Not long after the Heavenly Venerables created the new method, enabling cultivators to cultivate by pillaging Heaven and Earth, Heaven and Earth pushed back, and a cataclysm fell upon the world.
The more people cultivating the same technique at the same time, the slower everyone's cultivation speed became.
This was known as "immortal arts cannot be cultivated together."
This was a principle of Heaven and Earth that genuinely governed the present age, and the fundamental reason cultivation methods were so precious.
Yet now, out of an obscure little organization, a technique that defied this very principle of Heaven and Earth had actually emerged.
Who would believe it?
At first, cultivators treated it as nothing more than a joke, paying it no heed at all.
However, there were always those who yearned for immortal arts but lacked the means to obtain them. Carrying an attitude of "why not give it a shot," they crossed mountains and rivers, traveling all the way to Jiushan Province to investigate.
After joining the Lingyuan Sect and formally beginning their cultivation of the *Common People Lingyuan Technique*, something shocking occurred.
The followers of the Lingyuan Sect truly were all cultivating this single technique.
From Qi Condensation all the way to Soul Formation, cultivators of every realm were among them.
Most crucially, the supreme principle that arts could not be cultivated together seemed to have lost all power over the *Common People Lingyuan Technique*.
There was no slowdown in cultivation speed caused by too many practitioners.
The facts were irrefutable.
No matter how inconceivable it seemed, it had happened nonetheless.
Before long, news that the Lingyuan Sect possessed such a miraculous technique swept across the entire cultivation world.
The public's first reaction was that the one who created this technique had to be a peerless Longevity Heavenly Venerable who had stayed hidden from the world.
Only by defying the principles of Heaven and Earth could one achieve such an effect.
Yet the world knew very little about Longevity Heavenly Venerables.
They had caught only a vague glimpse of that realm through the single line recorded in the *Five Spirits Qi-Sensing Method*: "Defy the principles of Heaven and Earth to achieve Longevity."
How to defy them? What truly counted as defying them? To what extent must one defy them to attain Longevity?
Questions like these were nothing more than baseless conjecture.
It was hardly blameworthy that people arrived at such assumptions regarding the wondrous effects of the *Common People Lingyuan Technique*.
Evidently, that guess was wrong.
Immortal Venerable Huangyue, a senior Dao Integration cultivator from Tianqing Province, finally solved the mystery after perusing the *Common People Lingyuan Technique*.
The principle of Heaven and Earth that immortal arts could not be cultivated together had not been reversed at all.
The reason practitioners of the Lingyuan Technique appeared unaffected was purely due to an inherent property of the *Common People Lingyuan Technique* itself.
The more people cultivating the Lingyuan Technique at the same time, the faster their cultivation speed would be.
That was the technique's own innate effect.
At the same time, however, due to the restrictions of Heaven and Earth, with every additional cultivator practicing it, cultivation speed would slow down.
Both effects existed simultaneously.
The result was that the speed boost and the slowdown canceled each other out.
The Lingyuan Technique thus became a method that could barely be cultivated.
In fact, according to Immortal Venerable Huangyue, back when the number of people cultivating the Lingyuan Technique was gradually increasing from one to five, the restrictive effect of Heaven and Earth far exceeded the technique's acceleration.
With ordinary techniques, if five people cultivated them together, even the greatest genius would find it impossible to make an inch of progress.
However, once the number of people cultivating the Lingyuan Technique climbed past five—reaching ten, a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand—the acceleration grew more and more pronounced, until it finally barely canceled out the restriction that arts could not be cultivated together.
In a sense, this was "man triumphing over Heaven."
Yet its prowess stopped right there.
The acceleration effect of the Common People Lingyuan Technique also had its limits.
After canceling out the negative effect of Heaven and Earth, its ability to boost cultivation speed became virtually negligible.
And apart from boosting cultivation speed, the Lingyuan Technique had no other special traits.
As a result, for the vast majority of cultivators who had a choice, it could not be considered a good technique.
On top of that, other restrictions seemed to exist within the Lingyuan Technique as well.
However, Immortal Venerable Huangxing did not elaborate on them.
"The *Common People Lingyuan Technique* truly was born at the wrong time. In any other world, this would undoubtedly be a shocking, heaven-defying cultivation art. Too bad it's utterly stifled in the Xuanhuang Realm," Li Fan mused inwardly as he constructed the formation while listening to Yan Hang and the others chat.
Li Fan was no stranger to this Lingyuan Sect either.
It was the very organization Su Xiaomei and the others had encountered, setting up checkpoints and collecting tolls at Jiushan Pass.
That androgynous Shen Yurou, who possessed the Peach Blossom Grotto-Heaven and was wounded by a single strike from Wo Wudi's sword, had left a bit of an impression on Li Fan.
*According to Immortal Venerable Huangyue, only by gathering a massive number of cultivators right from the beginning to cultivate this Lingyuan Technique together could one even get started.*
*To rally such a large crowd in a chaotic place like Jiushan Province, the leader of this Lingyuan Sect is certainly no simple figure either.*
...
The injection of fresh blood slightly eased the growing tension within the Five Elements Grotto-Heavens.
Yet it did not last long.
As the fused monsters appeared with increasing frequency, the cultivators toiling across the various grotto-heavens finally began to falter.
When the first casualties appeared, some formation masters simply stopped working altogether.
Of course, they didn't openly proclaim their defiance.
They merely used fending off monsters as an excuse to comply in public while defying in secret.
Faced with this, Qi Buyi was somewhat helpless.
She couldn't very well ask the two Dao Integration Immortal Venerables presiding over the realm to go on a killing spree, could she?
Setting aside the fact that the formation masters in the grotto-heavens were all people of notable standing and background, if she truly acted that way, heavy-handed coercion would likely backfire and bring all formation construction across the Five Elements Grotto-Heavens to a complete standstill.
Having rarely encountered such a situation, Qi Buyi found herself thoroughly frazzled.
She could only report the situation to Chief Lu while doing her utmost to placate everyone, lest an even worse mutiny break out.
Although Li Fan himself did not care about the external turmoil, his efficiency in deploying the formation was inevitably affected.
With Yan Hang and his team of five struggling more and more against the monsters, Li Fan had to divert part of his attention to keep an eye on the battle at all times.
At crucial moments, he would even join the fray—naturally, only in the form of formation support.
Just as the situation was steadily deteriorating, a column of white light piercing heaven and earth tore straight through the Five Elements Grotto-Heavens.
The reinforcements had finally arrived.
An immense Dust-Crossing Boat loomed in the void outside the grotto-heavens, taking up more than half the sky.
Cultivators, like dense swarms of black specks, flew in orderly streams toward the various grotto-heavens.
And Li Fan, who had remained inside the Water Grotto-Heaven all this time, caught his first glimpse of the complete Five Elements Grotto-Heavens.
It looked like rings joined end to end, yet also resembled a palette of blended paints.
Distinctly demarcated, yet inextricably intertwined.
As the beam of light faded, the illusory vistas of the Metal, Fire, and Earth Grotto-Heavens gradually vanished as well.
At the same time, the joint operations roster within the Overseeing Heaven Record nearly doubled.
When Li Fan checked it, he even spotted many familiar names.
They were the young formation masters who had trained alongside him in the Universal Courtyard before returning to their respective provinces to participate in the grand tournament.
"It seems the Alliance of Ten Thousand Immortals really is stretched thin on manpower right now," Li Fan thought. "They've even dragged in the fresh recruits."
Chapter 385