Dragon Canon

According to what he had learned in class, the criteria for an immortal artifact to acknowledge a master was more or less the same: fortune, cultivation level, bloodline ties, karma, and compatibility with one’s cultivation methods. Wei Yuan was aware that he probably didn’t meet a single one of these criteria except for fortune. Considering Qingming’s level of existence, he did not think that an Avatar Trueman could control it, and even a True Lord was only good enough to make an attempt. No, the only existence with a solid chance of success was an Immortal Lord.

After activating Qingming, Wei Yuan finally understood how difficult it was to obtain its approval. However, the discovery only made him scorn Yun Xihe even more.

The guy probably did not realize that he needed the immortal artifact’s approval to become its master from the start until the end. That was why he had toiled diligently as a physical deity for over fifty years until his primordial spirit was ultimately dissolved by the power of incense prayers.

Even if he managed to erode the Immortal Lord’s divine thought, Yun Xihe would never be able to convince Qingming to accept him as its master. Besides that, the entire reason the immortal had left behind a divine thought was to teach them the activation array and allow Qingming to seek out their fated one. This did not happen only because an accident happened during his demise, and the divine thought inherited the pain and madness he felt during his last moments instead, transforming what was an inheritance process into a death trap. By wiping out the divine thought, Yun Xihe was cutting off any chance someone might inherit the realm stone using the activation array.

The fact that Qingming had rejected him did not disappoint Wei Yuan. He wasn’t planning to become its master to begin with. He was just a minor, newly ascended Dao Foundation after all. What right did he have to own an immortal treasure like this? Not him, not Zhang Sheng, not even Trueman Fen Hai would be qualified to do so.

Qingming was probably the item Palace Lord Pei had been looking for. As long as he had this, Yun Feifei’s survival would no longer concern him. He could just leave her to live or die on her own terms.

Wei Yuan gently grabbed the realm stone and gave it a pull. He wanted to pull it out of the earth it was embedded in. But to his surprise, the surrounding earthly veins and spirit qi immediately reacted to the action. After a careful examination, he discovered that Qingming had become one with the earth since heavens-know-when. In other words, it had already taken root in this realm!

After some careful deliberation, Wei Yuan reckoned it was because Qingming had made contact with the ground for too long. Over the course of tens of thousands of years, it had slowly but surely taken root in this earth.

This discovery also answered many of his questions. For example, he wondered why the seventy to eighty thousand people living in the settlements surrounding Swelling Water God Palace looked surprisingly well off even though the tens of thousands of people living in Willow Ash Town were clearly tormented by the environment. To be exact, they were only a bit weaker than they would have been in the human realm. It was because Qingming had already been rooted in the earth. Even in its unactivated state, it already possessed the power to transform the environment and made it hospitable—albeit just barely—for humans.