Li Qiye is the protagonist of the Chinese webnovel Emperor's Domination, a story about a young boy who enters a forbidden ground, gets turned into a magic immortal crow, spends millions of years learning and training people to become gods and the emperors of the universe, then gets his human body back and starts bullying the current generation who has no idea they're messing with a super old guy who knows all the most broken techniques in the world and will use them to become the emperor of the universe himself.
It currently has some 3.7 thousand chapters translated, with more in the original. To keep the story with an op protag going for so long, he starts as a weak human, starts getting his magic techniques and op items back, becomes the most powerful person around, then dies and starts all over again. This respect thread will cover him from chapter 1 to about chapter 1700, his first of many power resets. After each he gets new items, ditches some others, gets new powers and all that, so I'll keep this for the first version for simplicity and because I didn't read the rest.
The Magic System:
In the Nine Worlds where the story starts, people are able to absorb the energy of the world and learn the mysteries of the Dao to "cultivate" and become more powerful. They can increase the power of their blood, soul and body as well, but the most important part is usually the cultivation levels as follows:
Mysterious Fate (Royal Noble) < Star Plucking (Enlightened Being) < Ancient Saint < Heavenly Sovereign < Heavenly King < Virtuous Paragon.
There are more before Mysterious Fate, but they aren't really relevant at all. After Virtuous Paragon, they can go for different paths, but the most important to note are God-Monarchs and Godkings (amped up Virtuous Paragons), Emperor Assailants and Contenders (can take a beating from an Immortal Emperor), and Emperor Rivals (can fight an Immortal Emperor for real).
The Immortal Emperor, which can there only be one per generation, is the most important and the level Li Qiye is at his peak in the Nine Worlds. The Emperor gains the Heaven's Will, which boosts their power considerably, and allows them to leave the Nine Worlds and ascend to the Tenth World.
Each level gives a huge boost in power, an average cultivator of any level can usually annihilate someone at a lower level quite easily. Of course, the novel follows the most talented people on the planet, so it's normal to see someone at a lower level beating a higher one, but that's supposed to be rare for the verse as a whole.
Li Qiye reaches the Immortal Emperor level, and becomes the most powerful one to ever come from the Nine Worlds. For what that matters in regards to scaling, he's basically far above anyone that'll be shown in the feats here in terms of raw power, speed, durability and pretty much anything that isn't tied to a specific ability that he didn't learn. Good to keep in mind.
Raw Power:
If you at some point wonder how can these fights even happen on the planet they're on, worlds there are pretty big.
It's very common for celestial bodies to be destroyed merely as side-effects of the fights:
- Li Shuangyan, one of Li Qiye's maids, attacks a Heavenly Sovereign and destroys stars as a result.
- Li Qiye himself destroys myriad stars with a stomp of his foot.
- Using an Emperor's Possession, simply a normal item that an Emperor carried around and it absorbed a small fraction of his power, Li makes stars explode during a clash with another Possession.
- During his brief Buddhist phase, he splits the stars and the galaxy.
- With his combo of magic fists, he collapses a galaxy.
- A Virtuous Paragon had a weapon capable of hanging an entire galaxy, and used it to grab galaxies, turn them into a "faint sea of stars" and put it in front of him to block Li's attack. Li still blew through it by using weapons that came from previous Immortal Emperors.
- The mere animated corpse of an Immortal Emperor is capable of consuming all the celestials in the sky and plunging the whole world in darkness. Since he's dead, he's obviously weaker than he was in life, and even at his peak he's still far weaker than Li Qiye.
- Two Immortal Emperor-level gods can destroy many galaxies with just the fiery sparks of their blows.
- When he becomes the Immortal Emperor, over 100,000 cultivators challenge Li. Those include Godkings and Emperor Assailants. Even then, he still overpowers their attack and destroys them all with a single blow.
- Turns an Immortal Emperor into a bloody mist with just two punches.
Durability:
For his defense, he has a particular ability that is known to make the user pretty much unkillable, the Heaven's Will Crystal Physique. When one uses it properly, not even Immortal Emperors can break it. Li himself had to rely on an ability to nullify other magics, plus moving so fast that he time traveled to just disable the physique for a moment and be able to strike.
It does have a weakness of a time limit, but it's speculated that having the Heaven's Will might allow one to use it indefinitely, so Li, who has the Heaven's Will, might be able to keep it up forever.
Speed:
- A statue on the level of a Virtuous Paragon sends a hand flying from millions of miles away to hit a guy before he could kill Li.
- Li is so fast that the speed of a Virtuous Paragon is like a snail to him.
