An ultimate attribute Soul Saint at twenty-two.
Of course, that was only in theory. In practice, cultivation would only grow harder the further he progressed. Without other opportunities, relying on his own cultivation alone, it would be perfectly normal for Ye Qing to take until twenty-five to reach Soul Saint.
That was why he had asked so directly.
Nobody would turn down a faster cultivation speed.
At the mention of ultimate attributes, Mu En nodded gently. "You've reached the Soul Elder stage now. It's time you learned how to cultivate an ultimate attribute."
Hearing that Little Sunflower Prison Mu's classroom was finally in session, Ye Qing sat up straight, ready to lend a respectful ear.
Seeing that Ye Qing had grown serious, Mu En began slowly. "Over the past ten thousand years, there have been three Soul Masters with ultimate attributes: ultimate wind, ultimate wood, and ultimate fire. Every one of those powerful ultimate attribute wielders came from our Shrek Academy. Each time one appeared, they took our academy to new heights."
"That includes the ultimate fire senior from four thousand years ago. It was under his leadership that Shrek Academy and the three great empires shattered the Sun Moon Empire's wolfish ambitions."
"So naturally, our academy has preserved methods for cultivating ultimate attributes. The difficulty ultimate attribute Soul Masters face in cultivating soul power comes down to one word: compression. You need to compress your soul power ahead of time to ensure it is strong enough to sustain the consumption of your ultimate attribute."
Ultimate attributes were powerful precisely because their suppressive capabilities far exceeded those of Soul Masters at the same level. To ensure an ultimate attribute could exert its power, its wielder's soul power naturally had to be more condensed and substantial than that of their peers.
One could call it an inevitable connection.
Normally, starting at Soul Elder, an ultimate attribute Soul Master's cultivation was as difficult as that of an ordinary Soul Master two ranks higher.
In other words, an ultimate attribute Soul Elder faced the cultivation difficulty of a Soul King, while an ultimate attribute Soul Emperor faced that of a Soul Douluo.
Only after breaking through to Soul Saint would they regain a normal Soul Saint's cultivation speed and charge ahead to catch up. More importantly, from Soul Saint onward, ultimate attribute Soul Masters would encounter no further bottlenecks in their cultivation.
Even at worst, they could reach Level 95 Super Douluo.
That was the lower limit.
Unless they exhausted their potential prematurely, made a mess of their soul ring configuration, or suffered some grievous injury that could never heal.
As long as they cultivated normally, ultimate attribute Soul Masters were guaranteed to become Level 95 Super Douluos.
With somewhat better nurturing, reaching level 98 would be a breeze, and Level 99 would be no insurmountable mountain either.
That was the innate advantage of ultimate attributes, and what made them a T0-tier martial soul ability in the Peerless Tang Sect version.
Aside from the inherent strength of ultimate martial souls, the key reason ultimate attributes had no bottlenecks lay in that word: compression. This was not a matter of Soul Masters actively building a solid foundation. No matter how ordinary Soul Masters compressed their soul power, they could never match an ultimate attribute Soul Master at the same level.
Ordinary Soul Masters barely needed to compress anything before their soul power naturally broke through. The supposed practice of refusing to break through and endlessly compressing soul power did not actually exist.
Once your soul power level met the requirement, you simply broke through. It was like an experience bar in a game: you had no way to compress it. Each day's cultivation gave however much experience it gave, and once the bar filled, you broke through.
Soul Engineers were different. Their soul power did not come from normal cultivation, but from taking drugs. And the way people on the Douluo Continent refined medicinal power was crude and brutally simple. Clogged meridians and impure soul power were inevitable.
That had nothing to do with compressing soul power to build a solid foundation.
Building a solid foundation in the broader sense was more about thoroughly refining soul power into your own: taking power that did not belong to you, such as traces of a Soul Beast's aura in a soul ring or medicinal power left unrefined after taking drugs, and completely converting it into your own strength.
That was what building a solid foundation meant in the broader sense on the Douluo Continent.
The four-part Douluo series had never featured anyone actively compressing their soul power and spending longer at a particular stage to make their soul power more substantial than that of other Soul Masters at the same level.
There was no such thing.
What Mu En taught him, however, was precisely a way to actively compress his own soul power, turning the passive compression caused by an ultimate attribute into a process a Soul Master could consciously control for greater efficiency.
There was certainly a difference between active and passive.
Setting a basketball on the ground and letting it slowly roll down a steep slope under gravity and inertia would certainly be slower than giving it a kick.
The same principle applied to compressing soul power for an ultimate attribute. Consciously compressing soul power into the dense soul power of an ultimate attribute during cultivation would certainly be faster than absorbing the world's primal energy and then passively relying on the martial soul to compress it.
Ye Qing did not know whether this was the ultimate martial soul cultivation method Huo Yuhao had received, but there was probably little difference.
After all, he had never seen Huo Yuhao use any other cultivation method. He had used the Mysterious Heaven Skill from beginning to end. At most, he had started with a gutted version, then switched to a slightly less gutted version after leaving the Ice and Fire Yin Yang Well.
The cultivation method for an ultimate martial soul really was that simple.
Still, this technique was genuinely important. After listening to Mu En's instruction, he sat down on the ground and tried it himself.
First, he cultivated normally for an hour, then spent another hour cultivating with the ultimate attribute compression technique, comparing the two methods.
Ye Qing found that actively compressing his soul power really did improve his cultivation efficiency by nearly ten percent over passive compression.
It was roughly 13%-15%.
This way, even if he slowly cultivated with his own talent alone, without opportunities or outside assistance, he would probably be able to break through to Soul Saint at around twenty-two or twenty-three.
With the additional help of soul rings and soul bones, breaking through to Soul Saint before twenty would also be perfectly normal.
Every ultimate martial soul was uniquely blessed by nature. Its ability to withstand such an extreme attribute proved that the martial soul itself was absolutely off the charts in strength. Coupled with soul power quality far beyond that of others at the same level, fighting above one's level became as routine as an everyday meal.
By the time Ye Qing woke from cultivation, Mu En had quietly left.
Mu En had already taught him the cultivation method for an ultimate martial soul. The rest depended on his own cultivation.
From then on, aside from providing cultivation resources, Shrek would essentially no longer arrange any training plans for him.
At least, that was how things stood for now.
After all, Ye Qing was only around ten years old. Any further training arrangements would probably have to wait until he entered the Inner Court.
Before you continue