"There was no benefit at all, only a dead knot!" The Phoenix Sage let out a soft breath. "Though I longed to crush him to death, I had to accept an ironclad fact..."
"What fact?"
The Phoenix Sage slowly said, "We Thirty-six Sages had all inherited the karmic ties of this Heavenly Dao. To live and perish alongside this Heavenly Dao was our fate."
The Secret Sage pressed his palms together. "Amitabha. I sensed the same as the Phoenix Sage. This boy's venomous malice had filled me with bone-deep hatred. Even four thousand years of Zen cultivation could scarcely suppress the fury in my heart. But the karmic ties to the Heavenly Dao had already formed and could not be reversed. We could only live and perish with this Heavenly Dao. If you, Confucian Sage, wished to seize the Dao Fruit when the Heavenly Dao Collapse came, what you seized would not merely be the Dao Fruit—it would also be our lives!"
The Infant Sage said, "After inheriting this karma, we Sages had no need for Sacred Origin Fruits. Our only way out was to become Guardians of the Dao for this Heavenly Dao! Your entire premise was wrong."
Beside the Military Sage, the Sages looked at one another, each enduring an eighteenth-grade typhoon in their hearts...
Today's gathering had twisted and turned.
Today's gathering had been calculation against counter-calculation.
The Sages of the Confucian Sage's faction had used 360 Sacred Origin Fruits as bait, making the foreign Sages work for them and eliminate those from the Military Sage's faction.
But they had been wrong.
The thirty-six Sages before them had no need for Sacred Origin Fruits at all.
Having inherited the karmic ties of this Heavenly Dao, they had already opened a bridge connecting them to it. They themselves