"Gnaw?"
The saints exchanged bewildered glances, unsure what he meant.
"You misheard, fellow Daoists," Lin Xian said without a change in expression. "I said hardship. When Heaven is about to entrust a man with a great responsibility, it must first torment his heart and will, toil his sinews and bones, starve his flesh, empty his resources, and thwart his endeavors. Only then can he become a vessel of greatness!"
"Every bit of my cultivation today came from my own painstaking efforts, accumulated little by little."
Had Ye Fan been there, he would surely have spat in disgust. Having spent day and night with Lin Xian, he knew all too well who had actually suffered.
But the saints knew nothing of that. Judging him by their own experiences, they recalled the hardships on their paths to sainthood and praised him in turn. "Fellow Daoist Lin is absolutely right. Throughout history, those who became saints endured a thousand tribulations and ten thousand trials, washing away worldly adornment before attaining their accomplishment."
The Saint Domain Barrier was a natural obstacle, not something that talent or bloodline alone could carry one across.
Countless King Bodies had been trapped firmly in the Severing-the-Dao King realm.
The so-called Great Accomplished God Kings of the Eastern Wasteland were the classic example. Living off their physiques and relying on ancestral bloodlines to suppress the mortal world was the safeguard that allowed great families to maintain their footing.
Physique determined the lower limit; talent determined the upper limit.
But to advance another step into the saint domain, one had to create one's own techniques, methods, and Dao, becoming a founding patriarch, an Ancestral King!
The word "ancestral" said it all. Blindly learning from predecessors could never lead to sainthood, because at Severing the Dao, the body-as-seed system had theoretically