Cultivation

## Realms

Possessing XianTian energy and stepping into the XianTian realm were altogether two different matters. A master at the XianTian realm would definitely possess XianTian energy, but a person with XianTian energy might not be in the XianTian realm! While Ling Tian’s skills had long reached the realm of Saints, his cultivation could only be considered to be at the extreme peak of HouTian, one step away from the XianTian realm.

The cultivation realms of martial arts were very mysterious, similar to Buddhist Arhat enlightenment. In Ling Tian’s words, either you understood it or you didn't. If you thought you understood it, then you did. If you didn't understand it, then no matter how much it was explained, you still wouldn't understand it!

While all these comprehension levels sounded abstruse and mysterious, the truth was that one would discover a new level of existence each time after they had broken into the next realm.

The true XianTian realm brought with it another benefit, which was to greatly heighten the sensitivity of a person’s six senses. This was what the Arhats termed the ‘heavenly eye’. In fact, this was just a state where one developed an ability to scrutinize the most minute details of what they sensed around them!

 HouTian Realm
 Xiantian Realm
 Cyclic Pill/Saint Realm

## Martial Arts

There aren’t many praiseworthy martial arts in today’s world. Let’s use the Heavenly Star Continent as an example. In the aristocratic families, only the Yu Family has a complete heritage! However, authentic martial arts capabilities are usually indistinguishable by mere numbers or grades. Every school, sect or family has their own unique form of cultivation and also different method to develop internal energy. Some focus on cultivating strength, others battle tactics. Some develop their mental states, while others focus on agility and subtlety. How could one assign them a ranking as though they were officials in an Imperial Court? If one were to force it, they will only end up being a joke.
For example, let’s talk about the NanGong Family’s ‘Sword God Manual’. If we were to compare between normal disciples, their exquisite movements would rank first amongst the great families. However, if we were to factor in the disciples with internal strength, then their disciples would be relegated to the back. However, this does not mean that their manual is not up to standard, but rather the fact that they have never focused on internal strength, placing importance on their movements instead. There was once a couple of NanGong disciples who went about comparing notes with the other great families. Though they were always suppressed, the final victor would always be the NanGong disciples, who were firm and unwavering in killing! This is something that cannot be ranked!

In the same breath, if a peerless expert were to let down their guard at the wrong moment, he could still die from the hands of someone far inferior to him. Thus, to the pugilistic community, there was no such thing as rankings that could separate them. The only way was to separate between external and internal martial practitioners, as well as XianTian and HouTian internal energy. All we can conclude is that XianTian practitioners have more endurance as well as better skills as compared to those of the HouTian realm. But this is not an absolute, because if one’s method is outstanding enough, he could make up any deficiencies, and thus in martial arts, there are no definite superior martial artists.
Athough the martial community had never explicitly categorised each and every martial art, every great family as well as the sects have aligned themselves in a sequence for management purposes. They have a separate ranking for every house’s martial skills, but it only focuses on internal energy, and they were ranked based on the realm one can reach with that cultivation method. Though internal energy realms have a huge relation with one’s prowess, this is never definite.

For the evaluation of the various cultivation ranks of the great families, every house has their own standards. But in Ye QingChen's opinion, the standards given by the Yu Family of Northern Wei is still the most accurate.

The Yu Family’s evaluation is based on a count of five colours of jades: black, blue, purple, white and gold. However, Ye QingChen's eyes, those in the black and blue jade series are deemed useless, only good for people with shallow backgrounds. Above those, from the purple jade level onwards, they are further divided into lower, middle and upper tiers. From purple jade onwards, one can be said to have officially stepped into the ranks of internal strength practitioners. If one is able to achieve a ranking of white jade, most likely, the person should have achieved the peak of HouTian realm. Reaching the white jade middle tier would represent stepping into the XianTian realm! A white jade upper tier would mean small success of XianTian. As for the gold jade stage, it is reserved for the true XianTian experts. They would usually be masters of a generation. Even the Yu Family might not have a person at the gold jade upper tier.

