Chen Xun smiled, planted an axe into the ground, and gazed toward the distant Immortal Ridge. "Old Bull, the age of these Crane Spirit Trees is quite particular too. We must choose the moment when they flourish to their peak and then begin to decline. We'll also need to cultivate them further with Essence of All Things."
"Moo." Black Bull sniffed around everywhere.
They had studied this long ago. A Crane Spirit Tree had to reach the point of flourishing to its peak and then declining before it would cease absorbing heaven-and-earth spiritual qi, allowing it to be buried underground and evolve with the passage of time.
Yet Crane Spirit Trees in the Great World basically had no period of flourishing and then declining. Their lifespan increased with the concentration of spiritual qi, never with the passage of years. Chen Xun and Black Bull had learned this back when they were in the Five Aggregates Sect of the Domain.
And the next step after flourishing to the peak and declining was the birth of Heaven-and-Earth Death Qi!
In the previous generation of the Three Thousand Great Worlds, the Great Thousand World, during the Age of Universal Silence, Crane Spirit Trees had flourished with Heaven-and-Earth Death Qi and destroyed the world, sinking into deathly stillness as heaven and earth entered their next cycle...
But heaven and earth, and this era, were still nowhere near that stage. Heaven-and-Earth Death Qi could only be seen within the destructive laws of the Ancient Immortal Forbidden Grounds. Not even the Primordial Ancient Crane Spirit Tree possessed it.
The spiritual qi concentration of the Great World could never allow a Crane Spirit Tree to produce Death Qi after merely a hundred thousand years. Whatever the greater environment was like, that was the kind of spirit tree