Cultivating Disciples to Breakthrough

Chapter 1422  Blacksmithing and Alchemy Competetion (1)

Arriving at the competition ground shortly after passing through the teleportation formation, Xuan Hao slowly took his seat among a few of the elders in charge of overseeing the competition. Taking the most honorable position to indicate his status to anyone who might be observing, while at the same time making sure to act properly like a senior figure of an ancient sect.

Luckily, using his divine sense to scan the area around the competition, he quickly discovered that the strongest person around had only reached the Dao Seed Realm. No one in the Celestial Immortal Realm or above had shown up to observe the competition and possibly gauge the strength of the Star Shattering Sect. Meaning that the worst-case scenario of having to try and potentially fool a Celestial Immortal Realm Ancestor from the Blue Sea empire didn't end up happening.

Of course, even with this, Xuan Hao didn't dare to relax, as he would still have to do his best to present himself as a senior figure faced with someone in the Dao Seed Realm.

The main difference compared to if he had to fool someone in the Celestial Immortal Realm was the fact that he could easily make them believe his strength to have reached the Celestial Immortal Realm or Profound Immortal Realm by using his Dao of Space at the Large Success Realm.

After all, from what he had seen during his encounter with the Celestial Immortal Realm Ancestor from the Blue Sea Empire in the past, even having reached the Peak of the Small Success Realm in the Dao of Space was considered an impressive feat for someone in the Celestial Immortal Realm, let alone someone with the ability to comprehend the Dao of Space to the Large Success Realm.

As long as information of his mastery over the Dao of Space reached the ears of the higher ups of the Blue Sea Empire, they would undoubtedly believe that the elder who had come to oversee the competition of the younger generation was someone who had at least reached the Celestial Immortal Realm, someone who would be qualified to be considered a true elder of an ancient hidden sect.

Thinking about this to himself, a slight smile could not stop itself from making its way onto his face as he looked out over the massive platform that had already been full prepared for the upcoming competition with all sorts of spiritual herbs and metals, along with furnaces and cauldrons.

Although the sect would lose a bit from providing all of these things for the competition considering that a large portion of the people participating were not from the sect, it was all to keep up the image of an ancient hidden sect.

Even though, I do wonder if it was necessary to include those few transcendent grade spiritual herbs…

Shaking his head as he unconsciously glanced towards a few spiritual herbs hidden inside the pile of spiritual herbs that had been neat placed on top of a large table in preparation for the alchemy part of the competition, Xuan Hao could not help feeling like it was a bit of a waste to have included transcendent grade spiritual herbs among the spiritual herbs that the participants would be able to choose from.

However, according to Elder Song, this was something important to keep up the image of the sect, as an ancient hidden sect wouldn't care about these few spiritual herbs and would instead just use them to try and test the younger generation, while at the same time giving those especially talented one a way to shine.

All things considered, after the decision to make the Star Shattering Sect appear as an ancient hidden sect, Elder Song was by far the one who had ended up working the hardest, as he had researched everything he could find about hidden ancient sects and their behaviors so the Star Shattering Sect could perfectly imitate them.

In a sense, it was also because of this that he was here today, as according to Elder Song, even though hidden ancient sect rarely appeared in the world, when they did start recruiting and held tournaments outside of the sect itself, there would always be a senior elder of the sect present.

Not only to oversee the safety and fairness of the competition itself, but more importantly also to try and scout new talent for the sect.

After all, for hidden ancient sects who emerged, their primary goal was to scout more talent and recruit new disciples.

Even a simple tournament would always be open to anyone who fit within certain talent and age requirements. Serving as a way for the sect to try and recruit more disciples and potential elders to join the sect.

In other words, it was not so much a competition, as it was a recruitment test for the sect to find more talented people to join the sect, thus requiring the presence of a senior member of the sect- Or in this case, Xuan Hao, who needed to oversee the situation and find new talents for the sect.

To make everything more believable to the people from the Blue Sea Empire or other powers who might have snuck in to observe the competition, Elder Song also made sure that everything would progress according to how ancient hidden sect normally conducted these kinds of competitions. Making sure that the sect would also recruit a few talents to join the sect during the competition.

Of course, at the end of the day, the Star Shattering Sect wouldn't really lose anything by doing something like this. Instead, it would only end up gaining more talented disciples.

The only problem with this kind of method to recruit disciples was the simple fact that the resources required were far too massive for the Star Shattering Sect to do something like this on a regular basis.

The sheer number of spiritual herbs and spiritual metals, along with the quality of them far surpassed what the Star Shattering Sect could use on a normal competition.

Only because the sect had recently managed to gain a lot of new resources through expanding the territory of the sect into the chaotic region that had developed at the fall of the Sky Empire, did it manage to gather enough high-quality resources to host one such competition without affecting the daily consumption and flow of resources throughout the sect itself.

With that in mind, it would be impossible to hold another such competition in the near future. Especially if the transcendent grade spiritual herbs hidden inside the pile spiritual herbs ended up being used, as the sect didn't really have a reliable way to gather spiritual herbs of that grade at the moment. Most of the ones the sect had having come from Xuan Hao's recent information trade with the ancestor from the Blue Sea Empire.

As for the reason why ancient hidden sects had so many resources even though they were closed off to the world and seemingly didn't expand their influence outside the small area that the sect itself was located inside? There wasn't really much information on the matter, though… Xuan Hao guessed that these ancient hidden sects were in control of several large secret realm and possible even entire mystic realm. Allowing them a steady flow of resources even without them expanding their territory outside of their sect itself.

In the future, Xuan Hao also wanted the Star Shattering Sect to create a few secret realms that could be solely used to cultivate things like spiritual herbs or become training grounds for the younger disciples, like the Mirage Sect had done with the mystic realm, but… The current Star Shattering Sect was still far from being able to do something like that.

Although it had the resources to create a secret realm, it wouldn't be that large and wouldn't really have much use compared to the resources that it would cost to create.

Even in an empire like the Sky Empire, the secret realms created by their peak forces weren't more than a few miles in size and only barely held the core of their training ground or the place where their ancestor resided.

A truly large secret realm required far more strength and resources to create and was simply not something that could be created by someone in the Domain Lord Realm or Soul Ascension Realm.

Even with his strength in the Late Stage of the Dao Domain Lord Realm along with his comprehension of the Dao of Space, Xuan Hao felt uncertain that he would even be capable of creating a secret realm the size of the first one he entered after crossing over to this world.

Then again, outside of creating a large secret realm at the start, it could also grow naturally in size over time, which was how some secret realms created by weaker cultivators could end up growing far beyond the size of secret realms created by far stronger cultivators…