Of course, such an arrangement was not necessarily accurate. There might have been deviations, but broadly speaking, there should not have been any major problems.
As for actual combat, the changes could have been far greater than imagined.
Take Lord Bei, for instance. Although his combat strength was indeed inferior to Zhao Rulíng's, it was by no means weak. The reason he had appeared so wretched after fighting the two members of the Blazing Sun Divine Clan was largely due to a matter of mutual restraint.
That was right—restraint. Lord Bei cultivated the Path of Cold Ice, which mutually restrained the Blazing Sun Path.
However, Lord Bei lacked the support of a bloodline, so he instead became the one being restrained. Naturally, his combat strength was greatly diminished.
Another example was Long Feng. In terms of pure combat strength, he was absolutely no weakling. As a pure-blooded Dragon Clan member, his divine abilities were unparalleled. Whether it was his earlier battle against the two Celestials, Lieyang Jiao and Lieyang Dou, where he remained undefeated despite tangling with them for a long time, or his later confrontation with Zhao Rulíng and Lord Bei, where he had still held firm, all of it showed just how extraordinary he was.
Yet, under the suppression of Meng Zhao's Imperial Dragon Bloodline, he could not even withstand a single move against Meng Zhao. His performance completely failed to match what he had shown before. This was precisely what happened when one was restrained—combat strength suffered enormously, and one's performance fell far short of expectations.
In martial arts, cultivation was cultivation, combat strength was combat strength, and even victory or defeat was victory or defeat. None of it could be calculated out of thin air.
Whether low-realm martial artists or high-realm martial artists, they were actually