- Even light is as slow as a snail to him.
- Since cultivator's attacks can reach the stars and even cover entire galaxies in the short amount of time the fights take place, they should be able to react to that level of speed.
- Can surpass time itself and briefly travel to the past with enough momentum.
- Casually kills two people who were using the same type of ability as the time travel above, but far more powerful.
- An Immortal Emperor can cross the Nine Worlds with just a single step. Each of the worlds has their stars and galaxies and is pretty much a small universe by itself. Without portals open between them, one needs to be fast enough to surpass the turbulence of space and time between the worlds.
Immortal Physiques:
Coming from his Physique Scripture, each Immortal Physique can improve one's body to the apex in a certain aspect. He cultivates specifically the Soaring Immortal, Hell Suppressing, Void Imperfection and Sky Destroyer physiques. They're all at Grand Completion, the most powerful a physique can get, and come from the Scripture that created all physiques, so they're basically the strongest possible in the world.
He also has access to eight other physiques with his fist techniques and physique clones, which I'll get to later.
- Soaring Immortal gives the user supreme speed, far faster than light even at its lowest level, and can surpass time when cultivated to completion. Speed feats already shown above.
- Hell Suppressing grants extreme weight that can be used to crush anything. It can even shatter the void, and is said to be as heavy as millions of stars, although how heavy it actually is is unknown, since the exact description always changes (thousands of stars, millions of stars, infinite, etc). Still, people who destroy stars and can brute force their way through space and time often get crushed by it, so it's pretty heavy.
- Sky Destroyer grants limitless power, being able to casually lift someone with the Hell Suppressing Physique and greatly empower Li's strikes.
- Void Imperfection is so pure that magics, laws and special abilities cannot get close to him, basically anything that isn't a pure physical attack isn't allowed to get to him, and it can negate defensive abilities as well. It's shown to work on hypnosis, petrification, poisons and the many magical attacks that cultivators can use.
Domains:
Created by the combination of his immortal physiques, his domains allow him to control the area around him in certain ways.
- Stagnation Domain combines the Soaring Immortal and Hell Suppressing Physiques, causing time to slow down and enemies be crushed around him. Even someone pushing the Soaring Immortal Physique to the limit, breaking the limits of time and being even faster than how Li was when he managed to briefly time travel, was still slowed down to a crawl by the Domain.
- Demise Domain combines the Void Imperfection and Sky Destroyer physiques, causing everything around the user to be disintegrated back to its origin. If used along with the Stagnation Domain, even space and time wouldn't be spared.
Physique Clones:
While he only cultivates four physiques, he has access to them all and used them on the scraps of metal from a super old and powerful item to create six gods and six devils, each with the power of one of the Immortal Physiques, and all at Grand Completion just like Li's main ones, although they're weaker compared to a normal cultivator using them, which won't matter as much for the examples used here since most are far weaker than Grand Completion.
So, besides Hell Suppressing, Soaring Immortal, Sky Destroyer and Void Imperfection, the others are:
- Indestructible Diamond is immensely durable, being able to no-sell blows from a Godking even when being weaker in pure raw power. At Grand Completion, it's said that an Indestructible Diamond user is unkillable and even harder to take down than an Immortal Emperor. Even if you harm one, they can still regenerate instantly.
- Furious Immortal can rise in power mid-fight, becoming hundreds or even thousands of times stronger.
- The Void Physique can fuse with space, allowing the user to avoid blows and become undetectable, it can even be said that space itself becomes their body. With it, one can refine space itself. Li's senses in particular are good enough to detect a Void physique user.
- Extreme Yang has the power of heat, capable of creating suns, locking one in place with laws, entering an opponent's body to burn them from the inside and incinerating space itself to create a black hole.
- The Sacred Spring increases the user's blood energy, allowing them to fight for far longer than normal, and greatly increase the power of every attack.
- The Solar Physique creates light that can illuminate everything and even create a spatial gap that can make it impossible for an attack to reach the user.
- The Heaven Devourer can grasp space and time, creating a black hole that destroys everything around it.
- The Eternal Physique gives the user an extremely long life (the part about not helping in battle was retconned later pretty hard), and the power to trap enemies in the flow of time and make it so that they can't reach you no matter how fast they are by putting countless years between you and them. For this case in particular, Magu is incredibly overpowered, so Li's clone likely can't match her, but he should be able to pull off the same moves, just weaker.
- They can also fuse together, so their abilities can be stacked. Li can also fuse himself with the fusion, giving him the power of all physiques at once.
