“So it turns out in few days you thought of things that took me decades, even centuries.” Lou Chen forced out a self deprecating laugh.

“You give yourself too little credit, my old friend.” Alex patted Lou Chen’s shoulder, “First of all, not in few days. I had a conceptual understanding of reincarnation beforehand, albeit from a completely different angle. Secondly, you gave me a ton of hints that allowed me to come to those conclusions – it was not all me, you know.”

“Sigh, even if it’s so … what can you or I … or we even do?” Lou Chen asked.

“I don’t think he’ll do anything to either of us if we don’t provoke him.” Alex said after thinking for a moment, “He reminds me of another old monster I once fought – they are extremely cautious when there are unknown variables. I’m pretty certain the sect master would never attack the two of us at the same time on his own, but if he instigates others – they’ll need a small army. In that case, we’ll have a lot of fun even if we die, but our souls will still remain ours.”

“All of that sounds nice, but even though I’m strong, I can’t protect both of us. And you … you’re just five years old and look like two or three … and even if you remember one of your lives – it’s only one! But after you Soul merge four or five times, the sect master will definitely come after you!” Lou Chen said in a sad voice.

Alex cheekily smiled looking at the old man and said directly through Lou Chen’s mind, “Who told you I remember only one?”

When the old man sprung up in shock, Alex patted the spot beside him inviting Lou Chen to sit back down and said, “You’re not used to someone having your back, are you? You know, I’m not either, but I guess we can think of something.”

After Lou Chen calmed down, Alex explained the basic principles of the soul branding, but the old man found it hard to grasp despite all his experience and the absorbed split souls. Then Alex took another route – he explained the various ways the saints fought and how to counter them, the simplest and effective being the style of his father Phil.

Needless to say, after hearing Phil’s story, Lou Chen found him to be an inspiring and heroic character and gladly began cultivating the technique he invented. Also, to fight while relying on the sense of smell seemed interesting and challenging at the same time, thus the old man picked up another hobby besides the fishing.

Alex settled in the small pavilion by the lake and, before returning to cultivation, went through all the information he had once again. After wrecking his brains for few days, he came to conclusion that they, he and Lou Chen, most likely were overthinking things.

It was highly likely that to who-knows-how-old demon like the sect master, everything that happened was a game. Even Alex with his short nine lives often thought of the world in such categories, therefore they were not in an immediate danger. Sect master had other things to do or to worry about and Alex’s main objective was to use this time. Especially because of the peculiar formations they had in the core sect.

With this in mind Alex decided to check out the Soul merge first. The concept of connecting oneself through time and space with other reincarnations seemed thrilling, no matter if those were actual parts split off his soul or a full soul born in different coordinates of time.

According to the sect master, the first thing practitioner had to do was to find the soul thread connecting this life to the others and Alex already guessed those where the threads made of soul particles Adil was capable of seeing. The next part, after connecting to the other incarnation, would be experiencing the memories of that life, slowly merging it with ones own and in the process uniting the two parts of the soul.

This was the part Alex was most confused about – since he already carried the memories from the previous lives, it didn’t seem possible that parts of his soul were missing. That only left him with one possibility – the incarnations had nothing to do with actually splitting person’s soul, rather person’s consciousness was formed anew with the soul particles he was already familiar with. And during the Soul merge one actually didn’t unite two split souls, but two separate soul particle structures.

That was the reason why the disciples of the Immortal Gate sect could grow in strength practicing this technique. Alex already experienced his own growth when he collected the loose soul particles and multiplied their amount in his soul brand, but what would happen if he doubled, tripled or increased the count of his own natural soul particles nine times?

Driven by the curiosity Alex dived into the world of soul particles. After following the sect master’s technique, it didn’t seem to take long for him to sense the soul threads originating from deep within and spreading in to different directions. He followed few of them for some time and even felt an entity at the other end of the thread at some point, but managed to hold himself back and postpone the ‘merge’ part.

The whole process felt like a trip that lasted for a split second and an eternity at the same time and Alex emerged from the meditation a little dazed, but the timing was good. Lou Chen was just finishing to roast his catch of the day and after a sumptuous meal, Alex shared his experiences.

At first Alex was baffled by Lou Chen’s reaction – the old man even seemed to be disappointed with his slow progress although he awkwardly tried to hide it. But when Alex found out he had been lost in cultivation for over a year, even he had to agree he had ‘wasted’ a lot of time.

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Despite that Alex was not discouraged, rather the opposite. After hearing that Muchen had successfully completed his first soul merge, Alex requested they would go and place an order at Wang Hao’s workshop. He had this idea after seeing the craftsmanship used creating the fishing hooks and now he intended to make his own weapons – learning from the fiasco during the confrontation with emperor Cirius, he didn’t intend to go into the next fight unprepared.

