Another spring arrived.
All things stirred from their winter slumber, and the earth's qi surged.
Xuanming was startled awake from seclusion.
He rose and walked out of the Path-Seeking Abbey, gazing into the distance at seven locations on Floating Cloud Mountain: towering peaks, deep ravines, blazing volcanoes, and lush forests.
Seven waves of breakthrough energy rose from those seven places.
They came from Xuanxu and the other six True Persons, who had successfully condensed their Golden Cores.
Lightly stroking his beard, Xuanming waited patiently.
This was only the beginning.
The next instant, the Golden Cores rose into the sky.
They resembled seven little suns. Then their golden light vanished, replaced by other radiance—mysterious yellow, emerald green, or shadowy darkness. Different choices yielded different colors.
Each Golden Core merged with a region, and the seven regions interwove, covering all of Floating Cloud Mountain.
Xuanxu and the other six True Persons appeared.
The aura around each of them fluctuated violently.
It lost a measure of ethereal lightness and gained a measure of weight.
Their presence climbed steadily, stopping only when their Golden Cores transformed into Sacred Embryos. Most importantly, Xuanxu and the others gained an aura that seemed to promise lifespans equal to heaven and earth, as enduring as the sun and moon.
Of course, that was only an illusion.
Even so, their lifespans were astonishingly long, several times those of ordinary Sacred Embryo cultivators and at least a thousand years.
"The Earth Immortal Path... has succeeded!"
Xuanming stroked his beard and smiled.
Now Xuanxu and the other six True Persons had become the first Earth Immortals in the world. When the Earth Immortal Path spread in the future, they would reap boundless benefits as its pioneers and founding ancestors, with vast Dao Paths ahead of them.
The Sacred Embryo was by