The old man lowered his head and looked at his own hands. They were blurry as mist, yet a dim crimson light shone clearly from his fingertips.
"Everything this old man accumulated over hundreds of thousands of years in sword dao comprehension—"
"From the most basic sword-gripping posture to the highest Heaven and Earth Sword Intent—I swallowed it all in one gulp, then used sword intent to burn it from the inside out."
"Burn it from the inside?"
Hearing this, a flicker of surprise flashed through Ye Lin's eyes.
"That's right."
The old man spoke lightly, as if discussing some trivial everyday matter.
"I treated all that comprehension as firewood and burned it away."
"New sword essence needs a new sword dao to drive it. Old comprehension was no longer enough; keeping it would only make it dead weight."
"This old man lit a fire within his own spiritual platform and let it burn for three full years."
"For those three years, my head split with pain every day. My cultivation rose and fell like a roller coaster; sometimes even a first-layer Quasi-Saint cultivator could beat this old man flat."
As he said this, the corner of his mouth twitched, revealing an expression Ye Lin could not fully make out—something between pain and reminiscence.
"But after those three years of burning, the bottleneck shattered."
"That fire refined this old man's sword essence by more than tenfold. New sword dao comprehension grew from the ashes, three layers deeper than the old."
"This old man burned away his old self over those three years and traded it for a new, stronger self."
"Senior means that... sometimes the greatest enemy on the path of cultivation is not an external obstacle, but the old things within oneself that one cannot bear to discard?"
Ye