"Hide it in famed mountains, pass it down to posterity!"
"In the Age of Declining Dharma, immortality was no more. Yet who would have thought that even the way Dao lineages were passed down would be utterly transformed?"
"The elders and sages of the Supreme Heaven Sect exhausted their ingenuity, planning and laying their groundwork for tens of thousands of years. Yet one wrong step led to another, until the final outcome was beyond even their ability to foresee."
Fang Qianyuan soon pieced together the causes and consequences, and sighed wistfully.
In many legends of fortuitous encounters involving rogue cultivators, the elders and sages of the past were placed on an exalted, unassailable pedestal. Their cultivation, strength, the depth of their Dao legacies, and even their ingenuity and methods far surpassed those of people today.
When people today stumbled upon ancient ruins or cave abodes through some stroke of fortune, they were like pieces entering a chessboard, destined to be manipulated.
There was nothing inherently wrong with that view. As far as Fang Qianyuan knew, most of those who had left Dao legacies in ancient times, arranging trials and inheritances, had been accomplished Dao Realm cultivators of their era.
In even more distant ages, such figures would have held standing comparable to immortals. Naturally, nothing they arranged could be overcome by mortals.
Yet later generations also had their own cultivation methods, which, owing to historical changes, were even better suited to this Age of Dharma Decline.
An outstanding figure such as Grand Elder Tian Heng, for instance, might have been run ragged by the mechanisms and restrictions within a ruin when he was still weak. But as times changed, he could look back and discern numerous clues, or even revisit those old places and devise ways to investigate them.
Furthermore,