The squeaking sounds were coming closer as I advanced, and then I saw them. A group of Giant Rats playing with each other while releasing those happy calls. They were nudging each other and chasing after their tails, spinning around, doing all sorts of acrobatics…

I might have even considered them cute if they didn’t look like hellspawn, and stank like rotting corpses.

[Freeze.] I said with authority in my voice. The rats froze, and I could almost feel their fear. They tried to resist my control, but it was futile. The most they could do was twitch their whiskers.

I made a simple gesture with my free hand, and stones rose from the ground, encasing them completely.

After stabbing my weapon into the ground, I grabbed a frightened rat. A blade of Nascent Qi formed in my hand, and I swiftly sliced at its neck.

Unsurprisingly, the blade broke to pieces, but not before making a shallow wound.

[Damn it…] Even the lowest-ranking trash was able to resist a pure Qi construct. I could hardly wait for my Soul to be strong enough to create Golden Qi on its own so my creations would become more permanent, but that was still far away.

And even then, there was a difference in the quality of Qi. When two Cultivators compared the strength of their Qi, even if they were both in the same Realm, one of them would be stronger.

Let’s take Base Qi for example. We could say it lay between 1 and 9 points, and at 10 it would transform into Elementary Qi. It would then be so from 10-99 points, and at 100 it would become Nascent Qi. The range of strength would constantly be getting bigger, allowing for more variability in each tier the higher you went.

1-9, 10-99, 100-999… Now, of course, it didn’t mean that Qi scaled like that, but that’s how I thought about it as it was obviously exponential. And if I had to measure the strength of my Qi just based on this scale and how I felt internally, I would say I was at around the 300-400 range currently. I had still a lot of work to do to reach the threshold for Golden Qi at 1,000 points.

Was I right to think of it this way? Was I wrong? Maybe it was both, but it made it easy to understand. Qi was psychoactive. I needed to imagine stuff if I wanted to do it. Even if my idea wasn’t completely correct, as long as I was going in the right direction, that was enough.

I looked at the Giant Rat in my hands. The effect of my mind control ran out long ago, and the beast was biting and clawing at my fingers, trying to escape.

[Hmm…] I looked at it up close, and it panicked even more. However, its attacks were hopelessly underwhelming. What should have been strong enough to tear into mortal flesh with ease, didn’t even leave a scratch. I gave it a quick twist and broke its neck. The creature went limp, and I felt its Soul leave its body.

There came a wave of memories and emotions, each of them lasting only a split-second before being destroyed. I was like a bystander, only observing the chaos from afar while my emotions remained calm and steady.

I slowly exhaled through my nose and tossed the ball of stench to the side. I would have to wash my hands thoroughly later.

With a single thought, the stone cage closest to me shifted, and a spike pierced the trapped beast’s heart. It died in seconds.

Once again, I watched memories flash before my eyes, too quick for me to see them clearly.

[Wait!] I thought I saw a rat nest there, but the memory was long gone when my brain registered it. A nest wasn’t worth much, only 25 SSS, but that was a good bit of money that required little effort to acquire. Unfortunately, the memory was already destroyed, and the Soul absorbed. I couldn’t check it to confirm.

[Maybe if I slow it down?] I wondered out loud and looked at another stone cage. With a thought, another Giant Rat died and its Soul was absorbed into my… Well, it wasn’t yet absorbed into my Soul. More into the space around it? What did the Cultivators call it? Sea of Consciousness? Something like that.

Well, its Soul was absorbed into the Sea where my Soul waited to pounce on it. I took control of the process, and manually peeled the rat Soul apart, piece by piece, extracting memories one by one. It was slow and boring, and the memories were all jumbled up, with no coherent timeline, but I could see a lot of what the rat had been doing. The important or unique memories stood out more, while the everyday routines blended into one.

If I just let the memories go, they would disintegrate and be immediately forgotten, but if I wanted to keep them, I had to make a copy and then merge it into my Soul. I used Soul Essence from the Giant Rat to make the copy, but I had very limited material, so the memories I could take were very limited as well. I hadn’t managed to find the nest during the search though.

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[Interesting…] I slowly opened my eyes as I awoke from the deep meditation with a new set of fresh memories. That was not something I thought was possible but turned out to be quite easy. Stealing memories. But, I did it just to test it out a bit, I wasn’t planning on filling my head with the memories of Giant Rats.

[Okay, okay… I can work with this.] I ended another rat’s life and slowly combed through its Soul. It was like a damn ball of tangled string. It was nearly impossible to get what I wanted, especially since I was searching for a specific memory with little to no experience. I mostly got what I could, which often meant the freshest memories, and those weren’t the most useful.

Another body was discarded with no luck. I only had a few prisoners left, so I couldn’t afford to make any mistakes. But, before taking another try at it, I swiftly turned around after hearing some rustling of dry leaves.

