The sun rose and set, and in the blink of an eye, three days had passed. A silver moon hung in the sky.
At the center of the island, atop the enormous, hill-like crown of the tree, Ye Jingtang sat cross-legged with his eyes closed. Wisps of white mist rose from his head, and his posture was exactly the same as when he had first climbed up.
The little branch beside him, however, had been stripped bare by his eating, leaving only two green fruits hanging at its tip.
For martial artists, deducing the Dragon-Mingling Diagram was not particularly difficult in principle. The difficulty lay entirely in making no mistakes.
The process roughly involved using the pathways of the existing Dragon-Mingling Diagrams to deduce the course of the next diagram, then circulating the technique to test it once the thinking was done.
If the deduction was correct, circulating the technique naturally caused no trouble. But the slightest error meant a different way to die for everyone.
What Ye Jingtang was doing now was even more difficult. He had stepped straight outside the framework of the Dragon-Mingling Diagram, using it only as a reference to construct an entirely new technique better suited to himself.
The advantage of this method was that he built every pathway himself from beginning to end, understanding its principles and purpose, so there would absolutely be no unexpected errors.
The drawback was that it demanded extremely high comprehension, putting it utterly beyond ordinary people. It also consumed far too much time and mental effort. Even with the Longevity Tree nurturing his mind, the process was very slow, and it was limited by his own insights.
Ye Jingtang had only just reached the threshold of the eighth diagram, so the technique he tailored for himself could naturally reach