Cangxu had left behind the heritage of an ancient immortal, which likewise fell under the Martial Ancestor's ban. As Wei Yuan read through it, he clearly felt the pressure exerted by the Great Dao of Heaven and Earth. While he could withstand it himself, this knowledge could not be entered into the Splendor of the Many Realms for analysis.
The living beings within the Splendor of the Many Realms lacked Wei Yuan's status; the moment they violated the taboo, they would be reduced to ash under the suppression of the Heavenly Dao.
Reviewing the path of the ancient cultivators provided Wei Yuan with a point of reference, allowing him to understand the dilemma he faced. His Ten Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains was at least on par with the Dao Foundations of the ancient cultivation era—and even back then, it would have ranked among the pinnacle. Only in the primeval era, when figures like the First Human Sovereign cultivated Chaos and Yin-Yang, could anyone have surpassed him.
Had he lived during the ancient cultivation era, Wei Yuan would only have needed to continually strengthen the Ten Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains to eventually ascend to immortality.
Yet along his current path, Wei Yuan had first refined the spirituality of all living beings out of the Ten Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains, transforming it into the Smoke and Fire of the Mortal World. Afterward, he suspended various grotto-heavens upon it, evolving it into the Splendor of the Many Realms. In sheer scale, it was already well over a hundred times larger than the original Ten Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains.
By the standards of the ancient cultivation path, Wei Yuan was essentially cultivating an entire universe that encompassed both this realm and countless worlds beyond heaven.
Moreover, the grotto-heavens held singular Dao Foundations like the Ancient Full Moon, unmatched throughout past and present, alongside hundreds of millions of living souls. Elevating all of this above the Immortal Heaven posed a difficulty rare in all of history.
If everything prior to ascending the mountain were regarded as a single stage, Wei Yuan might only be slightly inferior to the First Human Sovereign.
Things had already reached this point, and Wei Yuan had no regrets. Craving greatness, completeness, and wanting everything was a weakness of his character; he could not change it, nor did he want to.
Just as now, he felt the authorities of all seven great grotto-heavens were wonderful, and even the newly joined Dharma God Grotto-Heaven was splendid. Wei Yuan was unwilling to relinquish any of them, intending to seize them all in one fell swoop when he ascended to immortality.
Fortunately, the Great Dao always left a sliver of hope, and with the Splendor of the Many Realms and a vast sea of human luck at his disposal, Wei Yuan could seize that chance as long as it existed.
Through deductions in the Splendor of the Many Realms, two paths currently lay before him. The first was accumulation: once his foundation had accumulated enough depth, ascension would follow naturally.
The definition of accumulation was broad; Wei Yuan could accumulate it himself, or others could accumulate it on his behalf. The Lü family, for instance, had directly and indirectly accumulated over twenty thousand years of cultivation for him.
The second was karmic luck. Once the amount of karmic luck reached a certain threshold, it would be equivalent to hundreds of millions of living beings lifting him together, drastically reducing the pressure of ascension. However, that threshold would likely start at ten billion at the very least.
This second path was unprecedented. From the Yuangu era onward, though many mighty figures had long recognized the power of karmic luck—leading the Sub-sage to proclaim, "The people are of supreme importance, the altars of the state come next, and the immortal sovereign is of least consequence"—throughout the dynasties, ordinary mortals had lived impoverished lives and contributed almost no karmic luck. Generating no luck, they were disregarded by immortals and sovereigns alike, and their lives grew ever more destitute. This cycle had persisted for hundreds of thousands of years until Wei Yuan appeared and put "every person like a dragon" into practice, truly breaking the cycle.
Cangxu's cultivation method served primarily as a reference for Wei Yuan, but the technique for refining boundary stones was something he desperately needed.
Across the world today, the method of using karmic luck to refine boundary stones was monopolized by the imperial house of Great Tang, serving as a vital lever for the imperial house to counterbalance the Nine Nations.
