Chapter 395: Void-Shattering

"The heavenly fiend origins of the two Void-Shattering and five Void-Refining fiendish cultivators were badly damaged and dispersed during the fight, but... thanks to also refining top-tier stellar cores worth over three billion Pure Yang Grand Pills, my grotto-heaven has finally reached the limit bordering on the Void-Shattering Realm."

Yaoguang sensed the state of his grotto-heaven. It had grown powerful and reached a boundary. From this point, the way forward was to shatter the void through his comprehension of Dao Techniques and glimpse the three thousand Great Dao behind the Great Dao of void.

If the Great Dao of void were a wall holding up the three thousand Great Dao, then reaching the Void-Shattering Realm meant temporarily smashing that wall to see the true three thousand Great Dao, rather than their reflections manifested through the void.

Yaoguang swept his hand. Clouds and mist churned over the Hundred-Refinement Peak. The Heavenly Dragon-Slaying Array, optimized over fifteen years into a level 14 array, surged to life and swiftly enveloped the entire peak.

Because Yaoguang himself had cultivated the Great Dao of void, the interior of the array now constituted a void unto itself.

Even now, he appeared to still be on the Hundred-Refinement Peak, yet in truth it was as though he stood within another vast starry expanse.

That starry sky was studded with three 360 mighty stellar cores, each one capable of collapsing into a black hole if placed in the outside world.

In other words, the energy tier of these 360 stellar cores equaled 360 Void-Piercing battle immortals.

Integrated and fused into one through the array, never mind a Void-Shattering supreme elder, but even if a top sect emptied its halls, with a dozen Void-Shattering cultivators joining hands with hundreds of Void-Refining and Void-Piercing cultivators, breaking this starry world would still cost them enormous effort.

And in that time, unless the Heavenly Dao Sect's people treated the rules laid down by the Golden Book Venerable as nothing and insisted on mutual destruction, reinforcements would arrive no matter how slowly they moved.

"Void-Shattering." Yaoguang took a deep breath.

His grotto-heaven trembled, releasing energy comparable to that of a large Primordial Void. At the same moment, the Dao resonance of the Great Dao of void surged forth through his Dao Seed.

The powers of his Dao Seed and grotto-heaven reinforced each other, continuously radiating outward, driving away all the void power around him that bore the Great Dao's manifestations, until the void became true nothingness.

And behind that nothingness, laid bare before Yaoguang, were the true rules that composed the entire world.

"The three thousand Great Dao!" Yaoguang exclaimed.

The three thousand Great Dao were like the world's underlying logic, a network dense enough to hold every change and every law in existence, composing the world itself.

A cultivator needed only a glance to feel the supreme truths held within them. If one could maintain this state and study them at all times, one's Dao Technique cultivation would advance by leaps and bounds.

With his grotto-heaven holding the void power apart, Yaoguang quietly contemplated the three thousand Great Dao spread across his perception.

"Reaching this step is the true Void-Shattering Realm." He felt moved to pass some verdict on his own breakthrough. In the end, only one phrase remained. "Effortless."

The entire breakthrough had flowed naturally without any danger or drama.

After a while, Yaoguang chuckled. Flow naturally? Is that not exactly as it should be? The Void-Shattering Realm? Anyone with hands can do it. What's there to fuss about?

He turned his gaze back to the three thousand Great Dao.

"No wonder it's so easy for a Dao Lord to raise a cultivator's realm... After Dao Integration, they are no different than the three thousand Great Dao themselves, part of the world, part of the universe..."

Yaoguang thought of exams and students. A Dao Lord was no different than the teacher writing the exam. With the exam's author personally teaching a student how to take the test, how could the student not score high?

Having witnessed the three thousand Great Dao, Yaoguang also understood on a deep level why Dao Lords so vastly outstripped Void-Shattering cultivators.

However strong a Void-Shattering cultivator became, their power came from their own grotto-heaven. And a single grotto-heaven, even one at the Void-Shattering Realm, could only hold so much mass.

"A Void-Piercing Realm grotto-heaven at full release commands energy roughly equal to a Primordial Void five hundred kilometers across! Void-Refining and Void-Shattering enlarge the diameter, but five thousand kilometers is the limit, and many Void-Shattering cultivators never even reach that! But Dao Lords... They merge with the Dao and channel energy on a cosmic scale through the Great Dao's power. That's basically a five-hundred-thousand-kilometer Primordial Void!"

What kind of gap was that?

Life-and-death duels between Void-Piercing cultivators might not just depend on whose Primordial Void had greater mass, and Dao Techniques and Dao Artifacts mattered enormously. But when the energy gap was that large, no technique or tool held any meaning whatsoever.

The opponent could simply summon sufficient mass through the Great Dao's power and roll over everything standing in the way.

That level of power was galactic. And yet, comparing a Dao Lord to a galaxy by mass alone missed the point; with the means at a Dao Lord's command, even destroying a galaxy was merely a matter of time.

If they wished, they could easily reign as overlord of a galaxy, ruling over areas tens or hundreds of thousands of light-years across.

"Truly a great form of life," Yaoguang murmured.

In his previous life, he could have stretched his imagination to its dying breath and never dared dream of reaching such heights.

Never mind a Dao Lord. Back in my old world, just reaching the Foundation Building Realm would have let me rule the world as its uncrowned king.Hunt in the rainforest in the morning, barbecue on the world's tallest peak at noon, swim in Antarctica in the afternoon, and lie back watching the galaxy from a desert at night...

