"What do you think?" Li Ling turned suddenly to glance at Kong Beiwu, his dark blue eyes flashing with deep intent.

Kong Beiwu frowned as he glanced below and sighed. "Ah, it was for the best. My junior brothers were… not good people. Too many women have suffered and been humiliated cruelly in their hands over the years and I couldn't stand it."

Li Ling grinned widely, his pristine white teeth showing. "And what about this lass? Do you know what I am going to do with her? I am going to hand her over to some fat weakling who is a lustful pig, to be defiled day and night as he wishes. What do you think of that?"

The face of the young lady changed greatly as she almost threw herself off the Mountain Splitting Blade for fear of the fate Li Ling described. However, rather than Li Ling himself, it was surprisingly Kong Beiwu who managed to catch her with a dark expression on his face, barely juggling her and the storage bags in hand.

After securing her, Kong Beiwu shook his head respectfully. "That's different. Anything you seek to do has its profound reasoning behind it, something a low sect disciple like me cannot understand. It's likely in her best interest to go through this fate, otherwise death would be her only alternative given the decree of the upper sect."

The young lady glanced at Kong Beiwu incredulously, wondering where this retarded hypocrite came from, whereas Li Ling felt his heart go slightly cold, realizing how deeply powerful and cruel the Dao Soldier Technique was.

It was not just loyalty, it was blind reverence and faith. No matter what Li Ling did or what he said, anyone who came under this technique, regardless of their values, would generate authentic reasons for him in their mind, justifying and rationalizing what he did.

Luckily, the knowledge of the Dao Soldier Technique being unique greatly calmed him down, but it also made him feel secure because if he encountered another method with a similar controlling effect, he had a huge and powerful defense against it thanks to this technique.

"Mm. I will be entering seclusion nearby to breakthrough to the Body Foundation Realm. You will act as my protector while also monitoring this girl." Li Ling commanded Kong Beiwu, who nodded reverently.

"As you command, Master!" he acknowledged with a slight bow, to which Li Ling paid no attention as he maneuvered the Mountain Splitting Blade downwards, towards a relatively high mountain that was not yet submerged by the flowing lava.

The heat immediately made the young lady uncomfortable, but she could bear it somewhat, while Li Ling and Kong Beiwu were nonchalant as peak Mortal Flesh body cultivators. Li Ling sent the two of them into the steaming hot rocks, which Kong Beiwu finally frowned against, while the young lady was forced to dance to avoid burning her feet.

He did not care about their comfort as he sat cross-legged upon his flying sword, checking his merit count after the destruction of the Fire Heart Sect.

Asura Blood Credits: 1010!

He barely had enough for the upgrade, and it was all thanks to those plentiful disciples back there. As for leading them out, it was obviously a ruse that Li Ling thought up on the fly to let them drop their guard so he could seize Kong Beiwu and slaughter the rest of them without much trouble.

With this dispatch completed, Li Ling immediately accessed the Whispering Blood Wing's tab in the Asura Blood Token and 'downloaded' the content pertaining to the second realm of the Asura Blood Descent after paying the steep 1000 Blood Credit cost, leaving him with just 10 merits remaining.

Immediately, his mind was flooded with information that was complex yet simple, broken down into chunks that were streamed at a stable rate as most disciples at this level would not have a Sea of Consciousness like Li Ling. However, for Li Ling, this speed was too slow, akin to being in class and the teacher asking that particular slow student to read a paragraph.

He directly took charge and dragged the information over after showing his strong calculative speed, causing everything to be done in one go. He slowly savored the content of the technique and finally began to understand some things, especially the deeper nature of body cultivation and why this technique was strong.

With regard to the overall realms of cultivation for both qi and body, Li Ling knew their names and some of the general effects as well as powers that one gained at that level, but not the finer details. For one, he knew that the qi cultivation system was split into the Taoist system of practice, featuring the cultivation of essence, spirit, and qi, but not in that order.

Because of that, qi cultivation was split into nine major realms below the immortal level, called the nine mortal realms of cultivation.

They were categorized into three major paths, which were the Qi Path, the Spirit Path, and the Essence Path.

The Qi Path started with Qi Refinement, which introduced spiritual qi into the body as strands, increasing the lifespan to 150 years; Foundation Establishment, which elevated spiritual qi into magic power and granted 300 years of life; and Core Formation, which elevated magic power into dharma power and granted 600 years of life.

The Qi Path was about accumulating, refining, and growing one's qi, basically one's 'energy', jokingly called 'energy refinement' by higher-tier cultivators. This path does not require a strong soul, spirit, mind, or comprehension, just a strong spirit root.

This was why most low sects prioritized those with spirit roots at higher values, because without one that could cross this path, you wouldn't even be able to enter the next path of cultivation!

The second category was the Spirit Path, which was far more complex and demanding than the previous path. Here, one began to require a strong spirit and especially soul talent!

