For any Taiyi Realm cultivator seeking to break through to Heavenly Venerable, purity was the key. Even those who followed the Ghost Dao had a chance to transcend that boundary and become a Heavenly Venerable of the Ghost Dao, provided their bodies possessed pure yin and pure baleful energy refined to a sufficient degree.
When the time came to break through to the Heavenly Venerable Realm, the most perilous trial on the path of cultivation would descend: an assault by an Extraterritorial Heavenly Demon born of one's own heart demon.
This fiend was intimately connected to the cultivator, usually springing from flaws in their state of mind. If they failed to overcome it, they would fall victim to the Extraterritorial Heavenly Demon, and millions of years of cultivation would come to nothing in a single day...
But defeating it meant overcoming their greatest flaw and making their state of mind whole. Only then could they successfully advance to the Heavenly Venerable Realm, fully break free of the shackles of lifespan, and no longer suffer the Three Calamities.
As for the legendary realm of Grand Heavenly Venerable, it involved the cycles of the Heavenly Dao and the countless threads of cause and effect hidden in the unseen. Success required enduring innumerable hardships and dangers, accumulating merit far and wide, and opening a new path of cultivation for the world.
Since the birth of primordial chaos, only a handful of individuals had ever reached that level.
Shen Luo rose and walked out of the cavern, then leaped to the top of Five-Finger Mountain's broken peak and sat cross-legged.
High above, winds rose and clouds surged. The clouds took on a strange form, arranging themselves in concentric rings as though opening a passage through the sky to usher something down into the Mortal