Chapter Ninety: The Northern Sea Gambit, Part Nine

This was also the only way, for now, to make up for the loss of power in the avatar: by using the exchange function of the Divine Conferred System to convert the true body’s mana into divine force and graft it across the void. Yet even so, it was only a drop in the bucket. Qingxu’s true body had only recently advanced to the late stage of Earthly Immortal, and compared with the early stage of Great Luo Golden Immortal, the difference was as vast as heaven and earth. Still, he had no other choice. Fortunately, he had refined many spiritual pills before, and as long as the avatar’s expenditure was not too great, it could still be sustained.

“Thankfully, mana can be exchanged for divine force, or the situation would be even worse.” But it was not a mutual exchange after all. The true body could convert mana into divine force, yet the avatar could not use divine force to exchange it back into mana.

This incident made Qingxu resolve that he must, in the future, cultivate believers on a grand scale; otherwise the restraints upon his avatar would be far too severe.

Come to think of it, the divine path did have its unique merits. At the very least, even if one cultivated the immortal path to the realm of Great Luo Golden Immortal, one still could not open up a small world; that was the privilege of the quasi-sage. But the divine path, so long as one advanced to Divine King, could begin such cultivation. Though it could not exist independently within the Primordial World and had to dwell in chaos, it was still quite good. In this respect, it was more than a little stronger than the immortal path.

The little world opened in the first level of Qingxu Tower could not even truly be called a real world. At most it could be regarded as a mustard-seed space. A genuine small world required a complete system of laws. A divine kingdom could evolve a simulated system of laws, and thus could also be counted as a small world, only somewhat imperfect.

In truth, a divine kingdom could greatly assist a Great Luo Golden Immortal of the immortal path in advancing to quasi-sage, though Qingxu had not yet experienced that, owing to his current cultivation.

“Cultivating the divine path really has only two especially difficult hurdles. First, a demigod must condense a divine seal, and must pass the trial of the senior gods. Second, the laws of the divine kingdom must transform from illusion to reality, and one must survive the divine tribulation. But that is still far away for me. There is no need to worry about it for the time being.”

This was easy to understand. Once the laws of a divine kingdom changed from illusory to real, it would be able to exist within chaos and transcend the Primordial World. At that point, how could the Heavenly Dao possibly refrain from trying to stop it? As for the strength of the divine tribulation, it was also tied to the divine kingdom itself. The main question was how much of the Primordial World’s resources it had secretly seized. The more it took, the more terrifying the tribulation would become. But even the tribulation triggered merely by the portion of resources used to condense the divine kingdom would probably not be much weaker than the Nine-Nine Thunderfire Calamity.

Wangqiu lay by the edge of the Eastern Sea. Thinking of the Northern Dark Sea, there were two routes: one by sea, one by land and sea. Since the four seas connected, he could go directly from the Eastern Sea to the Northern Sea, or perhaps pass through the Eastern Victory Continent and the Northern Reed Continent before crossing the Northern Sea. Though the sea route seemed shorter, Qingxu still chose the land-and-sea route, mainly because the sea regions were roughly ten times as vast as the land. In the end, it was still a little faster to cross the two great continents directly into the Northern Sea.

Along the way through the Eastern Victory Continent there was not much obstruction, but once he entered the Northern Reed Continent, Qingxu’s speed slowed as well. There he found the climate to be brutally harsh: sandstorms, hurricanes, tornadoes, thunderous rainstorms—virtually endless in number. There were deserts, frozen lands, foul marshes, and barren mountain wastes.

Scorching heat, bitter cold, poisonous miasma, and even magnetic radiation, thunderous eruptions, and chaotic wind blades—everything one could imagine was here, and things one could not imagine as well. Most terrifying of all were not even these harsh environments, but the beings that survived within them. There was no saying more true than this: every environment gives birth to its own creatures. Tender flowers blooming in greenhouses are weak and fragile, while beasts that struggle and slaughter in the wilderness are forever predators. How much more so in this Northern Reed Continent, where even Heavenly Immortals could perish?

