All four divine beasts were intelligent people. They knew that Xia Tianze was a member of the ancient Glazed Palace and a trusted deputy of Jiang Chen. Seeing how desperately he was fighting, it was clear that he bore a deep blood feud with Ancestor Xieying from the ancient era. As for Xia Tianze stealing the spotlight, they had no objections.
Poor Ancestor Xieying — he had been on the verge of breaking free from the seal. His chest had been filled with lofty ambitions, yet before he had even the chance to enact them, he perished in utter bewilderment.
Until the very end, he never figured out what had just happened.
Successfully pre-emptively eliminating both the Stonefiend Old Ancestor and Ancestor Xieying in succession filled Jiang Chen with even greater confidence. The demon race was indeed terrifying, but the facts proved that they were not invincible.
During the ancient Great War of Sealing, the reason humanity had never been able to completely annihilate the demon race was not because humans lacked the ability to kill demons. Rather, during those great battles, humanity's powerhouses had never fought as a unified force — they had been scattered across various locations, failing to leverage their numerical advantage.
Of course, the most critical reason was still that humanity simply did not possess an overwhelming advantage over the demon race. Coupled with the demons' formidable vitality and their fearless, savage fighting style, many ancient cultivators had chosen to seal the demons rather than fight them to the death.
A fight to the death demanded the ultimate price, and not every human cultivator possessed the resolve and courage for that. In this regard, humanity differed greatly from the demon race.
Still, Jiang Chen harbored no smug satisfaction from destroying these two demon ancestors. Compared to the vast armies of the ancient demon race, these two unremarkable demon ancestors were nothing more than an appetizer.
Xia Tianze himself had once said that in the ancient era, each of the ten demon lineages had at least several divine-path ancestors. Doing the math, the number of demon divine-path ancestors was staggeringly large.
Moreover, the demon invasion had not relied solely on the forces of the ten demon lineages — there had also been many foreign-race cultivators like Mang Qi.
In the ancient era, the number of demon forces and demon puppets that had been poured into the Divine Abyss Continent had been astronomical. Otherwise, they could not have nearly swept across the entire continent.
If the human domains had not tied down the main bulk of the demon forces, it would have been truly hard to say who would have won that war.
And so, Jiang Chen had no grounds for optimism.
However, it was undeniably true that in the present day, everything in the human domains was trending in a positive direction.
The Myriad Heavens and Ten Thousand Spirits Divine Lock Formation had been reactivated. The Glazed Palace had been rebuilt.
The completion of these major endeavors had laid a solid foundation for the situation in the human domains.
In the time to come, regardless of when the demon tribulation erupted, the human domains would enjoy a period of peace — perhaps decades, perhaps centuries, depending on when the tribulation struck and how the war unfolded in the other territories of the Divine Abyss Continent after its eruption.
But one thing was certain: the time the human domains had gained would be invaluable.
The foremost task to tackle next would undoubtedly be seeking out the inheritances of the ten great leader factions from the ancient era, and restoring the spirit veins of the human domains.
In particular, the restoration of the spirit veins — whether for Jiang Chen personally or for the human domains as a whole — would be a milestone of tremendous significance.
Inside the Glazed Palace, Jiang Chen spent his days cultivating and studying the jade slip left behind by the Great Glazed Divine Sovereign, learning about the overall layout of the human domains' spirit veins.
According to the records in the jade slip, restoring the spirit veins in their entirety and unsealing them was actually not prohibitively difficult in terms of complexity.
There were a total of seven seal points for the spirit veins.
The most critical seal node — the core hub — was located right within the Glazed Palace.
The remaining six seal points were scattered across six other locations.
These six places were relatively well-hidden.