Chapter 480: Difficulties

"The Dao of time." Yaoguang studied the Dao Seed of time he carried.

The Great Dao of time was not one of the forty-nine Great Dao found on the North Sea Star. It had never been transmitted through the Gate of the Immortal Realm.

In other words, if he entered the Gate of the Immortal Realm as a Dao Lord of the Dao of time, there would be no Dao contest at all. He could simply walk in.

But that rested on one condition: that the time Dao Lord avatar he shaped could integrate with the Dao successfully.

After thinking it over, Yaoguang turned his attention to the Merchant and Daemon Hunter branches.

I've received a fair amount of goods lately, all of them gifts congratulating me on becoming a Dao Lord, and now that I've reached the Dao Integration Realm, they finally count as completed transactions, giving experience to the Merchant branch. On top of that, the damaged Void-Sealing Tower I took from killing the Extinction Dao Lord and the demon paragon quintessence from killing the Kunpeng Demon Paragon are both worth a great deal.

He paused there for a moment. The Jade Scale Demon Paragon's heavenly demon body had also been worth a lot, but he had already given it to the Penglai Dao Lord, so there was no point dwelling on it.

Investment gifts from various parties, spoils from slaying a Dao Lord and a demon paragon, and the immortal artifact materials the Central Heaven Dao Lord had presented him not long ago...

The experience gained from all of that was considerable. Of course, since his own "market value" had risen and driven up manpower costs, all those gains together still came out slightly below what the Daemon Hunter branch had brought in.

It's a little less, but still...

Yaoguang focused on the Dao Integration(Void) branch, and in the next moment every scrap of nourishment from the Merchant branch and the Daemon Hunter branch alike poured into it.

As a flood of information about the Dao of void rushed in, the branch grew vigorously, and before long its progress had shot straight up to 101/10000. At that point it had fully entered the domain of immortal venerables.

Yaoguang paid no attention to the change in progress, though. He gathered his thoughts and set about comprehending the enormous mass of information he had just received. Much of it concerned the Dao of void, but what truly startled him were the factions those pieces of information pointed back to.

The Creation Group, the Heavenly Origin Group, the Shenluo Group, the Longevity Group... He examined the cultivation arts one by one.

Most of them, remarkably, came from nine great groups, of which the most important seemed to be those four.

Not sects but groups!

The name felt familiar and foreign at the same time, leaving him with a dissonance he could not put into words. Something about it was off, but he could not say what.

Beyond that, once the arts reached the immortal venerable level, they seemed to run abruptly into some sort of bottleneck. No! More accurately, they fell into a kind of stagnation. Not only did they grow scarce, but they all carried some sort of flaw. Or perhaps it was better described as incomplete innovation.

So, in theory, even the arts that circulate in the Immortal Realm only support cultivation up to the immortal level? And to go one step further from immortal to immortal venerable, you can only rely on creating your own? Create one successfully, and you become an immortal venerable; fail, and you stop at the immortal level... That was the conclusion Yaoguang reached based on what he could see.

If that was the case, he might have to pause on the road of the Dao Integration(Void) branch. Having to create a new cultivation art by yourself meant you would inevitably hit some kind of bottleneck.

And while any cultivation art a person managed to create might carry its creator to become an immortal venerable, it would not necessarily take another immortal that far.

So if he kept pushing the Dao Integration(Void) branch forward from here, even driving it to 999/10000 and obtaining one immortal venerable inheritance after another, they would likely amount to nothing more than "bespoke" arts steeped in someone else's personal understanding.

My comprehension has reached the immortal venerable level, so I should raise my actual strength to match first. Once I truly have the power of the immortal tier, there's still time to push my comprehension further afterward. And besides, the path I walk is the human immortal path. On the human immortal path, cultivating into an immortal requires refining three immortal artifacts. Only with immortal artifacts in hand can I hold a one-thousandth share of the power of the Great Dao of void. Without them, even if the share of the Great Dao of void were laid out right in front of me, I...

Yaoguang considered it. In the end, he could still take hold of it, since his comprehension had already reached the immortal venerable level.

But any other cultivator of the human immortal Dao could not grasp a one-thousandth share if it were handed to them, just as a cup could not hold a bucket of water.

As he thought, he took out the damaged Void-Sealing Tower. After studying and analyzing it for a while, he activated the grand arrays of Heaven-Forsaken Valley and used the valley's unique environment to try to strip the Mystic Spirit Resonance Crystal out of the tower.

"The properties of the Mystic Spirit Resonance Crystal align fairly well with the Guixu Mystic Crystal, so if I feed this crystal into the Eight Desolations Mirror, with any luck I should be able to refine the immortal artifact Heavenly Ten Directions Mirror," Yaoguang estimated.

He turned his psychic mind to the Refiner branch, and then frowned. The Refiner branch had reached level 16, but its actual progress stood at only 1%, and even that 1% had come from pouring in vast quantities of immortal artifact materials to refine top-tier Dao Artifacts one after another.

With refinement skill at that level, producing a true immortal artifact was not impossible, but it would be extremely difficult and would take enormous time and effort.

And judging by the trend, even with a constant supply of immortal artifact materials to practice on, pushing the progress to 100% would take him at least ten thousand years.

Ten thousand years was nothing much in itself. The problem was that across those ten thousand years he would have to work through four or five hundred sets of immortal artifact materials, and four or five hundred sets, even at the most ordinary grade, came to forty or fifty trillion.

