In the present era, after Tang Gaozu claimed the realm, he governed all under heaven with benevolence. He utterly banned the method of blood refinement, turning instead to karmic luck to refine boundary stones. As a result, the yield of boundary stones plummeted, but the stones produced were no longer plagued by defects that corrupted and disturbed the mind.
In ancient times, the threshold for blood-refining a boundary stone was exceptionally high; only an Immortal Lord could enlighten the embryo of a boundary stone. The founding wars of Great Tang lasted over a century before the prior dynasty was finally overthrown. More than half of the world's Immortal Lords fell, and most of the survivors were gravely wounded, leaving them with neither the time nor the leisure to enlighten boundary stone embryos.
When the Martial Ancestor seized momentum, suppressed the era, and thoroughly banned Immortal Lords, the blood refinement method lost its crucial Immortal Lord link. Boundary stone embryos grew increasingly scarce through use, and over the course of time, the ancient arts of sacrificial refining for boundary stones were gradually lost to history.
Back then, Cangxu failed in his bid against the Emperor of Liang for the throne. Grievously wounded, he fled to the Domain of the Mountain Folk. There, he established an immortal's cave to nurse his wounds and recover. Once healed, he relied on pretenses of godhood and sorcery to dupe a massive host of Mountain Folk into becoming his devoted followers, driving them as his servants.
Cangxu possessed genuine talent in the Dao of boundary stones. Drawing inspiration from the ancestral smithing techniques of the Mountain Folk, he used his own blood essence to enlighten the embryos of boundary stones, carving out a new path that allowed one to forge boundary stones without being an Immortal Lord.
Although the new boundary stones retained merely sixty percent of an ordinary boundary stone's efficacy, their price was less than thirty percent of an ordinary blood-refined stone. In effect, for the same amount of money, one could purchase two boundary stones.
In any era, price was an absolute killer. Cangxu used the Mountain Folk under his control to continuously sell boundary stones to Liang's enemy states in exchange for cultivation resources. Once he had wealth, he purchased even more Mountain Folk slaves for blood sacrifices to manufacture even more boundary stones.
Selling boundary stones continuously in this manner for two thousand years, Liang was finally destroyed.
Another of Cangxu's innovations was infusing karmic luck into boundary stones. To obtain the luck of the Mountain Folk, he drew upon the ancient rituals of the Saint and created a rite of worship.
The Mountain Folk needed only to complete the intricate rituals of worship every day. Regardless of whether they were truly sincere or submissive, so long as they followed the procedures strictly, in Cangxu's eyes it was karmic luck sprouting like tender shoots. Then, wielding power bordering on that of an Immortal Lord, Cangxu would forcefully pull up the shoots to speed their growth, ruthlessly shearing away their karmic luck.
"As long as you give me a sliver, you must give me everything." This train of thought opened up an entirely new world to Wei Yuan.
For instance, Qingming's contracts for nurturing template Dao Foundations could be modified by adding dense fine print—the kind imperceptible to anyone below the Dharma Idol realm. Then, key clauses could be encrypted with mathematics and woven into the agreements, ensuring that once you signed your name, it would be virtually identical to signing an indenture contract.
Fortunately, Wei Yuan still had his bottom line and rejected this effortless, shortcut method.
Boundary stones were merely Cangxu's divine ability; his cultivation heritage was another matter entirely. Beginning from the Yuangu era, Cangxu detailed the methods passed down along his path.
In the Yuangu era, led by the first Human Sovereign, human cultivators directly cultivated the Great Dao of heaven and earth—such as Chaos, Yin-Yang, the Five Elements, and the like. Cultivation in those days held only a single barrier: Ascension. Once through the Immortal Gate, one was an Immortal Lord. Yet one could tell immediately that such cultivation was preposterously difficult. Back then, across the entirety of the human race at any given time, the number of ascended beings coexisting never exceeded the fingers on one hand.
Entering Antiquity thereafter, cultivation stepped down a level; people began cultivating the sun, moon, mountains, rivers, stars, and demons.
In those days, monsters were extraterrestrial monsters, and demons were heavenly demons from beyond the realm. Then, prior to Ascension, the realm of Dao Foundation was demarcated. One first forged a Dao Foundation, and then, using the imagery of the Dao Foundation, stepped across the Immortal Gate. Cultivation difficulty plunged drastically, and the number of human cultivators surged.
By modern standards, one could easily imagine how earth-shattering the Dao Foundations of ancient cultivators were. There were even peerless geniuses whose Dao Foundations spanned past and future, uniquely singular throughout all history.
