Or was it? What if there was a way to cheat my way through this problem? What if there existed a shortcut only a select few could use? And by select few, I mean me. Only me.

A fraction of my Soul was made out of Divine Essence after all. It still refused to assimilate as if I was not strong enough to digest it. But that was good. I was already using it as a scaffold for my Soul, preventing it from being completely severed under the strongest Soul-rending attacks.

I already made it so that two thin lines spread through my every limb, and though it tried to shrink back into a small sphere in the beginning, after such a long time of being stretched, it kind of kept its shape. And okay, let’s be honest, I hardened my Soul around those thin Divine threads, not letting them retract. That was the best solution to my problem, instead of stretching the tendrils out every day.

Divine Meridians? Divine Dragon Meridians?

Anyway, I should think about the way my body changed and modify it further. I had still plenty of room for improvement.

----------------------------------------

After returning home, I relaxed for a day, catching up with Vilya and checking on her progress. She was improving slowly but surely. Day after day she became better, and though the improvements were tiny, they were there. Forever improving, as a Cultivator should.

I also improved, especially in terms of guarding my Soul against the Passionate Spirit Siphon Technique. No matter how distracted I was, no matter how my mind wandered, the thing didn’t budge me. My mind was protected completely and at all times. There were no more weak points, though there was still much to be done to make it perfect.

I sat in my Cultivation chamber and closed my eyes, focusing inward. The threads of Divine Essence, as stable as they were, I had to mess with them once more.

It was not enough to be perfect with lower forms of Qi. If I had normal amounts of it, let’s say 100, then using a large chunk, while difficult to control, would still be 20 or maybe 30 at most. Manageable.

But considering I had close to 3000, a large chunk could mean more than 1000. The difficulty of keeping so much energy tightly contained so nothing would leak out was just impossible.

Obviously, the numbers were nothing close to reality, but they made it easy to think about stuff.

I opened my Arcane Eyes and looked at the base Qi around me. The tiny glowing strings of it, with no thickness and short length, just floated there, barely moving. Almost no energy to them.

They were between 1-5 centimeters in length and hard to miss. The higher forms of Qi were not. Elementary Qi was more than 100 times shorter while being brighter and more energetic. Nascent Qi was even smaller, less than a hundredth the size. Golden Qi was already on the scale of nanometers, able to alter cells on a molecular level.

Of course, to be truly able to change the body, Spirit Qi was required. To form the first seed for…. I was getting ahead of myself. Spirit Realm was still far away.

Anyway, once the density of Qi exceeded a certain amount, it became hard to contain. It was different for every person, depending on their ability and skill.

The Soul was the one that kept it all under control, but sometimes it was just not strong enough. Like mine, for example. No matter how stupidly tough my Soul was, no matter how big, keeping all those countless Qi motes without a single one leaking was simply an impossible task.

That’s why I decided to try it out with the Divine Essence, I already had threads going to my every limb, I just had to make them spread out like branches of a tree, to reinforce it better.

I stepped into the arena for a quick test and formed an orb of Qi on my hand. A small, golfball-sized sphere. It had a translucent golden color. I did nothing but pump it full of energy while keeping it all contained. The density inside increased and the color deepened, becoming more solid. At a certain point, around 5% of my total Qi I would say, the sphere began to leak.

I formed the same shape inside my hand and began concentrating the Golden Qi inside my body. At 7% it began to leak, at 8% it spewed out so much Qi that nobody would be able to ignore it, and I never reached 10%, because it was just too hard. The leakage was too great. I was trying to compress the energy into an area less than a thousand times smaller. And it didn’t work. I guess that was my limit.

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I returned inside and focused on my Soul. I began to stretch the threads further, the Divine Essence resisting my calls, but it moved, even if extremely slowly. It always wanted to go back to its original shape, so I had to anchor it within my Soul.

First I stretched it out like the main arteries of my body which I used as a template. Then, after setting them in place, I waited, seeing how it would react to the new shape, and then continued stretching and pulling until it reached that perfect form.

Days went by by the time I was done. I woke up hungry and stiff, and despite my wishes to continue, I got up to take care of business. I took two days off to relax and let things settle, before once again going into closed-door Cultivation to continue.

With the main arteries done, I pulled and shaped my Divine Essence like veins running through my flesh. It took much longer with the increased complexity, and with each limb nearly a month went by. After every completion of a body part, I took time off to not lose touch with the outside world.

