The verification's failure left Luo Qiuzhen without making any moves for a while, and gave Ning Ye a rare stretch of leisure.
Seizing this rare gap, Ning Ye diligently cultivated. Luo Qiuzhen had forced his hand—without the support of Black and White Divine Palace, Luo Qiuzhen's greatest problem was that he could only act in secret. He could not afford to provoke any target with real strength; one only had to see how he did not even dare question Chi Wanning, Yang Ziqiu, and the others.
Since you bullied the weak and feared the strong, I could only make myself stronger.
With the pills supplied by Xuan Mulang and Wang Sen, his progress was swift. Before the year was up, he successfully advanced to the fourth layer. He had even taken up the Tianji cultivation method again, though his progress in it was far slower than with Black and White Divine Palace's methods.
On the day he advanced, Zhang Liekuang came to see Ning Ye. After examining his cultivation, he tossed out a single remark—"You haven't slacked off"—then left on his own. He was irresponsible to the extreme. As for his talk of testing Ning Ye's loyalty within a year, he had probably forgotten it himself.
Ning Ye was more than happy with that.
He understood Zhang Liekuang's mindset well. Zhang Liekuang was no different from most cultivators: single-mindedly pursuing the Dao of immortality, treating strength as the sole foundation.
No scheme, in the end, was as satisfying or practical as crushing someone with sheer strength.
There was nothing fundamentally wrong with that.
If the gap between Ning Ye and Black and White Divine Palace had not been so enormous, why would he not have wanted to crush them with strength?
So-called wisdom and clever stratagems were, in the end,