That was a staggering sum! Whether the combined fortunes of every Dao Lord in this cycle's North Sea Star Dao contest could even reach that figure was an open question.

Put another way, it would take one or two hundred Dao Lords spending everything they had, until the point of becoming beggars, to support him enough to raise his refining craft to perfection at level 16. That was not realistic.

I'll still have to raise the refinement level with "nourishment." If I can get it to level 17 before refining something like the Heavenly Ten Directions Mirror, an ordinary immortal artifact, then success will be assured, and the refinement efficiency will improve considerably too. Yaoguang thought.

The ways to obtain nourishment came down to only two, or perhaps one: experience, whether from the Merchant branch or the Daemon Hunter branch.

On the Merchant side, refining top-tier Dao Artifacts has gotten much easier for me. Even without the Penglai Dao Lord's help, I can now produce a void-type top-tier Dao Artifact every fifty years. But the buyers for void-type top-tier Dao Artifacts are all void Dao Lords, and selling them top-tier Dao Artifacts isn't exactly appropriate. Top-tier Dao Artifacts of other Great Dao take considerably longer to refine, unless the Dao Lord placing the order is willing to assist me.

Yaoguang thought it through. Refining Dao Artifacts for sale involved troublesome procedures, and thanks to the effect of his "manpower value," the final returns had already fallen compared to before. By contrast, the Daemon Hunter branch was far more satisfying.

Besides Extinction, Kunpeng, and Jade Scale, who have already fallen, the group that tried to cause me trouble had two other Dao Integration cultivators, Black Lunar and the Light Divine Venerable. The Black Lunar Fiend Sovereign, in particular, is the one I need to deal with next. Only with that fiend sovereign wiped out can the southern domain keep developing, bringing the old Yin Lunar Sect's territory fully into the southern domain and becoming the foundation on which the Nine Cauldrons Sect is built! Yaoguang made up his mind.

He adjusted his condition. He had his next two targets!

And even if he moved against those two, it would not cause much panic on the North Sea Star, since this was an act of vengeance and he had just cause.

Black Lunar and Light aren't void Dao Lords, so dealing with them won't be like snapping dry twigs the way Extinction and Kunpeng were. It'll take some work one way or another. And given that every Dao Lord holds plenty of trump cards, and that they'll call in friends and allies the moment things start, I'd better prepare for every possible outcome. Yaoguang thought.

Yaoguang quickly went through the Dao Techniques available to him. All of them pointed ultimately toward the final Origin Dao Technique, and for him, a Dao Lord of void, that Origin Dao Technique was the Great Void Technique.

Mastering the Great Void Technique meant a cultivator had earned the qualification to become an immortal, which was to say he held at least a one-thousandth share of the Dao of void.

In terms of comprehension, Yaoguang had already reached the Immortal Venerable Realm. In the share he could contain, and in his use, understanding, and mastery of the Dao of void, he had reached an immortal venerable's level. But his "share" was only 3.

Even the finest cook could not make a meal without rice. With such a small share, even for him, performing the Great Void Technique was no easy thing.

If the Limitless Sword, the Eight Desolations Mirror, and the Endless Tower all transformed into semi-immortal artifacts, then with their amplification plus an understanding and mastery on par with the immortal venerable level, I could release the Great Void Technique. Every gesture would match an immortal's, and killing Black Lunar and Light would be like snapping dry twigs. But at 1% of level 16, upgrading three top-tier Dao Artifacts to semi-immortal artifacts...

Yaoguang considered things. Each one would likely take three or four hundred years. Three or four hundred years to raise a top-tier Dao Artifact to a semi-immortal artifact was fast enough to delight any Dao Lord. But for Yaoguang, it was far too slow.

Upgrading three top-tier Dao Artifacts to semi-immortal artifacts takes too much time, and with my strength alone, I can't easily kill the Black Lunar Fiend Sovereign. The other fiend sovereigns of the Six Great Fiendish Dao Sects would come to his aid before it was done.

Having weighed his options, Yaoguang decided to call in help. He took out a communication jade talisman and contacted the Penglai Dao Lord directly.

In theory, I should be consolidating my realm right now, but there's no such thing as consolidation for me. Ten days or half a month to adapt to Dao Lord Realm power is enough, which means I could move on to the Black Lunar Fiend Sovereign today. And the Black Lunar Fiend Sovereign would never guess I'd come after him this soon. Even if he takes precautions and makes preparations, it'll be a decade or more from now. That gives me the element of surprise. He mused while he waited for her reply.

Before long, waves of psychic thought came through the talisman.

"Dao Lord Yaoguang?" The Penglai Dao Lord sounded a little surprised. "Don't you need to consolidate your realm? The change from the Void-Shattering Realm to the Dao Integration Realm is no small thing. It amounts to an across-the-board leap and transformation."

"You of all people should know my realm has already gone past that of an ordinary Dao Lord," Yaoguang said.

"True enough. So what do you need from me?"

"With my integration this time, it wasn't only Extinction, Kunpeng, and Jade Scale who moved against us directly or indirectly. There were also Black Lunar and Light."

"You mean..."

"We join forces and wipe out Black Lunar," Yaoguang said, stating his purpose outright.

"I knew it." The Penglai Dao Lord wasn't surprised in the slightest, and quickly asked, "When?"

"Now."