Aside from that, boundary stones occasionally surfaced across the land, some left from antiquity, though most actually originated from the Saint. These constituted all current sources of boundary stones.
Only now did Wei Yuan realize that the imperial house of Great Tang must still possess the final batch of boundary stone embryos, allowing them to continually produce boundary stones.
With Immortal Lords extinct and the only suspected surviving Immortal Lord, the Venerated Lord, harboring a feud as deep as the sea with Great Tang, he naturally would not enlighten boundary stone embryos for them.
Yet the method Cangxu created required no Immortal Lord—only someone approaching that realm.
Wei Yuan's insight was already extraordinary. After deep analysis, he understood the essence of this method: it required power of sufficiently high status to serve as a seed to awaken a spark of primordial spirituality, which was then filled with the flesh, blood, essence, and vigor of sentient life, refining it into a boundary stone capable of transforming heaven and earth into an environment suitable for human survival.
The first step had few procedures but immense difficulty, comprising three thousand three hundred refinement processes where not a single mistake was permitted. The second step was not particularly difficult but had vast numbers of steps, totaling over one hundred and seventy-nine thousand processes; completing them all without error yielded a boundary stone. These steps had actually been streamlined, for a boundary stone had to alter heaven and earth, requiring modifications in every aspect to ensure absolute perfection. After all, how could there be only a few hundred thousand variables between heaven and earth?
According to Cangxu's records, he had spent six hundred years to succeed at the first step and over seven hundred years on the second step before his first success, producing his very first boundary stone.
Successors could directly study Cangxu's established methods without having to explore from scratch as he had. Cangxu thus believed that someone of supreme talent, spending no more than five hundred years of practice on each step—a total within a thousand years—ought to be able to refine their first boundary stone. Anyone unable to refine one within a millennium simply was not cut out for the trade.
However, the materials consumed during those thousand years of practice would be enough to produce over a dozen boundary stones.
Cangxu had left behind enough materials for eight boundary stones for his successors, leaving any further resources to be gathered by future disciples themselves.
Yet when Wei Yuan explored the secret realm, he had not seen any of these materials at all. Comparing cause and effect, Wei Yuan faintly guessed the truth. After Cangxu passed away, the secret realm's location had somehow been discovered by an entity from beyond heaven. After breaching the secret realm, it had likely devoured the materials as delicacies, then used Cangxu's heritage to set a trap, waiting for new prey to take the bait.
The Dao palace Cangxu left behind had probably been eaten long ago by that otherworldly creature, and the stone palace Wei Yuan saw was merely the trap it laid.
Over the years, the strong Mountain Folk who had vanished while exploring the secret realm had almost certainly ended up in the belly of this otherworldly entity.
For Wei Yuan now, materials for refining boundary stones were not in short supply. Qingming's territory bordered the Shamans, Liao, and the Mountain Folk; whenever war broke out, there was no lack of alien essence-blood and souls. As for karmic luck, Wei Yuan's current accumulation numbered in the hundreds of millions, likely ranking among the highest throughout history.
The core element of refining a boundary stone embryo was status, and Wei Yuan's status happened to be high enough. Furthermore, the refinement process of a boundary embryo resembled the formation of world seeds in otherworldly realms. Having successfully awakened the vital force of world seeds, refining a boundary stone embryo became far easier.
After careful consideration, Wei Yuan gave the recipe for crude boundary stone embryos to Yu Zhizhuo, putting him in charge of preparing the materials for the crude embryos.
Crude embryos were the raw material for boundary stone embryos; once enlightened, they became boundary stone embryos, which could then be refined further into boundary stones.
The step from crude embryo to raw embryo was the bottleneck choking the supply of boundary stones across the world today.
Then Wei Yuan sent a letter to Tianyu, asking him to make every effort to collect sacrifices, slaves, and death-row prisoners of various races. There was no need to mince words with a Strength Shaman; Wei Yuan stated plainly that he needed the essence-blood and souls of the Shaman Clan to refine magical treasures, the more the better. Trading with the Shamans had another advantage: as long as sufficient money was paid and the Shamans agreed, the deaths of these slaves and sacrifices would not be counted against Wei Yuan's karma.
