The greatest threat to an immortal’s Dao heart is not a demonic invasion, nor is it the heavenly thunder sky-trial.
It’s skilled jealousy.
For three hundred years, Grand Elder Song Yun of the Profound Sky Sword Sect had cultivated in total seclusion inside the Cold Jade Grotto of Mount Tianzhu. He sat on an unbending stone slab, wearing rough gray robes, subsisting entirely on mountain dew and bitter spirit pine needles. He had abandoned wine, women, song, and warm cooked meals in pursuit of the elusive peak of the late Nascent Soul realm. He had meditated so long that moss had grown across the hem of his trousers, and spiders had spun cobwebs between his ears.
And yet, his dantian remained as cold and stale as a frozen pond.
Then, three days ago, his favorite grand-student had brought a portable water-mirror into the cave.
Grand Elder Song Yun had watched, mouth slightly open, as young Yan Zixuan—a boy who was still wetting his swaddling clothes when Song Yun was already a peak Golden Core swordmaster—survived the lunar storm of Floor 50, unlocked a fifth-tier star-iron shield. Then he broke through to Grade-6 Dao intent in a single afternoon.
The boy had not meditated in a freezing cave for three hundred years. He hadn’t starved himself on bitter pine needles. He had formed a party with four friends, sprinted through fifty floors of phantom monsters, laughed, eaten sausages at the entrance, and broken through his bottleneck while drinking plum wine on…
