Chapter 2273: Preparation (1)

Done with helping his people, Su Yu started focusing on his own growth. He had never stopped comprehending the dao. But with a myriad daos in his world, comprehension was much harder than before. This was supposed to be very time-consuming. In order to speed up the process, Su Yu had to utilize the path of milking.

Fortunately, the Master of Time was absent and the River of Time was powerful enough. It would have been milked dry by Su Yu long ago otherwise. Then again, Su Yu was hardly the only person doing this. All the known Creators of the Myriad Realms had done the same.

Everyone had been milking the River of Time to expand their worlds rapidly. If Su Yu were the Master of Time, he would first kill the Master of Death, followed by Human Emperor, before dealing with Su Yu the moment he returned.

Su Yu had only been draining the River of Time in bursts. Meanwhile, the Master of Death had nearly emptied the River of Time of the death dao.

***

After sending the Human Mountain back, Su Yu wasted no time and returned to the River of Time. Again, he wasn't moving alone. He brought Martial Emperor with him. Yes, Martial Emperor had been recalled, and he was greatly annoyed.

He did not like staying beside Su Yu. But since his physical body was being held by Su Yu, he had no choice but to comply. He did not doubt that a scumbag like Su Yu would do something bad to his body if he refused.

***

Inside the River of Time.

Martial Emperor glared at Su Yu gloomily. What now?

Su Yu was unbothered by his reaction. He naturally had to make full use of Martial Emperor while he could.

Su Yu said, "Look for some masterless daos for me. With the Heaven Gate, this won't be a difficult task. You are the only person with the Heaven Gate apart from me. Mark each masterless dao you find."

Martial Emperor gasped and asked, "What are you trying to do?"

"Drain some power. Stop wasting time and get to work."

"..."

Martial Emperor was unhappy, but as a thought hit him, he said, "Sure, but I can't utilize my Heaven Gate without my physical body."

He wanted his body back.

Su Yu smiled and said, "Maybe I should...consider exterminating your sea of willpower and try getting someone else to take over your body. That's also a way to get another Heaven Gate by my side."

"..."

Martial Emperor was left without an argument. Fine, fine. A lie like this would not work against someone who had also opened the Heaven Gate.

The Heaven Gate could be used even with only the sea of willpower. He was merely unhappy that he didn't have his body with him. Not wanting to spend more time around Su Yu, Martial Emperor left without any argument.

Su Yu shouted at him, "Don't go far enough to reach Human Emperor."

"Do I need you to tell me that?"

Martial Emperor snorted. Was he stupid enough to do that? He did not have a good relationship with Human Emperor. Would he go alone and risk getting attacked as an enemy? Wouldn't that be dumb?

Su Yu ignored the response. It was true that Martial Emperor was the only person capable of helping with some of his tasks. Yes, that fellow was slightly weak, but that fellow was also a super genius who had opened the Heaven Gate.

Not everyone was capable of opening 360 acupoints and 360 apertures. Then again, he was also an embarrassment for being stuck at the second tier as someone who had opened the Heaven Gate.

Su Yu started his search while deep in thought. Hundred Battle had the Human Gate open while Yu Qing had the Hell Gate open. These gates felt easier to open. That was especially true for the Hell Gate, as a considerable number of them had opened it. Could it be that the older a gate was, the weaker it was? Was that why it was easier to open?

"The Human Gate requires 720 body acupoints..."

When Su Yu thought about it, he acknowledged that the structure of his body might truly differ from Hundred Battle's. He was certain that there weren't 720 acupoints in the body of a modern human.

Perhaps that was the case for the giants. He needed to take some time to study the matter more. He could also study some of the survivors from the sinned lineage.

"It doesn't matter if nobody on my side can open the Human Gate and Hell Gate. However..."

Su Yu thought of Heavenbridge. That fellow would be stuck for now. Most of the people with their gates open had already been killed by Su Yu. If he could find a way to help some people open the Human Gate and the Hell Gate, he could perhaps use this method to slowly feed Heavenbridge.

"Also, the Hell Gate can be used to summon the chaos beasts behind it. I don't know what the Human Gate can do yet. As for the Heaven Gate, I have only been using it to see the true essence of dao. Is there nothing else I can do with it? Can I summon the beings behind the gate as well?"

