Before he knew it, Jiang Ding had reached the limit of the Nascent Soul Middle Stage.
He had encountered limits like this many times. By now, he could hardly have been more familiar with them.
As long as he had a cultivation inheritance, he still had no idea what a bottleneck or a barrier felt like.
"Time to break through."
Jiang Ding took one last, faintly nostalgic look at his Nascent Soul Middle Stage cultivation and spoke softly.
Within a thousand miles, the spiritual energy of heaven and earth and the essence of the great sun, which had already settled, surged toward him again like a tsunami. After being refined through layer upon layer of complex meridians, they became drops of azure mana from the Myriad Transformations Magnetic Origin Scripture, each tinged with a trace of blazing gold.
This was the influence of the Supreme Clarity Flying Sword's fundamental nature.
That trickle of mana entered his dantian, which had already reached its limit. It swelled slightly, sending a faint stabbing pain through him.
Then—
Crack!
With a crisp sound, hairline fractures appeared across the Nascent Soul Middle Stage bottleneck. They spread like a spiderweb, then shattered into countless motes of spiritual light that sank into his dantian and dissolved.
Nothing obstructed the mana in his dantian anymore. It poured past the two-thirds mark and flowed freely through the space beyond.
Jiang Ding's aura surged in that instant, nearly doubling!
In almost every realm, reaching the late stage brought a dramatic increase in strength over the stages before it. That was why cultivators of the same rank called such people "great cultivators" and treated them with respect.
Strength was the reason. A late-stage cultivator could fight a dozen or more opponents of the same rank alone without losing.
In a one-on-one