"Heh! Desperate Move!"

"Hah! Overlord Spear!"

"Yah! Earth-shaking Hammer!"

"Whoa! Ghost King Saber!"

The Golden Armor Divine Weapons were hng-hng-ha-ya ho-ho-ha-yi thrashing about in the black water, like adults splashing around in a kiddie pool, or like buff dudes in the backstage gym of a martial arts movie pumping iron as moving scenery. In short, they were just swinging their Divine Weapons around, flailing at nothing, blasting out terrifying bursts of Qi that blew water everywhere. They were exerting force at empty air, without the faintest idea what they were actually hitting.

Ahem, sorry you have to watch this, but at the end of the day they’re just a bunch of security guards on gate duty.

Of course, in their dreamlike Bubble Shadow, they were actually engaged in a fierce exhibition of martial skill, locked in deadly combat with an imagined Seventh Level pest, unleashing everything they’d ever learned, racking their brains and burning their spirit, all just to fight for that one shot at standing out and reaching the peak of life. They were going so hard their bodies moved on their own, sleepwalking through an exhibition match, tossing themselves around as much as they could.

Too bad the mist is not mist, the flower is not flower; the true is hidden in the secluded valley, all phenomena are false; lake light mirrors reflections, truth and illusion are hard to tell apart, and nothing on either side is real. When you yourself are the person in the mirror, with clouds deep and the path unknown, how can you break free of the climbing cage, first see your true self, and then see the blue mountains again?

Thinking of how he’d been ambushed by an Illusion Technique earlier, he probably had looked just as pathetic and ridiculous. Chen Xuantian felt a wave of annoyance; the water rippled, rose from level ground, and turned into a Black Coffin of Youquan that shrouded the Divine Weapons within. He couldn’t be bothered to watch their idiotic antics anymore.

Yes, this is why his new track is called the Nether Spring Path, and not the Octopus Path or Tentacle Path.

Very simple: because the true form he evolved is not some octopus or tentacles at all.

It’s the Nether Spring.

Right, he is precisely this whole patch of pitch-black filthy water...

Fine, these Divine Weapons still need to be stacked with Nether Spring for a while before they can be refined, so he might as well lecture a bit on the Dao and explain things.

As everyone knows, the Mystic Sect’s Taiji Dao, in essence, is about evolving and refining "Qi" to the extreme, to the point where Qi can freely convert among solid, liquid, gas, light, energy, heat, Plasma, and all sorts of other forms. And if you dissect it further and compare, the fact that the Taiji Dao hits a "Divinity Transformation Bottleneck" with no road forward is basically because the Qi has been refined too brutally.

When a Mystic Sect Cultivator walks the Tai Chi Dao, and turns their Blood Qi and spirit, the colossal energy collected, refined, and transformed over thousands of years, all into a Plasma-state Primordial Spirit body, they exceed the Dao Body’s nuclear furnace limit and the carrying capacity of this world’s laws. One careless moment and—BONG!—they go into fusion and achieve a brilliant radiative ending.

But the Nether Spring Path has no such restriction.

Because what the Nether Spring Path evolves is not "Qi," but the Nether Spring. Not a high-energy Plasma Qi Body, but a liquid. Since Qi in the Taiji Realm is not stable enough and tends to explode, you just look for another, more stable medium to replace Qi as the intermediate carrier of matter and energy, to refine the Dao Body with.

The Nether Spring can turn into tentacles, turn into an octopus, turn into claws, turn into a black coffin, turn into flesh and blood, and naturally it can also turn into a puddle of water. And the ultimate extremity of this evolution, refinement, and progression is to greatly transform into the "Void," roam the Void, and achieve Returning Void and Merging Dao.

So, following the Ancient Dao’s guiding outline of Refining Essence to Qi, Qi Refining and Transforming God, Refining God and Returning to Void, Returning Void and Merging Dao, and mixing in what he had learned from the Tai Chi Dao and the Technology Path, plus seizing the opportunity of devouring the Demon God Egg Shell—

This time Chen Xuantian thoroughly abolished his old cultivation and started over, refining his Dragon and Tiger Golden Pill Dao Body into a Nether Spring Dao Body, thus completing the stage evolution of "Qi Refining and Transforming God," changing his life pattern.

So in a certain sense, you could say Chen Xuantian did it in one step, skipping the Nascent Soul and directly completing Divinity Transformation. He refined his own Essence, Qi, spirit, bone, blood, and skin, his lifelong Dao Power and true body, all into this pool of Nether Spring Black Water, turning it into the carrier of his consciousness and will—truly reaching the point where as long as the water doesn’t dry up, the spirit doesn’t perish.

To be honest though, Chen Xuantian didn’t feel that the water of the Nether Spring was all that much better than Taiji Qi.

To put it harshly, this is pure self-degeneration into the Demon Path, a deliberate nerfing of his own combat power. At least right now, he absolutely doesn’t dare confront these South Heavenly Gate security guards, whose Gang Fist Instant Strikes can stack hundreds of layers, head-on. All he can do is use every last thing he’s ever learned—Illusion Techniques, Escape Techniques, transformations, concealment Magic—ambushing them one by one, taking them down one by one, using the Black Coffin to corral and bind them, and only when the Nether Spring has stacked enough layers does he use Returning Void Hand as an Ending Skill. You could say his tactics are scummy to the extreme.

But Chen Xuantian had no grounds to complain. If you just look at battle performance, the Tai Chi Dao is indeed stronger. After all, the Mystic Sect has been evolving it for thousands of years, fighting sword fighting every day, facing tribulations every month, annihilating sects every year to reach this point. They’re a damn army of living weapons by now, so of course they’ve reached the stage where everyone can go on a killing spree, casually thunder-strike, spray Light Swords everywhere, trigger nuclear fusion, and blast out with Plasma; the sheer swagger and ferocity is off the charts.

And what can your Nether Spring Path do? Sneak in through some random hole, flood it, and drown people out of nowhere??

Still, whatever. In the end Xuan Demon and Dao are one, and all roads lead to the same destination. In Ancient times the Dao split into three thousand paths, with as many as Thirty-three Heavens of founder lineages. Once you refine yourself to the end, don’t you still all have to return to the Void? Roughly speaking, as long as you can Return to Void, just refine and be done with it.

Of course, even if he really does Return to Void, the Nether Spring Dao Body probably won’t be invincible. Once it gets irradiated by high-energy rays—like just now when some bastard flashed him with high beams—it’s like some kind of photochemical catalytic reaction kicked in; the Nether Spring Dao Body visibly volatilized and sublimated at high speed. He was almost damn well killed on the spot by that one flash. It scared Chen Xuantian so badly that all his tentacles stood on end. No wonder that fellow has been hiding in little holes all this time; if he dared take a few more steps outside, chances are he’d get secretly flashed by this company of high-beam trolls and, biu, evaporate on the spot...