To meet Muchen turned out to be impossible. Proud and sad at the same time Wang Hao explained that the talented youth went into a ‘cultivation frenzy’ and was almost never stepping out from the best cultivation pavilion they had. After the lecture the sect master personally gave Muchen few pointers and ordered to spare no resources in developing him.

While Alex and Lou Chen easily guessed the reasons and were not happy about it, the other core disciples didn’t like that for a different reason. Luckily they were not able to make things difficult for the newcomer as long as he was in the closed door cultivation.

Alex’s first reaction was to rush his cultivation as well to prevent Muchen from following Lou Chen’s disciple’s tragic end. But then realized that despite them being something like childhood friends of this life, Muchen’s fate had nothing to do with him, just like any other person in the world. Of course, there was one he deeply cared about, but she lived two lifetimes ago, although the memories still deeply hurt.

When they came back, Alex spent a couple of days fishing together with Lou Chen, relaxing at the lakeside while talking about random things and only then went back to cultivation. This time he already knew what he wanted to achieve during this session and, after settling down in the pavilion and closing his eyes, immediately followed one of the soul threads.

The idea was to find one particular incarnation and merge with it, or absorb – depending on how one defined the process. And the incarnation Alex looked for was the one during which he learned the most effective ways on how to deal with stronger foes or groups that outnumbered him. Of course, he was worried about the side effects of the merge, especially since he was a female during that lifetime.

Just like a ‘regular’ person during their one life, Alex had forgotten many things he learned during his previous lives. What he wanted the most was not the power boost one gets after the merge, but the forgotten knowledge. That was the reason why he looked for Ramona Esmeralda Angelina Valentina Cassandra Morales, or Mona how his mother called him.

Unfortunately the first life he found was the previous one, his eight. After noting down the path towards it, Alex started over again.

This time he didn’t even need to reach the end of the thread to realize he had found the one during which he met Nabia. The stinging pain of her loss radiated through Alex’s mind as he opened his eyes and found himself back in Lou Chen’s pavilion again. This was the life he longed for the most, but at the same time the least, because he had been dead to her for over two lifetimes – no matter how persuasive the sect master was with his theories about the time not actually existing.

After calming down the mind, Alex closed his eyes again. He observed the eight soul threads for a while and tried to guess which one he should follow this time, when he noticed slight discrepancies between them – some felt more distinct than others, almost as if they were of different thickness or brightness.

The thickest one of all was the one that led to his previous life and without thinking much Alex decided to perform an experiment. He picked and followed the weakest soul thread. It was so thin, at times he though he would loose it and have to start over, but after some struggle his efforts were rewarded – the life it lead to turned out to be his first one!

The closer Alex got to it, the more the nostalgic feelings of his past returned – the jobs he took, the girls he fooled around with. Everything felt almost like it was yesterday. It took him a lot of willpower to resist the temptation to merge with his first life that from the point of view of his current problems was somewhat worthless.

But the experiment turned out to be a success – he verified that the stronger the soul threads were, the more recent the life was.

Alex focused once again and numbered the threads by their thickness. Then he picked the third thickest soul thread that should indicate his sixth life and, after a period of time, sank in an ocean of forgotten events and emotions.

During the soul merge for a person to live through another life while, depending on how one defines it, absorbing it or absorbing another consciousness into own, was the hardest part – for a regular practitioner that is. To Alex this was nothing more than watching an old movie he had seen before.

What he found peculiar was that actually the merging process went somewhat different than the sect master described – instead of only absorbing the consciousness along with the experience and knowledge, Alex managed to get a hold of a huge amount of soul particles that for some reason didn’t immediately dissipate. According to his understanding, these soul particles were the ones that formed his previous self and after the merging process they had to become loose similar to how a body degrades after a person dies.

But if he was given such a generous gift, Alex was not going to say ‘no’. After the initial surprise, like a sculptor working with clay, he grabbed the soul particles in batches and continuously added to his soul brand one after another.

Since he was not the most creative person in the world, in the rush he could not think of anything better than to reconstruct the part of his ‘Wheel of life’ that depicted the sixth life with the soul particles that initially already belonged to his sixth self and the freshly absorbed experience and memories allowed him to create it in amazing detail.

When Alex was finished he long lost the count of how many soul particles he actually absorbed, but he was certain it was close to a half compared to what he previously had in total.

‘No wonder!’ Alex thought to himself, ‘If the power boost that the cultivator experiences is close to the improvement I just received, they would continue to relentlessly work for decades to become even stronger!’

And the sect master, most likely, had long become addicted to the process of absorption, despite the fact that he probably couldn’t improve his physical strength much. The part where he could maintain his middle aged appearance for centuries was already enough.

‘Wait! The looks!’ Alex remembered the potential side effect of the Soul merge.