Ren Qing did not choose to advance the Disaster-Dispelling Method on the open sea. Instead, he went ashore, found a relatively secluded sea cave, and cultivated there.
Whenever he came into contact with the Heavenly Dao, his soul would be dragged underground. He had no desire to pass through the Matchmaking Immortal's body and encounter some unforeseen danger.
He was even more nervous about advancing the Disaster-Dispelling Method than he had been for the Zhili Technique.
After all, the Disaster-Dispelling Method would very likely bring him face to face with the Primordial Heavenly Venerable for the third time. Moreover, this technique was connected to the one located within the Corpse Immortal's body.
Ren Qing paced back and forth inside the cave, yet his mind simply refused to calm down.
Left with no other choice, he repeatedly meditated on the technique, focusing his attention on himself rather than on the Three Dao Ancestors.
The preparations he had made for the Disaster-Dispelling Method were on par with those for Wuying Ghost. He intended to finish everything in the shortest possible time.
He organized all the information he had previously deduced over and over again until his heart finally became as still as an ancient well.
Only by advancing the Disaster-Dispelling Method to the Ascension Ladder could he make up for the shortcomings of his five techniques and accelerate the healing of the Heavenly Dao Crack.
[Advance to Ascension Ladder? This will consume 5,000 years of lifespan.]
He silently confirmed the choice and took a deep breath. Ghost Shadow completely enveloped the cave, preventing even the slightest trace of Ren Qing's aura from leaking out.
Although he could not see Wu Deceit, he could still sense its presence.
Faced with the imminent breakthrough, Wu Deceit became exceptionally restless. Had the Information Stream not forcibly suppressed it, it would likely have attempted to devour its master.
Fragments of memory surfaced in Ren Qing's mind, beginning with the creator's own life.
He had been born inside a dark, freezing prison cell, like a rat forgotten by the world. His birth mother had been executed beneath the guillotine at the execution grounds when he was only three years old.
She had died without ever giving him a name, making him truly a nameless person.
Nameless was imprisoned in the death row section. No one paid any attention to a child, allowing him to survive there without incident until he was over ten years old.
From Ren Qing's perspective, Nameless remained hidden in darkness the entire time.
No one knew his gender, nor could he speak. He survived on leftovers, spending every day silently observing the various death row prisoners.
"He definitely understood the world differently..."
Ren Qing felt that Nameless existed completely outside the human world. He never interacted with anyone, instead observing all living beings from an extraordinarily detached perspective.
Throughout his life, Nameless possessed only three things.
A handful of black mud that concealed his skin color, a fragment of the bronze mirror left behind by his mother, and a tattered book containing nothing but illustrations.
When Nameless reached fifteen, all the other prisoners were suddenly taken away.
Perhaps war had broken out outside and expendable soldiers were needed, or perhaps they were sent to build roads and bridges. The prison instantly became eerily empty.
Nameless hid himself perfectly, like a ghost that no one noticed.
Faced with the deserted death row block, he was at a loss. He spent every day staring blankly into the broken bronze mirror, and several more years passed before he realized it.
Eventually, new prisoners were brought into the prison. By then, Nameless no longer hid himself.
He slaughtered every prisoner. His thin body slipped through the iron bars and walked toward the prison gate where light shone through, as though he had finally begun accepting the world.
A large group of yamen constables surrounded him, yet Nameless merely continued walking in silence.
The bronze mirror shard pierced into his palm. Blood dripped from his fingertips onto the ground, slowly seeping into the soil, as though the shadows were greedily drinking it.
After taking merely five steps before falling into a trance, Nameless came into contact with the indescribable Dao Ancestor before the eyes of all the constables, creating Mirror Immortal.
It was not that Nameless possessed talent far beyond ordinary people. Ren Qing simply felt that his way of thinking had been pure to an extreme.
He wished to avoid all karma while simultaneously enjoying the observation of mankind.
People who reached such extremes indeed found it easier to touch the Heavenly Dao.
Whenever Nameless acted, it was always a killing blow. He exterminated everyone who knew of his existence, even disposing of every corpse within the prison.
The bodies were buried ten meters beneath the prison's blue bricks. No one ever learned what had happened.
Ren Qing watched Nameless use Mirror Immortal before hesitantly stepping out of the prison, calmly walking through the county yamen filled with constables as though no one else existed.
For Nameless, cultivating the perfectly compatible Mirror Immortal progressed at a speed beyond imagination. Only Ren Qing, with the Information Stream, could surpass him.
Then came the memories of the Disaster-Dispelling Method.
By then, Nameless had already reached at least the Ghost Envoy Realm. Using Mirror Immortal's illusions, he made himself completely impossible for the world to notice.
However, Ren Qing felt Nameless had become far too extreme.
As long as anyone discovered even the slightest trace he had left behind, he would kill them without hesitation. Eventually, he even refused to spare livestock and birds.
It was precisely because of this that Nameless created the Disaster-Dispelling Method, though he also completely descended into mutation and loss of control.
Even without using the Disaster-Dispelling Method, he no longer possessed any sense of existence. By the time he fully mastered it, both his body and soul had already lost all physical substance.
Finally came Storyteller.
After living in loneliness for more than a century, perhaps unable to bear the suffering of being known by no one, Nameless voluntarily followed an elderly Storyteller.
The old Storyteller was advanced in years, his eyesight failing him, so before every performance he would first read through the treasured book he always carried.
Nameless experienced the Storyteller's life by secretly altering the contents of that book.
Even after the old Storyteller died, Nameless tirelessly searched for new targets, leaving behind traces of himself in this peculiar fashion.
His obsession shifted from erasing his own existence to regaining it.
It was precisely because of this pure madness that he created three bizarre and unfathomable techniques. Even after becoming immortal, all he wanted was to return to the human world.
