Lu Yang similarly coveted Tianhun.
After all, this was a supreme treasure, and one left behind by Sisui at that. Its value was beyond doubt, and it could be described as a perfect match for his Dharma Body Dao.
Before, I was still worrying that if both the Void Attainment Dao Fruit and the Dharma Body Dao needed to reach the Immortal Bridge stage to break through to the Heaven Treading stage, a single [Arctic Exorcism Court] might not be enough. But someone brings a pillow just as I'm falling asleep! This [Tianhun Diagram] is exactly what I need to solve my urgent crisis!
Two supreme treasures meant two Immortal Bridges.
The Heaven Treading stage was now within reach.
Thinking of this, the gaze Lu Yang directed at Tianhun grew increasingly fervent, almost triggering Tianhun's psychological trauma and making him subconsciously take a step back.
"Fellow Daoist, you..."
Lu Yang hurriedly waved his hands. "Don't be afraid, don't be afraid, I'm not a bad person... It's just that, as Fellow Daoist can probably guess, I am truly struggling to support myself out there."
Immediately after, Lu Yang let out a sigh. "With [Paramita] hanging high and the Dao Lords above, and having cultivated such a dharma body, one can imagine how much the Dao Lords dread me. Right now, it's because I've hidden well that I haven't been discovered yet. Once a Dao Lord spots me, I am certain to die."
"Senior Sisui only has me as his sole inheritor."
"If I die just like this, I fear no one will be able to avenge Senior Sisui... Fellow Daoist Tianhun, you wouldn't want such a thing to happen either, right?"
Tianhun: "..."
After a moment of silence, the young military general shook his head and sighed, "It's not that I don't want to help Fellow Daoist, it's truly that I have no way to help you."
"Why?" Lu Yang pressed.
Tianhun thought for a moment, then said in a deep voice, "Saying more is useless, it's hard to explain clearly. Fellow Daoist, follow me. I will take you to see for yourself, and then you will understand."
The two were previously at the top of the twenty-fourth layer of the palace in the painting. However, this time, Tianhun brought Lu Yang to the bottom first layer of the palace. Instead of just walking past the palace's cloud ladders, he pushed open a door and entered the palace's inner hall. Following that, a gloomy darkness entered their vision.
Whoosh, whoosh...
As Tianhun walked in front, wherever he passed, golden flames lit up in the darkness, illuminating the path and revealing a floor covered in skeletal remains.
Lu Yang furrowed his brows, following all the way.
Then he arrived at the depths of the inner hall. Dim yellow candlelight illuminated the walls, revealing one giant ink portrait painting after another hanging impressively upon them.
"That great war back then was not limited to the Dao Lords."
Tianhun's voice drifted from the darkness: "It was even more a battle between the new laws and the old laws. Countless cultivators fought in the Immortal Nexus, slaughtering until the Light Sea turned crimson."
"In the end, Master was defeated, and the overall situation collapsed. The Spiritual Power Dao Lord and the Dao Arts Dao Lord each swept up their subordinate cultivators and left. Master was naturally no exception... Until Master felt his death was certain and didn't want to sit by and watch the cultivators of his Dao lineage be buried with him, so he had me take them and flee into this place."
Hearing this, Lu Yang raised his eyebrows slightly.
"So you're saying, these paintings..."
"That's right." Tianhun nodded. "They are the sparks I preserved. Without exception, all of them are the great cultivators who followed Master in the past."
"What is their cultivation level?" Lu Yang asked out of curiosity.
In response, Tianhun turned his head and gave him a somewhat strange look. "Cultivation? Personally promoted by Master, of course they are all uniformly at the late-stage Golden Core!"
All of them were Great Perfected Lords!
Hearing this, Lu Yang's pupils instantly contracted. Glancing roughly, there were a good dozen or so portraits here, and all of them were actually Great Perfected Lords?
Speaking of this, Tianhun appeared incredibly proud. "Master attained the Dharma Body Dao. Aside from innate Dao Gods like the Ancestral Dragon, he was the number one Dao Lord through the ages. Regardless of which Dao Lord it was in later generations, before they attained the Dao, they all received Master's guidance. If it weren't for that Primordial Saint scheming and plotting..."
Lu Yang ignored Tianhun's boasting.