## Martial Arts Realms

The so-called martial arts can actually be split into four different realms. The common people are ignorant and think that a mere boxing routine or swinging their swords around can be considered the study of martial arts. However, they are extremely wrong!

If one strengthens his body with martial arts and is capable of displaying a few boxing routines to become a street entertainer, that is the 'Martial Technique' realm. It is just a technique for people to earn their living and can barely be considered martial arts. That is the most shallow form of boxing and isn't anything special. When facing an opponent, if their opponent was an ordinary individual, it wouldn't matter much. But if they were to face a person who has truly cultivated proper martial arts, it would be useless. It is only good for entertaining people and putting up a show and can be said to be the lowest form of martial arts.

The second category is the 'Martial Skill' realm. The eighteen martial weapons can be considered within it and someone who has trained to the second realm can enter the battlefield to kill their enemies. In other words, only the second realm of Martial Skill onwards has the ability to cause fatal damage. However, it can only amount to so much and even if one can be proficient in all eighteen weapons, he wouldn't be considered much!

As for the third category, it is the 'Martial Learning' realm. It includes the martial techniques that the men from the pugilistic world use. Martial arts is a type of science and one has to use his whole life to explore and research it. Only when one reaches such a realm would he be able to compare martial arts as a scholarly art. In the world today, there probably aren't many who have achieved such a realm.

Only those who enter the XianTian realm can be barely considered to be part of the Martial Learning realm. As for the others, there isn't even a need to talk about them.

However, the highest realm of martial arts is called the 'Martial Way'! The way of martial arts! This is a realm that one can only look at but not attain! Of the millions of martial arts practitioners in the world, it would be rare to see even a single person attain this realm! The Martial Way realm emphasizes becoming one with the world. Perhaps one wouldn't be capable of moving the mountains and controlling the oceans, but he would be able to take a peek into the heavenly ways!

The so-called martial way could only be considered having started when a person has reached the XianTian stage. In the XianTian stage, it can also be roughly divided into 4 categories, namely: Cultivating essence into energy, smelting energy into spirit, refining the spirit back to Void, and melding the void into the Way itself. Right now, Ling Tian had successfully broken through the stage of cultivating essence into energy and had stepped into smelting energy into spirit.

## History

A millennia ago, all under the heavens were embroiled in a vicious war. Out of the three great continents, there were a few exceptional people, each with their own ambition to rule the world! At that period of time, martial arts cultivators appeared in succession without ceasing, and between continents, empires, sects, and even individuals, the struggle for dominance never ceased. Peace was a foreign word! Every day was filled with bloodshed and corpses littered the ground. Finally, under the lead of three heroes that appeared from each continent, they managed to unify each continent. However, no one would have thought that this unification would be the start of a worldwide calamity!

The heart is never satisfied, after conquering a continent, the three heroes each set their sights on monopolising the heavens! As such, between the three continents, they started with probing attacks, and escalated until they finally ripped off all masks of pretence and launched all out wars with each other. Continents warring against each other, how often do you see such a scene? Originally, when the empires were warring, the various sects could still remain unruffled. But when the entire continent was threatened, they could no longer hold back! Each sect took their stance with a continent and sent their disciples to the battlefield, or to assassinate the various generals of the camps. Some even chose to wage war with another sect! In this scenario, the world was covered with blood, the flames of war hiding the sky and covering the earth!

Towards the end, those in the martial circles could no longer accept the losses of their men inside the ceaseless killing and decided to collaborate together. The Heavenly Wind Continent came out with this combined alliance named ‘Outside Heavens’ as a sect, which united all the sects under the Heavenly Wind Continent under one banner. Under this huge coalition, they had no opponents and crushed all the individual sects of the other continents just like snapping dried twigs.

