Chapter 472: Hostility

"Dao Integration," Yaoguang muttered.

He sat quietly, feeling out one of the three thousand forces that formed the most basic, yet most essential, structure of the entire universe: the void.

When he immersed himself fully in that power, he felt himself become the void itself. He was the void's voice, the foundation that carried everything. The deeper he sank, the stronger the sensation grew and the wider its range. Once he had become a part of the void completely, he would be the void of the universe itself.

Of course, for a human being, with a human's psychic thought and will, attempting to merge fully into the void and expand his perception to a cosmic scale would end in only one way: being swallowed by it.

The feeling was like taking something already vast and magnificent and setting it against an enormously larger scale. For instance, a star or a black hole. To a human being, such objects were immense enough to seem divine, and yet as the view pulled steadily back, a blazing star shrank fast.

At the galactic scale it became a point of light. At the scale of a galaxy group, it disappeared entirely. At the scale of a supercluster, you could search your whole life and never find its location.

A Dao Integration cultivator was the same. Perhaps he was not as small as a star. Perhaps he was greater than a galaxy. But set the scale at the level of the universe, and he was still the sort of object you might never locate no matter how hard you tried.

How could power, thought, and soul at that magnitude ever really steer the workings of the Great Dao of void? Force a merger, and you would only drift with the current until every trace of self was stripped away, and you became part of the Great Dao of void.

The road after Dao Integration is one step at a time. Grow stronger, command more of the Great Dao of void, until at last you become that Dao's ruler and become the Dao Ancestor of the void. The thought turned over in Yaoguang's mind.

It was the road he had glimpsed as soon as his realm rose. Back then, he had held out a small hope that he had simply misunderstood, since he had not yet achieved Dao Integration. Now that he had, he had to admit the road was exactly what it had looked like.

"On this road, growing strong isn't a matter of cultivation. Your realm is one thing, and the portion of the Great Dao you can command is another entirely." He put out a hand and felt void power circling his fingertips.

At this stage, every cultivator's share of the Great Dao was identical. A Dao Lord meant one part in ten thousand.

Cultivation? Cultivation was useless. At most, it raised a Dao Lord's realm and tightened his grip on void power, so that when a share became vacant in the future, he would be better equipped to seize it.

The true ceiling of one's void power could only be raised by killing another void Dao Lord and taking that Dao Lord's share. That was the only way to truly progress.

In other words, the moment you stepped onto the road of Dao Integration, every Dao Integration cultivator of your own type became your mortal enemy.

"And because they share a Great Dao, one Dao Lord can actually sense another. And it doesn't just reveal each other's position, but it breeds a natural hostility!" Yaoguang's scalp prickled.

A void Dao Lord could raise his own ceiling and his own strength only by killing another void Dao Lord, and because of that, the Great Dao itself pushed Dao Lords of the same type into natural enmity. And Dao Lords of a type could locate one another at will.

What was this supposed to be? This was just like raising venomous creatures in a jar, nothing else![1]

The one thing he could not work out was why, to this day, there weren't three thousand Dao Ancestors. The Immortal Realm should have long since bred its kings, which was to say a Dao Ancestor for each Dao.

Once a Dao Ancestor appeared, that Dao should have no Dao Lords left. Yet the facts said otherwise.

The Gate of the Immortal Realm on the North Sea Star alone has passed down forty-nine Great Dao, one of them the enormously popular Great Dao of void, and that's without counting the other gates. The Dao Techniques and paths I can reach right now already number over eighteen hundred. By that logic, there ought to be at least eighteen hundred Great Dao that have never produced a Dao Ancestor. It doesn't add up. Yaoguang thought about it over and over, yet found no answer.

After a while, he set the question aside. Secrets that touched on Dao Ancestors were probably something he could only approach once he reached the Immortal Realm, or once he had pushed his own progress past one percent, or perhaps even ten.

For now, he would keep his hands on what was in front of him.

The road past Dao Integration will be rough, but at least I've reached a whole new stage. Yaoguang said inwardly.

In a sense, he already stood at the summit of the lower realm's universe. A Dao Lord's lifespan was capped at 129,600 years, but as one, he could count on at least the next 120,000 years without worry. Especially...

The path of the human immortal is now open. Yaoguang thought.

He could clearly feel that, after Dao Integration, he could fully merge his essence, qi, and psyche into the three Dao Artifacts: the Limitless Sword, the Eight Desolations Mirror, and the Endless Tower.

The Endless Tower would hold his essence, the Limitless Sword his qi, and the Eight Desolations Mirror his psyche. With those three as his support, he could then draw the power of the Great Dao of void into all three artifacts and raise his strength even further.

Even without a share of the Great Dao, three top-tier Dao Artifacts carried power almost rivaling an immortal Dao Artifact. In a frontal clash, that would put him far above a ghost immortal or an earth immortal away from its home ground; they could even allow him to fight evenly against a psyche immortal.

Combat power that matches a psyche immortal, without the need to suffer the thinning emotions and eroded thought that come with the psyche immortal path's deepening Dao transformation. All it costs is an investment of three immortal artifacts. The human immortal path really is the path that suits me best right now.

