Although most of them had not yet successfully Entered the Dao, if they continued to cultivate at this pace, it wouldn’t be long before they developed some real combat strength.
To make the Divine Shadow Guard’s existence more justifiable and to avoid attracting the attention of the tribe or the outside world, Man Yu replicated her mask eleven times. She gave these masks to all the other members, having them all wear one to sever all contact with the outside world.
It was just as the name she had chosen implied.
From the day of its creation, the Divine Shadow Guard was destined to become the shadows flanking their God. Without his command, they might go their entire lives without a chance to display their strength.
The emergence of the Divine Shadow Guard quickly led them to take over the duties of the original Divine Envoys and the Divine Guard Team. They became responsible for patrolling and guarding the vicinity of the Temple, while also conveying the tribe’s will to the Guardian God and delivering the Guardian God’s divine edicts to the tribe.
...
Of course, none of this was the most important thing to Li Chang’an.
What mattered most was that throughout the Divine Shadow Guard’s training, Li Chang’an was using their cultivation to deduce a Martial Dao path suitable for himself.
For now, the Incense and Candle Divine Dao allowed him to progress at a blistering pace.
Some time ago, he had successfully achieved his Transformed Form and fully stepped into the Dao Realm.
Yet, the more Li Chang’an cultivated, the more he realized he didn’t much care for the Incense and Candle Divine Dao. It relied purely on an external power granted by heaven and earth.
The speed of cultivation was fast, to be sure, but the limitations were just as significant.
It was just as his Rebirth Mark had warned when he was first Entering the Dao: once you cultivated the Incense and Candle Divine Dao, your fate was no longer controlled by you, but by your craving for Incense.
After all, who could refuse a boost to their cultivation speed of several times over, or even nearly tenfold?
With enough Incense, a follower of the Incense and Candle Divine Dao could achieve in a single year a breakthrough that might take cultivators on other paths a decade to attain.
What a terrifying rate of advancement!
But the question was, if their supply of Incense was cut off, what would become of a Cultivator of the Incense and Candle Divine Dao?
Moreover, while the amount of Incense in this world was vast, it was still a finite resource.
If you took more, others would have less.
Besides, no matter how much Incense one gathered, even if they cultivated to the absolute peak, they would likely be no match for the Divine Spirits of the Celestial Realm.
After all, the Divine Spirits controlled all living beings in the world; the number of their followers and the amount of Incense they commanded were far beyond what any latecomer could hope to match...
In other words, if they relied solely on the Incense and Candle Divine Dao, all the Cultivators in this world would likely end up as Puppets for the Divine Spirits of the Celestial Realm.
They might even end up worse than Puppets. After cultivating to a certain point, they could be captured and fed to some great horror, becoming mere fodder for its sustenance.
It was precisely because the Incense and Candle Divine Dao was so insidious that Li Chang’an felt an even greater need to cultivate with caution.
After all, if such an excellent cultivation path truly existed, then Cultivators who achieved godhood through Incense should have been common in the other worlds he had visited.
In reality, while the Incense and Candle Godhood Path had been viable in the worlds Li Chang’an had visited, very few people walked it. Most only used it to supplement their cultivation; almost no one relied on Incense for their entire journey from beginning to end.
Only in this current world was the Power of Incense so frighteningly potent.
The world was filled with Guardian Gods cultivating the Path of Incense and Fire, leading to endless conflict as countless beings slaughtered one another over a handful of believers and small plots of land.
In Li Chang’an’s eyes, this was by no means a normal world order.
However, his strength was currently too low for him to grasp the deeper reasons behind it all. He only knew that he could not allow himself to be manipulated by Incense.
Initially, he had only entered the Incense and Candle Divine Dao because he’d had no other choice. When he first came into being, he was merely a rock with no Spirituality, leaving him with no other path to take.
But now, everything was different.
Not only had he successfully achieved his Transformed Form and gained mobility, but he also now controlled a small piece of land and its population.
Furthermore, by training Man Yu, he had gained a preliminary grasp of the secrets and essence of how Martial Dao cultivation worked for the humans of this world.
Although the method Man Yu practiced was a Martial Dao Cultivation Method that Li Chang’an had developed based on the human bodies of this world, he himself was unable to practice it.
But all of this served as the foundation for him to one day Defy Fate.
The difference between having this foundation and not was as vast as heaven and earth.
Li Chang’an was a stone. Even though that stone had successfully achieved its Transformed Form, this still didn’t change the fact that he was a stone.
A stone body and a human body are fundamentally different.
For this reason, if Li Chang’an wanted to cultivate the Martial Dao, he had to deduce a new path for it, one suitable for a stone to practice.
To this end, he planned to use the cultivation progress of Man Yu and the others, in combination with the characteristics of his own body, to conduct the necessary deductions and research.
This world severely suppressed any cultivation path besides the Incense and Candle Divine Dao. If not for the backing of his Heaven-defying Comprehension talent, Li Chang’an would not have dared to make such a reckless attempt.
...
For Li Chang’an, a Guardian God, time was perhaps his most abundant resource. Fifty years passed in what felt like the blink of an eye, as if he had merely awoken from a deep sleep.
「Fusang Calendar, Year 17,074. Li Chang’an was now one thousand six hundred years old.」