What is the Yang God?
The Yang God has form and substance, capable of transforming from the void to reality, and from reality to the void.
What is the Primordial Spirit?
The spirit roams beyond the physical body, transcending spatial limitations. The body remains still, yet the mind can traverse the Greater and Lesser Moons in an instant.
Without a doubt, compared to directly shattering the Core and forming an Infant, cultivating the Primordial Spirit fruition, and transitioning from the Yin God to the Yang God, then to the Primordial Spirit, this process, though more complex, is step-by-step and significantly safer.
Regrettably, even through this safe procedure, the Primordial Spirit School has been unable to forge a path to achieving the Primordial Spirit. The so-called path of the Taiyin Wuji, Taiyang Wuji, and the convergence of Yin and Yang to form the Primordial Spirit and attain the immortal fruition has not seen a single Core Condensation realm cultivator truly succeed.
Let alone the Primordial Spirit, even the Yang God, a state where one can depart the body for thousands of miles, enjoy the moon and flowers, and casually collect a bloom upon return, remains merely a hypothetical realm. No cultivator has ever truly achieved it.
The Primordial Spirit School, while mocking the Core Formation School for treading a dead end with no hope of success, has itself only managed to solidify the Yin God within the three stages of Yin God, Yang God, and Primordial Spirit. The latter two remain under research.
There is a vast difference between the Yin God and the Yang God. The Yin God is merely a "spirit" that relies on the physical body, whereas the Yang God exists outside the body, between heaven and earth.
If the attainment of the Yang God allows one to travel ten thousand miles with ease, and to commune with heaven and earth through its power, then the Yin God, a "spirit" generated by the body, can only roam within a hundred-mile radius.
Concepts like soul possession and rebirth are out of the question; these are functions of the Yang God or even the Primordial Spirit.
The Yin God, by its nature, can only exist in dependence on the physical body. How could it possess another? It merely grants a few supreme divine abilities beyond ordinary Core Condensation cultivators.
The Primordial Spirit School can only complete the construction of the Yin God, unable to build the Yang God or Primordial Spirit. The Core Formation School, with its nine revolutions and nine returns, faces insurmountable difficulty, with achieving even six revolutions being considered astonishing.
Other schools believe these two schools are equally mediocre, mere pretenders to the future path of cultivation, and that they have strayed from the true way.
However, other schools face even greater scorn than the Primordial Spirit and Core Formation schools.
Take, for instance, the Multiple Core School. This school posits that the path beyond the Core Condensation realm is to condense more Cores.
In the lower dantian, one can condense a Qi Core; in the middle dantian, a Blood Core; and in the upper dantian, a Spirit Core.
Thus, there are three types of Cores.
Ordinary Core Condensation cultivators possess only one Core, while the Multiple Core School boasts three. Does this not illustrate its superiority?
In reality, it does not.
What is a Core? A Core is the condensation of a cultivator's essence, qi, and spirit, inherently containing all three.
Yet, the Multiple Core School aims to condense a Blood Core, a Qi Core, and a Spirit Core. This is less about condensing three Cores and more akin to splitting one Core into three, with no discernible superiority over the original Core.
The master of the Multiple Core School proposed first severing the essence and qi from the Core, transforming it into an Essence Core, located in the lower dantian.
Then, severing the spirit and qi from the Core, transforming it into a Spirit Core, located in the upper dantian.
Subsequently, severing the qi from the Core, transforming it into a Qi Core, located in the middle dantian.
Finally, merging the Essence Core, Qi Core, and Spirit Core back into a single Core.
The master of the Multiple Core School believed this method to be exceptionally superior.
However, others pointed out: splitting the Core into three distinct Cores, and then merging these three Cores back together, does it not result in the original Core? What is the difference?
It is akin to the method of severing three corpses to attain the Dao. First, one severs the good corpse, then the evil corpse, then the self-corpse, and finally, one must somehow merge the three corpses back into one.
If they were severed, why merge them back?
Is this not equivalent to not severing them at all?
Such haphazard actions, returning oneself to the original state, one truly wonders which great genius conceived of this.
The master of the Multiple Core School was such a "great genius," hence he was profoundly scorned by other schools.
In response, the master of the Multiple Core School devised the "seeing mountains as mountains, seeing mountains as not mountains, seeing mountains as mountains again" tripartite mental state division to explain the correctness of the haphazard operation of splitting and then merging the Core.
Although his reasoning was insufficient, other schools could not refute him due to his stubbornness.
Besides this peculiar school, there is also the Body Cultivation School.
The Body Cultivation School's deduction of the future path of cultivation centers on the physical body.
They advocate for using the power of the Core to nourish the body, ultimately achieving an incorruptible golden body.
To achieve this so-called incorruptible golden body, the Body Cultivation School advocates for infusing all 129,600 mystic acupoints throughout the body with different malevolent and righteous energies, and then refining the blood and qi with immortal secret techniques.
If one did not examine the immortal secret techniques for refining blood and qi closely, other schools might still consider this a feasible approach for the future development of the immortal path.
However, upon understanding what these immortal secret techniques for refining blood and qi entailed, cultivators immediately realized the true intention of the Body Cultivation School.
The immortal secret techniques for refining blood and qi, while sounding impressive, are essentially an extrapolation and refinement of ancient bloodline secret techniques using the principles of the immortal path.
Their advocacy is to refine and supplement bloodlines through secret techniques.
Some cultivators of the Body Cultivation School have already fed back the power of their Cores to their bodies, supplementing their bloodlines to a degree comparable to the seventeenth-grade bloodline.
Hundreds of years ago, the first pioneers' original goal was to research methods for supplementing bloodlines. The reason they later developed not bloodline supplementation methods but the immortal path was due to unforeseen circumstances, not because the pioneers' original intention was the immortal path instead of bloodline supplementation methods.
Now, cultivators of the Body Cultivation School have achieved the initial goal of the pioneers.
The pioneers' initial goal was merely to supplement bloodlines to the twenty-first grade and be content with possessing bloodline power. Today, cultivators of the Body Cultivation School, using immortal secret techniques, can supplement bloodlines up to the seventeenth grade.
If this achievement were presented hundreds of years ago, the first pioneers would have been ecstatic. However, in the current era, as the immortal path develops, cultivators increasingly recognize the superiority of the immortal path over the bloodline path.
Hundreds of years ago, the immortal path was considered a subordinate and supplement to the bloodline path.
In the current era, cultivators view the immortal path as superior to the bloodline path in every aspect.
Although the superiority of the immortal path over the bloodline path has not permeated the hearts of everyone in this world, it has deeply ingrained itself in the hearts of all cultivators.