But how could the might of a True Immortal be withstood by a single Immortal Ascension Tribulation?
In the end, their Senior Disciple Brother still perished at the old immortal's hands.
Yet after that battle, the old immortal seemed to change overnight, returning to his former attitude toward his disciples. He no longer harbored any designs on Jun Qian and Ni Yue, and even passed on to them his unique secret method for nurturing immortal seedlings.
Ni Yue believed that their master had finally come to his senses after Senior Disciple Brother's death, but Jun Qian sensed something amiss.
This experience of teetering between life and death also completed a transformation of his Dao heart.
He did not believe the old immortal had reined himself in at the edge of a cliff. It seemed more like a reluctant concession forced upon him.
After several centuries of continued verification, he finally discovered the clues and deduced that the root of the divine ability affliction lay in karmic debt, rather than in the divine abilities themselves.
When the old immortal first began devouring his disciples, it had been a case of a desperate man grasping at straws when he could not wait for immortal seedlings. What he did was no different from drinking poison to quench thirst.
Though it could temporarily stabilize his affliction, the karmic debt at its root continued to accumulate.
And Senior Disciple Brother's final act of using his body to shake an immortal had raised that karmic debt to a critical threshold.
If the old immortal continued acting this way, only death awaited him.
It was not that he did not want to devour Jun Qian and Ni Yue, but that he could no longer do so.
That was precisely why he behaved so abnormally. He became ever