As Tang Wanzhuang and Qin Dingjiang made their way to the imperial study, Xia Longyuan was meditating deep beneath the Imperial Ancestral Temple at the other side of the imperial palace.0

During the battle at sea, only a part of his soul had been injured. The damage to his main body was not catastrophic, but it could not be said to be trivial either.0

It was, ultimately, a form of spiritual injury. This significantly affected his performance at the Profound Control Realm, preventing him from unleashing his full power. As for the exact extent to which his abilities were impacted, that was hard to quantify.0

But under normal circumstances, his current power was still much more than enough to handle an ordinary cultivator who had reached the Profound Control Realm.0

Take the incident in the Maitreya Secret Realm, for example. Xue Wu was merely an ordinary Profound Control Realm cultivator. While Xue Wu’s divine soul had mostly recovered, he still lacked a proper body and had to hastily possess the remains of a celestial maiden. Despite his fragmented state, it had taken a combined assault from top-tier experts like Ying Five, Lady Three, Cui Wenjing, Yang Jingxiu, Gui Chen, and Yuan Cheng—figures from the Rankings of Heaven and Earth—to subdue him. Yet even now, Xia Longyuan, weakened as he was, far surpassed the likes of Xue Wu. Maintaining his dominion over a world devoid of other...0