Cultivation begins with separation.

Chapter 317 Mist
The Vast Ocean Spirit Realm, the East Sea.

There is a place in the East China Sea that is shrouded in mist all year round.

These mists are formed by a natural array, possessing hallucinatory and hypnotic effects.

Apart from powerful beings like true dragons, ordinary beings cannot resist the mist.

This year.

Beyond this misty sea, countless large airships and floating islands are docked.

In the ocean, there are all sorts of enormous sea monsters, including sea turtles as big as islands, whales tens of thousands of meters long, and giant fish with some dragon-like features.

On those flying boats and islands, and on the backs of various monsters, stood many different intelligent races, among which were humans.

Billions of humans were distributed on the backs of sea beasts or on large flying ships.

Among humans, only a small number are cultivators; the majority are mortals.

The third deck of a seven-story airship utilizes space technology; this deck is essentially a vast plain dotted with densely packed high-rise buildings.

Each room was crowded with several to a dozen people.

Inside one of the rooms.

A little girl, covered in dirt and looking as if she hadn't bathed for over ten days, hugged her knees, shivering all over, and looked at the beautiful woman sitting on a long bench with pitiful eyes.

The little girl's name is Adong. She comes from a small tribe and was chosen by the tribe's shaman one day. After several transfers, she came to this place.

Adong was originally very cheerful. The several transfers did not make her worried. On the contrary, she gradually felt at ease because she could eat and stay warm.

This sense of security disappeared more than ten days ago.

Because she watched helplessly as the woman, whose appearance was as beautiful as a goddess from tribal legends, released several black unicorns that cruelly devoured the other people in the room bit by bit.

The scene was even more gruesome than the human sacrifices she had witnessed in the tribe. She could never forget the dying screams, and the horrific scene had deeply wounded her otherwise resilient spirit.

Adong had thought she would be eaten by the black unicorn, but to her surprise, the cruel woman had not released the black unicorn to eat her.

However, even though the woman didn't release the black unicorn to eat her, she would stare at her with strange eyes from time to time, making her tremble with fear.

This beautiful woman was none other than Yi Yan.

Yi Yan held the Great Thousand Mirror in her hand and fell into deep thought as she looked at the images in the mirror, which were divided into thousands of scenes.

How do the dragons select humans?

The selection criteria were not spiritual roots, bloodlines, or souls; I still can't figure out what these people have in common.

Apart from that, the other objectives have been largely achieved.

That old ice dragon, including myself, must have placed many pawns among various intelligent races. I've already cleared out most of the human ones.

I didn't intend to go this far, after all, the old ice dragon did help me in the first place, but those people were dishonest and actually tried to monitor me.

It seems the old ice dragon already knows what I did in the frozen polar regions.

Thinking about it, Yi Yan turned her gaze to the little girl not far away.

She came to this room specifically for this little girl.

As for the other people in the room, they were not pawns of the old ice dragon. The reason they died was simply because they looked at Yi Yan with strange eyes a few more times.

"The Hourglass of Time actually reacted to this person. It seems that I haven't completely refined the Hourglass of Time."

Or rather, if my current spiritual energy circuit cannot enter the hourglass of time, I will not be able to truly master this treasure.

Should they refine this child into a spirit, or make the Hourglass of Time recognize her as its master, thus indirectly using its power?

Yi Yan pondered the advantages and disadvantages of these two methods.

After much thought, I realized that the conditions for forging a weapon spirit were somewhat demanding.

To become the spirit of a supreme treasure, the child must at least become a cultivator, and may even need to cultivate to the Void Returning stage before their soul can be refined into the spirit of a supreme treasure. This process is not only time-consuming but also full of uncertainties.

To become the master of the Hourglass of Time, one only needs to be recognized by a treasure. Even a mortal can use their essence to slightly activate the treasure's power.

Even if the hourglass of time recognizes this person as its master, the other party would only be able to break free from its control if they had the help of other powerful individuals or cultivated to at least the Nascent Soul realm.

“Child, if you become my disciple, I will teach you cultivation. This is the Qi Refining stage cultivation method of the ‘Six Transformations of the Ice Dragon’. Take it and try it out.”

Yi Yan threw a thick book at the little girl.

But then she saw the little girl carefully take the martial arts manual, which was even larger than her body, her eyes filled with confusion, and then she cautiously said:
"I can't read."

Ok?
Yi Yan frowned. This was indeed a lack of consideration. She had gone out of her way to translate it into the child's minor language, only to find that the child could only speak it but not read or write it.

Yi Yan's Great Dao Golden Core contains Golden Core Cities with various functions, making it easy to impart knowledge.

However, the little girl's soul is very fragile, and if handled improperly, it may cause some irreparable damage to her soul.

Yi Yan didn't care about the child's life or death, but her spiritual root was an ice-attribute spiritual root, which was inherently inferior to the five-elemental heavenly spiritual root. Even with the addition of the ice-attribute spiritual body, her aptitude was not considered good, at least far inferior to her own.

If someone is already lacking in talent, and their soul is damaged, their comprehension will be further affected, rendering them useless.

