Chapter 1532: The Dao-Burning Furnace
She quickly pushed the treasure-offering cultivator from her mind as her attention was completely captivated by the thin plate in her hand. Common sense told her that an item of such dubious origin couldn't possibly be the true Supreme Dao Scripture. Yet, for some inexplicable reason, Bai Lishan found herself unable to look away.
But after studying it for half a day, she couldn't find anything peculiar about the plate at all. With a wry smile, she temporarily gave up, concluding it was just a figment of her own wild imagination.
It was not until three days later.
As Bai Lishan returned from her master's tutelage, her mind still replaying his teachings, she found herself unconsciously toying with the thin plate known as the Supreme Dao Scripture once more.
"The third layer of the Four Seasons Verdant Scripture... that line, 'Heaven has four seasons; follow them for eternal green, defy them for eternal life.' What on earth does it mean? Isn't being eternally green the same as having eternal life...?"
As this question swirled in her mind, a mysterious green light suddenly pulsed from the thin plate in her hand, consuming her thoughts.
When Bai Lishan came to her senses, she was standing in the middle of a vast, boundless cosmos. In the background, she could faintly discern the ethereal silhouettes of towering mountains and endless seas.
And above her head, countless mystical characters floated, shimmering like a galaxy of stars. It was as if the Great Dao itself had descended and revealed its true form!
"The... the Supreme Dao Scripture? It's real?" Just as she stood there, dumbfounded, a streak of light shot down from the celestial characters above, merging into her body.
"Green is the order of heaven and earth. Long life is transcendence beyond heaven and earth. Heaven and earth have their end, but long life is eternally boundless..." A majestic, sacred voice resonated within Bai Lishan's mind.
It echoed for a long, long time.
In that instant, Bai Lishan felt as if she had been enlightened, and she was overcome with joy. "So that's how it is!"
...
Just as the first user of the Supreme Dao Scripture finally established a connection with Li Fan, its creator, Li Fan, successfully peered into the Great Dao of this timeline through Bai Lishan's mind.
It was akin to viewing flowers in a mirror or the moon reflected on water. But Li Fan was already intimately familiar with both flowers and moons; he merely needed a fixed point to serve as an anchor.
Now that someone had helped lift the veil obscuring the Xuanhuang Dao, Li Fan followed the thread, cross-referencing the Great Dao of this timeline with the one he had once comprehended to the greatest extent possible.
In the blink of an eye, every vista of the Dao that Bai Lishan had ever glimpsed in her cultivation journey became known to Li Fan.
To extrapolate the true Dao of reality from the incomplete Dao perceived by other cultivators—this was the ability of Li Fan, a former half-step transcendent powerhouse.
As smoothly as water flowing into a channel, Li Fan's cultivation realm made a three-stage leap in an instant: from mortal, to Qi Refining, to Foundation Establishment.
He was now synchronized with Bai Lishan's late-stage Foundation Establishment.
However, Li Fan's late-stage Foundation Establishment and Bai Lishan's were on entirely different levels.
"I could probably slay a Nascent Soul cultivator with a wave of my hand. This should be enough for self-preservation, for now," Li Fan murmured, assessing his body's condition with a slight nod.
"But this so-called realm isn't particularly important. What truly matters is the depth of one's comprehension of the Dao. Bai Lishan is merely a disciple of the Verdant Valley Sect; her perspective is limited. I must distribute more copies of the Supreme Dao Scripture as quickly as possible..."
Li Fan first checked the progress of his `Fantasy Becomes Truth` ability.
The sliver of Dao seen through Bai Lishan was but a drop in the ocean for advancing `Fantasy Becomes Truth`, but it did prove the feasibility of his plan.
Replicating Dao comprehension through Bai Lishan had not drawn the attention of the Xuanhuang Realm's Heavenly Dao, nor of the Great Heavenly Venerate lurking behind the curtain.
"Next, I must go to where the heroes of the world gather..."
Li Fan gazed into the distance and drifted away.
A month later, the Great Dao Sect was faintly visible on the horizon.
Along the way, Li Fan had not been stingy with his copies of the Supreme Dao Scripture. Whenever he encountered someone with even a hint of talent, he would offer them one. In turn, his own strength had climbed from the Foundation Establishment stage to the late Golden Core stage.
However, this seemed to be the limit for ordinary disciples outside the Ten Great Immortal Sects.
During this time, Li Fan had encountered no shortage of cultivators. Those below the Golden Core realm were everywhere. But cultivators at Nascent Soul or above were few and far between. The handful he did meet were mostly advanced in age and did not meet his criteria.
"The ancient Xuanhuang Realm should have been a grand age of cultivation. This kind of desolation, this scarcity of talent, shouldn't be happening. Could it be..."
Recalling the Verdant Valley elder's words about impending chaos, Li Fan guessed that the Ten Great Immortal Sects might be waging wars to conquer other cultivation worlds at this very moment.
The elite disciples of the Ten Sects had all been mobilized.
"No wonder the Xuanhuang Heavenly Dao's sense of rejection is so potent."
"I just wonder if they are currently facing the Tianfa Realm, where the Heavenly Doctor resides."
After numerous calamities, the history of the Xuanhuang Realm was fragmented and twisted, hidden within a thick fog. Even with the records on the stone slab, its original, true appearance could not be fully restored.
Only by returning to the past and experiencing it firsthand could one witness its authentic form.