His attention was focused more on another sentence Tianhun said: "Innate Dao God, Ancestral Dragon? Fellow Daoist Tianhun... how much do you know about the Ancestral Dragon?"
"You don't know?"
Tianhun blinked upon hearing this, then nodded again. "That makes sense. This matter wasn't much of a secret back then, but now surely no one knows."
"Among all the Dao Lords, the Ancestral Dragon is the sole exception. He is an innate Dao God. No one knows his origins; they only know that from the very beginning when the Light Sea was born, he was already at the Dao Lord level. His strength is undisputedly the strongest. Only Master back then was able to exchange a hundred moves with him without being defeated..."
"What about the Primordial Saint?" Lu Yang continued.
"The Primordial Saint?"
The moment this name was brought up, Tianhun trembled with anger. "That two-faced, shameless junior! Among the Dao Lords, this person was the youngest in age."
"When he first made his debut, he was kind to others and proposed a concept that Master highly appreciated—that cultivators should unite more closely together."
"At that time in the Light Sea, although everyone was kind, resources were infinite, and lifespans were ample, the barrier between high-realm cultivators and low-realm cultivators was severe. Qi Refining could only see Qi Refining, Foundation Establishment could only see Foundation Establishment, and Golden Core could only see Golden Core. When they fought, it often triggered countless casualties."
"Back then, there were two Perfected Lords."
"One from the Spiritual Power Dao and one from the Dharma Body Dao. They survived from the primordial era and shared a blood feud, so they engaged in a life-and-death battle in a certain area of the Light Sea."
"In the end, both of them were completely unharmed."
"But the thirteen large and small World Realms affected by them, billions of living beings, countless Foundation Establishment Perfected Ones, Qi Refining cultivators, and mortals were all crushed into powder by the aftershocks."
"And even this only stopped because the Primordial Saint, who had just successfully attained the Golden Core, stepped forward and entered the vision of those two Perfected Lords, thus stopping the great battle."
"It was precisely because of this incident that Master came to admire the Primordial Saint so much. Besides this, the Primordial Saint did many other things, including founding the Primordial Saint Sect. His disciples further filled in unorthodox methods such as alchemy, artifact forging, dual cultivation, and beast taming, causing the immortal path to become increasingly prosperous..."
"Wait."
Right at this moment, Lu Yang suddenly spoke up: "Fellow Daoist means to say that before the Saint Sect, things like alchemy and artifact forging didn't exist in the Light Sea?"
"Of course not."
Tianhun shook his head. "The Dao of Alchemy, the Dao of Artifacts, the Dao of Dual Cultivation, and the Dao of Beast Taming were all concepts compiled by the Primordial Saint and attained out of thin air from the Light Sea!"
"Only after him did people refine pills and forge artifacts."
"Of course, these were subsequently distributed by him to the disciples he favored. And those four disciples of his were indeed, just as he said, all heaven-defying talents..."
Speaking up to here, Tianhun suddenly shuddered, his tone abruptly shifting. "Except for Bu Tianque! That demon must have surely suffered qi deviation in the end!"
Lu Yang was in no mood to pay attention to Tianhun's psychological trauma right now. He only felt an indescribable astonishment: The fundamental inheritances of the four first-generation peaks didn't originally come from the first-generation Peak Masters, but were created by the Saint Sect's Ancestor? He attained so many Dao Fruits by himself out of thin air? Is he a Dao Fruit wholesaler?
No, that's not right!
In the fundamental inheritances of the four first-generation Peak Masters, not a single one leads to the so-called "Dao of Alchemy" or "Dao of Artifacts". I haven't even ever seen these Great Daos!
Where did they go?
Never mind the other Daos, I have long since reached the very peak of the Dao of Dual Cultivation. If there truly was such a Great Dao, it is impossible for me not to see it!
Lu Yang was very confident in this point.
If someone of his level couldn't sense the existence of the Dao of Dual Cultivation, there were only two possibilities. Either this Dao simply didn't exist at all, or—
This Dao is located in a place I cannot see.
He was now a Great Perfected Lord, and a Great Perfected Lord at the Immortal Bridge stage at that. Below the Dao Lords, he was a peak expert. What else could there be that even he couldn't see?
[Paramita]!
(End of Chapter)