The Beginning of the Rift

"No, no, no!" Gazing at the scene before him, which looked like Asura Hell, the young man struggled to his feet. He was covered in wounds, too, all of them caused by the desperate final strike of Li Yuan, the Jade Pool female disciple. Dazed, he looked at the Sharp Sword in his hand.

The sword was unchanged, but the man holding it was not.

His name was Hai Ding, the son of a Saint elder of the Mysterious Yellow Holy Land. He came from an extremely illustrious family. Perhaps others envied his background, but it was precisely the source of his greatest pain.

As the saying went, dragons sired dragons and phoenixes sired phoenixes. As the child of a Saint, he was born to surpass others and become a peerless prodigy. But unfortunately, he was nothing of the sort. He wasn't merely untalented—he was an astounding failure.

His father, Elder Hai, doted on him. From childhood, he had sought out all kinds of Heavenly Materials and Earthly Treasures and miraculous medicines to build Hai Ding's Dao Foundation and cleanse his physique. He had even gone to incredible lengths to obtain one of the few ancient Quasi-Emperor scriptures kept by the Mysterious Yellow Holy Land for him to cultivate.

Anyone else given such treatment would have reached the Immortal Platform Realm long ago, become a mighty cultivator, or even Severed the Dao and become a king.

But after thirty years of struggle, Hai Ding had achieved only one ten-thousandth of the results despite receiving a hundred times the resources. His cultivation had remained stuck at the Four Extremes Realm. He hadn't even reached the Dragon Transformation Realm, much less the Immortal Platform Realm.

For a time, he had been utterly despairing. Perhaps he truly wasn't cut out to cultivate the