Chapter 471: Dao Lord

"This is... the rhythm of a Great Dao?! That sign means a new Dao Lord has been born!"

"The rhythm carries a cultivator's aura, spreading it through the power of the Great Dao across the surrounding starry sky, and every cultivator on that same Great Dao can sense it, letting the whole world feel the greatness of this newborn Dao Lord! He succeeded?! That little fellow called Yaoguang... Daoist Yaoguang... He succeeded?!"

"That's impossible! Absolutely impossible! How long has it been? Not even fifteen minutes! That's nothing! Instantaneous Dao Integration?! There is no way!"

The psychic thoughts of multiple cultivators crossed and clashed through the whole starry sky, inside the North Sea Star and out. And those strands of psychic thought belonging to Dao Lords all carried the same disbelief.

Forget the Jade Scale Demon Paragon, the Light Divine Venerable, the Black Lunar Fiend Sovereign, the Extinction Dao Lord, and the Kunpeng Demon Paragon, who had been waiting gleefully for Yaoguang to fail. Even the Dao Integration cultivators of the Ten Great Immortal Dao Sects—the Sovereign Radiance Dao Lord, the Central Heaven Dao Lord, the Azure Crow Dao Lord, and the Pill Cauldron Dao Lord—wore expressions of disbelief.

It was absurd. In all of history, no one had ever completed Dao Integration so quickly. The fastest advancement the North Sea Star had on record still took a month or so.

A mere fifteen minutes?! It overturned everything every Dao Lord thought they knew.

"So he really did achieve Dao Integration on the spot?" The Penglai Dao Lord's bright eyes betrayed the same astonishment.

Yaoguang had sworn he was ninety percent certain he could take the step, but she hadn't put much faith in the claim.

Plenty of cultivators carried a mysterious confidence before they reached Dao Integration, convinced that with the foundation they had built during the Void-Shattering Realm, failing to break through would be an offense against heaven itself.

What none of them ever considered was that every cultivator who achieved Dao Integration had also been a figure of overflowing talent and dazzling brilliance at the Void-Shattering Realm.

And even those who had made it, who had been through Dao Integration once and tasted the profundity of the realm firsthand, would not expect to have more than a thirty to forty percent chance of success if they attempted to take that step again.

So the Penglai Dao Lord's belief that Yaoguang could do it had carried a heavy element of gambling. Not a gamble on that thirty-to-forty percent chance, but on the proposition that geniuses like herself, like him, could not be measured by ordinary reckoning.

And as it turned out, she had won!

Yaoguang, a talent finer and stronger and more brilliant than she was, had shown an ability far beyond anything anyone had imagined. He had not only achieved Dao Integration successfully, but he had also compressed the previous one-month record to just fifteen minutes. An achievement like that would go down in the annals of the North Sea Star.

"He really is a genius you can't judge by ordinary standards!" The Penglai Dao Lord gazed toward where Yaoguang stood.

She could see the profound state he was in, and the Great Dao rhythm radiating from him matched that of a true Dao Integrator.

He had really succeeded.

"Unbelievable," the Penglai Dao Lord murmured, lowering her head.

While Dao Lord after Dao Lord struggled with disbelief and overturned assumptions, strands of psychic thought began spilling out from inside the North Sea Star itself.

These were the Dao Lords who had stayed home. Unwilling to join either the Central Heaven Dao Lord's side or the Extinction Dao Lord's, and equally uninterested in becoming Yaoguang's human tribulation, they had remained within the North Sea Star to watch the show.

But with Yaoguang's Dao Integration barely begun and already complete, with the Great Dao of void pulsing from a man who had merged his own body into it... The sudden change didn't let any spectator sit still.

"What's happening?"

"A Great Dao rhythm?! I feel the rhythm of the Great Dao of void. A Void-Shattering cultivator of the void has achieved Dao Integration?!"

"It can't be... Surely not?! Central Heaven, what exactly is going on?!"

The Origin Sword Dao Lord, the Azure Firmament Dao Lord, the Taiqing Dao Lord, even the Origin Dao Lord who had been lying idle in the Heavenly Sea Sword Pavilion all this time, all fully released their psychic thought, reaching out to whichever Dao Lords they had ties with to ask what was going on.

Psychic thought flew everywhere, its sheer weight enough to press down on any Void-Shattering cultivator, completely filling the North Sea Star.

The Central Heaven Dao Lord, the Sovereign Radiance Dao Lord, and the rest gave no answers. What was going on? They wanted to know that themselves!

Had Yaoguang really achieved Dao Integration in less than fifteen minutes and transformed from a Void-Shattering perfected lord into a Dao Lord in that bit of time?

It was unprecedented and inconceivable!

The several Dao Lords were left dumbstruck, with no idea how to explain what had just happened to the neutral parties asking. But with psychic thought flying in every direction, and the rhythm of the Great Dao of void growing stronger to the point that even Void-Shattering cultivators nearby could feel it, the crowd below began to stir as well.

"What's going on?!"

"If I remember correctly... This looks like the Great Dao rhythm from the old accounts. They say it only occurs when a Dao Lord completes Dao Integration and merges fully into the Dao, like ripples spreading from a drop of water striking a pool. If what the records say is accurate, someone must have succeeded at Dao Integration!"

"Dao Integration?!"