Witnessing this scenario, the other two continents, of course, did not want to be outdone and immediately imitated the Heavenly Wind Continent. The Heavenly Sun Continent came out with the ‘Above Heavens’ Sect and our Heavenly Star Continent came out with ‘Beyond Heavens’ as our alliance name. As such, all the martial artists in the three continents congregated under these three banners, even those reclusive experts. As such, the curtains to a grand and majestic stage setting, for the likes of an unprecedented and never to be repeated rain of blood, was opened!

The three sides never stopped engaging in skirmishes and people were dying every other day. Enmities grew deeper and more irreconcilable. At the same time, the expedition of the three continents grew more and more intense. Originally there were still cases of two sides joining forces against one party, but after the alliances were formed, it was a case of every side for their own. In the war of the combined forces, the number of citizens for every country lessened drastically and many of the flourishing and bustling lands actually turned into soulless places without a shadow of a person to be seen! Eventually, the chiefs of the three continents realised that if they were to continue duking it out, the entire world’s population would eventually die out. Thus, after communicating with each other, they came to a consensus of sending out their full forces to have one last battle in the sea! One battle to decide everything, the victors would be crowned kings, while the losers vilified!

Once this news spread out, the entire world was shocked! However, for those of the martial way in the three continents, their hatred had already reached an extreme state, where they could not live under the same sky any longer! Those who were weaker had long perished and even more than half of those unrivalled experts had already died in the continuous war! After the three continents published this news, the rest of the martial artists were unwilling to be outdone and agreed to a fight to the death! The location was set to be at Heavenly Wind Continent, on some random mountain, with the timing similar to the deciding battle of the continents! However, their definition of victory was different; the winners would live, while the losers would give their lives! A life and death battle, no one stops until the rest are dead!

On that day, the three great sects of each continent each employed a total of twenty thousand people from the scattered sects for the life and death battle. Surprisingly, none of them chose to shirk their responsibilities and arranged themselves on the mountain neatly! The head of the Outside Heavens Sect, Meng KaiTian, was the host. But before he even had the chance to finish his opening speech, those cultivators, upon seeing their mortal enemies, had already turned red with anger, rushing forward to begin a heaven shaking bloody murder!

In the space used for the final battle, surprisingly, no one ran from the location, all fighting to their death! The fog of war surrounded the wretched place, shrouding it from the entire heavens. A grand total of seven days and nights were used in this desperate and bitter war and for those of the Heavenly Sun Continent as well as from the Above Heavens Sect, all seven thousand of them lost their lives in there! This included people who had achieved the realm of Saints. Even the sect leader of the Above Heaven Sect, Yin JueKong, who had broken through from the apex of the XianTian realm was left on that very mountain!

In the end, those who were left no longer had the manpower nor resources to continue, and those still alive did not even have the strength to lift their fingers. The battle came to an impasse and had to be postponed, for those that were still alive barely numbered over a thousand! They consisted of Outside Heavens Sect’s leader, as well as two protectors, a few scattered members of various sects, and the Beyond Heavens Sect leader Sun ZhengYang with nine others; all with major injuries! They were destined never to recover their peak cultivations.

Facing this tragic sight that looked like a scene from hell, the two leaders burst into tears of grief! They beat themselves up due to guilt and swore, with the mountain of corpses as witnesses, that both of their sects would from then on never take part in any mortal battles. They then commanded all the other sects in the pugilistic world to never seek revenge! From then on, unless they had something of importance, all martial sects were to keep themselves secluded from the ordinary citizens! The mountain which involved the final battle was then renamed as mountain of no hatred, to symbolize that everyone who walked down the mountain no longer bore any grudges in their hearts!

In the return journey, tens of the heavily injured martial practitioners left their mortal frames. Only after half a year of returning to Heavenly Star Continent did the news of the battle at the sea come. Over ten thousand men had ended in mutual destruction in the battle of the three continents and, out of those alive, there were no generals nor marshals left! The blood spilled had turned the entire surrounding sea red, without being diluted for the next few months. Corpses were piled to the point they formed a land mass on their own. After this, the location was renamed as the sea of bloody spirits! The three continents were never able to recover from this setback.

