"'It' has been startled awake?"
On Cloud Summit Peak in the Spirit-Taming World, the Heaven-Tier Powerhouses also sensed that vast, primordial aura.
Apart from a small minority cultivated through Dao Unification by cultivators such as Fang Qianyuan, the wills of the Heavenly Dao were spirits of nature formed from the natural spirit essence and the wish power of countless beings within a world. In the understanding of Spirit Tamers, they belonged among divine spirits, and were innate deities of relatively high standing at that.
Divine spirits born under the influence of human affairs, brought forth by the projection of certain emotions or by logical thought, were known as acquired deities.
There was often no difference in cultivation or strength between the two, but their very foundations of existence and the roots of their attainment differed enormously.
Below these were the Immortal Kingdom Divine Officials invested with divinity by the Immortal Court, their true spirits bound and deprived of freedom, as well as the divine beings artificially created in the later era of Middle Antiquity. These were deities of an even lower order, and likewise belonged to the acquired category.
Their standing ranged from the highest, comparable to true immortals, to the lowest, mere mortals who had received enlightenment and gained a trace of divinity, with strength amounting to no more than Qi Refining or Foundation Establishment. The gulf between them was like that between heaven and earth.
Without question, the will of the Heavenly Dao in the Jianmu World was a spirit of nature of the former kind, spontaneously born within its native world and worthy of being called an innate deity.
It was not a sentient being. Even if it gave birth to a true spirit, it could never develop intelligence like plants, mountains, and stones that became spirits,