***

While Yaoguang sat quietly considering what Dao Integration meant for the human immortal path, farther off, the Kunpeng Demon Paragon and the Extinction Dao Lord, both void Dao Integration cultivators, were finding it hard to sit still.

To everyone else, Yaoguang attaining the Dao meant only that the Ten Great Immortal Dao Sects had gained another Dao Lord. To these two, it meant one more rival in the Dao contest.

And this rival came with natural allies like the Penglai Dao Lord and the Central Heaven Dao Lord, with a figure capable of refining top-tier Dao Artifacts standing behind him.

On top of all that, he was a Dao Lord at two hundred years old. What kind of monster was that? Backing, talent, equipment... He had all of that, and if he ever joined the Dao Contest, he would be an enormous threat to every Dao Integration cultivator of the void.

How were the two of them supposed to ignore that?

Feeling the presence of a true Dao Lord already emanating from Yaoguang, the Extinction Dao Lord's face filled with jealousy and refusal. "How can this be happening?!"

The refusal shifted by degrees into something savage and ugly. "I don't believe a junior like Yaoguang truly achieved Dao Integration this quickly! In the entire history of the North Sea Star, the fastest Dao Lord still took a month to break through, and this was just fifteen minutes! That's basically achieving Dao Integration on the spot. What does he take Dao Integration for? It can't possibly be this easy! It's fake! This has to be fake!"

Listening to him, the Kunpeng Demon Paragon, no less jealous and feeling just as much killing intent after seeing Yaoguang become a void Dao Lord, quickly caught on. "I don't believe it either! Maybe he has some treasure on him that fakes Dao Integration. We have to test it!"

Its gaze went cold. "There are this many Dao Lords here, and the two of us in particular came for Yaoguang. If we don't even dare to test him, how will the world see us? Besides, this is a matter of our own void Dao. If we don't move first, who will stand up for us? Black Lunar? Jade Scale? Light? None of them are Dao Lords of the void!"

"What's your plan?"

"We're void Dao Lords. The world is wide, and there's nowhere we can't go! Even Penglai, how is she going to hold us?!" As soon as the Extinction Dao Lord asked, the Kunpeng Demon Paragon urged him. "Yaoguang must be carrying some great secret. How else could he do something so utterly unbelievable? Jade Scale and I can hold off the Penglai Dao Lord for a while, and Light and Black Lunar can hold off Sovereign Radiance and Central Heaven. You go straight at Yaoguang with everything you have and kill him!"

"Go after Yaoguang..." A flicker of hesitation crossed the Extinction Dao Lord's eyes, but it lasted only a moment before jealousy and resentment buried it. "Fine! But Yaoguang's corpse and everything on him belong to me!"

"Done!" the Kunpeng Demon Paragon agreed at once.

As for the Taiwei Dao Lord, the Pill Cauldron Dao Lord, and the rest, none of them were especially worried.

The Taiwei Dao Lord obviously wouldn't care. As a void Dao Lord, declining to move against Yaoguang was already doing the Heavenly Dao Sect a favor. And the Pill Cauldron Dao Lord would not commit himself before the situation was clear.

The Azure Crow Dao Lord did warrant some caution, since he might genuinely move against the Light Divine Venerable. Still, the gap in strength between Dao Lords was never large, and even a fight to the death rarely resolved quickly. Even two against one, the Light Divine Venerable should hold out for a while.

In short, the two void Dao Lords simply could not accept watching Yaoguang attain the Dao this fast, and they had set their minds on probing him.

If Yaoguang was only bluffing, or had paid some enormous price to reach the Dao Lord Realm, they would strangle him immediately, while the breakthrough was still fresh.

If he had really reached the Dao Lord Realm and they couldn't do anything to him in a short time, they would simply withdraw at once.

Freedom of movement was a void Dao Lord's greatest confidence. The Penglai Dao Lord had already spent her trump card, and they did not believe she had another supreme treasure in hand that could kill void Dao Lords like them in a single blow.

Psychic thought flashed between the assembled fiend sovereign, divine venerable, demon paragons, and Dao Lords, and consensus formed in an instant.

With this many Dao Integration cultivators gathered here, glaring at each other with unconcealed hostility, walking away without striking would only make it look like they were afraid.

And Yaoguang had integrated in fifteen minutes! Anyone could tell he was likely hiding an astonishing secret, and who didn't want to know what it was?

So the moment they agreed, the Kunpeng Demon Paragon was the first to flash forward, its Heaven-Devouring Kunpeng Technique bearing down to swallow the Penglai Dao Lord whole.

With her attention pulled away, the Extinction Dao Lord struck immediately after, targeting Yaoguang, who had seemingly only just completed his breakthrough.

A battle of Dao Lords erupted without warning, just as everyone in the Ten Great Immortal Dao Sects thought the dust had settled.

1. Gu-breeding is a type of ancient Chinese witchcraft. It is the act of putting all kinds of venomous and poisonous bugs in the same place, letting them fight and devour each other. The surviving one is known as "gu". ☜