Grand Ancestral Bloodlines

'Interesting...'

Ryu spun the jade on his finger, his mind churning. His thoughts shifted from the overview of the technique, down to where the pitfalls might be.

The first and most obvious was in the method to fuse Spiritual Quintessence and qi. Unfortunately for the Martial Gods, the secrets of the Three Souls and Seven Spirits was already revealed to Ryu, so he knew what was written down here was a large pile of nonsense.

It spoke about taking Spiritual Quintessence, pouring it into your surroundings in a sphere, forming it and molding it, before trying to "cultivate" it through the nose and mouth as though it was normal qi.

Trying to do such a thing would be asking for minor fractures to accumulate along your soul over long periods of time.

'Usual injuries to the soul were meaningless for one with the Perfect Blackbody,' Ryu mused, 'I had even split my soul completely in two before in the past and had ended up just fine. However, that didn't mean that there weren't any injuries that could permanently harm my soul.'

'In this case, forming a link between my Soul Quintessence and my Meridians sounded nice... until one remembered that the Chaotic Silk Meridians were literally connected to Chaos.'

'The soul was one of the ultimate forms of Order,' he continued in his thoughts. 'It represented the core of life itself and without it, there wouldn't be life or reincarnation at all. To provide a perfect feed between it and the Chaos Plane would be like committing suicide through a thousand cuts.'

Though Ryu spoke of it as though it was the most obvious pitfall of this technique, in reality, it was probably the most sinister of the lot. You wouldn't even realize what the problem was initially, and even if you did, you might assume that it was like any other injury that you could weather, maybe even thinking that this sort of special technique that put so much pressure on the soul was something only someone with a Perfect Blackbody could withstand.

'By the time you realized that you were too naive,' he thought grimly, 'your Perfect Blackbody would lose all its elasticity and talent, and your path of cultivation would be finished.'

This was just the first flaw that Ryu found on his own, there were bound to be others. And unfortunately for the Martial Gods, Ryu had the guidance of the Heavens to lean back upon.

'Although the path the Heavens laid out for me wasn't exactly like this, and it was lacking enough that I had to come find these techniques in the first place, that didn't mean that they were useless.'

'In fact, by cross-referencing certain tidbits here and there, I could more easily pick out the flaws.'

In just an hour, he had actually found more than a dozen. He couldn't help but laugh to himself.

'These so-called Martial Gods are truly the bottom of the barrel. I can't wait for the day I wipe you all off the map...'

Despite the laughter hanging from his lips, the darkness in Ryu's gaze painted a completely different story.

After another half-day, Ryu found absolutely nothing else, so he was more than 90% certain there weren't any other flaws to find. But he didn't dare to say for certain.

Even so, he had no plans of cultivating the technique outright. He, too, only needed it for reference, and if anything, finding more flaws didn't harm him. In fact, the parts of the technique that contained flaws were like neon signs pointing toward the most important aspects of them.

'It's ready now...' Ryu thought. 'Now, let's take a step back and really understand what's going on here...'

'This path was cut off from me because my Beyond Perfect Extreme Spiritual Foundation isn't in my dantian as it should be, but rather located in my Realm Heart. To make matters worse, the Realm Heart is supposed to be an Incarnation of Order, but because of my Spiritual Foundation's presence, it has become an Incarnation of Chaos instead, further distancing it from this path...'

When Ryu battled Valerius just now, he had made use of Transcended Control, but what he hadn't revealed was his Chaotic Transcended Control. While he was laying the cards everyone else knew about on the table, he hadn't felt a need to reveal things they wouldn't know about just yet.

But these variables also happened to be things that were holding him back as well.

'So, because my Spiritual Foundation is separated from my body by so many layers, it makes it difficult for it to affect the same change as well...'

There was another problem, too. A dantian was a hidden world of a cultivator, much like one's Spiritual Sea. It was an intimate connection between yourself and it was the only place your Spiritual Foundation could connect to you.

'But my Realm Heart isn't exactly the same. Sure, it has a connection with me, but it isn't nearly as intimate. In fact, my body sees it as a foreign entity and my Spiritual Foundation doesn't have perfect and unmitigated control over it. There's even a potential future path out there, albeit slim and unlikely, where this Realm Heart would awaken to itself and suddenly turn against me.'

This was the barrier Ryu was facing right now.

'While my dantian was occupied by the Spiritual Foundation of another, my original Spiritual Foundation was practically a world away and unable to help me to the extremes it was meant to be able to.'

'So in that case... how could I fix that? Or, maybe the idea of fixing it was inappropriate...'

'How could I take advantage of this new situation the same way the Martial Gods had taken advantage of the potential first situation?'

'Innovation...' Ryu thought softly, his mind mulling things over. 'Let's try something first, then?'

Ryu pulled at his Cosmos Fog, pouring it toward his Realm Heart.

He wondered... if the Realm Heart was just too separate from him...

Why not make it an inseparable part instead?