Chapter 873: The Beginning of an Invincible Dao (Patreon)

For the second time since I’d met him, Lin Youran walked over to me on his own two feet, which already told me enough about how significant this was in his eyes.

“Senior, this young master wishes to file a complaint,” Cao Yu whispered from his knees.

Without responding to him, Lin Youran focused his full attention on me.

“Now that your dao is awake, I can sense its potential and its affinity with you,” he said. “If you are able to learn how to wield it as it is meant to be wielded, then you might end up being one of those few who step past Civilisation Realm.”

Hearing this coming from someone as talented as Lin Youran meant a lot, I always knew that a dao that was not well suited to its user would result in the cultivator facing a bottleneck sooner than later, so it was reassuring to hear that mine had chemistry with me.

“But don’t become overconfident just yet,” he continued. “Most cultivators who are talented or lucky enough to awaken a dao, have no idea on how to fight with it. They treat the dao as one more technique to throw at their enemy, so when that fails, they die confused with the thought that their dao had let them down.”

I nodded at that since I knew that the dao was more deeper than a technique or cultivation method, it was the core of a person’s inner self, which meant it was the foundation of cultivation itself.

“Qi is the strength behind your punch, a technique is the shape your punch takes,” the elder raised one finger, “but it is the dao that decides what happens when it lands.”

For a moment, it seemed he was about to raise a second finger, but the effort must have been too much because he simply went on.

“There are three things you can do with a dao in a fight. You can release it, which is what you did a moment ago, and force everything around you to obey. While that might work against those weaker than you that don’t have a dao, it is a different matter with those equal to you.”

That made sense. I couldn’t just caveman my way through the dao. Finesse was required.

“You can put it inside a technique,” he continued. “The technique will stop following the rules of heaven and earth and start following yours.”

Now that sounded interesting. Every technique had a well-known effect that followed its own rules. An example of this was Phantom Strike, if I succeeded in landing it, the momentum from the palm strike would cave in the victim’s chest. But from what Lin Youran was saying, I would be able to manipulate its effect with my dao. That opened up a can of opportunities.

“Or you can meet another dao head on.”

“What happens then?”

“The one who understands himself better wins, and the loser’s sense of self takes the damage,” he said. “If you lose badly enough, you could spend the next few hundred years doubting everything you are.”

That reminded me of the Clash of Convictions, and my debate with the City Lord Feng Zhaoyang. It was a battle of philosophical worldviews, and in some ways, it was much more dangerous than a normal battle because if you lost, you would lose a part of yourself. That was how I had converted the City Lord into a Disbeliever so that he would join my side.

“Your dao has only woken up, so while it can push and be felt, it isn’t ready for a battle just yet,” Lin Youran continued, rubbing his eyes. “Over time, you need to learn how to combine it with techniques, then with your domain, and finally with your inner world, until every celestial body you own answers to it. That takes most people centuries, so don’t get arrogant.”

For someone who had been cultivating for around a year, centuries sounded wonderful…

“Says the man who comprehended his dao by falling asleep under a tree.”

“Exactly, I took the easy path,” he replied, without a hint of shame. “You are stuck with the hard one.”

Despite shaking my head, I took his advice to heart. Rushing would only create an incomplete dao, and that would cost me more than a few centuries. And since the world’s fate wasn’t on my shoulders and no one was hunting me down at the moment, it meant there was nothing forcing me to cultivate at godspeed as I had been doing.

With a flick of Lin Youran’s wrist, the grey thread slid out of Cao Yu and back into his palm.

“Senior, no!” Cao Yu cried, clutching his chest. “This young master’s Dao of Imperial Repose!”

“It was never yours, and how many times do I have to tell you, I have no idea what a Dao of Imperial Repose is except that it sounds like a lot of work.”

“Fine,” Cao Yu sniffed, turning his nose up at us. “This young master never wanted such a sleepy dao in the first place.”

***

For the last forty days, Lin Youran surprised me because instead of napping, he stayed awake most of the time, which meant a lot since I knew that wasn’t easy for him. We spent the first few days trying to figure out what my dao could actually do, and the more I learned about it, the more I realised that Lin Youran hadn’t been exaggerating. The Dao of Connection was overpowered!

If one day I was able to master it, then distance wouldn’t mean anything, so instead of physically moving or throwing out a technique, I could just strike along the connection between me and my target.

But more importantly than that, I might even be able to cut off the connection between a cultivator and their cultivation. The reasoning was quite simple, though I doubted putting it into practice would be. There wasn’t a cultivator in the Cultivation World that I knew of except that they drew their main power from their inner world. This meant that there was a connection between themselves and their inner world, and if there was a connection, then there was an opportunity for me to access it.

Just imagining the scene that I might be capable of cutting a Peak Stellar Realm cultivator off from his stars in the middle of a fight and leave him with nothing except whatever qi was sitting in his meridians brought a smile to my face.

