Some setting notes.
This was a Xianxia novel wearing a Digimon skin. The protagonist, Zheng Fan, came from Mount Buzhou, the sacred land of the Human Race.
In the most ancient era, there was only chaos and the beings within it. After a great war, chaos shattered and became clear heaven and turbid earth. This was Pangu's creation of heaven and earth.
The war continued afterward. Clear heaven shattered into light, darkness, wind, and lightning. Turbid earth broke into metal, wood, water, fire, and earth. Light, darkness, wind, lightning, metal, wood, water, fire, and earth were the nine extremes. A Treasure Vault reinforced with the nine extremes could store anything in existence.
The nine extremes continued to shatter into smaller pieces, eventually becoming countless motes of dust. In the age of chaos, all living beings were invincible. In the age of the nine extremes, reaching the end of a single path also made one invincible. When there were three thousand paths, reaching the end of one path allowed one to manifest. But when there were countless motes of dust, reaching the end of a single path merely qualified one to cultivate. The Periodic Table of Elements represented only a tiny fraction of those countless motes.
A great war broke out in ancient times. Every race and powerhouse capable of fighting joined in, and countless top powerhouses were killed or wounded. Nuwa dug blood mud from the very center of the battlefield, mixed it with the survivors' sorrowful tears, and created the Human Race. This was why humans had the most heavily mixed bloodlines, making all sorts of strange talents and constitutions possible. Living beings also kept crawling out of the seas of blood around the battlefield's edges. Their bloodlines were relatively purer than those of humans.
From then on, the