Chapter 772: Before the Great Battle

After the wedding banquet, everyone dispersed. Lilith, Pearl, and the others stayed in the Refining Realm to continue their cultivation.

For a few days after getting married, Ye Feng enjoyed a peaceful life—a kind of tranquility he had hardly experienced since leaving Earth. He also recounted to Si Tu Xuan some of the events he had gone through over the years.

Upon learning about the affairs in the outer realms, Si Tu Xuan urged Ye Feng to enter seclusion, stating that she would join him to enhance her own strength as well.

In the Refining Realm, Ye Feng first devoured several powerful members of the Blood Demon clan, such as BloodwithoutTrace, raising his bloodline level to ninth grade and reaching the same level as Immortal. His lifespan also increased accordingly. Then, he consumed black holes from members of the Devouring clan, like Shadowdevourer, raising his Devouring ability to over 450 levels.

To help Ye Feng improve rapidly, Luo Yanjinwen and others contributed the corpses of many powerful enemies they had slain.

After using two Supreme Privileges, Ye Feng achieved enlightenment and received blessings, enabling the powerful beings within his realm to rise swiftly. He successfully met the requirements to break through to the tenth level, becoming a true tenth-level warrior.

After reaching the tenth level, the ten large universes within Ye Feng’s body expanded further, reaching the level of giant universes. Ye Feng spent considerable time planning a new wave of immigration until he reached the upper limit acceptable by his universes.

Subsequently, Ye Feng underwent a period of enlightenment that lasted over 300 years, consuming ten eras of his lifespan. Finally, he mastered 107,990 secret patterns, reaching the same level as the Heavenly Dao. Yet, he still couldn’t comprehend the final layer. He then turned his focus to divine powers, obtaining all possible divine abilities from the Void Realm and mastering them all. However, his integration level remained stuck at 1,000, with no progress possible.

Then, after decades of enlightenment, he elevated the use of the Eye of Divine Punishment to the highest level. This allowed the Eye of Divine Punishment to increase damage by ten times when attacking directly, and by five times when targeting weaknesses. As for illusion attacks, Ye Feng could make people like Luo Yan, who also reached level 999 in their mystical powers, unable to distinguish between reality and illusion, thus trapping their souls entirely within them. However, he also discovered that after reaching level 1,000 in mystical powers, the strength of each subsequent level seemed to double. This was why, when using the Eye of Divine Punishment at full strength, he could only reach level 1,010 in mystical power strength, and even with the damage from targeting weaknesses, it was only level 1,015.

After two hundred years of enlightenment, he increased the stacking of his mystical powers to nine layers instead of the previous two. Yet even so, the combined strength of his mystical powers only reached level 1,009.

Finally, Ye Feng spent nearly three million more years in enlightenment, consuming a hundred thousand eras of his lifespan, to fully master the laws of time stagnation and time flow. Yet he still had no clue about the power of time reversal. It should be noted that a hundred thousand eras is equivalent to the lifespan of a peak-level sixth-tier warrior, while an ordinary ninth-tier warrior only lives for a million eras.

After completing these tasks, Ye Feng spent some time adapting to several forbidden treasures. The supreme long sword finally allowed him to increase his attack power by twenty times, while the forbidden defensive treasure could reduce enemy attack power by ten times.

He knew that he had reached a bottleneck. To make further progress, he might need to create a higher dimension within his body, but he was still far from sensing when such a breakthrough could occur.

In the time that followed, he took on the responsibility of helping others cultivate, supervising and teaching them.

Soon, hundreds of years passed in the outside world, while several eras had already elapsed within the cultivation realm.

Luo Yan, Jin Wen, Xue Hai, as well as Xiao Yu, Xiao Bei, and Shi Tou, Qing Wen, and Bai Yiyi, all received Ye Feng’s life essence, and their mystical power strengths quickly reached the same level as Ye Feng’s. This included the tenth-tier warrior from the Divine Eye clan hidden in Xue Hai. Ye Feng used one of his supreme privileges to restore his original cultivation level and re-signed a contract with him using life essence, raising his mystical power strength to level 1,000 as well.

And since Ye Feng had completely become the master of the Void Realm, some of the internal rules could also be changed. He modified the rule that species purchased with privileges were automatically bound to him, allowing him to directly assist others in migrating cosmic lifeforms within their bodies. Over several eras, everyone finally reached the level of a Level 10 powerhouse.

As for the levels of their divine powers, such as Pearl’s, he could only offer limited help. He could provide them with divine powers but couldn’t assist at all with their integration.

Nevertheless, Lilith and the others performed well, with all of them having divine power levels above 90. But as Ye Feng said, there was still time ahead. This group had all lived for less than an era, while Level 10 powerhouses could live for millions of eras.

As for Situ Xuan, since she was already a powerful intermediate main plane warrior from the start, her cultivation didn’t take too long. She focused most of her time on integrating her divine powers. She also had extraordinary talent; after several eras, her divine power integration level reached 210, placing her among the top tier among Level 10 powerhouses.

What saddened Ye Feng was that over the hundreds of years that had passed outside, he had left the Refinement Realm more than once to search for Long Tian’s whereabouts, yet still found no trace of him.

A sense of unease lingered in his heart. Every time he thought of Long Tian, he would sit quietly aside, saying nothing.

At first, it was Pearl and the others who noticed the abnormality and comforted him. Later, it was Situ Xuan who would comfort him, saying, “It’s okay. Brother Long will definitely be fine. He’s probably just in seclusion. We spend several eras in seclusion each time. It’s normal for him to be in seclusion for hundreds of years…”

“I don’t know. I always have a sense of unease. Long ago, I knew there was a demon from another realm inside him. That demon even caused changes in me, endowing me with the power of consumption. It wasn’t until I met the Consumption Clan that I realized the one sealed inside him was a member of that clan. If he didn’t seek help from the Heavenly Dao Master, there are only two possibilities: either the demon has taken control of his body, or he has successfully consumed the demon… But I’m well aware of how powerful the Consumption Clan is. Even just a trace of their dark energy left behind in my body has made it impossible for me to expel that power of consumption, let alone a living demon… What worries me most now is that he might have already turned into a demon… That means I’ll have to stand against him, which is the last thing I want to see…”
“It doesn’t have to be as you think. Even if it is, we can still find a way to drive out the demon from his body. Maybe once the Heavenly Dao Master reaches a higher level, he’ll have a solution… We’ll figure it out as we go. All you can do now is stay calm and focus on your cultivation,” Si Tu Xuan advised.
Several more years passed, and turmoil arose once again in the Meteor River region. Ye Feng and the others knew that a great war was about to begin…