Thinking it over, Yi Yan created a puppet with the ability to teach language within a Golden Core city. Then she released the puppet, whose body and head were magical artifact screens, and said, "You can learn to read from this puppet first."

For more than ten days in a row, Adong's learning progress was extremely slow.

This is understandable. Adong came from a small human tribe, and most of the tribe members were like savages, with little concept of writing. Not to mention, the writing that Yi Yan was having the puppet teach her was not her tribe's language, but the Dao script of the Immortal Kingdom.

The human race in the Vast Ocean Spirit Realm is not unified, and there are countless languages. The cultivation traditions of the human race are also ambiguous due to the differences in these languages, resulting in the human cultivators in the Vast Ocean Spirit Realm being generally weak.

Learning to write is already so difficult, let alone cultivating oneself.

The "Six Transformations of the Ice Dragon" that Yi Yan gave to A Dong was not an ordinary cultivation inheritance. It was derived from the first half of the "Nine Transformations of the Ice Dragon," the supreme inheritance of the dragon race, which she stole from the treasure vault of the old ice dragon.

That's right, the old ice dragon left its lair before Dragon Island was about to open.

Without the old ice dragon's deterrence, even though there were still a few real dragons in the Frozen Arctic, they couldn't make Yi Yan wary. So before coming here, Yi Yan couldn't help but sneak into the old ice dragon's treasure vault and loot everything inside.

"Nine Transformations of the Ice Dragon" is the Heavenly Book inheritance that Yi Yan obtained from the Dragon Clan.

Perhaps due to insufficient cultivation, Yi Yan could not see any text in the second half.

Of course, if the first half is analyzed, one can also cultivate to the point of returning to emptiness.

Yi Yan has only analyzed a small part of it, but it is enough for A Dong to cultivate to the Golden Core realm.

Adong studied very hard, but the results were hard to describe.

Fortunately, after Yi Yan became a Golden Core cultivator, she gained tens of thousands of years of lifespan, which greatly improved her patience. Even if A Dong spent several years learning, she didn't care.

this day.

Yi Yan suddenly looked up at the sky.

With starlight twinkling in her eyes, her gaze pierced through the airship's compartments, reaching the gale-force winds.

The gale-force winds began to churn like ocean waves, revealing huge passages.

Looking out from inside the passage, one can see a pitch-black void.

Soon, various kinds of energy lights appeared in the gale layer, and then many enormous black shadows appeared in the gale layer.

But one after another, real dragons returned from the void.

The oppressive aura of hundreds of true dragons caused towering waves to rise on the sea, and the powerful aura permeated the air, as if even the air itself had solidified.

That is to say, those sea monsters are generally of the fourth or fifth rank, and the flying boats and floating islands are protected by powerful formations.

Otherwise, the mere pressure from numerous true dragons would have been enough to kill many mortal beings.

As the true dragon descended from the void, countless dark figures emerged from the ocean, revealing themselves to be the true dragons of the Four Seas Dragon Palace.

Yi Yan dared not use her spiritual eye technique to look directly at those true dragons, and instead used the Great Thousand Mirror to observe them.

Soon, Yi Yan saw four exceptionally large true dragons.

A typical dragon is only a few thousand to ten thousand meters long.

The four dragons were astonishingly long, exceeding 30,000 meters.

It's obvious without even thinking that those four real dragons are the Four Dragon Kings of the Seas.

Yi Yan had seen the old ice dragon's true form; the old soldier dragon was only 20,000 meters long.

Looking at the four Dragon Kings, a look of solemnity appeared in Yi Yan's eyes.

If the Nine-Headed Dragon could control him, then the Four Sea Dragon Kings, who were even more powerful than the Nine-Headed Dragon, were clearly not someone he could deal with.

If they target you, your life or death is uncertain.

"However, I sensed the starlight left in the Nine-Headed Dragon's body in the Vast Ocean Spirit Realm a long time ago, so why hasn't it appeared yet?"
The old ice dragon has also disappeared.

Could it be that the Nine-Headed Dragon and the Old Ice Dragon have already entered the mist?

Yi Yan read about the history of the True Dragon Clan in the Vast Sea Spirit Realm while in the Frozen Polar Region. She learned that the Nine-Headed Dragon had once served as the guardian of Dragon Island, and that it itself had mutated on Dragon Island. It might really have a way to enter Dragon Island a little earlier.

"However, both the Nine-Headed Dragon and the Old Ice Dragon want me to retrieve the Dragon Transformation Pool. Is there something better on Dragon Island than the Dragon Transformation Pool that they would fight over?"

Just then, Yi Yan's heart stirred, and she looked towards the South China Sea.
"Mother opened the starlight channel, but how did she manage to set the coordinates to the South China Sea?"

Could this mist even distort starlight, causing my mother's perception to become distorted?

At this moment, Yi Yan dared not release star power fluctuations at will, lest she attract the attention of the true dragon, and could only temporarily ignore her mother.

At this moment, several true dragons were circling above the area where humans were gathered, releasing their divine senses to investigate something.

"Ninth Sister, are you really sure that human is here?"

“I’m quite certain that person’s presence is in this area, but I just can’t pinpoint the exact location.”

"Alright, let's look again."

One of these true dragons was Ao Luoshui.

(End of this chapter)