It had to be said that obtaining the Heart Mantra came with one enormous benefit: it allowed one to comprehend the Dao heart.
Ye Tian had painstakingly cultivated mental arts for so long that he naturally understood the benefits of a Dao heart.
In the past, he had thought that one's state of mind was the Dao heart. He had believed that after being tempered by the vicious formation, his Dao heart must be quite formidable. Only later did he learn that unwavering resolve and a Dao heart were fundamentally not the same thing.
The difference was difficult to explain, but in cultivation it was plain at a glance. At present, he spent ten shichen each day cultivating mental arts, while the rest was spent tempering Sword Qi and taking brief rests.
Yet of those ten shichen of lonely, dull, unbearable hard cultivation, seven or eight had to be spent consolidating his previous realm. Otherwise, his cultivation would regress. Those with powerful Dao hearts, however, needed to spend very little time to maintain their realm without decline.
As he understood it, cultivation was like rowing upstream: if one did not advance, one fell back. But some rowed against the waters of a brook, while others rowed against mighty rivers—the difference was beyond words.
Some were even favored children of heaven. They were not rowing upstream at all. Even if their thoughts wavered, distracting thoughts rose in swarms, and they neglected cultivation, their realm would not decline. Before his very eyes stood one such peerless genius: the headless master.
Headless had once complained to him that this was precisely why he had been forced into becoming a monk. His master's eye had truly been sharp. Even if this master had no desire to cultivate, his cultivation was only a notch below