The Ancient Full Moon currently suspended in Wei Yuan's mindscape world was one such unique singularity. For hundreds of thousands of years, whenever cultivators touched upon the moon, they could only cultivate flawed, waxing or waning lunar phases.
Compared to ancient Dao Foundations, the immortal swords recorded in the Hall of Myriad Manifestations of the Palace of Grand Beginning were simply second-rate. Wei Yuan's Ten Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains was passable, while all the rest could hardly be presented in polite company. Aside from Wei Yuan, only Zhang Sheng's Five Hundred Immortal Swords after his cultivation restart could be considered respectable.
In the Yuangu era and Antiquity, immortals often scoured the entire realm for thousands or tens of thousands of years just to find one or two qualified successors.
By Middle Antiquity, the era Cangxu belonged to, ancient beasts, immortal relics, heavenly treasures, and wondrous realms had become the mainstream of cultivation. Divine beasts and immortal creatures in particular, having direct counterparts in the mortal realm, attracted the greatest number of cultivators. For instance, the Mount Xiao white snake cultivated by Cangxu fell precisely into this category.
Cultivation in Middle Antiquity centered around the dharma idol, the primary objective being to transform oneself into the divine beast being cultivated. For example, those cultivating the Azure Dragon would truly transform into an Azure Dragon upon ascending, those cultivating the Dark Phoenix would ultimately become a new Dark Phoenix, and those cultivating the Mountain Lord would roam the forests as a fierce tiger.
Yet certain sacred beasts and immortal demons were also uniquely singular across history. If a crowd of cultivators cultivated the Heavenly Phoenix and one among them successfully transformed into it, the paths of all the others were severed forever.
Hence, in Middle Antiquity, combat among immortals was brutal and bloody, with geniuses falling constantly in the struggle over Dao paths.
After Middle Antiquity, another major realm was added: Scenery Command. This was primarily because the dharma idols formed by many cultivators were far inferior to those of Middle Antiquity—they were simply too weak, incapable of achieving immortality on their own. If your dharma idol were a Dark Phoenix, the idol alone would suffice for ascension. But if you cultivated a common hen, you wouldn't touch immortality even in lifetimes to come.
When the dharma idol fell short, one needed a mindscape world to compensate and bear it up, allowing one to step across the Immortal Gate.
Of course, when it came to Qingming's current Golden Pellet path, those Golden Pellet dharma idols could no longer be described merely as "weak." Calling them weak was an insult to the word itself.
The earliest Taiyin-Shaoyang Golden Pellets possessed at least some degree of spirituality. Nowadays, Golden Pellets changed with each passing day, proliferating into countless varieties, but their divine abilities grew weaker by the day and their spirituality lower and lower. With dharma idols like these, no matter how powerful a mindscape world was, it could never prop up such worthless mud.
Cangxu's cultivation method focused, after forming the dharma idol, on bolstering spirituality while transforming himself, nudging closer to the white snake bit by bit. The secret realm's environment was designed entirely for the gold-tailed white snake, providing a domain for its movement and habitation. The gold-tailed white snake fed on karmic luck as well as souls; hence, all living creatures vanished from its domain, leaving only grass and trees able to grow.
Within this secret realm, Cangxu hid away for tens of thousands of years, diligently cultivating. According to the true intent transmission, after shedding his skin nine times, Cangxu would undergo complete metamorphosis, turning entirely into a gold-tailed white snake. He would gain hundreds of thousands of years in longevity, living in carefree freedom.
Reviewing the entire Dao path, Wei Yuan could not help but admire Cangxu's brilliance and talent. Cangxu cultivated the gold-tailed white snake because this immortal beast held the greatest affinity with him; no predecessor had ever cultivated it before. Thus, after forming his dharma idol, the subsequent cultivation techniques and the construction of his mindscape world were all forged through Cangxu's own painstaking exploration, tantamount to pioneering a brand-new path from scratch.
At this point, Wei Yuan gained a brand-new understanding of cultivators prior to Middle Antiquity: every single one of them was a powerhouse capable of blazing their own path.
Having received Cangxu's Dao heritage, the most critical missing link in Wei Yuan's knowledge of cultivation was filled. The evolutionary path of humanity's cultivation methods now lay clearly unfolded before him.
Generation after generation of human cultivators had made cultivation arts increasingly diverse while lowering the threshold ever further, causing the number of cultivators to multiply accordingly. This was naturally a good thing; the numbers were built through deliberate expansion. Those cultivators of the Yuangu era would have been peerless prodigies in any age, capable of ascending without a hitch.
Wei Yuan suddenly understood: his ideal of everyone becoming a dragon had not arisen out of thin air. From the Yuangu era down through history, the pinnacle powerhouses of mankind had all walked this very same path.
Chapter 1341