That would be a wonderful sight.

And it didn’t stop there, I could do so much more than that.

I could link my allies’ strength together, link my inner world to other places (though with how the Genesis Seed has been acting, I didn’t know if I actually wanted to do that), and perhaps even find the threads that tied a cultivator to heaven and earth itself.

“Master, if you master this dao, nobody will ever be able to hide from you, because everyone is connected to something.”

Azure wasn’t wrong, but the keyword was ‘mastery’ because right now I was far from that. I was merely a beginner treading the dao. In practical terms that meant that I could only see connections within about ten metres of me, and probably only the connections that were obvious. I could only hold on to one for a few breaths before my head started pounding, and when I tried to cut the line between Cao Yu and his inner world, all I managed was to give him the hiccups.

“What did you do to this young master’s—hic—dignity?” he demanded, his face turning red.

Once I understood my limits, I started with my qi techniques.

During our first fight, Phantom Strike had leaked half the Stellar Realm energy I forced through it, because it was built for Qi Condensation cultivators. However, this time when I activated it, I did something different.

I connected the qi inside the technique to itself and back to my meridians so that it held together, then aimed my palm at the line running between my hand and Cao Yu’s heart instead of at his chest.

“Dragon Vein Body Reinforcement!” Cao Yu shouted, golden lines flaring beneath his skin as he puffed out his chest. “Strike with everything you have, peasant, this young master’s body is—”

My palm landed, and he was sent flying.

“My robe is unharmed,” he wheezed, clutching his stomach. “So why do this young master’s insides feel trampled?”

Staring at my palm, a smile appeared on my face.

A Qi Condensation technique that cost me next to nothing had hit a Peak Stellar Realm cultivator from the inside. Sure, this wasn’t a complete replacement to Stellar Realm techniques because if I could achieve this with a Qi Condensation technique, then what could I achieve with a Stellar Realm technique? But at least now my qi techniques could pose a threat to cultivators at my level, they were no longer useless.

Then there were my red sun runes.

One of the things that Lin Youran had mentioned during one of our training sessions was that the biggest problem with my ‘formations’ was that each one worked on its own, so switching from one to another left a tiny pause.

That was true.

During our first fight, Cao Yu’s Imperial Dragon Currents had squeezed into that pause and stopped my Shockstep from activating at all, but now that I had the Dao of Connection, I could fix that.

So, I used my dao to connect every rune on my body and my inner world, so that nothing could slip between them, and the switch would be instantaneous. It wasn’t at the level where they could empower each other, or work together to create new effects, but it was a start.

“Imperial Dragon Currents!” Cao Yu roared, dragging me off my feet towards his raised fist.

This time, Titan’s Crest, Shockstep and Aegis Mark activated one after another with no gap between them. The hexagons of the barrier caught his fist, the shockwave burst out at the same moment, and the force behind it, doubled by Titan’s Crest, sent him flying across the stage.

“This is a great injustice,” he screamed, scrambling back to his feet. “A peasant has no right to chain his techniques together!”

“Then stop pulling me towards you,” I said.

“This young master will pull whoever he pleases!”

As for my Lightweaver cultivation, I hadn’t neglected it.

With a few strokes of blue sun energy through the air, the Thornveil Labyrinth tore out of the stone, and this time, I connected every vine to the vines beside it, so it was as though they were one being rather than separate.

When Cao Yu’s Sovereign Dragon Pressure tried to blacken one section of the maze, the rest of the labyrinth shared its energy with that section, which prevented the vines from withering away. But that wasn’t all, I tried something that made Lin Youran sit up.

I painted a single character in the air, the word Kneel, then reached out with my dao and connected it to Cao Yu.

His legs folded at once, and his knees slammed onto the stone, his green eyes wide with disbelief. A heartbeat later, the connection snapped, and he sprang back to his feet, dusting off his robes.

“This young master slipped,” he announced.

Something warm trickled from my nose, and when I wiped it, my fingers came back red.

“Do that against Gong Ru, and you will faint before he does,” Lin Youran said, lying back down.

He wasn’t wrong, but my heart was still racing, because for a second, I had made a Peak Stellar Realm cultivator kneel with a single word.

And if I could do that with the blue sun, what could I do with the much stronger golden sun energy? My Dharma Vessel already drew its strength from the people I cared about, so in theory, a dao built on connection should let it hold together far longer than it had lasted against Cao Yu’s dragon.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get the chance to test it because before I could summon a thread of golden sun energy, something stirred deep inside me from somewhere far below the place where my Dao of Connection had awakened.

It was faint and slow, and it pressed against my sense of self from a direction I didn’t recognise.

Unlike the Dao of Connection, which carried with it a warmth, this felt cold, but the aura coming off it was no less in majesty.

My eyes widened as I realised what this was – it was a second dao.

A/N

Comment what dao you think it will be and why :)

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