Ren Qing suspected Nameless had attempted to pass these techniques on to others, which was why the outside world contained instances.
Nameless's life had not been especially dramatic, yet it all felt perfectly reasonable. It was rather lamentable that he had ultimately become stuck at the Heavenly Aberration Realm.
Before Ren Qing could even finish sighing, the memories of the Disguise Technique entered his mind.
Its creator was known as the Hundred-Faced Young Master. The first half of his life had gone smoothly. Thanks to his handsome appearance, he married into a wealthy household and lived comfortably.
Then a great fire reduced his entire family to charred skeletons while leaving him severely burned.
The once handsome young man continued living off the wealthy family's farmland and estates, but his temperament gradually became twisted. Eventually, he developed an obsession with caisheng zhege.
He wanted to use caisheng zhege to obtain a new human skin, and soon put the idea into action, causing the number of tenant farmers on the estate to steadily dwindle.
Ren Qing was not surprised that the handsome young man had touched the Heavenly Dao and created the Disguise Technique.
However, after absorbing the experiences of so many cultivators, he inexplicably felt that in ancient times, enlightenment of the Heavenly Dao had been much easier than it was now.
He desperately wanted to ask whether the Heavenly Dao they had witnessed was the same indescribable horror that he himself had seen.
Longevous Tortoise's history was comparatively ordinary, since it had been a technique created by Ren Qing himself.
Ren Qing closed his eyes and waited.
Yet this time, several breaths passed without anything happening. His soul could not sense the Heavenly Dao at all.
Time slipped by rapidly, and anxiety slowly arose within him.
The last thing Ren Qing wanted was for the breakthrough to fail for no apparent reason. Even if there were no lasting consequences, healing the Heavenly Dao Crack would still become troublesome.
Suddenly, an extremely strange sensation emerged.
His heartbeat grew faster and faster. His face flushed red, as though an invisible hand were gripping his heart and squeezing it repeatedly.
"Without sect, without supreme."
A strange chant drifted in from outside the cave.
"Yet alone able to become the beginning of all things."
"Therefore named Primordial."
"Fortune and destiny, supreme over all."
"Forever abiding within the Two Purities."
"Emerging above all heavens."
"Therefore called Heavenly Venerable."
The moment Ren Qing realized it was the Primordial Heavenly Venerable, every impossible occurrence suddenly made sense. He stood up and walked out of the cave.
Several thousand Flood Merfolk stood upon the sea's surface, their expressions rigid as they called out to the Primordial Heavenly Venerable.
Though they had never learned any human language, they now mechanically repeated the chant over and over, creating an indescribably horrifying scene.
Soon, even the dragons joined in praising the Primordial Heavenly Venerable.
Fish after fish drifted with the waves, speaking in human voices filled with unimaginable reverence.
Ren Qing instinctively looked up.
The sun was gradually going dark.
As the light dimmed, a gigantic face covering the heavens appeared before him. Bubbles emerging from its flesh distorted light and shadow.
It was the Primordial Heavenly Venerable.
Ren Qing felt as though the entire world were about to split apart. Cracks spread across the enormous face as tens of thousands of bubbles emerged.
The constantly disassembling and recombining aggregate nearly replaced the sun itself, bathing heaven and earth in dazzling seven-colored radiance.
Mountains, forests, oceans... everything was simultaneously merging into one and scattering apart.
Ren Qing saw the Endless Forest changing. A leopard leaping through the air while hunting suddenly had its stomach burst out through its body. Flesh tore apart, and within moments it transformed into a spotted vine.
The dragons began shedding their scales, exposing flesh and bone. Their flowing blood boiled as bubbles floated upward toward the Primordial Heavenly Venerable in the sky.
Ren Qing knew this was probably an illusion, yet his body still could not avoid being affected.
He forcibly suppressed the urge to use his techniques. The power of Heavenly Aberration Realm techniques was far too terrifying and would very likely attract nearby factions.
Unable to control himself, Ren Qing fell to his knees. The sour liquid he vomited transformed into colorful butterflies before finally becoming blood-covered eyeballs.
The laws of the world had completely collapsed.
Everything was falling apart.
The title Primordial itself represented primordial qi, the very origin of existence. The indescribable entity replacing the Primordial Heavenly Venerable should logically represent the same concept.
Ren Qing recalled the contents of the Disaster-Dispelling Method.
His thoughts moved far faster than during the previous four times, to the point where his soul felt as though it were about to shatter.
The importance of the Information Stream became fully apparent. Otherwise, both his body and soul would certainly have fallen into mutation and loss of control, perhaps even completely descending into a Turbid Immortal.
He threw tens of thousands of bacterial souls into comprehending the Ascension Method.
In only half a breath, one complete Ascension Method had already taken shape.
This proved that confronting the nearly real Primordial Heavenly Venerable carried both advantages and disadvantages for Ren Qing.
Bang, bang, bang...
The bacterial souls could not withstand the pressure emanating from the Primordial Heavenly Venerable. They instantly scattered into nothingness, and even the disease seeds within the Mud Pellet Palace suffered severe damage.
[Kitchen God]
[Created by Ren Qing. Cultivation requires swallowing the leftover kitchen fire from a hundred households while leaving behind part of one's internal organs to cook dishes as gifts before it can be mastered.]
The Kitchen God can be cultivated up to Earth Immortal and may be cultivated alongside other techniques.
[Immortal Position: Kitchen God Lord]
Ren Qing found the Kitchen God Lord Immortal Position somewhat unexpected. It did not seem to fit the Disaster-Dispelling Method's nature, perhaps because of its core elements.
However, after giving it some thought, the Kitchen God truly could be considered omnipresent, and could also parasitize others through food.
It was simply still far from the Immortal Position Ren Qing had originally hoped for.