Li Fan's primary reason for coming to the Great Dao Sect was to find Zhao Ruoxi. As someone who would one day become a Longevity Heavenly Venerate, her talent was undoubtedly among the apex of the Xuanhuang Realm. Although he was already familiar with her memories, he couldn't determine the precise point in time she existed.
"However, I don't remember seeing anything in her memories about a war against other worlds. Could it be she hasn't been born yet?" Li Fan couldn't help but feel a twinge of regret.
He was already intimately familiar with the Great Dao Sect's mountain entrance.
As for the grand formation guarding it, Li Fan merely glanced at it for a moment before dismissing it entirely.
He slipped inside unnoticed.
Compared to what he had seen in Senior Sister Zhao's memories, the Great Dao Sect of this era was vastly different.
The most glaring distinction was that signs of a chaotic battle seemed to have erupted everywhere within the sect's grounds.
A faint, lingering scent of blood hung in the air, and the earth and buildings were scarred with gruesome marks of combat.
"The fighting has reached the Great Dao Sect's main gate?" Li Fan grew increasingly alarmed.
He had never seen any record of this piece of history in the later ages.
Sensing the area with the highest concentration of life force, Li Fan changed into the robes of a Great Dao Sect disciple and silently made his way closer.
"This is an absolute disgrace! To think we were nearly overrun at our own gate..."
"If the other nine sects find out, we might be struck from their ranks!" Before he was even close, he could faintly hear the furious roar of an old man.
"Martial Uncle, there's no need to be so angry. Once the war is over, I will personally request the [Dao-Burning Furnace] to wipe this matter from existence. Right now, the most important thing is to ascertain the enemy's movements." The calm, soothing voice that followed was somewhat familiar to Li Fan.
It was the sect master of the Great Dao Sect, Fang Dingge.
He was surrounded by a gathering of about five hundred cultivators.
Their cultivation levels ranged from Qi Refining all the way to Dao Integration.
Every one of them wore a grim expression.
"I must admit, we underestimated them. After all..." Only Fang Dingge maintained a faint smile, speaking in a calm, unhurried tone.
But before he could finish, the old man interrupted him.
"I disagreed with your plan from the very beginning. The Xuanhuang Realm is the foundation of the Ten Sects' legacy! How could you speak of abandoning it? Instead of fighting amongst ourselves, we should be uniting our strength to find a solution for the great calamity..."
"Martial Uncle, you've said more than enough," Fang Dingge remarked, glancing sideways at him.
The old man was still full of dissatisfaction, but he merely let out a snort and fell silent.
Fang Dingge surveyed the crowd, and after a moment of contemplation, a peculiar three-legged furnace floated out from his palm.
An invisible fire flickered to life from the base of the furnace.
Suddenly, the image of the three-legged furnace expanded, enveloping the entire crowd within it.
"Immortal spiritual energy?"
Startled, Li Fan was caught off guard and found himself enveloped by the three-legged furnace as well.
However, the raging furnace fire posed no threat to his life.
But Li Fan vaguely sensed that his memory of the conversation he had just overheard was becoming hazy.
But Li Fan was no ordinary cultivator.
He had survived the cataclysmic fusion of three Daos and remained unscathed.
That three-legged immortal artifact, while mysterious, was incapable of affecting him. Before the formless flames could even seem to ignite within his mind, they inexplicably died out.
"The Dao-Burning Furnace?" Li Fan mused thoughtfully.
He had never heard of this immortal artifact before.
Judging from the exchange between Fang Dingge and the old man, this point in time must be when a schism occurred within the Ten Sects.
Li Fan was not surprised that the Ten Sects possessed immortal artifacts.
However, the power displayed by this Dao-Burning Furnace was slightly beyond his expectations.
"Fang Dingge said he would borrow the Dao-Burning Furnace to wipe this incident from existence. And in later ages, there is no record of this battle..."
"If it truly possesses such an ability, this Dao-Burning Furnace would be no common item, even in the ancient Immortal World. I wonder where it ended up." While Li Fan was pondering, Fang Dingge spoke again.
This time, he skipped the preamble and went straight to issuing commands.
Of the five hundred people, one hundred cultivators at the Golden Core stage and below were to be dispatched as reinforcements. The rest were to remain at the sect, responsible for repairs and defense.
"Golden Core and below?" Li Fan almost thought he had misheard.
But seeing that the other Great Dao Sect disciples didn't seem particularly surprised, he figured there must be some hidden reason for it.
Thus, he remained silent.
It seemed, however, that his luck was rather poor, as he happened to be chosen among the one hundred sent as reinforcements.
Li Fan noticed that while selecting the personnel, Fang Dingge's gaze lingered on him for a noticeably longer time.
"It seems `Fantasy Becomes Truth` is still not powerful enough to completely affect powerhouses at the level of a sect master."
Li Fan could only choose to go along with it for now and wait for a better opportunity later.
A golden chain materialized out of thin air in the sky above the Great Dao Sect.
Fang Dingge then swept up the selected cultivators and led them along the chain, traveling through space.
They seemed to cross an impossibly vast expanse of the cosmos. By the time Li Fan regained his bearings, he had arrived in an exceedingly peculiar dimension.
The power ceiling of this world was extremely low.
It was only equivalent to the peak Golden Core level of the Xuanhuang Realm.
And yet, for some reason, the suppressive force of the Dao here was no weaker than that of the Xuanhuang Realm.
Consequently, the strength of all the cultivators who had arrived was restricted to the Golden Core realm.
(End of Chapter)
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