I walked at a comfortable pace through the jungle toward the south. The cacophony of animal sounds had long since merged into the background. My Aura was cloaked, making it appear as if I wasn’t even there. The ancient memories boosted my understanding of Qi manipulation, but it wasn’t as great as some might think.

As the old ghost said, his Soul degraded a lot, having lost most of his power, and it was the same with his memories. Souls were the ones that carried memories and not the brain, which was just the bridge between the material and immaterial world. And so, as he was becoming weaker over the decades, his memories became fragmented and lost as his Soul fell apart.

Still, what I got was many decades of useful information, especially for the Golden Core Realm.

I just needed to sift through all of them and make sense of it all.

But that wasn’t easy, far from it. The constant racket the beasts were making in the background was really annoying and made it hard to concentrate. I needed at least a few days of peace and quiet to sort out everything, so in the end, I decided to postpone it.

Instead, I used my Arcane Eyes and looked around. There was an immediate and obvious difference between the two techniques. While the Magic Eyes allowed me to see up to 100 meters away, the Arcane Eyes didn’t seem to have that same drawback. I could see as far as I wanted, though it got increasingly hard to distinguish the blobs and dots of colorful light that reached my eyes.

My resolution was still shit since I was overwhelmed by new information. But that just meant I had to use it for longer to acclimate my mind to the new sensation.

However, as I was busy looking outward, I failed to notice the state of my clothes. A cold wind blew and my attire fluttered with it, waking me up from the intense concentration of watching two colossal birds fight in the sky.

[Oh, fucking hell…] I looked over my nice, new gray robe and frowned. I for sure looked like a hobo after ten years on the streets at that moment. Everything was torn, burned, or otherwise ruined.

I threw off my clothes and rummaged through the storage pouches until I found a spare green robe. It must have belonged to one of the men as it fit me nicely. And since I was in the BS Sect’s territory, it served as added camouflage on top of my cloaked Aura.

The technique was mostly my creation, though some memory fragments of the old ghost helped me to make it more efficient. It wasn’t yet deserving of its own name, but it was slowly getting there.

And as I was getting better at sensing, I similarly became better at cloaking. Now that I had the Arcane Eyes at my disposal, I realized how weak and pathetic my previous attempts at hiding my true Cultivation were. Turtle Breathing Technique only disrupted the surface, while the deeper layers remained clear to see for anyone that knew where to look. I was certain the Elders saw through my feeble attempts at hiding since even the current me could detect the mistakes if I went against myself a month prior, yet the Elders didn’t say a thing.

Maybe they just didn’t care enough to say anything. A young Nascent Soul was but a speck of dust compared to a Spirit Realm Cultivator after all.

I picked up my torn clothes and emptied the pockets of anything valuable that might have remained in there. Good thing I did too, the Thunder Translocation Talisman was still left in there. While it was useless a the moment, as soon as I reached the Myriad Beasts Sect’s territory, I would be able to safely jump back home.

I carefully stored it in a pocket inside the sleeve as it seemed the fashion was similar between the two Sects.

Having done that, I took my old clothes and crumpled them into a ball, and squeezed them tight. My hands began glowing white with heat and the cloth burned and turned to ash soon enough. I shook my painful, burning hands and let them cool off. A layer of a gray shell formed around them, and as I squeezed, it cracked, revealing pristine new skin underneath.

I moved my fingers and they felt no different than before.

[Hmm… I wonder if…] I rolled up my sleeves and then my hands began to glow again as I watched them closely with my Arcane Eyes. And then they cooled down. And burst into flames again. And cooled down again…

I repeated the action a few dozen times, each one extremely painful and annoying to experience. Like placing your hands into a furnace, having all your nerves explode in burning sensations of pure agony, yet unlike in reality, where your nerves would die in seconds, this sensation didn’t diminish and instead stayed constant during the entire duration.

And, as I suspected, I was indeed burning Essence. Arcane Eyes allowed me to see the tiny, golden, dust-sized particles throughout my body that just had to be Essence. There was no other explanation. I also saw the tiny strands that were my Golden Meridians. They were already extremely thick, like a single strand of hair. That’s not much you say? Well, it is if it’s compared to what it was at the beginning, which was like a single strand of spider silk. Yeah, big improvement. 100X surely.

But anyway, I confirmed I was burning Essence with each regeneration. It wasn’t much during the short bursts, but the longer the skill was active, the worse it got. Like running an engine fuel rich. Efficiency started to drop rapidly, and a lot of fuel was wasted.

So, short bursts were fine, up to a minute. Anything longer would be wasting away my Essence and flesh.

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Of course, there was another thing I noticed, that one just as annoying.

Every time I regenerated my hands, the next time there would be less pain. I checked my hands and my feeling of touch wasn’t going away, so I wasn’t permanently ruining my nerves, just the excruciating pain from having my body melt and burn was diminishing.

It wasn’t much, and I wasn’t sure if it was even real, that’s why I had to repeat it so many times. But, eventually, I confirmed it. It was getting slightly more manageable.

After a quick calculation, I determined a few thousand repetitions should make it so that I wouldn’t feel any pain anymore if the decrease was linear. If it was exponential then it would be faster, and if it was logarithmic, then I was fucked. Logarithmic functions never reached zero, only approach it very closely.

So, basically, if my uninformed theory was correct, and I wanted to train my body to resist the pain of being burnt alive, I would have to stay burning for more than a day, if I only had 30 seconds of rest between the pulses. The pulses had to be at least 30 seconds to fully activate.

Oh, and I would probably burn at least 50% of my Essence, basically nullifying the work Long Dong had done during these two weeks.