The Shaman Clan had rigid social strata. In times of need, low-caste shamans served not only as sacrifices but also as emergency rations, living under conditions far more wretched than mortal human paupers. Across the Shaman territories, trafficking low-caste shamans was big business, and often enough, low-caste shamans had it worse than humans living within Shaman territory.
In Yizhou, Wei Yuan dispatched Hule Gao'en to make contact with the Mountain Folk and negotiate the purchase of slaves. Hule Gao'en's secrets were now fully under control; his body hosted several viruses developed by Sun Yu as well as two kinds of soul toxins, so Wei Yuan had no fear of him fleeing.
Having opened the door to purchasing alien races, Wei Yuan decided to go all the way. He sought out Baoyun, intending to purchase a batch of Guiche and Sea Li slaves through the Bao family. On one hand, they would serve as practice materials for boundary stone refinement; on the other, he could test methods for gathering the karmic luck of both races.
The more foreign luck he had, the greater the diversity of life within the Realm of Extinction, and the faster it would sprout and grow.
However, an unexpected turn occurred when he visited Baoyun. Her pregnancy had reached a critical stage, so excessive physical indulgence was naturally out of the question. Yet Baoyun refused to let Wei Yuan off the hook when he delivered himself to her doorstep, so the customary marital dues were converted into oral rations.
With all preparations complete, Wei Yuan began his secluded cultivation to learn the method of refining boundary stones.
Though called secluded cultivation, Wei Yuan merely partitioned ten thousand strands of divine sense, running a hundred processes simultaneously to simulate the refinement of boundary stone embryos. Whenever a process made a mistake, it restarted from the beginning. It was a crude method that required virtually no insight, relying purely on the sheer quantity and strength of his divided divine sense to brute-force his proficiency.
His remaining divine sense was partly occupied with Qingming's official duties and partly dedicated to comprehending the cultivation path of the ancient cultivators.
In the blink of an eye, several months passed, bringing the close of the eighth year of Zhaoning.
In his meditation chamber, Wei Yuan slowly opened his eyes and exhaled a breath of turbid air. After months of seclusion and hundreds of thousands of simulations, he had finally completed the entire simulated refinement of a boundary stone embryo. With the first success came the second, the third, and soon countless more. It was only a pity that he could not employ the Splendor of the Many Realms; otherwise, he estimated he could have finished within a month at most.
When Wei Yuan stepped out of the chamber, an attendant reported that Yu Zhizhuo had completed the refinement of the first batch of crude boundary stone embryos and delivered them three days prior.
Wei Yuan's spirits lifted. "How many did he refine? Take me there at once!"
According to Cangxu's records, back when he controlled Hule Gao'en's maternal clan and several neighboring Mountain Folk tribes, the materials gathered each year yielded five hundred jin of crude embryos, requiring twenty years to accumulate enough for a single enlightenment attempt.
The attendant led Wei Yuan into the storehouse to the room specifically set aside for crude boundary stone embryos. Upon the shelves, deep blue crude embryos were neatly stacked, each weighing a hundred jin, totaling one thousand blocks!
Faced with so many materials, Wei Yuan naturally held nothing back and immediately commenced his practice. Over the course of a month, he drew upon the power of all eight great grotto-heavens in turn, finally succeeding in using the power of the Ancient Full Moon to enlighten a boundary stone embryo! At this point, enough materials remained for two more enlightenment attempts.
Recalling how Cangxu had spent six hundred years just to complete this step, whereas he himself had taken merely five months, Wei Yuan felt his Dao heart grow exceptionally clear and untroubled. It was just a pity that Cangxu remained under the Martial Ancestor's ban, leaving the world with no means to draw the comparison—and thus unaware of the truth that the present inevitably surpasses the past.
Chapter 1342