“What exactly is cultivation?”
Swish—
As soon as Huang Rong’s voice fell,
the entire Think Tank conference room fell so silent a pin could be heard dropping.
Including Zhou Jianmin, everyone sat up straight, eagerly awaiting Lin Yi’s answer.
After all, cultivation…
was the true focus of this conversation!
Inside the Guihua Sect Forbidden Ground.
“Cultivation, huh…”
Lin Yi pondered for a moment. A wisp of spiritual energy condensed at his fingertips, lifting a blade of grass to float before him as he said, “Director Zhou, Elder Huang, do you still remember the Taigu Cataclysm I mentioned earlier?”
“Legend has it that during that cataclysm, the Tianling Realm split into four, and boundless spiritual energy emerged from the void between the four domains.”
“As spiritual energy entered their bodies, humans and beasts alike began to transform—that is the earliest record of cultivation in the Tianling Realm.”
What Lin Yi spoke of was the most widely known legend in the Tianling Realm.
It was said that in the Taigu era, the Tianling Realm was shrouded in ignorance, and humans and beasts attacked each other with their mortal bodies.
Although the human race had simple tribal beginnings, their lifespans were only twenty or thirty years—a primitive era of raw flesh and blood beyond primitive.
Until the end of the Taigu era, when the Tianling Realm divided into four domains, and spiritual energy rose from the gaps between them.
Under the influence of spiritual energy,
cultivators who could fly through the sky and burrow through the earth emerged from among humans, and powerful demon beasts capable of moving mountains and overturning seas were born among livestock.
Thus, the end of the Taigu era was universally recognized in the Tianling Realm as the beginning of cultivation.
“Spiritual energy?”
Inside the Think Tank base, Huang Rong thought for a moment and quickly caught on: “Is it the medium you used with Little Pan… cough, Comrade Pan Yongnian, during your two-world transmission experiment?”
“Yes, that’s it,” Lin Yi nodded, continuing, “Later, as the cultivation system gradually improved, guiding spiritual energy into the body came to be seen as the first threshold of cultivation, called Awakening.”
“After Awakening comes the formal stages of cultivation. The major realms, from low to high, are Qi Refining, Foundation Establishment, Golden Core, Nascent Soul, Spirit Severing, Divided-Thought, Return to the Void, Return to Unity, Illuminate the Void, and the Way of Dominion—ten major realms.”
“Each major realm is further divided into early, middle, and late stages. If one stagnates in the late stage for too long, this state is unofficially called Perfection.”
“Demon beasts correspond to ranks one through ten, but in one-on-one situations, demon beasts usually have a slight edge.”
Ten major realms?
Hearing this.
At the transmigration point in Lindu City.
Chen Zhengze, participating remotely with Pan Yongnian, couldn’t help but furrow his brow, his expression stern.
Good heavens.
The cultivation levels of the Tianling Continent were actually this complex?
No wonder Lin Yi had said his mid Foundation Establishment cultivation was just a small fry…
Compared to the home world’s nine-year compulsory education system, Lin Yi was basically a second-grader who had only attended half a semester.
To be honest.
This was both good news and bad news.
The good news was that the higher the cultivation realm, the more content could be analyzed and explored, and the more likely high-value results would emerge.
Even if a project hit a dead end, they could calmly switch to another direction and continue researching.
But the bad news was…
When facing certain high-realm cultivators or demon beasts, home world weapons might very well become ineffective.
For example, h11 could kill a late second-rank Golden-Eyed Crimson-Scale Beast, and Perfection second-rank or early third-rank should be manageable without much pressure.
But what about mid-to-late third-rank?
What about fourth-rank?
Extrapolating further, did humanity’s ultimate means—namely fusion weapons—also have a lethality limit?
Or, letting the imagination run even wilder.
What if one day another channel connecting the Tianling Realm to the home world appeared, and demon beast cultivators invaded Earth in large numbers…
How would they respond then?
Huang Rong, far away at the Think Tank base, also realized this problem and quickly said to Lin Yi, “Comrade Lin Yi, are the ten realms of cultivation purely a theoretical progression, or have beings of that level actually appeared?”
“If the latter, how many such beings exist in the world?”
Lin Yi decisively shook his head, rejecting Huang Rong’s first guess. “Definitely not just theory, Elder Huang,” he said. “Both humans and demon beasts have produced Way of Dominion beings in history, and every one of them has clear records.”
“However, after entering the Jingu era, top-tier beings suddenly began to vanish. The last Way of Dominion being to appear in the world was over sixteen thousand years ago.”
As creatures standing at the pinnacle of the Tianling Realm, Way of Dominion beings have always been a topic of great interest from ancient times to the present.
According to records left by the ancients.
In both the Yuangu and Shanggu eras, humans and demon beasts both gave birth to multiple top-tier beings of the Way of Dominion level.
At the peak of the Tianling Realm’s prosperity, there were even as many as three supreme Way of Dominion powerhouses alive among the human race at once!
Some legends of these powerful humans and demon beasts have even been passed down to the present.
For example, the lethally poisonous uninhabited plain to the west of Guihua Sect, and the Baiduan Mountains separating Qingzhou and Qiongzhou, are typical representatives.
Legend says they were two forbidden lands born after the fall of a rank-ten demon beast called Zhenyan during the Shanggu era.
But these are extremely ancient anecdotes, and their authenticity cannot be verified.
In the current era.
Not to mention Way of Dominion cultivators and demon beasts, even Return to the Void beings are nowhere to be found.
For example, the strongest expert of the Great Zhou Immortal Dynasty Immortal Alliance, Senior Bai Ya, was only at late Divided-Thought.
“Is that so...”
Huang Rong looked somewhat surprised, clearly not expecting Lin Yi to give such a mixed answer. “Comrade Lin Yi, then what realm was the strongest being you’ve ever seen?”
“Me?”
Lin Yi recalled for a few seconds, quickly reviewing his past experiences: “Late Nascent Soul, perhaps, but the other party was just passing by and didn’t engage in combat with anyone.”
“However, I did once encounter a battle involving a Nascent Soul early-stage cultivator. I even recorded a few videos with my phone. If needed, I can send them back to the home world.”
“Oh?” Huang Rong was momentarily stunned. Coming back to his senses, he couldn’t help but stand up from his seat. “That’s wonderful, Comrade Lin Yi. Please send the materials back!”
Lin Yi gladly agreed: “Certainly.”
About thirty years ago, when Guihua Sect had just been established.
While passing through Youzhou doing storytelling, Lin Yi had once seen two high-level cultivators fly overhead from a distance.
But those two cultivators vanished into a hidden cave heaven in the blink of an eye, so Lin Yi had no way of knowing their true strength.
He only learned from the gossip of the surrounding onlookers that they were two famous Nascent Soul late-stage bigwigs: Cao Mangjun and his cultivation partner Mi Zhiji.
However, coincidentally.
On his way back to Qingzhou, Lin Yi happened to encounter a battle between a Nascent Soul early-stage cultivator and a demon beast.
He filmed a few videos from afar, threw a stone at the demon beast; the stone veered off toward Java, crushed a patch of rice in nearby farmland after it landed, and Lin Yi ran away on the spot.
After returning to the sect, he boasted to Professor Wu Xiangnan, claiming he had encountered a future supreme human expert, fought side by side with him against a young demon emperor, and battled until the great capital was reduced to nothing…
Who would have thought that, in the present day,
those few videos Lin Yi used to boast about would actually become crucial materials urgently needed by the home world.
Chapter 23