Afterward, Zhao Cheng turned his gaze toward the court.
Twenty years after Great New's founding, those who had followed him from the beginning were now in their thirties, nearly forty if they had been young then; those a little older were already approaching fifty.
As for Li Tonghai, he was already past sixty. Though he had taken good care of himself and consumed no shortage of pills refined by Daoists, he had still grown old.
More importantly, having followed Yellow Heaven's army from an early time, drifting from place to place, had damaged his vital essence. No matter how much he ate, that loss could never truly be replenished.
Even if the Dao Nation were forged, only a handful of people would achieve immortality. Everyone else would still have to journey to New Heaven World.
This was a cycle: the gifted of the mortal world struggled across the human realm, gained divine ranks, and ascended to heaven. Meanwhile, those gifted in heaven, once they cultivated to a certain realm, could reincarnate into the mortal world to temper themselves, ultimately ascending once their merits were fulfilled.
Between heaven and earth, a cycle was thus constructed.
Only when it formed a cycle could such a Dao Nation possess vitality.
Those in the mortal realm could gain higher divine ranks by building the Dao Nation, thus receiving a higher starting point when they ascended to heaven. Those in heaven, descending to the earth, could climb to still greater heights by building the Dao Nation.
If one day, the Dao Nation on earth and the Dao Nation in heaven both reached their peaks, Zhao Cheng too would arrive at an unfathomable realm.
As Zhao Cheng looked upon the scene below, he felt a faint sense of awakening in his heart.
He recalled his days