When Chi Xue told them that Ling Tian had already reached the peak of the Twenty-first Heaven and was even showing faint signs of breaking through to the Twenty-second Heaven, Shi Meng and the others found it hard to accept. It wasn't just that, in their minds, cultivators couldn't break through two minor realms in a mere hundred thousand years or so. More importantly, they struggled to accept that Ling Tian's cultivation had improved so dramatically. It was understandable: Shi Meng and the others had finally gotten a chance to threaten Ling Tian, or at the very least see him take a fall, only to find that it had all been a bubble. Naturally, they found the outcome difficult to accept.
Still, Shi Meng and the others knew Ling Tian well. They also knew he would never stoop to lying about his cultivation. And since they knew what Ling Tian was capable of, they understood how powerful he would be if he had truly reached the point of breaking through to the Twenty-second Heaven. Even with so many powerful cultivators in their hands—including two cultivators at the middle stage of the Twenty-second Heaven of Near-Saint—they probably couldn't threaten him at all.
That was without even considering the traps Ling Tian had laid in advance. Shi Meng and the others knew how powerful his combined Myriad Sword Demon Extermination Grand Formation and Buddha Kingdom World formation were. With the help of such formations, he could probably handle cultivators at the late stage or even the peak of the Twenty-second Heaven with ease. In other words, even if Chi Xue and the others captured more cultivators at the late stage or peak of the Twenty-second Heaven, they still wouldn't be able to do anything to Ling Tian.
"From what we know of