Inside the Thatched Hut.
Listening to the Martial Saint's account, Jiang Ning felt deeply shaken.
Rebirth from a drop of blood, a cloud of blood mist gathering back together in an instant, leaving the body utterly unscathed.
Even now, he found such a feat almost inconceivable.
"Then... have you reached that level, Senior?" Jiang Ning asked.
The Martial Saint, his hair gray and withered, shook his head. "No! Refining the billions upon billions of flesh-and-blood particles throughout your body requires an incomparably powerful physique, one that can bear the imprints of your spiritual will and preserve them forever. It also requires a spiritual will capable of perceiving the smallest details, of seeing your own body as you would the cosmos."
"The cosmos?" Confusion appeared on Jiang Ning's face.
"All time, past and present, constitutes the temporal; all space, above, below, and in every direction, constitutes the spatial," the Martial Saint explained.
At those words, Jiang Ning was momentarily speechless.
Having lived two lives, how could he not understand such an explanation?
Now, he also understood what the Martial Saint meant.
Not heaven and earth.
But the cosmos.
This was a higher level.
Though heaven and earth were vast, compared with the cosmos, they were as insignificant as a speck of dust.
Heaven and earth generally referred to the observable world.
The cosmos, however, meant the endless starry skies, the vast depths of space, the convergence of time and space across past and present.
"Then what level have you actually reached now, Senior? After more than eight hundred years, you took that step and attained the Martial Saint Realm. With your talent, another eight hundred years should have brought you much further," Jiang Ning said.
The Martial Saint, his hair gray and withered, nodded, then shook his head.
"You're both right