Even his Martial Dao branch had risen to 78%. Originally, he had estimated that it would take another year or two to push the Martial Dao branch to 99%, but the spirit stones he had just gained had significantly advanced that timeline.
"The three branches are about to merge into one," Yaoguang murmured.
He had previously thought that the fusion might occur when the other two branches reached around 60%. Now it seemed like they would have to reach 100%.
As he thought, nourishment from the Merchant branch was mobilized and poured rapidly into the Martial Dao branch. Immediately, that branch began to grow at an astonishing pace, soon reaching the critical 99% threshold.
As it reached 99% and continued to receive nourishment, it, along with the Psyche Dao and Qi Dao branches, began emitting a hazy gray glow that enveloped all three intertwined branches.
Within that dim gray light, Yaoguang felt as though he saw something. A path. A new profession. A new road that would be determined by his understanding. And the ultimate realm pointed to by his cultivation path...
"Immortal." The word slipped from his lips almost involuntarily.
At once, the mist dispersed, just like the sudden clarity in his understanding of cultivation. A brand-new branch appeared before him. The Martial Dao, Qi Dao, and Psyche Dao vanished. In their place remained only one.
The Immortal Dao. A path that pointed directly toward becoming immortal.
As Yaoguang focused his psychic mind on it, the ancient tree swayed. The branch that seemed to extend into the void, drawing information from endless emptiness, suddenly retracted before the nourishment was fully consumed. The result made him pause in surprise. Very quickly, he understood.
"It’s not enough!" he said. "The concept of the Immortal Dao I established is too vast. Even with high-dimensional cognition, I cannot fully see the entire path of the Immortal Dao! In other words, at this stage of the Immortal Dao, I cannot achieve omniscience!"
Yaoguang understood that this was not a limitation of high-dimensional cognition but rather of his own cognition. Just as an adult could clearly perceive the world seen by an ant, yet a child’s perception of the world differed greatly from that of an adult.
He was still weak. Even what his high-dimensional cognition perceived was not the entire universe. At most, it encompassed the Great Cangwu World, the North Sea Star, and several surrounding worlds. An adult could learn about the entire world through various channels, while a child only knew the small circle in which they lived. In terms of high-dimensional cognition, Yaoguang was still a child.
With that thought, Yaoguang slightly reframed his understanding of the Immortal Dao. The Immortal Dao(Void-Piercing Realm) was only the first realm of the Immortal Dao. The next moment, as he continued to pour nourishment into it, the branch resumed its growth.
Simultaneously, information regarding the Void-Piercing Realm flooded his mind at a furious rate. The progress reached about 4% before the nutrients ran out. Yaoguang quickly ran some numbers.
It will take roughly five hundred million spirit stones in revenue to completely fill the cognition of the Void-Piercing Realm.
The Immortal Dao (Void-Piercing Realm) encompassed the former systems of body, qi, and psyche refinement. Five hundred million was not excessive.
However, as my reputation inevitably grows, my labor costs will rise accordingly. The final required investment may be between eight hundred million and one billion spirit stones. It might even exceed a billion... Yaoguang paused in his calculations.
To round it off, he set the number at one billion. That was no small figure. In the past five years, he had been busy refining the outer core and had taken on fewer orders. His annual income had only been around thirty million. At that rate, accumulating one billion would take thirty-three years. He needed to increase his income.
The most stable source of income is still the spirit-gathering arrays. Now that more and more people have mastered the improved array deployment techniques, the sect is no longer lacking manpower, but rather more nodes to deploy the arrays. Over the next five or six years, the nodes might just be enough. But once all improvements are completed, growth will plateau.
At that point, the Nine Cauldrons Sect’s annual revenue would exceed four hundred million, and his dividends would surpass fifty million. Adding his earnings from other sources, he might even reach an annual income of one hundred million. But naturally, the more he made, the better it'd be.
Aside from advancing the Void-Piercing Realm, his Refiner and Array Caster branches were also awaiting breakthroughs. He shifted his focus to the Refiner branch. Countless pieces of information about artifact refinement flowed through his mind.
Speaking of artifact refinement... I can craft far more than just life-bound flying swords. There are many other refined artifacts, astras that amplify specific spells, defensive astras, flying vessels, alchemy furnaces... I can refine them all. He thought.
An immense volume of information had accumulated in his mind by now. Most of the time, he refrained from accessing it to avoid overloading his mental capacity. Now, as he briefly reviewed it, countless methods for forging alchemy furnaces surfaced at once.
Among them was one particular alchemy furnace which, if used to refine treasured pills, would likely offer even better cost efficiency than the Azure Jade Pill Cauldron, despite the latter being a spirit treasure. Unfortunately, the artifact refinement techniques required for these furnaces were extremely demanding. Unless Yaoguang was willing to spend ten years personally guiding Dong Liushui and the other artifact refinement grandmasters of the Artifact Sect step by step, they would not be able to produce one. Even if he gave them the complete refinement method, they would still be unable to refine it.
The Nine Cauldrons Sect simply lacks sufficient high-end technical talent. Refining ordinary astras and artifacts was manageable, but for the more advanced ones, I have to rely on myself more and more. Yaoguang’s thoughts lingered over several alchemy furnace designs before he ultimately abandoned the idea.
There was no point in refining high-grade treasured-artifact-level furnaces. If he was going to refine one, he would directly refine a spirit treasure.