The next few decades were spent in peace, as every continent slowly recovered. People with talent appeared once again, each occupying positions of power. Centuries passed, and every continent rose from the ashes, ready for another round of power shuffling. However, the difference this time was that no one from any of the martial sects took part, and this only involved internal power struggles within each continent. Thus, it was still relatively peaceful.

Those cultivators who returned from the mountain of no hatred, after returning to their own sects, set down a will to be passed down the moment they returned. It stated that all their children and grandchildren would never be allowed to take part in the wars of the empires and can never involve themselves in any political battles! They were to live in seclusion, living lives as ordinary people. Were they to disobey these instructions, they would receive punishment from the heavens!

However, amongst these few martial sects and families, there were two powers that had their major characters all killed by the other party. Thus, their hatred was irreconcilable and without any chance of compromise. Even though the Outside Heavens Sect of the Heavenly Wind, as well as the Beyond Heavens Sect of the Heavenly Star stepped in to mediate, they were unable to reach a consensus!

Left without a choice, the two super sects could only set some rules: The two families were not allowed to take part in any personal duels. But once every sixty years, the two families would deploy 10 representatives for a battle and the defeated would have to provide gifts to the younger generation of the victors. As for those involved in the battle, their life and death would be decided by the heavens and no one would be allowed to take revenge in secret, or rile up trouble! If any of the rules were flouted, the Outside Heavens and Beyond Heavens Sect would both join hands together and level both families to the ground, letting them disappear into history! For the past millennia, both families have followed this agreement, which is why this place is a lot more peaceful!

The two houses are the Yu Family, residing in Northern Wei Empire of Heavenly Star Continent, as well as the millennia old martial family at Heavenly Wind Continent, the Shui Family, nicknamed ‘Water of Heavenly Wind’! In the past, they were known as such: ‘Water of Heavenly Wind, Jade of Heavenly Star. When water meets jade, none shall escape!’ When this sentence was created, there was no one unaware nor did anyone not understand the meaning!

Due to the ferocious battle a millennium ago, which resulted in a huge loss in the constitution of martial arts of the three great continents. Close to 70% or 80% of the top-class skills and manuals have become extinct because of that, never to resurface amongst mankind!

## Trivia

* The advantage of a XianTian physique was the fact that so long as the user didn't fully exhaust themselves, they would recover in a short time. However, when things reached an extreme, they could only move in an opposite direction.
* if martial artist were to exhaust all the energy in his body he would enter a dangerous situation, as even a kid would be able to beat him up! This was similar to a billionaire who did not bring along any spare cash, and was unable to purchase anything on the streets! Furthermore, since martial artists put more emphasis on burst strength, the moment they drained all their energy, this would mean that all the muscles in their body would not have even the slightest bit of energy left to move! Ordinary people would meet a scenario known as 'energy depletion', but a martial artist's scenario was known as 'devoid of energy'! Both could not be explained in the same breadth, as an ordinary person's energy depletion could be recovered in two or three days, but once the martial artist became devoid of energy, if not handled properly, he might end up crippled forever!
* However high your cultivation might be, you would never be able to strengthen the eyes!
* Even for a martial expert, they were in the end still human, and would not be able to continuously keep their bodies levitating off the ground.
* In the eight Great Families, the weaker families may not even have a single XianTian expert, such as the NanGong, XiMen, and Yang Families. It can be seen just how rare a XianTian expert is. However, the Yu Family was actually able to produce nineteen XianTian experts! While it can't be said that there are as many XianTian experts as cabbages in the Yu Family, it wasn't too far off.

## References

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Chapter 189
2. ↑ Chapter 138
3. ↑ Chapter 353
4. ↑ Chapter 376
5. ↑ Chapter 136
6. ↑ Chapter 37
7. ↑ Chapter 319
8. ↑ Chapter 373
9. ↑ Chapter 402
10. ↑ Chapter 441
11. ↑ Chapter 455