Soul talent was something that could be measured by most middle-grade sects and above, like the Boundless Joy and the Qing Shan Sect, and they prioritized it over spirit roots to an extent.

The Spirit Path started with Nascent Soul, which infused one's scattered soul fragments into their former core to mix dharma power with the soul origin to form Soul Power and give birth to the Soul Sense!

After that was Soul Formation, which converted the infantile and weak Nascent Soul of the yin element to one of the yang element, allowing it to mature and attain form, meaning it could be sent out of the body for extended periods of time.

Then came the final realm of the Spirit Path, Dao Integration. At this realm, one would have finished the construction of their Purple Mansion and would open the Heaven and Earth Bridge, linking the Purple Mansion to the world. It grants basically infinite energy, as one could use external spiritual energy in its raw form to cast daoist arts, but Li Ling knew that cultivating here required an intense connection with the five elements of the world.

Hence the need for five elements heavenly treasures by those in this realm, like the 'debris' choking his spirit root.

Finally, there was the Essence Path, which was where most without elite talents were halted because the requirements were too steep. The Essence Path focused on changing the essence of one's being, slowly transforming from a mortal towards an immortal, each step changing and replacing one's being with the better parts of nature.

Because of this, there is only one thing needed for this realm, and it is Comprehension!

It was not just the kind of understanding that came with intelligence—being able to deduce and understand—but rather an affinity for the natural world and its laws! If your Comprehension was poor, then you would have to, like in all other realms, use a hefty amount of resources to make up for it.

The first of the Essence Path was Void Refinement, where after mastering the basic Five Elements in the Dao Integration realm to build the Heaven and Earth Bridge, you now must master the rule of space. Due to how high level it was, even after browsing the forum and the sect's Whispering Blood Pavilion with his current permissions, all Li Ling knew was two things.

First, this realm allowed one to break space and teleport anywhere they wanted across the Tian Ming Continent, with some even venturing cross-continent for exploration. This was how even he, at the bottom of the cultivation world previously, could know that Firmament Heaven had multiple continents.

Second, this realm allowed one to gain their own void space, a sort of super mini small world where they could store things like a void ring, which would grow in size along with their realm until it could even house life!

The second realm of the Essence Path was the Nihility Realm, and even here, the information was even sparser. After all, Void Refinement was the realm of the True Inheritors of the top ten sects, and they often competed overtly and covertly, so information about this realm frequently trickled downward to give those below some insight into higher powers and stoke their drive to ascend.

But for Nihility, Li Ling really had to dig deep into the depths of the available platforms he could access, only gaining some sparse information.

Nihility was akin to Void Refinement, but instead of refining the space element, cultivators here began to refine the Time Element. Apart from greater regeneration, all Li Ling could find was that this was finally the realm where lifespans basically became ridiculous as people expected of cultivation.

If Qi Refinement gave 150 years of life, Foundation Establishment 300 years, Core Formation 600 years, Nascent Soul a millennium lifespan, Soul Formation 1500 years, Dao Integration 3000 years, and Void Refinement nearly 10,000 years, then Nihility soared to a hundred thousand years at the minimum!

As for the final realm of mortal cultivation, the Ascension Realm, there was only one line that Li Ling could find.

Converting the essence of mortality to immortality, rising through the firmament to the world of immortality!

Seated on the Mountain Splitting Blade, Li Ling had to breathe out to calm his pounding heart. It was not just the fantasy of such power existing, but also knowing that he would definitely be able to reach that level thanks to the Infinite Slaughter System that assisted him on his rise, making him yearn.

But he focused his mind and came back down to his mere second realm matters, especially regarding body cultivation rather than qi. Body cultivation was adapted from a mixture of the concepts of martial arts and qi cultivation, so it also followed the same structure in having nine mortal realms before immortality.

The realms here were even scarcer to find than for the mainstream qi cultivation, leaving Li Ling to only see up to the sixth realm, which was called the Soul Merging Realm. Before that were the Mortal Flesh, Body Foundation, Golden Body, Sarira, and Nirvana Realms, which had their own methods of practice.

However, Li Ling would deal with body cultivation as it came, while foreknowledge about qi cultivation was necessary since he did not have a secure method for it, so planning was necessary.

This brought him to the contents of the second realm Asura Blood Descent and what Body Foundation meant exactly, especially compared to Foundation Establishment and its predecessor, the Mortal Flesh realm.

In the Mortal Flesh Realm, one enhanced their body systematically using spiritual qi refined by the spirit root and their body cultivation technique, which was superior to that of martial arts tempering over its nine realms because spiritual energy was superior to the True Qi of martial artists.

Not only could it dig deeper and temper parts that were unseen, it also had to do with the fact that spiritual energy was a type of ever-present worldly energy that was benevolent and positive, focused on growth rather than destruction.

More than that, a body cultivator had access to spiritual energy from the start of their practice, while a mortal martial artist could only use blood energy from nutrition at the first six realms and only gained an esoteric energy at the seventh realm, which upgraded into True Qi at the ninth realm.

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