Grand Ancestral Bloodlines

Ryu smiled and didn't seem to feel the fact that both Death Guards were Lord Demons. It seemed that his hesitance earlier was worth it.

He hadn't sensed the Death Guards earlier, but that was because he wasn't looking for them. It had been a long while since he thought of Death Guards.

Now that he thought even further, Valerius, the 16-year-old youth he had battled in Martial God territory, almost certainly had a Death Guard as well. It was just that Ryu hadn't threatened the young man's life during the course of the battle, so he hadn't appeared. And, on top of that, it was likely that Valerius' Death Guard was even more powerful than these two Lord Demons because Valerius himself was an existence with far more potential than these two...

At least on the surface.

It was much harder for Ryu to gauge the age of a non-human creature. For all he knew, Ferouge and Luna were both 16 years old as well, or maybe even younger.

Even if they were that young, though, their auras were less substantial to him than the Beast Mimicry Sect's young genius, so he placed them on a lower tier.

But it was precisely because they were all so young that they were worth nurturing in the first place.

Ryu had already realized that except for the very top echelon, the gap of talent between geniuses didn't exist in anything but temperament. If they were so young, they still had a great deal of time to mature and build that temperament.

That meant that any genius born with a bare minimum level of talent had the right to be nurtured until they proved themselves to be carps stuck in a tide or carps capable of leaping the Dragon's Gate.

'Temperament...' Ryu's eyes fell into a bit of a daze for a moment.

There were Six Pillars of cultivation. The Meridians, the Bone Structure, the Bloodline, the Soul, the Spiritual Foundation, and the Dao... None of these included temperament. The Spiritual Foundation was somewhat related, being the Dao Heart... But why did those with strong Dao Heart glow from their chests?

It made sense for Ryu because he had a Realm Heart that stored his Dao Heart, but for everyone else... weren't their "Dao Hearts" in their dantians? Why did their chests light up like that 16-year-old brat's had?

Ryu felt he was missing something, and yet despite only finding a piece of the puzzle, he still felt his Dao tremble.

He had never truly considered the importance of temperament in the past. But whether it was his Dividing Order or Dividing Chaos aspects, they were actually both missing such a big piece of the puzzle.

And when he finally incorporated them...

BOOM!

A violent aura swirled about, and Ferouge would have been blown off his feet if not for Lu'card's intervention. Before either Death Guard could even feel what was happening, Ryu took a seat in the middle of the sand drenched in blood, his hair and robes fluttering wildly as the aura of the True Sky God Realm began to billow off of him in waves.

For thousands of kilometers, Nether Qi soared toward Ryu, but he cut it off. He couldn't use Nether Qi, and as far as he knew, he couldn't create it. This was still something worth exploring to see if he was correct or not, but the time to do so wasn't at such a crucial moment.

Chaos Qi erupted from his body, and the world rumbled. The dense concentration of chaotic aura rose like a pillar. At that moment, the Chaos Qi communicated with the Nether Qi and then cooperated with Order.

It had taken Ryu several weeks to complete his breakthrough into the False Sky God Realm before. Logically, it should have taken another obscene length of time this go around as well.

But the difference was that before he had only relied on the qi in his immediate vicinity, but now he was relying on an entire plane.

It was akin to a flashbang. With a boom, both of his Spiritual Foundations climbed to a towering Realm, and his Inner Matrix mutated and grew once more.

In that moment, it was as though his Dao had become a Quasi-Omniscient Dao, exuded an aura that was somehow both at and not at that level at the same time. This was the beauty of having his Internal Matrix, and at this point, it was likely his greatest breakthrough to date.

At that moment, droplets of Embryonic Qi began to fuse with his body, taking advantage of the metamorphic state to perfect himself even further.

Of all the people he had used Embryonic Qi on, his own self was likely the most resistant to it all. Since the formation of his Inner World, things had changed... but hadn't changed at the same time.

At the very least, he could instantly heal himself on a whim now, but he instead faced a different problem.

If before Embryonic Qi didn't work on him because he didn't follow the path of the Heavens, now it didn't work well on him because he didn't follow a path at all.

When he gave Embryonic Qi to a beast, the Heavens knew exactly how to perfect their path and bring them toward perfection. When he used Embryonic Qi in the past, the Heavens could see the path, but it wasn't compatible with it, so there wasn't much it could do.

Now, however, when he used Embryonic Qi, it floundered, not quite understanding what to do. The reason it could heal him instantly was that it understood his current state perfectly, so it could bring him back to his pinnacle condition. However, because he was now creating a path of his own, it didn't know what the future looked like, so helping him to improve was difficult.

The exception was when he had a breakthrough.

When he broke through, he paved new ground and took a large leap forward. His Dao and his eyes both became stronger, so his ability to deduce and comprehend where to go from here also increased.

Like this, when Ryu broke through now, it wasn't just a change in Realm...

It was also a change in talent.