Wei Huan's intense concern for those surviving disciples stirred a jumble of emotions in Fang Qianyuan.
What he saw now was a seasoned expert, worldly and experienced, but also one who had been subdued by sects and aristocratic clans, bound by the affairs of the mortal world.
"Since the Dharma-Ending Age descended, immortality has vanished from the world. Cultivation and the pursuit of the Dao dissolve like bubbles into nothing..."
For no apparent reason, those words flashed through Fang Qianyuan's mind.
In the First Year of the Dharma-Ending Era, a surviving ancient cultivator of the Dharma Dao had roared those words in grief and defiance as his enemies surrounded and killed him.
His plight had been so desolate that others felt his anguish as their own. Thus, even ten thousand years later, his words were still passed down.
Since the world held no path to immortality, only sects and aristocratic clans could perpetuate traditions and bloodlines, achieving a kind of immortality by other means.
Such things had been peripheral at the height of the immortal Dao, but as that Dao collapsed, they gradually grew important.
The closer one drew to mortal life, the harder it became to escape the constraints of ritual, law, and established order.
This was the decline of cultivation.
What exactly are you fighting for?
Fang Qianyuan silently ordered Little White to dodge and leap aside, while inwardly pondering the question.
Now, at last, he began to understand what Wei Huan had said earlier.
An expert was not simply a warrior, but a representative forged from the gathered elite of an entire power. His connections, resources, reserves, and capabilities were all part of his strength.
A clash between experts was, in truth, a war between two great powers and two traditions. That was why victory and defeat