And that was nothing, really. The great figures at the summit of his old world could manage as much with their technological creations.

But one step further, to the Golden Core Realm? One would be able to tease the rabbit on the moon in the morning, breathe in carbon dioxide on Venus at noon, stroll across Mars in the afternoon, sunbathe on the sun itself at night.

As for the moon having no rabbit, would it really be any trouble for a Golden Core cultivator to build a true Guanghan Palace up there and shape an environment where living things could survive?[1]

"A Golden Core cultivator's footsteps are still confined to the solar system. But at the Void-Piercing Realm... Using the grotto-heaven's distortion of surrounding space to make spatial jumps, touring the entire galaxy becomes only a matter of time. Then I'd see sights no one in my old world could reach with all the imagination they possessed... and I am already stronger than a Void-Piercing or Void-Refining cultivator. I am a Void-Shattering cultivator!"

Yaoguang reflected on what he had become, and for the first time felt that the person he was now could genuinely merit the words "a great form of life" in the eyes of countless people and countless civilizations.

If he simply walked away from the North Sea Star, left this super-planet that housed the Gate of the Immortal Realm, the countless civilizations of the surrounding star regions would become his playground, his to roam at will.

Yaoguang stood there, basking in the glory of having achieved greatness. If he had no higher pursuit, he could really lie back and coast from here on. And yet...

"Still not enough." It was a while before Yaoguang collected himself. "The universe is so vast... A Void-Piercing, Void-Refining, or Void-Shattering cultivator could spend an entire lifetime and never finish touring one galaxy. Their lifespans are a pitiful ten thousand years. Even a Dao Lord, with 129,600 years and far greater divine abilities, could at best explore the tip of the iceberg that is the universe. To truly endure alongside the world, to walk every corner of the starry sky and witness every splendor and every wonder the universe offers, I need to go at least one step further!"

To become immortal! Undying! With no limit to his lifespan hanging over him, what place would be too far? What sight could he not see?

In a life that long, he could pause a hundred years just to wait for a supernova, spend ten thousand watching two black holes devour each other, and stand by for a million seasons to see two great galaxies collide.

"Just this one small goal. Immortality, undying life, the freedom to roam the North Sea at dawn and Cangwu at dusk. That will do." A smile spread across Yaoguang's face as he reined in the urge to go sightseeing beyond the starry sky right then and there.

In his mind, the information belonging to the Void Sword and Void Flicker was pulled up again and again.

For a Void-Shattering cultivator to achieve Dao integration, one Dao Technique had to be practiced to perfection. Only a Dao Technique at perfection could transform the very nature of the grotto-heaven, allowing the cultivator to merge into the Great Dao and be accepted by it.

When Yaoguang had pushed his Void-Shattering progress to 100%, it had naturally included a small amount of information on Dao Techniques cultivated to the perfection stage. Not many, but his life-bound Dao Technique, Void Flicker, was among them.

After all, void-type Dao Techniques had many practitioners. Even though both Void Flicker and the Void Sword counted as refined works within the category, there were still cultivators who had reached perfection with each, and so the information was available.

There was not a single trace of information on how to reach perfection with his other life-bound Dao Technique, the Torrent of Time; that likely would not surface immediately even at the Dao Lord Realm, perhaps not until 20% or even 40% progress.

"Void Flicker," Yaoguang muttered.

The Great Dao of void cycled endlessly through Yaoguang's body, and as it flowed, Void Flicker's Dao Seed grew rapidly. The Dao resonance radiating from it covered every corner of his grotto-heaven.

As those ripples of resonance washed through his grotto-heaven again and again, it took on more and more of the Great Dao's characteristics.

When those characteristics reached a certain point, the cultivator could try to fool the true Great Dao of void and attempt to merge into it. That was the most critical step in a Void-Shattering cultivator's advancement to a Dao Lord: merging oneself into the Dao.

But no matter how one cultivated, an individual's Dao resonance remained incomparably minuscule against the Great Dao of the entire universe.

More than ninety-nine percent of Void-Shattering cultivators, at that step of merging into the Dao, had their minds scattered by the sheer scale of the Great Dao of void, losing all sense of time and space, sinking forever into the Great Dao, never to wake again. This was the so-called Dao transformation.

That step was so brutal that if ten Dao Lords were made to attempt it again, nine would fail, and the tenth would rather die than try.

Even Yaoguang, whose Void-Shattering Realm progress stood at 100% and contained a wealth of experience in attempting Dao Integration, felt lingering dread after only a few glances at it.

Until my realm reaches Dao Integration... No, until the progress on Dao Integration itself reaches 100%, I will not take that step lightly. Yaoguang thought.

Not long after Yaoguang quietly stepped into the Void-Shattering domain, news brought by Li Hanqiu interrupted his continued seclusion.

"Deputy Sect Master, the sect's tribute delegation has arrived... But... they've made additional demands."

1. Guanghan Palace, also known as Moon Palace, is a palace on the moon that existed in Chinese myths. In Chinese mythology, Chang'e is the goddess of the Moon and wife of Hou Yi, the great archer. Renowned for her beauty, Chang'e is also known for ascending to the Moon with her pet Yu Tu, the Moon Rabbit, and living in the Moon Palace. She is one of the most prominent goddesses in Chinese folk religion, Chinese Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism. ☜