Myriad Fists:
He has several fist techniques that enhance his punches. He can also use them with his technique based on the Thousand Hands Against the Nine Worlds to create many hands around him to attack the opponent. Many of the fists use abilities from the Immortal Physiques, although they're not as powerful as the Physiques themselves.
- Heaven Devouring Fist creates a black hole that sucks you in and destroys you.
- Solar Fist creates a spacial gap between the opponent and the user.
- Diamond Fist makes one's hand extremely durable to block the enemy's attack.
- Extreme Yang Fist makes his hand as hot as the sun.
- Soaring Immortal Fist for fast punches.
- Void Imperfection Fist carries the Physique's ability to be untouchable by all enemy abilities.
- Golden Sealing Fist can seal a weapon so that the opponent cannot use it.
- Void Fist fuses with the void and cannot be perceived.
- Hell Suppressing Fist carries the boundless weight of the main physique.
- Sky Destroying Fist, the most destructive punch (although prob not considering the last one here).
- Furious Immortal and Sacred Spring Fists both increase the power of the other punches.
Combining all the fists besides Void Imperfection and Golden Sealing leads to an attack that destroys space, time, the laws of the world and the fabric of reality.
Even then, that's not his most powerful fist, that'd be the Heaven Suppression Fist.
- When facing a technique that copied his abilities and stacked them against him, that had even beaten his Hell Suppressing and Sky Destroying Fists, he casually defeats it with his Thirteen Fate Palaces (we'll get to that) and his Heaven Suppression Fist. The attack suppresses everything and is above all laws.
Anti-Regeneration:
Powerful cultivators can make it so the wounds they deal are never able to be healed.
- A wound from an Emperor lasts for an eternity.
- It's explained that they can deal an Eternal Wound, an injury so powerful that even if you recreated your body from scratch (which cultivators can do quite trivially as long as their True Fate/soul is still around), you'd still be hurt.
Death Scripture:
One of the super powerful scriptures created at the birth of the universe.
- The Death Seal gives him super regeneration, allowing him to be blasted by giant arrows, have his body be blown apart and even reduced to ashes, but always heal without issue. It also gives him more Death Energy, making it hard to even hurt him at all.
- The Death Record protects his soul from destruction, so even if you try to kill him by destroying his spirit, he'll still be able to come back to life.
- The Death Soul is basically a Horcrux, he splits his soul in three and hides those parts, so even if he dies for good he can still be reborn later as long as he didn't die from old age.
- The Death Chapter gives him necromancy abilities. Allows Li Qiye to summon dead things to come fight for him, using "things" since it works even on fires that were put out. At its ultimate level, it can be used on beings around an entire world. The undead can be recreated even if they are destroyed, and there's a weakness that Li Qiye receives a backlash when they are hit hard enough.
- Li is hit by an attack that completely destroys space, time, laws, the power of the grand dao, and even Heaven's Wills. Li is utterly annihilated, but even then the Death Record revives him, and thirteen Emperors realize it's pointless to attack him since he's unkillable.
Space-Time Breaking:
Cultivators often shatter space and time while fighting:
- It's explained that breaking space and time is normal, but the effects usually go away quickly.
- Li breaks thousands of miles of the sky.
- When punching Di Zuo, makes time stand still and creates a black hole.
- A Virtuous Paragon breaks through space-time after being BFR'd.
- The corpse of an Immortal Emperor can shatter space-time just by moving sightly.
Space Scripture:
Another of the super scriptures from the birth of the universe:
- It can teleport him across space-time, making larger portals for huge distances or smaller ones for quick travel.
- Space Connection can open spatial channels that create gigantic portals that armies can cross. Can also be used to connect to dangerous places like the Great Maelstrom, that can destroy a country of cultivators.
- Space Displacement, as the name implies, allows one to send things to other spaces. It even works on arrows that can pierce the fabric of space.
- Displaced Space is capable of switching positions, allowing Li to make enemies hit each other, or create a great distance between himself and his opponent.
- Space Shifting lets him shift space, can be used to make enemies kill each other even if they do their best to make it impossible for Displaced Space to do so.
- Deep Space is a banishment technique that can trap Virtuous Paragons forever, and they can normally just break through space-time to escape more shallow banishments.
- Space Sealing can seal a space so that not even Virtuous Paragons can escape. Space Closure has a similar effect, and Space Shackles can be used to try to trap the opponent no matter how far they manage to move away.
- Space Removal and Space Quarantine can be used together to send an enemy to a different space then trap them there. If they're not strong enough to break the sealing, they'll be trapped forever.
- Cryptic Space is a stealth technique that can hide his presence entirely, making even cultivators with their extremely powerful senses have trouble finding him. When he became an Emperor, even eleven other Immortal Emperors couldn't find him.
