Sensing this, Qin Tian suddenly understood. Without realizing it, his attainments in the Formation Dao had come to rival those of the person who had laid out the formation. They stood at the same level.
Only then did Qin Tian understand what the scripture of an Emperor Dao Powerhouse truly meant.
Such a being stood at the pinnacle of the Human Dao, gazing up toward the Immortal Dao. Though their exposition of the Great Dao was ancient, and some of their views had already become common knowledge.
The people of today were not necessarily inferior to those of antiquity.
Cultivation advanced step by step, and the ages progressed little by little. Later generations stood on the shoulders of giants, surpassing their predecessors and reaching new conclusions. Principles once known only to sages and Great Emperors could, ten thousand years later, be clearly understood by ordinary cultivators.
But in some respects, ordinary people could never reach the level of a Great Emperor: their insights into cultivation would never become obsolete, no matter how much time passed.
They were geniuses, supreme powerhouses who stood at the very pinnacle of the Human Dao.
No matter how many ordinary people there were, they could hardly glimpse even a sliver of such beings' perspectives or thoughts. They were like peasants imagining an emperor's life as tilling fields with a golden hoe and eating flatbread for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
The scripture contained wisdom and knowledge that surpassed mortal understanding. Comprehending even the slightest fragment was enough to surpass the vast majority of living beings in the world.
Every reading brought new insights. New growth.
It contained merely tens of thousands of words, yet it expounded on the very roots of the Formation Dao with exhaustive clarity.
It allowed one to comprehend the essence of the Formation Dao and grasp "one," laying the firmest foundation for Qin Tian to master "two" and "three."
Such profound attainments inspired involuntary admiration and reverence. Those feelings only came to an abrupt end after Qin Tian met Duan De.
Although Cao Yusheng never did anything decent, his cultivation was still something to aspire to, Qin Tian thought.
During this time, Qin Tian also found a spare moment to take two fist-sized pieces of heterogeneous source and exchange them for two Saint-level scriptures, one for the Divine Bridge realm and one for the Other Shore realm, in case he needed them.
Just as Qin Tian had expected, this drew quite a few people's attention.
Whenever he descended into the mining tunnels, people would follow him and mine nearby, hoping to dig up heterogeneous source and earn a chance to enter the Scripture Repository.
Time flew by.
Three months had passed since Qin Tian obtained Cao Yusheng's formation inheritance. With the Enlightenment Tea Tree paper beside him, his mind remained clear and unclouded at all times, greatly increasing the speed at which he learned.
One day, after finishing a night of Formation Dao cultivation, Qin Tian shouldered his hoe and was about to head to work when he noticed a noisy crowd gathered nearby.
Curious, Qin Tian went over to take a look. It turned out that the Yaoguang Holy Land had posted a notice.
Standing behind the crowd, he channeled divine power into his eyes and read its contents word by word:
"Due to abnormal changes in the earth veins, the A-Class Mining Field will close in three months. The mining slaves will therefore be transferred to the D-Class Mining Area."
Qin Tian was somewhat surprised. "This place will be sealed in a couple of days?"
"We'll be transferred to other source mines, too." The old man who had tried to dissuade Qin Tian at the beginning looked a little lost.
He had arrived at the A-Class Mining Field at sixteen and was now nearly eighty. It could be said that the vast majority of his life had been closely tied to this mining area.
He had worked here his whole life. Suddenly being told to leave the A-Class Mining Field for somewhere else left him afraid of the future.
Qin Tian, however, was extraordinarily excited. He squeezed the words through clenched teeth: "The moment has finally arrived!"
Silver light flickered in his silver eyes. Once the decision to seal the source vein was finalized, the future changed with it. Timeline after timeline was pruned away, leaving only futures related to Vein Sealing.
"Not only am I leaving, I'm going to give them a huge surprise!" Flames burned in Qin Tian's eyes. Rationally speaking, slipping away quietly was the best option.
With his mastery of formations, he could cross the Yaoguang Mine's formation barriers without anyone noticing.
But that was not what Qin Tian wanted. Leaving like that would leave him bitterly unsatisfied.
The rage he had accumulated was on the verge of burning him into madness.
Three years of slavery had not made him bow and scrape or worn away his spirit. Instead, the fire within him had only burned fiercer, almost becoming an obsession.
No, it was an obsession. Unless he turned this place upside down, his heart would find no peace and his thoughts no release, hindering his future path of cultivation.
"Vein Sealing... sealing the vein with a formation. Perhaps I can make use of that," Qin Tian murmured, undying hatred and fury in his eyes.
As its name suggested, Vein Sealing meant sealing a source vein to leave it for future mining.
Only after coming to the world of Shrouding the Heavens had Qin Tian learned that source was actually a renewable resource. In essence, it was nothing more than condensed earth essence.
The Big Dipper, formed from a Chaos Physique, was a "living" planet, constantly breathing in and out the essence of the universe. "Source" was the Big Dipper's life essence, its blood.
Cultivators were people who stole the Big Dipper's blood to evolve.
From that perspective, the saying that Heaven nurtured humanity with all things, while humanity had nothing to repay Heaven, was entirely true.
The earth veins waxed and waned, completing a cycle every ten thousand years.
Source stone was born from the earth veins and was, in fact, a renewable resource. It was just that each renewal required more than ten thousand years to replenish it fully.
Vein Sealing was a method of accelerating the accumulation of energy within the earth veins to produce source.
Formations were used to block the circulation of energy through the earth veins, retaining a portion of the earth's essence so that it could accumulate, settle, and ultimately form what was called "source."
The formations within source veins were laid by Saints. Only Saints, whose bodies were small worlds unto themselves, could bind the veins of heaven and earth.
Otherwise, no matter how vast the Big Dipper was, after a million years of nonstop excavation by a host of holy lands, it should have been hollowed out.
Qin Tian knew nothing about the other mining areas, but in the Yaoguang Holy Land's source mines, a source vein was sealed every thousand years. Ten veins formed a group, with each mined for a thousand years, making a complete ten-thousand-year cycle.
After ten thousand years, the earth veins finished accumulating essence and were opened again. The previously exhausted "source" would have fully regenerated.
In fact, given the Big Dipper's sheer scale, its source veins should not have needed ten thousand years to recover.
Unfortunately, the holy lands were not the only ones doing this. Quite the opposite: the share they occupied was merely a tiny fraction.
The entire Big Dipper was one vast formation, like a living creature, constantly breathing energy in and out.
It drew energy from the void to supply the living beings of the Big Dipper. That energy flowed between the dragon veins, distributed throughout the Five Regions and Eight Desolations.
Some spilled out of the earth veins, flowing between heaven and earth for people to cultivate.
Another portion was stored within the dragon veins, wandering through the earth veins and giving rise to all manner of treasures.
Yet the energy that settled within these dragon veins, the energy that supplied the world's cultivation, accounted for an extremely small proportion.
It was merely a few scraps, the leftovers from the cosmic energy the Big Dipper breathed in on its own.
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