Baili Jingxie and the others departed.
Although they had decided on what to do next, that did not mean they would head over immediately. There was still preparation to be done, personnel to be settled, and countless other issues to deal with.
The preparations for entering the Heavenly Court in particular—setting aside everything else, merely establishing a stronghold would take quite some time.
For cultivators, no matter what else a stronghold lacked, it would certainly have formations. It had to serve as a fortress: able to attack when advancing and defend when retreating. It was immensely important.
Setting up formations was not something that could be finished by tossing down a couple of stones and drawing a few lines. A great many things had to be prepared in advance.
The appropriate stone materials, as well as the crucial energy sources, all needed to be readied.
And of course, the stone materials here were not merely earth or ordinary rocks.
They were stones used to lay formations, bearing specific formation patterns. Cultivators deeply versed in earth-element formations had to spend considerable time crafting them.
At the pinnacle of this field was undoubtedly the Eternal Stone created by the Heavenly Court. It possessed the property of being almost impossible to wear down, and with formation patterns deeply engraved within it, it could establish a grand formation that even a Daluo realm cultivator would find difficult to breach in a short time.
Coupled with the inherent difficulty of conquering the Heavenly Court, this would undoubtedly be a hard-fought campaign that required a long time to complete. Not only could they not lack supplies of every kind, their logistics had to keep up as well.
The initial preparations alone would require at least one to two years.
The reason the Dao Sons of the