Perfected Lord Ying Feng, Perfected Lord Ni Chang, Perfected Lord Jing Mo, and even the usually calm Martial Paragon Perfected Lord and Perfected Lord Tian Xiao all lost their composure at once, their gazes drawn helplessly toward the direction the rhythm came from. And there...

"Yaoguang?!"

"A Great Dao rhythm only happens during a successful Dao Integration..."

"H-How long has it even been?! How long has he been attempting Dao Integration?! This is completely absurd! Insane!"

In an instant, every one of those Void-Shattering perfected lords, any of whom could have served as a supreme elder in one of the Ten Great Immortal Dao Sects, fell into frantic disorder.

Ying Feng and Jing Mo, the two who had so recently boasted about challenging Yaoguang, stared wide-eyed toward the site of his Dao Integration, their faces full of shock and something twisted and savage.

Above the warships, the Central Heaven, Sovereign Radiance, Azure Crow, and Pill Cauldron Dao Lords finally shook off the shock of what they had just witnessed, and their eyes went straight to the Taiwei Dao Lord, the void Dao Lord standing right there among them. As for whether Yaoguang had succeeded, no one had more standing to speak.

"Taiwei Dao Lord!" The Central Heaven Dao Lord's was the first to look at him expectantly.

If Yaoguang really had succeeded, no one stood to gain more than the Heavenly Dao Sect. As a void Dao Lord, Yaoguang had no direct conflict with a truth Dao Lord like himself, and as sect master of the Heavenly Dao Sect, he was a natural ally.

Add in the apparent good relations between him and Penglai, the number one Dao Lord of the North Sea, and by the next Dao contest several of them might form a powerful alliance. Was that not better than fighting alone?

So even though his own read on the Great Dao rhythm told him Yaoguang had almost certainly made it, he lost his composure enough to seek confirmation.

"He is a void Dao Lord," the Taiwei Dao Lord said quietly.

Dao Lords of the same category always sensed one another, and he had felt Yaoguang the instant the rhythm emerged. By now it was growing stronger by the moment.

Yaoguang had obviously survived the most perilous stage: Dao transformation. The fact that he had not emerged from seclusion likely meant nothing more than that he was still getting used to the many changes between the Void-Shattering Realm and the Dao Integration Realm.

"Congratulations, Daoist Central Heaven. The Dao contest hasn't even arrived, and the Heavenly Dao Sect has gained another Dao Lord," the Taiwei Dao Lord said with a smile, offering a fist-and-palm salute.

"He actually did it?!" The Central Heaven Dao Lord could barely contain his delight. "Good! Good! That's truly excellent!"

A Dao Lord ally, free of charge. Yaoguang had not been with the Heavenly Dao Sect for long, and there was no deep bond tying them together, the kind that would be hard to break; but the goodwill between them was real, and a man who could become a Dao Lord would bring many indirect benefits in the end.

Beside them, the Sovereign Radiance Dao Lord heard the Taiwei Dao Lord's confirmation and offered his congratulations with a smile as well. "Daoist Central Heaven, Sect Master Yaoguang's successful Dao Integration is a happy occasion. It has to be celebrated properly, and when the time comes, I'll be coming to the Heavenly Dao Sect for a cup of the good wine."

"We share the joy, we share the joy. The mutual defense pact Sect Master Yaoguang signed with Sect Master Taiyuan of the Taiyi Immortal Sect should extend into the Dao Lord stage as well, so our two sects will have to grow a good deal closer from here on," the Central Heaven Dao Lord answered with a hearty laugh, his face wreathed in smiles.

The Azure Crow and Pill Cauldron Dao Lords listened to the exchange with envy in their eyes.

Further away, the faces of the Jade Scale Demon Paragon, the Kunpeng Demon Paragon, the Extinction Dao Lord, the Black Lunar Fiend Sovereign, and the Light Divine Venerable had gone dark, and the psychic thought radiating from them was heavy enough to congeal the void.

As for the perfected lords aboard the Central Heaven Dao Lord's warship, Zhen Xuanyuan and Gu Li above all, they were completely dumbstruck.

"H-He actually succeeded?!" Even the flow of the chief supreme elder's psychic thought slowed. "Sect Master Yaoguang... is a Dao Lord?"

"I-It seems so. The Taiwei Dao Lord confirmed it himself, and I've read about this in some of the old records too. A Great Dao rhythm manifesting, spreading across the universe, proclaiming itself to all the heavens, is the sign of a Dao Lord being born." Gu Li's train of thought came out just as broken.

The two Heavenly Dao Sect supreme elders were shaken to the core, while Ni Chang, Martial Paragon, Tian Xiao, Ying Feng, and the other Void-Shattering cultivators of the Dao Lord Candidate Rankings, direct disciples all regarded as future Dao Lords, sank into a dead silence.

Martial Paragon and Tian Xiao, in particular, looked toward the site of Yaoguang's seclusion with complicated expressions.

A Dao Lord! A Dao Lord! We're talking about a Dao Lord, and he just became one in fifteen minutes! What is this? Since when did breaking through to the Dao Lord Realm become so easy?

But no matter how they writhed, no matter how bitter, envious, or jealous they felt, the fact was laid out before them.

In the end, the two proud prodigies, both in the top three of the Dao Lord Candidate Rankings, exchanged a look and exclaimed as one. "A Dao Lord!"