In short, the second step of legendary cultivation was essentially "Transforming the Ancient into the Present": allowing a present-day Legendary to occupy the position of an ancient cultivator and replace them—for example, the principal of First University. Historians traced his origins and discovered that he had lived for a very, very long time, and that during the Spring and Autumn Period, he had taken seventy-two disciples in Lu Territory.
Whether he and Confucius were one person or two, no one knew the truth anymore.
The only certainty was that they had now been unified beneath a single concept.
The Master.
Some wizards with higher moral standards believed that this act of actively hunting down ancient people and usurping their nests was steeped in malice, so they called mid-stage legendary cultivation "Cultivating Malicious Intent." But another group of wizards believed that during the process of attachment, the wizard and the person they attached themselves to actually shared nearly identical fates and experiences. They had been one entity from the start.
This debate, involving changes in identity over time and the definition of "sameness," had endured throughout the Alliance. High-level Wizards discussed the path of legendary cultivation, while Low-level Wizards encountered only the concept of the Ship of Theseus.
Thus, more neutral wizards in the Alliance now preferred more objective terms such as "Cultivating Past Self" and "Cultivating Self" to describe this stage of cultivation.
By the third step, the late stage of Legend, the direction of cultivation was actually the same as in the middle stage.
One still followed the River of Destiny and continued tracing back, constantly pursuing ever more ancient history. Once a mid-stage Legendary had "annexed" the fates of two or more ancient people, extending the mark of their existence within the River of Time two stages upstream,