‘This isn’t as easy as I expected it to be… but nothing that matters ever is.’

Zhang Dong was sitting in something that looked like a room that was lifted from an apartment. The back of it was missing and instead of walls, it was surrounded by a bubble made of energy. The outside was in an empty space covered by thick cement-looking rocks. It was illuminated from all sides and floated directly in the middle. The lack of any windows and doors was on purpose as only he could get in here through the help of his system.

This place was hidden away in the Dimensional Regalia that housed a continent-sized pocket dimension. It was the best place to hide away such an important treasure and perhaps enough to keep the overseer away. Considering that it was an immortal grade treasure, perhaps the one pretending to be the Azure Emperor’s wife would not be able to get in.

What he wanted to do here was figure out how time worked. The Dao of time was mostly unknown to him but after seeing the creatures that were frozen in time, he hoped to figure some things out. Bob had been able to somewhat hack himself into the room to present him with a few things. It was now somewhat possible for him to recreate the effect through this machine but he didn’t really understand the concept of it.

For the test, he brought over a lone creature from the outside. It was just a little spirit mouse that had been put on hold. The time around it had been slowed down but not really frozen as it was still moving. Through the machine, he could somewhat slow down or speed up the passage of time around this little creature. However, stopping it outright wasn’t that easy, first of all, it required him to use spirit points and a lot of them.

‘So, if I wanted to stop time for one second with this thing, I’d need a year's worth of spirit points?’

‘Affirmative.’

‘That’s quite something and I can’t even activate it unless it’s outside of this chamber…’

To be frank, the plan to learn the Dao of Time to counter the time-stopping effect of the Azure Empress was looking grim. With his current understanding, he would not be able to speed up or slow down everything by more than a fraction of a second. He did not even know if he would be able to move at all if the same thing happened again.

‘It’s better than nothing though…’

There were a few ways of using this thing and at least he was able to go through the tip of the iceberg. There was a chance that he could protect himself against the time-stopping effect if he did things right. Luring the woman over here would be one thing and something that he even thought about.

The sea shell that he took from the Cerulean Empress was still in his possession but he decided not to use it yet. He worried that the moment he did something would happen to his mutated seed. It could attract the Azure Empress to this location which he wanted to postpone.

‘Maybe it would be possible to trap her here and ask her some questions… But will I be strong enough to tackle her by myself?’

By analyzing the Overseer from the other world he knew that his next opponent should be above the nascent soul level. After revisiting the secret ground that he was forced to go through he became aware of one truth. Something that created this world was keeping people from reaching the immortal realm through regular means.

Qi Condensation, Foundation Establishment, Core Formation, and last Nascent Soul. These were the first four realms that were freely accessible to the people of this world. However, there was a new realm above the Nascent Soul that was still below the immortal realm.

After going through the research of his predecessor, he came to a conclusion. The realm above the nascent soul level should have been easily reached by him. All clues pointed to mastering a greater Dao and he had mastered multiple ones already. Dao of Heavenly Lightning, Dao of Holy, Dao of Darkness, Dao of Flames, Dao of Wind, and Dao of Gravity were the ones that he had fully mastered.

There were ones that he had not yet fully comprehended as the Dao of Swords that he was also very proficient at. Yet this should have already been enough for him or anyone else to break through into the next realm. He could even conclude that fully mastering a greater Dao was not really needed for the stage above the nascent soul.

‘He names the stage after this Dao Enlightenment stage, then after it would be the Dao Mastering stage or Dao Merging stage. The first one was probably where you mastered one greater Dao and in the next one you had to do the same with multiple ones, maybe even combine them into something greater…’

This was his theory that he came up with and also ran through Bob which gave him a high probability of it being true. There were at least two new realms that this world was stripped of. Without getting into those stages a person’s spirit sense would not be able to evolve either. Their understanding would reach a bottleneck that could never be broken.

The same thing was happening to him, without the help of the system he would not have been able to gather so many new greater Daos. Even though he knew so many it was still not possible for him to get into the true immortal stage and perhaps even if he absorbed the Dao of Water and Wood that he was given, not much would change.

‘If the stage before the Immortal realm is the Dao Merging stage, it might require me to combine at least two Greater Dao’s with each other in some way…’

Zhang Dong had tried this theory already and it wasn’t that hard to complete with his attacks. Combining the Dao of Wind with the Dao of Fire to create a Firestorm technique wasn’t that hard but this didn’t seem to be the issue. There was something missing, it was more likely that he needed to create a grand Dao of something by merging the greater Daos together with each other.

‘The main elemental Daos are wind, earth, water, and fire. Then there is also wood, holy, and darkness that sometimes are accounted for… Do I have to combine them all into something to reach the Immortal stage? Maybe it would be enough to combine the four base ones?’

He was not sure what he should do or if it was even possible. If he was supposed to combine greater Daos into a grand one then they all had to be connected to some type of source. Just like there was a lesser Dao of Rainwater that connected to the greater Dao of Water, all of these elements had to come from something.

‘There could be something that all of them came from… like a point of origin, something like a Prime element that they all stem from… In theory, if I could figure out what this Prime element is, then I’d be able to open up this seed and enter the Immortal realm.’

Now came the focal point of the issue. For him to start his research he would need to analyze all of these various elements to find a connection. Perhaps it was enough to analyze the paths that he already knew but maybe he needed the two others that were for now inside the seashell.

‘This might take a while, I wonder how long other masters took to get through this…’

He started considering the life spawn increase after reaching a realm above the nascent soul one. Perhaps it reached something like then thousand years for the first one and a hundred thousand for the next one. It was unclear but it probably gave each master a lot of time to ponder their Daos in peace and tranquility.

‘Well, I should have some time to do it…The Empire has gotten quite peaceful and if that woman hasn’t appeared I should be able to continue.’

For a moment he deliberated about hiding himself in one of the spawn zones that appeared as black circles on his map. The walls were made from an incredibly hard substance that he couldn’t break. However, after Bob informed him about them being connected to the world’s system he decided to not go with that option.

All his attempts to cultivate safety didn’t go to fruition. He had convinced himself that the moment he began a transformation into the immortal realm or one of the other two realms that were blocked, the Overseer would be at his doorstep. He was not sure how strong his next opponent was but she had to at least be in the next realm but also could be in the other one right before the immortal realm.

‘Well, I’m not in a rush for now… maybe this is for the best…’

With peace somewhat returning to the empire he finally had some time on his hands. His children were continuing to grow and he hoped to be there to witness everything. Perhaps he was being a bit selfish but he wanted to at least take some time off and enjoy the current state of things.

His lifespan would be around a millennium and his current age was not even forty years old. The body that he currently had would not age and even if it did it wouldn’t really matter. His soul was tremendous and would allow his Qi to remain almost as powerful until the moment he died.

With this in mind, he decided to make a few moves. It would be one of the first times that he actually went into a state of closed cultivation. He needed to focus on examining all of the various Daos that he had and connecting them to the others. Only after learning what he could learn from the paths he already had would he attempt to use the sea shell because when he did that, the end of this world might be upon him.

His shoulders felt heavy as he had to wrestle with a moral conundrum. Was it really fine to allow this world to perish if he failed? Like in the other world, the Overseer was trying to wipe it clean and the same thing could happen here. Perhaps it was better to live out his long life with his family and let it all go, who was he to decide their fate?

Even with those thoughts clouding his judgment he needed to push forward. The possibility of this unknown being wiping this world clean even without his involvement was also probable. When that time came, he just needed to be ready and give it his all. If there was something he could do to protect the people that he cared about, he would work tirelessly to achieve this goal.