- Symmetrical Dimension or Parallel Space can create copies of space. When the Seashield Prince created nine copies of himself, Li just copied the copies and made them fight each other, and when five masters challenged him, he just let them fight themselves, although this showed that the copies aren't perfect and can't fully copy the ultimate attack from Immortal Emperor-level weapons. Stopping your attacks would also make the copies not attack you, but that weakness isn't present in the higher form of the technique, Parallel Displacement.
- World Creation could open up an entirely new world.
Imperial Aura:
Powerful cultivators can suppress enemies with just their presence, and make weaker beings instinctively want to fall to the ground and worship them.
- The mere presence of weapons from Immortal Emperors make weak cultivators bow to the ground.
- The appearance of the Heaven's Will makes all existences prostate in worship. Worth noting that to Li the Heaven's Will was nothing more than a decorative piece.
- Even before getting the Heaven's Will, all existences had to kneel before him.
Emperor's Blessings:
When he was still a crow flying around training gods and emperors, his mind and soul and soul were reinforced by multiple Immortal Emperors so that his memories couldn't be read. Anyone who attempts to do so will be immediately suppressed.
Li can also unleash them willingly, so even if he lost all his power and became as weak as a normal human, he could still send the power of Immortal Emperors to fight for him.
Merit Laws:
The many magical techniques he got along the way.
- Grass Sword Attacking Immortal Law: creates a grass sword that can destroy the stars in the sky.
- Dragon-Subduing Palm can both block and redirect attacks, and even move an enemy against their will without harming them.
- Fire Laws can be turned into many weapons to fight in melee combat.
- Thousand Hands Against the Nine Worlds creates many hands that can be used for attacking. Myriad Slashes uses all the hands at once to kill anyone in sight.
- Resplendent Break can unleash the full potential of an object, using all its power at once, making it so that even a blade of grass can be deadly. Powerful weapons like ones from Immortal Emperors can unleash their ultimate attacks multiple times.
- Nine Sun Locking Heaven Law creates nine suns behind the user, and can raise one's cultivation level by several realms.
- Daylight Sky Immortal Secret uses the power of the Heaven's Will to stop the enemy from communicating with the grand dao, and destroy them.
Items:
From all the stuff he grabbed during his adventures, the most useful is likely his World Seal, which has the power to copy anything, although the copy will be weaker if the original is too powerful. In return, he can unleash the copy's full power pretty much nonstop.
- With the World Seal, he copied the Drystone Courtyard's petrification power, allowing to petrify even time and space.
- The Benevolent Saber, a weapon from an Immortal Emperor. When it unleashes its ultimate attack, even the people around it start wishing to commit suicide.
- The Heaven Sealing Pentagate, a set of five doors that can be used to seal targets. It was once used to seal an entire world, Li can use its ultimate ability to defend himself with its sealing power or send the images on the doors to attack the enemy.
- Tetra-War Bronze Chariot was used by Li during his wars against gods and Immortal Emperors.
- The Dao Sword has the ability to return effects to their primordial state, making them useless. It can unleash a chapter that can suppress an entire world.
- The World Seal can copy Li himself.
Nirvana Heavens:
Cultivators must open their Fate Palaces as they progress in power, said palaces manifest as huge buildings that fly above their heads. Inside them is their True Fate/soul and the four symbols (we'll get to that), and the space inside approaches infinity. When unleashing the palaces, you can create a pocket dimension to draw enemies inside, where you're far more powerful than normal, although a stronger opponent can still destroy the whole place to escape.
The more Palaces you can open, the more powerful you become. Usually Twelve is the peak, but of course Li Qiye opened Thirteen, giving him the most powerful set ever, which he called Nirvana Heavens.
- When going to Godhalt, a continent that suppresses your cultivation when you enter, the Thirteen Palaces made Li immune to the effect.
- When facing Di Zuo's Aphotic Dao, an ability that cuts one from communicating with the Grand Dao, leaving them powerless, Li managed to easily defeat it with even just Twelve Palaces, far weaker than the Thirteen.
- When facing a technique that copied his abilities and stacked them against him, he casually defeats it with his Heaven Suppression Fist being powered by the Thirteen Palaces. Before the Nirvana Heavens, all other daos are insects. Of course, right after saying that, he immediately gets sniped and taken down, so an attack can still get past the heavens if it's powerful and haxed enough.
Four Images of the Fate Palaces:
Inside the Fate Palace, in each cardinal direction, there are four symbols: The Spring of Life, Cauldron of Life, Tree of Life and Pillar of Life. Li combined them with four ancient items to increase their power to the max.
