【Year 1. One by one, you review the Dao-merging methods you mastered long ago. Following Yue Tianji's hints, you bring out the Blue Sky Method again and try to suppress the wisp of Divine Peak True Intent inside you】

As the working-through began, demon lifespan drained away fast.

Shen Yi sat cross-legged in the quiet cave estate, and his whole form grew faint and drifting again, as if it had melted into everything around him. Even the smallest movement of aura was within his grasp.

This was the power of a Dao-merging Numinous method. It all but went beyond techniques and came closer to the realm of a domain.

With Yue Tianji's help, Shen Yi soon fused the Blue Sky and Peak-Suppressing Methods together and bore down on the Divine Peak True Intent inside him.

A Numinous method and a Rare method were crushing it from both sides, and vast demon lifespan kept flooding in. Soon the wisp of Divine Peak True Intent flickered like a candle about to go out.

But just as the True Intent was about to scatter, Shen Yi noticed something wrong.

To him it seemed only a little while had passed, but in truth every change inside him came from nearly a thousand years of hard cultivation on the panel.

Through those long ages beneath the bleak blue sky, the True Intent shrank from a high mountain to a mound, then to a hard lump of rock. In the end, one mote of dust was all that remained.

Here, the change stopped dead.

However well Shen Yi knew the method, and however strong his realm became, that grain of dust never went out.

"……" Shen Yi was silent for a long time. Then he suddenly stopped pouring in lifespan. "Are you sure you're right?"

"I—" All of Yue Tianji's certainty was suddenly gone from its voice. Its master had followed its teaching to the letter, and not one step had been wrong. Yet the working-through would not budge even half a step.

Yet it still found the idea a little absurd. "Surely you don't mean…