I saw some sort of a beast staring at me wide-eyed while keeping low to the ground. It looked like a mountain lion, and it wasn’t all that big and was probably quite young.

But a mountain lion? In the Sect? Well, we were on a mountain range, so I shouldn’t be too surprised. The beast was also quite skinny and I felt no threat from it. Still, I didn’t like how it was slowly coming closer. It disturbed my delicate work, and I frowned.

[Oy! Piss off!] I waved my hand and a gale of wind struck it, but it just crouched down lower and didn’t move.

I was sitting on the ground with my back partially turned toward it. I didn’t feel like standing up, so I just threw one of the dead Giant Rats at it in hopes of scaring it away. And it worked… kind of.

The creature pounced at the rat and chomped on it, holding it firmly in its maw. I winced at the thought of eating the disgusting creature, but the mountain lion didn’t seem to mind. With a fresh meal safely in its grasp, it quickly turned around and ran away, disappearing into the lush undergrowth of the forest.

[What a freak…] It was clearly just hungry, but to eat a Giant Rat… it had to be quite desperate.

Maybe some stronger creatures already arrived and were taking over its hunting grounds? That was quite likely if you think about it. The Beast Tide should begin any day now, according to the Elders. Now it was just a waiting game.

But that’s just more of a reason I had to figure out this newly discovered ability of mine. Just thinking what I could achieve by taking important pieces of memories of my fallen enemies… Yeah, that pacifist route of mine seemed less and less likely.

Why dis violence and death seem like the only viable options for me? Not that I was complaining. Fighting was actually very enjoyable, especially if it was difficult. Triumphing over a strong opponent felt so satisfying, even if it was masked by pain at the time. And I was growing stronger because of it as well, so that was a bonus.

Well, I closed my eyes after killing another Giant Rat and steadied my mind to dive into its memories. Memory Harvest – a technique that allowed me to reap the fragments of memories and take them as my own, giving me the ability to learn directly from another’s mind – was currently under construction. As long as I could work out the kinks of this technique, I would be able to boost my speed of growth massively.

It’s not that I was hoping people would die in the upcoming Beast Tide, but the reality was that they will, whether I’m near them or not. So, rather than letting all those Souls go to waste, I would clean them up, recycle what I can, and discard the rest. It’s actually a very noble job I’m doing, recycling Souls. Who knows how long they would need to decay on their own? Minutes? Hours? It’s a waste to just let them pollute our beautiful Sect.

Yeah, that was a whole bunch of bullshit. But seriously, I was looking forward to the feast. I just need to stay alive long enough to enjoy it. Which is why I was focusing on defense. As long as I stayed alive long enough, opportunities like this would keep coming my way, hopefully. Fingers crossed!

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Well, that was it. I ran out of training materials, I mean rats. And that was without finding the nest too, which was a shame. I was getting better at combing through memories, but mostly through those at the surface. The deeply hidden secrets were too difficult to untangle, and the Soul broke down before I could do that.

My guess was that weak Souls couldn’t be explored too much or they would decay. Maybe I needed a stronger beast to try my technique on. A human in Nascent Soul Realm would be ideal, but I couldn’t just go around killing people. Murder was kind of frowned upon in the Sect, much as it was anywhere else where civilization came to be.

But I also wanted to figure out a way without mindlessly killing all the time. A fight against an equal was great, but just bullying weaklings was beneath me.

I subconsciously looked at the pile of Giant Rats. It is what it is… They were pests that needed to be purged. But, I didn’t feel like bringing them back for a single Spirit Shard, so I turned them into Essence. Two pitifully small cores of Black Essence. I tossed them into my pouch with the intent of gifting them to someone else later. I would not be eating them ever again.

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After returning back to the Inner Sect, I was a person I recognized walking with haste somewhere, and in the spur of a moment, I decided to chat him up.

[Hello, Senior Brother Liam!] I loudly greeted him. Yes, it was that Liam. The member of the White minks that tried to extort me. Maybe I could annoy him a little. An act of tiny revenge, if you will.

“Oh, hey Junior.” He then did a double-take. “Do I know you?”

I was taken aback. What the fuck did he mean? [You don’t remember me?]

Liam scratched his head and squinted, staying silent for a while. “Not really… There are hundreds of you, I can’t remember every newcomer that joins the Sect. Have we met before?”

[Seriously?! I mean… we spoke once.] I was completely flabbergasted. My… enemy? He couldn’t even recognize me? Did my face change since the last time?

“Ah, so it was like that…” He seemed to remember something, finally. “You are probably here to pay the fee, right? I’m kind of busy right now, so if you need some help, find one of the others, alright? They should be around here somewhere. Now, if you’ll excuse me…” And with that, he left.

And I was left standing there, confused, shocked, and with my mouth hanging open.

[What the fuck just happened?!]