Su Yu sank into thought. From what he knew, the Heaven Gate was already extremely useful. Many of his tricks relied on it. But that was not enough.

He suspected that there were still unexplored functions to the Heaven Gate. For example, he could somehow enter the real Heaven Gate through his Heaven Gate. He had yet to find a good way of doing so. Previously, he only accomplished that during his moment of death. But even so, he ended up landing in a sort of alternate timespace instead.

With all those in mind, Su Yu entered the physical body dao of humanity. He entered directly with his main body. This was his first time entering this dao so openly. It was incredibly big. It already seemed boundless from the outside. And upon entering, he found that it was much bigger than he had imagined.

When he focused, his eyes gleamed as he opened the Heaven Gate. Immediately, he noticed the many bumps and holes on the surface of the dao. Clearly, it had suffered a lot of damage over the years.

In fact, some cracks could be seen on it. He gazed into the distance and sensed several powerful undulations. Those were probably the stretches occupied by the various human kings. At the same time, he also found a large unoccupied territory.

"This was probably the territory Hundred Battle and Zhou Ji occupied before."

After a quick look, Su Yu concluded that Hundred Battle and Zhou Ji had occupied one-third of the dao before this. And from what he could see, there were about four surviving physical body human kings. The four only occupied one-third of the dao.

In other words, Hundred Battle and Zhou Ji were about twice as strong as these human kings. And in cultivation, twice as strong was not as simple as granting one the ability to fight one against two.

"After so many years, these human kings should have grown. They should be tier fours by now, right?"

That was quite a slow growth. They were all ancient human kings. The fourth tier was way too low for them after so many years. He estimated that they would either be at the fourth tier or the bottom of the third tier.

With Hundred Battle and Zhou Ji gone, the cleared area remained unoccupied. That was mainly because the dao power in that area had been mostly drained as well. Thus, nobody had bothered expanding into that stretch of the tributary. It would take the tributary some time to replenish the power in that area.

The remaining one-third of the dao was occupied by some weaker presences.

"Probably some Daofuses."

That was Su Yu's guess after a quick scan.

Of the ancient marquises who had departed with Human Emperor, some probably cultivated the physical body dao as well. Together, these marquises occupied about a third of the physical body dao. These might be powerful Daofuses, but they weren't powerful enough to become human kings.

Zhou Ji and Hundred Battle King had cultivated for a far shorter time than those ancient powerhouses.

"Physical body dao..."

Su Yu sank into thought. He was here to extract some physical body power to strengthen his own world. But when he saw the drained state of Zhou Ji and Hundred Battle King's former area, he knew that he could only take what he needed from the areas of the ancient humans.

That might result in some trouble at the frontline.

"Sigh."

Previously, he had warned Xing Yue about this. At the time, he believed that things would be fine for a few human kings to weaken temporarily. But now that he knew about Human Emperor's actual situation, he no longer wanted to risk doing that.

"Since I can't take...I shall fill it up instead!"

Su Yu's eyes gleamed. He couldn't really go upstream with the identity of a Creator. Those on Human Emperor's side might know due to Xing Yue, but the myriad races were still unaware.

The identity of a weak Creator wasn't something one should flaunt. A book appeared in Su Yu's hand. Mark of Civilization.

"In that case, I'll occupy the physical body dao temporarily and disguise myself as a physical body cultivator."

With that, he tore a page off and sent it into the drained section. The page started occupying the section. It utilized the power from Su Yu's world instead of the physical body dao itself. That created a section that was clearly different from the other two sections.

Of the three sections, faint golden light could be seen from Su Yu's section.

Rather than extracting power from the dao, he inserted the physical body power from his world into the tributary. They shared the same essence, so it worked fine. Initially, there was a slight rejection from the tributary, but it didn't last long.

With this, Su Yu would be able to disguise himself as a physical body cultivator. People like Human Emperor might know about his creation. But it didn't matter. He could always lie that his world had been destroyed. Su Yu was never one to be fully honest toward people he didn't know well.

While working on the physical body dao, Su Yu also took the chance to further observe the dao. He noted that the dao had suffered numerous damages over the years. That was the reason for its decline in strength. At this rate, the dao would probably collapse by itself in the future.

Done with occupying the physical body dao, Su Yu started extracting power from the other daos. Martial Emperor continued searching for the masterless daos while cursing non-stop.