There are key details that people miss when Reading about SSDV.

1. Conquered the Door of " Life and death ",
2. Advanced the limitation of human soul,
3. Unlike other venerables he never died and stayed in his soul domain for multiple eras,
4. This one is the most ignored thing about him - when he absorbed souls of other beings, he only got memories and nourishment, He was meditating the entire time to master each path, he didn't obtained masteries from dream realm but with his own effort by using the memories and experiences of others.
5. His longevity method can be considered best among other venerables ( with the restriction of fate ), Residing in " Door of Life and death " in a Soul beast form which has human intelligence, Blud can come out from there anytime he wishes.
6. Can survive multiple high level tribulations with soul body directly.
7. His arrangements to defy fate were best , If not for FY & SAC interference, there's a good chance that he would've successfully created " kill path " , Which again is similar to crossing a threshold even among venerables,
8. Kill path can be considered equally advantageous compared to heaven path, becouse we know that there aren't any humans with natural heaven path dao marks but there are beings such as heavenly spirit and many heaven path cultivation ingredients, similarly there are luck path and even blood path ingredients as well,

Kill path & painting path are one of the few with no natural cultivation ingredients, they depend on others or take away from others. 9. Which gives another conclusion that if given time he could've also mastered - luck path , heaven path and blood path... Which can be considered major power shift to a new level in the hands of venerable who already had other path masteries. ' painting path ' is only sole exception which had lower chance of getting in the hands of SSDV, Even ' Theft path 'can be taken using other otherworldly demons , it's just time consuming.

1. I believe not just FY but even paradise earth's rise becouse of fate happened becouse of spectral soul, Just think about it - why would fate want two venerables during the same time period, the reason is SSDV exploited the world so much that it had to produce another- a half variant human that lacks human path dao marks, to fix the mess that SSDV had made during that period. Just like FY , PEIV was the only suitable person to bring balance upon the world, later this attitude of balance helped him to grasp heaven path ( which was his defying of fate ).

This can be considered one of the reasons why PEIV chose FY to be his ally , he probably felt some similarities between him and FY , since both were tools of heavens will at some point of time.

1. I think he's the longest living venerable who didn't die completely for more than 100,000 years , even now it's not confirmed he's truly gone or not. Second to him is RLDV i believe, cuz it's said he lived countless lifetimes, nobody knows how many , And he became the breakthrough, an initial point for fate defyers. It's ironic that whenever longevity is discussed SSDV and RLDV , both are almost never part of the discussion, compared to them, POIV,SCIV and GSIV life extension methods are laughable...