The war preparations continued building, but I was not called again. It was time for Elders to do their part. When real fights took place, Core disciples were worth less than nothing. They got in the way, making it difficult for the old warriors to let loose.

It was quiet underground. The harshness of battle did not reach us.

And so I continued. Limb after limb, month after month, I stretched and expanded my Divine Essence across my Soul, forming a web of threads that no spear could pierce, and no sword could slash.

I stepped into the arena and formed an orb of Qi inside my body. I pushed the energy into it. It was easy. I just kept pushing and pushing, expecting at least some resistance, but compared to months prior, there was barely any. At 10% the change was detectable, but not significant, and at 15% continuing became hard. At 20% the first leak began, and at 25% nobody could miss the wasted Qi.

The ability to control my Golden Qi was boosted about three times by my actions. Such an increase was huge! Unheard of. If I could use just 10% of my energy for a single attack, I doubted anyone below the Spirit Realm could survive it, even if they had defensive treasures.

Items were inferior to living flesh, at least most of them were, and their energy drain rate was limited so they wouldn’t self-destruct. If I could push my energy over that limit, any defensive treasure would become paper before my might.

And nobody would see it coming. An ultimate ability that came out of nowhere. No charge time, no warning. As far as my enemy knew, that was an instant attack and not an ultimate ability I had to charge up for seconds.

I laughed in delight. Overcharged super beams of death? Arcane Blaze just received another magnificent upgrade.

Oh, of course, that was for only one pulse. I couldn’t keep shooting beams like that constantly. An armor-piercing, relic-destroying, bad-guy-killing ultimate technique.

I decided I should give it a different name since it was a one-time use. Arcane Blast. Yep. Also, fuck it, instead of a thin beam, just send a wave of destruction. No escape allowed!

[Arcane Blast.] I spoke quietly, tasting the words. It rolled nicely off the tongue. My imagination really had no bounds. Who else could come up with such a complicated spell?

Kidding! It was the most simple, basic version of magic. Just send a wave of destructive energy at your enemy. But it was the amount of energy that mattered.

I stood in silence, looking at my hand. My flesh was dense in terms of both energy and matter. I wondered if I could improve the handling of my Qi even more. I could still form capillaries from the Divine Essence, there was still enough left, but then I did a few simple calculations.

There are billions of capillaries in the human body. If I wanted to copy mine, and even if it took just a second for each one, it would take me… 10.000 years? Yeah, no thank you. No matter how much of a boost that would give me, it is not worth it. Heck, if nothing went wrong, I could probably achieve a Divine Soul on my own by then.

A slight increase in handling of Qi or becoming a god? I wonder which was better?

[Fuck that.]

I took the thought, crumpled it into a little ball, and threw it to the far corners of my mind, never to be seen again. I was not wasting my entire lifetime on an unrealistic goal.

What would be more useful would be making a technique or a spell that could disrupt other forms of magic. That teleporting sniper was super annoying. If I only had something to stop him from escaping I could have learned so much…

It still bugs me that I felt something from him, a weird sort of familiarity. I wasn’t 100% convinced he was a native. A part of me still doubted his origins, especially since he didn’t speak. If I could just capture him and question him, I would be able to learn if he was from Earth or not.

I needed to know if there was a possibility of others coming to this world. I was transferred simply enough, but I took the instructions and materials with me. Well, the tiny fragment of a Divine Beast core, the Soul Eater, was used up.

I subconsciously touched my chest where the black stone was poking through my skin. The fact that my first merger was with a Soul Eater of all things, was still hard to accept. A beast in the Divine Realm. That’s really something.

[I wonder if others are the same…]

Could there be more world travelers with similar abilities? Maybe the sniper was one and that’s why I felt that way when meeting him? I wondered if he also carried a fragment.

There was no doubt, I had to find that man and speak with him. And to do that, I needed to learn how to stop him from escaping, first and foremost.

[Disruption…] I murmured, thinking back to the first time when I used Null magic, as I called it back then, and then Chaos magic, as people called it in the Sect. [Hmm…]

I crossed my arms as I sat in a lotus position inside my chamber, and closed my eyes, lowering my head to my chest, as if I was asleep. I entered a state of deep meditation as I let my mind wander among the infinite lifetimes of memories, searching for inspiration, for a clue.

I needed something to lock down space. To disrupt magic. To prevent energy constructs from forming. I needed… Anti-magic.