I didn’t know if it was worth it.

That seemed like a whole lot of pain for not much gain. Heck, I would get a lot weaker too.

I had to think that over. Maybe there were other advantages to doing that that I didn’t realize. In any case, doing it in the wild was out of the question. I at least had to get back to the Sect if I even wanted to consider it.

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I was getting kind of peckish. Scanning the storage pouches I noticed I had nothing good to eat. There was food, but it wasn’t to my liking. There was barely any meat. Only some traveling rations in the form of hard biscuits and dried fruit.

I tossed them all out without a second thought. That was food for my food. I needed meat and fat, not a freaking snack for squirrels.

Focusing on long-range detection, I scanned the forest for signs of easy prey. A plump chicken would have been great to fill my rumbling belly, but those seemed to be somewhat lacking in these parts. There were a lot of creatures all around, but most of them seemed dangerous and too much trouble for their worth.

[Maybe a snake… Those are supposed to taste like chicken, right?]

I looked around warily in case I jinxed myself and a giant python jumped at me. The coast was clear. It’s not like I was superstitious, but you know… Weird magic mumbo-jumbo and stuff.

Anyway, I noticed some smaller beasts that could-

[The hell? Why are they all running away?] I squinted my eyes as every single beast suddenly ran away from me in panic. I checked my Aura and noticed it was still contained, not that it would frighten everyone even if it was revealed. Many of those running away were well in the Golden Core Realm.

[Weird...]

Then I heard a loud squawk of a bird coming from the sky as a giant shadow covered the forest.

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Gerald was thrown back as a loud boom and a subsequent gale of air and soil crashed into him. The mighty Ironbark splintered upon impact like toothpicks in a hurricane as his body was nearly splattered against one like a pancake. Sharp rocks and pieces of wood flew all around him as the angry caws and shrieks intensified inside a mass of dust and wild magic.

A few hundred meters of a forest were obliterated where Gerald stood just a minute prior. Two masses of feathers, one green, and one black, moved around at lightning speed, producing a destructive hurricane.

[What-] Gerald gasped, which quickly turned into a coughing fit as blood sprayed out of his mouth. He collapsed on the ground, his limbs turned unnatural ways and bent in the wrong places.

His body began to glow from the inside, and soon he was burning all over. A mass of molten flesh stood up as the muscles and bones regrew and snapped back in place.

[Motherfuckers…] Gerald groaned as his body cooled down and the shell around him broke. Once again, his clothes were ruined.

[My Talisman!] He suddenly realized. He frantically looked through the smoldering remains of his robe. Luckily the Talisman seemed to be fire-resistant and was only slightly darkened from the heat.

He quickly stored it in one of the storage pouches and tied them around his neck like an exotic necklace, when suddenly he was swept off his feet and pinned to the tree behind him with a long, thick spear.

[No, a… feather?!] A jet-black, two-meter-long feather pierced his abdomen, pinning him to the wood as various colorful blasts of energy continued to ravage the forest. The air was filled with dust and sharp Qi as he desperately tried to destroy the black feather.

He pulled and twisted, yet the thing didn’t budge. He hastily grabbed a few Spirit Shards and coated his hands in Golden Qi, making long, sharp claws, and attacked. His fingers felt as if striking raw metal, and the damage he had done was minuscule.

[This isn’t what I meant with a chicken! Fuck!] He roared and turned the Qi backward, toward the tree behind him. The centuries-old wood was comparatively much weaker, like a soft jello compared to the steel of a feather.

But then a mountain of green feathers and blood flew above him and crashed into the forest somewhere behind him. He had a moment to look at the remaining beast which was staring in his direction.

It was an ugly beast. Its black feathers were covered in mud and blood, its face like that of a dragon, minus a snout, instead its nose were two slits in its face, and its mouth full of razor-sharp teeth, each longer than his arm. Long gray horns curved from its forehead along its skull, ending in sharp points that turned up at the back of its head.

It stood on its two legs, each like an ancient Ironbark tree, and flared its wings wide, covering the sky. It took a deep breath, and with it, Qi. Brilliant, white, crystalline Qi. The creature opened its mouth and roared.

[… I’m dead.] Gerald whispered.

The air itself seemed to still. The world went white and silent. Only the rumbling of his body and pain assaulting his senses told Gerald of the scale of the destruction. He instant went deaf and blind as the monster released its attack, a beam of white destruction, like a nuclear bomb, only contained, and aimed toward a single point.

A line of the forest, a hundred meters across, was simply vaporized, turned to atoms, as the sheer magnitude of the destruction hit it. And those were just the residual waves that came from the beam. The space itself was warped and unstable where the true energy ran.

The green bird, the target of this destruction, flapped its wings in defiance, taking the attack head-on. The beam of white split into eight as its emerald wing met it halfway, spreading the annihilation far and wide. Its meters-long wings cracked under the strain, some of which even turned to dust under the wild, chaotic energy, yet it remained standing, not much worse for wear, and responded with an attack of its own.

Gerald lay on the ground, his head slowly cooling down as his hearing returned. He observed the fight from afar, yet in his eyes, it was like watching two suns battle it out.

He shook his head as his body continued to smolder and looked around. Above him was the sky filled with dust, smoke, and fire, and below him was the earth, cold and hard, and drenched in blood.

He looked around at his body which was weirdly lacking pain. He, surprisingly, found it lacking too. There was nothing below his chest, and similarly, his hands were missing too. Only the fist-sized chunk of black crystal pulsed in defiance as his precious crimson blood dripped to the floor.

[Oh…]