The advancement of the Void-Piercing Realm will inevitably be extremely slow from here onward. Rather than focusing on that, I should first elevate my refinement techniques, gain the ability to forge spirit treasures, possibly even high-grade spirit treasures. If I can craft a high-grade spirit-treasure-level alchemy furnace, it will greatly improve Xie He and Wu Qingying’s efficiency in alchemy. And if I equip Li Hanqiu with high-grade spirit treasures, his combat strength will also increase significantly. Yaoguang settled on this decision.
After organizing his thoughts, he turned his attention back to the Immortal Dao branch. Speaking of... Now that the three branches have merged into one, are there no flowers or fruit? Did it simply swallow the three innate divine abilities?
The qi refinement innate ability being absorbed is understandable. I had already refined qi before growing the Qi Dao branch, so the circumstances were unusual. But now that all three branches have merged, even the other innate divine abilities have disappeared. This is a huge loss. Yaoguang thought.
After a long while, Yaoguang calmed his mind. If they are gone, then so be it. Innate divine abilities are merely products of pushing one’s understanding of a realm to its absolute limit. The Star God, Golden Core, and Dharma Form Realms have all been dismantled and reorganized. Failing to form Dao Fruits is not entirely unreasonable.
***
The chaos around the Immortal Alliance subsided after they managed to extort the Nine Cauldrons Sect through the Immortal-Proving Tower. The overall situation on the Heavenly Star Continent remained relatively stable.
The Great Sun Sword Sect focused on internal development while deepening its cooperation with the Infinite Star Palace. Within the First Yang Sect, the internal conflict over whether to focus on the sword or on spells gradually approached its conclusion, and it looked like the factions were about to reconcile. The Xuanming Sect continued to lick its wounds and accumulate strength. The remaining powers—the Ancient Immortal Sect, the Great Yue Dynasty, and the Star Sea Sect—had all grown noticeably quieter.
However, the Brahma Divine Kingdom saw the rise of a new sect master: Zhai Di. This sect master possessed both ambition and vision. With a broad and inclusive mindset, he sought to integrate the Brahma Cult and the Brahma Sect into the Brahma Divine Kingdom. If he succeeded, the Brahma Divine Kingdom would inevitably rise to become a colossal force second only to the Six Great Immortal Sects, gaining the qualifications to contend for the hegemon position of the Heavenly Star Continent.
The Infinite Star Palace remained mired in its war with the Black Feather Sect on the Black Flame Continent. Meanwhile, the competition between the Thousand-Beast Sect and the Immortal Alliance gradually stalled.
Originally, the Thousand-Beast Sect had not only contended with the Immortal Alliance for dominance over the Radiant Sun Continent, but had also diverted significant energy to support the war against the Black Feather Sect on the Black Flame Continent. It had grown increasingly difficult for them to manage both fronts, and thus, they had chosen to temporarily set aside their disputes with the Immortal Alliance.
The Immortal Alliance was equally content to let the Thousand-Beast Sect free up its forces to clash with the Infinite Star Palace on the Black Flame Continent. Both sides entered a temporary lull.
On the Cold Moon Continent, the Lunar Sect and the Dharma Heaven Pavilion, the two factions competing for supremacy, also appeared to be about to reconcile. They seemed to realize that continued internal struggle would only push them further away from the long-term strategic goal of unifying the world. As a result, they decided to stop the hostilities and enter a period of recuperation. Thus, the Cold Moon Continent also quieted down.
As this situation persisted, people gradually realized that the Great Cangwu World had entered an unprecedented era of peace. Among the five continents, aside from the Black Flame Continent, the other four were free of war.
With no wars raging, communication between sects became closer, and commercial exchanges flourished. Seizing this opportunity, the Purple Firmament Institute aggressively promoted its flying swords. Orders flowed in continuously, and spirit stones poured steadily into the Nine Cauldrons Sect.
As for the Immortal Alliance’s plan to dump pills into the Nine Cauldrons Sect’s market, it progressed smoothly at first. Through low pricing, they aggressively seized market shares, leaving the sect’s alchemy institutes with almost no breathing room.
However, several years later, when the Immortal Alliance sought to raise prices after securing dominance over the spirit pill market within the Nine Cauldrons Sect, they were astonished to discover that the Nine Cauldrons Sect had seemingly switched tracks.
Because of changes in cultivation methods, their demand for pills had also shifted. And the pills now required by the Nine Cauldrons Sect were ones the Immortal Alliance simply could not provide. Establishing dedicated production lines solely to supply pills that would only sell within the Nine Cauldrons Sect’s market was not realistic.
Of course, not everyone in the Nine Cauldrons Sect had converted to the new cultivation art. However, due to the Immortal Alliance’s earlier low-price dumping, the sect had stockpiled a substantial quantity of spirit pills. Those reserves were sufficient to support those who had not changed their cultivation arts.
Naturally, this outcome left the Immortal Alliance deeply dissatisfied. But faced with Li Hanqiu’s frequent threats of self-detonation whenever pressured, being dissatisfied was pointless. In the end, it could only be said that they had been outmaneuvered.
Amid this seemingly tranquil landscape, ten years flew by. These ten years came to be known worldwide as the precious decade of peace. Within the Nine Cauldrons Sect, however, they were called the golden decade of transformation and development.
