In the eyes of most Professionals, Lu PingAn was a Rule-level powerhouse, a peak expert they could not even bear to look upon directly.
As for Tier 7, Tier 8, or demigod, while each step differed enormously, to ordinary Professionals who spent ninety percent of their lives below Tier 3, there was no essential difference.
But Lu PingAn himself understood very well how difficult this qualitative transformation was.
A newly entered Tier 7 was, in the end, still "individual," while Tier 8 was "collective." Even the weakest Tier 8 surpassed a Tier 7 by more than fivefold in both quality and quantity. Their upper limit in actual combat and their immortality were on entirely different levels.
But Lu PingAn was somewhat different. From the very beginning, he had inherited a god's divine kingdom. His form differed from that of other Rule-level beings. From the start, he had been a "collective," a "world." His growth was more about repairing and evolving his original "territory."
For other Professionals, advancing from Tier 7 to Tier 8 also meant going from individual rules to multiple rules, from a single power to an entire system of powers. That was extraordinarily difficult, potentially taking ten years, twenty years, or even a century.
Many Tier 8 Professionals truly sought out another Path and raised it to Tier 7 as a foundation in order to reach this step. Often, one Path was not enough, so they took another. Most existing Tier 8s genuinely possessed five or six independent Tier 7 foundations.
This was still the greatest advantage of the Professional supernatural Path: accumulation could be achieved through painstaking effort. In some supernatural systems, the step from "king" to "Overlord" was impossible without bloodline or opportunity. The advancement rate could be so low as to be negligible.
When Lu