Prehistoric behemoths, desolate beasts surviving from antiquity, ferocious beasts, demonic beasts... There was an endless variety here. There were also many mutated lifeforms: wind demons that could vanish without a trace, mountain giants towering ten thousand zhang high, swamp fiends, sand serpents, magnetic spirit beings... Their attack methods and ambush techniques were things Qingxu had never heard of and never seen before. Fortunately, his divine avatar was not flesh and blood. It was forged of supreme black gold, incomparably sturdy, and further reinforced by divine force; its recovery power was also astonishing. Otherwise, any ordinary Great Luo Golden Immortal who came here would surely face no chance of survival, body and soul utterly destroyed.

“Too abnormal. Why had I never heard that the Northern Reed Continent was so terrifying? The weakest beings here seem to be at the peak of Mysterious Immortal, and the majority are at the level of Perfected Immortal. There are quite a few Great Luo Golden Immortals as well. Especially their divine arts—they take strange paths, stand apart from the rest, and are so mysterious and unpredictable that one can hardly guard against them.” If not for the thought of reaping benefits from the Northern Dark Sea battle, Qingxu would truly have liked to linger in the Northern Reed Continent for some time. Setting aside everything else, just gaining more combat experience would already have been worthwhile.

Within the Northern Reed Continent, Qingxu also discovered two things. First: slaying the local beings yielded merits of both yang and yin. In simple terms, it was “killing monsters to accrue virtue.” Second: the chaos spiritual vein in the first level of Qingxu Tower’s small world could devour all living things. He had calculated that the flesh and blood of a peak Mysterious Immortal creature, once devoured by the chaos spiritual vein, could release an amount of innate spiritual energy roughly equivalent to that of an early-to-mid Mysterious Immortal.

And it was not only these two discoveries that benefited him. His Great Luo Blood Refining Azure Nether Sword was also thriving there, swallowing great torrents of blood rich with spiritual charm. The acquired restraints within it were continually evolving and increasing, its power rising again and again, as though without limit. Qingxu was so delighted that he nearly could not close his mouth.

“This trip was well worth it!” Whether or not he gained anything from the journey to the Northern Dark Sea, just the benefits obtained in the Northern Reed Continent alone were enough to leave Qingxu exhilarated.

Now, in the mustard-seed space of his small world, there were mountains upon mountains of upper-grade spirit stones. Spirit stones could be divided into two kinds: innate spirit stones and acquired spirit stones, formed respectively from innate spiritual energy and acquired spiritual energy. Their grades, from low to high, were lower grade, middle grade, and upper grade. The first two were formed from flawless jade infused with spiritual energy, while upper-grade stones were entirely condensed spiritual energy. Of course, the Primordial World contained more than just these two kinds of spirit stones—there were also chaos stones, demon stones, shaman stones, immortal stones, and so on. The key distinction lay only in the type of energy they contained, though the basic classification was the same. If all of these were converted into mana, perhaps even a peak quasi-sage would fall short in comparison.

The Great Luo Blood Refining Azure Nether Sword also successfully advanced to twenty levels of acquired restraints. The blood-refining aura within it condensed into a Blood Refining Pearl. Merely the blood radiance touching the body could bring about the destruction of both body and soul for anyone below the level of Perfected Immortal. If the Blood Refining Pearl itself made contact, then even a Great Luo Golden Immortal would likely be crippled if not slain outright. It was simply terrifying.

With the formation of this Blood Refining Pearl, the material of the Great Luo Blood Refining Azure Nether Sword could from then on be further transformed. When sword and pearl were finally united, though it would still not be innate, it would at least become an acquired supreme treasure. Truly worthy of its name: with a single strike, even gods and immortals would turn to blood, and not a blade of grass would remain. It would be fully capable of threatening a quasi-sage.