In the slow passage of time, another five hundred years went by.
That day, thunder rolled without cease over the Netherbright Realm. One Void Refining tribulation after another descended, and dark clouds blanketed the sky.
Jiang Ding stood with his hands behind his back, gazing quietly at the heavens. No one knew what he was thinking.
Those facing the tribulations were Dinghai and the others.
Whether they ascended or died would be decided today.
If they succeeded, they would enter a new realm and gain thirty thousand years of life. If they failed, everything they had lived through would become memories, left behind in the minds of others.
"Sword Lord,"
Radiant Inheritance reported from beside him, "after nearly a thousand years of cultivation, several Nascent Soul prospects have emerged. They have some chance of surviving the Immortal Sect's ascension and immigration tribulation and becoming Immortal Sect Citizens."
"These prospects all have the potential to reach Void Refining. Their military merit and moral character are excellent."
He had poured his heart into the work. He wanted Immortal Sect Citizens who felt close to Netherbright Sword Grotto-Heaven—cultivators who would remain loyal citizens while also caring for the grotto-heaven.
These ascended immigrants from Netherbright Sword Grotto-Heaven, together with the Taiyin-Sun citizen sword cultivators raised within the Immortal Sect over the past thousand years, would carry on the Taiyin-Sun inheritance.
It was an excellent, well-established path, suited to many Daoist partners among the Immortal Sect Citizens. It could not be ignored.
Whoever walked it, the patriarch's Taiyin-Sun inheritance would live on.
In truth, if bloodline alone mattered, few cultivators in Netherbright Sword Grotto-Heaven today carried blood from the Upper Realm, apart from the first-generation patriarch.
Immortal cultivators did not care about that. Bodies were only shells.
Only an inheritance endured forever.
"You've done well."