1250 Holistic vs Focus
The Favor Alchemy Sky God's eyes opened wide, her expression becoming one of abject shock. It wasn't just that this was a Founding Dao, that much was shocking enough and it still didn't guarantee that Ryu would be able to enter the Sky God Realm, if anything, it would only make it harder.
What was so shocking was the fact that she couldn't immediately see through the grade of this Founding Dao. It felt far too abstract for her to fully grasp.
To put this matter into perspective, the Favor Alchemy Sky God was from a race of people well known for their intelligence. Not only was she from such a race, but she could be considered the best born of them in countless generations. She had never, Never, come across something in her life that she couldn't comprehend at least in part.
But when it came to Ryu's Dao, she didn't even know what grade it was at outside of understanding that it had reached the Realms of a Founding Dao, let alone begin to understand what it could do and what its abilities were.
This realization left her truly without a single word to speak. Her bottom lip trembled, the tears in her eyes still not having dried as she looked up as though she could see through the barriers of the world around her and right to Ryu.
Ryu himself stood in silence. The world around him felt both fascinating and somehow dull at the same time, as though he could both see things he had never seen before, but because he could see through them with such ease, they lost their novelty almost immediately.
What was especially shocking was that the burden of using his Dao seemed to have vanished entirely. He didn't know if it was an illusion or not, but it felt as though his Dao had transcended the need to use Focus Qi, as though it had become a part of his being no different from any of his other fundamental senses.
Did one have to strain to see for long periods of time? What about feeling, was there a limit to it? And what about tasting?
Although each sense did have such limits, one would fatigue after keeping their eyes open for too long, one could grow insensitive to touch and taste if the repetition was too great, but even so, fundamentally, they had much greater staying power than most things.
Somehow, Ryu's Dao had entered this range of use.
Ryu clenched his fists. The most profound breakthroughs seemed to come in the most unexpected of ways, and he truly didn't expect such a breakthrough to come so casually. It felt that whenever he just let his mind wander as it pleased, he would take large leaps forward.
Fundamentally, he had the Origin Flame to thank for this shift in perspective.
It was his decisive in going after those Sparks even given the danger of the situation that had allowed him this opportunity, and at the same time, it put into perspective that while these natural treasures might not be able to directly give him exactly what he wanted, they were all part of a fundamental fold of existence, they were foundational to the universe itself...
How could such treasures not have unique insights for him to benefit from?
Ryu looked up. He took a breath and exhaled.
The air that he couldn't seem to breathe previously seemed to enter his body without any sort of effort now.
'I'm headed in the wrong direction. My original deduction was decent, but it was ultimately still a guess. This direction however... This one is correct!
Ryu pivoted and he vanished.
His original destination definitely had a Ruin worth exploring in it, however this Ruin only had a 40% probability of being related to the Taboo Powers. The effort it would have taken to raise that percentage likelihood before took more time investment than he wanted to put in. it was more efficient to just visit them all one by one than to try to press.
However, his mind felt as though things he couldn't quite grasp in the past had become easy beyond comparison.
With his new deductions, the odds that this Ruin was related to the Taboo Powers fell from 40% to just 3%, as for this new direction he was headed in, it rose from 36% to 84%.
It took only a day for Ryu to reach this new location and he immediately sensed activity.
'There's something odd about this land. There's a formation here, a high level one at that.'
Ryu's gaze sharpened and he saw through the spatial nodes, noting where the formation had been anchored. If he had taken just a single step more, he would have already fallen into the formation.
When Ryu observed the formation, he realized that he could tell that it had been set up exactly 33 days ago. Not only that, but he could tell that it was a Fragmented Grade Formation that seemed to have been laid at the hands of several World Sea Realm experts.
The amount of detail Ryu could comprehend now even without actively using his Dao was astonishing. He felt almost as though his eyes were already back, these were the kind of things he used to be able to see all of the time.
'For World Sea Realm experts to lay a Fragmented Grade Formation, they should be quite excellent. Their souls are probably on the verge of entering the Sky God Realms'
The Body, Mental and Qi Realms became a bit murky once one entered the Sky God Realms. Cultivators would usually fall into two categories after crossing this step.
The first were colloquially known as Holistic Cultivators, the second were colloquially known as Focused Cultivators.
The Sky God Realm allowed one to choose between fusing the three Realms into one and practicing them all at once, the first group, or keeping one or all three separate, the second group.
This meant that, technically, it was very much possible for there to be Focused Cultivators who had one or more Realms still stuck within mortal limits, while having taken one or more to enter the Sky God Realms.
These few hadn't quite succeeded in this, but it seemed that they already had plans of separating their Mental Realm from their Qi and Body Realms.
Ryu's gaze turned cold.
