The hallmark of early Spirit Transformation was mastering an origin Dao fruit; advancing to the middle stage meant attaining a dharma body.
After reaching Spirit Transformation, very few could bypass the early stage and attain a dharma body in a single leap.
Li Ling had possessed extraordinary talent back then, achieving soul projection while still in the Qi Refining Realm and attaining a Yang Spirit early on. Thus, after advancing to Nascent Soul, he had swiftly passed the two great thresholds of dharma form and Yang Spirit, encountering almost no bottlenecks.
But after reaching Spirit Transformation, even a single minor stage had consumed nearly half his life.
He had advanced to Spirit Transformation at six hundred and thirty. Before he knew it, nearly another five hundred years had passed.
"Thinking of it that way, advancing and breaking through... was actually rather simple. It merely took time and effort, with no room for shortcuts in any of the work."
Li Ling could not help reflecting that he had spent far too much time and energy on this slow, grinding work. For nearly five hundred years, he had done little but sort through incense essences and sever avatars from himself to purify the power of the laws he possessed.
Other mighty cultivators had surely encountered similar problems. This was not something they could resolve simply by incorporating fewer laws as they cultivated and advanced. Their innate dispositions were already complex enough that they had no choice but to sort them out anew after reaching Spirit Transformation.
His core Dao fruit now lay in the Incense Ancestor Origin, which could evolve myriad fragrances. His three great powers of law were feathering, transformation, and transmutation, while the first dharma body he had the greatest hope of attaining was the Xiyi Dharma Body, corresponding to