Everlasting Years: For Shi Zhidao, Defender of Jinling, on His Birthday
Song dynasty: Xin Qiji
Autumn grass along the border walls brought word again that all was well. At the feast, a hero's bearing shone. An air of strength rose from walls of metal and moats of boiling water; pearls and jade fell thick amid talk and laughter. Spring drew near-could plum blossoms, like this man, resist growing old?
Do not begrudge emptying the golden cup. The phoenix edict would soon arrive. The lands east of the river were too small to keep you here. At ease, you would enter the command tent and set heaven and earth in order. For hundreds, thousands of years to come, all your service would be reckoned in the Central Secretariat.
From Attuned Form to Embracing the Spirit, from Zhitong to Guarding the One, then from Mind Bearing to Wuzhang, followed by Wandering the Wilds and Sea-Breaking, all the way to Heavenly Access: these were the successive realms of the Green Mountain Sect. For Zhao Layue, Zhuo Rusui, and the names that appeared so often in this story, it was a natural process that looked exceedingly simple. In truth, it was anything but.
Cultivation was an exceedingly difficult undertaking. Each realm would stop roughly half the cultivators, and advancing from Zhitong to Sea-Breaking required five Realm Breakthroughs. A simple calculation showed that those who reached that stage truly were one in a thousand.
Some cultivators lacked talent but possessed extraordinarily strong wills, hoping to endure their way across that threshold with the passing years. The problem was, with an insufficient cultivation realm, how many years could they have?
Thus, most cultivators determined early on that ascension had nothing to do with them, then determined that they would stagnate in a certain realm,