- The Void Rune was fused with the Pillar of Life, allowing Li to do things like absorb curses that could harm Immortal Emperors when he was still way weaker than them, and absorb lightning tribulations.
- The Heavenly Dao's Primal Chapter fused with his Cauldron of Life. It can be used to absorb enemy attacks, even forcing the enemy to keep attacking to take all of their energy. When he was trapped inside a spell formation that tried to erase him with the power of time, then was attacked by an Imperial Massacre, his Primal Chapter still easily absorbed both the attack and the formation and sent their power back at the enemy.
- The Life Origination fused with his Spring of Life, while the Epoch Leaf fused with his Tree of Life, although I don't think he has used either by themselves at this point.
- Using them all together, he defeats the ultimate attack of the Soaring Immortal Physique, and states that even an Immortal Emperor wouldn't be able to understand the attack in time to counter it.
Nine Ants:
After finding some ants running in circles that contained the secrets of the universe (yes, really), he was able to create the Nine Ants merit law, divided into three initial forms:
- Vessel of Life can draw the life force of all existences into it. When he was attacked by a Life Reduction that absorbed his life energy, the energy of the world, space, time, darkness, evil and the power of the grand dao, he casually overpowered it with the vessel, using the life force equal to thousands of Immortal Emperors to overwhelm the tribulation.
- The Vessel of Genesis, along with the Vessel of Life and the Death Scripture, was able to bring the shadows of Immortal Emperors to life, so that they could fuse with his Emperor Blessings and help him fight. It can also give him more primordial energy to keep his dao going in case it's being suppressed or destroyed.
- Vessel of Athanasia can make things everlasting. Li used it to fight against the petrification of the Drystone Courtyard, and help him defend himself against the death beam of twelve Immortal Emperors.
Seven Nights Dao:
Using his Thirteen Palaces, his knowledge from the Nine Ants, and his study of the Kun Peng, he creates this dao (Li Qiye means Seven Nights).
With it, he was able to create an entire universe, until it was destroyed, then recreated many times.
When he unleashes his Dao in combat, he becomes the creator of laws, and all forces of nature are derived from him. He can cross through the past and future to become eternal in the present, allowing him to block an attack that was overpowering his nirvana heavens and three vessels.
Although, in the end, he was fighting thirteen Immortal Emperors who were using a formation spell made specifically to destroy immortal beings, so his dao couldn't stand the attack, showing that it's still defeatable with enough power.
Even then, it's still the power to create an universe being used to power attacks and defense, so if he decides to use it, it's safe to say you need universal power to contend with it.
Dao Heart:
Basically one's willpower and perseverance, the mental side of cultivation. Li needed a strong Dao Heart to survive all his tortures and defeats throughout his millions of years of life.
- In Li's world, a Buddhist's words are so powerful that they can convert you with a single word. All Cultivators flee in terror when a powerful Buddhist appears, since a weak Dao Heart means instant conversion and being a Buddhist forever (basically wololo, really). Even so, Li's willpower was still enough, and he defeated the guy in a debate.
- Withstood ten thousand years of torture.
- Is not bothered by an illusion of himself being ripped to pieces.
- Unaffected by illusions targeting his seven emotions and six desires.
- Simping resistance.
Dao of Alchemy:
The Dao of Alchemy involves making pills to increase cultivation, having knowledge of plants, controlling poisonous creatures and making salves to increase the power of one's body.
- Insect mastery allows him to have control over poisonous creatures, worth noting that the powerful poisons can even harm one's soul/True Fate.
- With the Five Poisons Mutual Generation, he can increase the power of a creature's poison by ten times.
- His Heaven Restoration Salve can even save someone from death as long as only a strand of their soul remains.
- Wood Mastery allows him to create gigantic plants that can attack the enemy.
Miscellaneous:
- Can freeze a mortal in place with a wave of his finger.
- Can change the appearance of others.
- Cultivators above Heaven's Primal can fly (basically anyone relevant).
- Can communicate with telepathy, and read memories.
- A cultivator's Heavenly Gaze lets them see things very far away and see the blood energy of living beings.
- Cultivators can live at least for a thousand years.
- They often fight in space to avoid damaging the world below them.
- Resists divination.
- Since after the Mysterious Fate realm everyone can survive complete bodily destruction, cultivators can aim to destroy their enemy's souls/True Fate to make sure they die. Li very often kills people at such level with normal attacks, so it should be fair to say that he's pretty much always aiming for a soul kill, or his attacks are just so strong that the soul goes boom even if he isn't specifically aiming for it.
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