While Guan Zhenyan was being tortured by friendship, Sage was focused inward. While he was left with only his Nascent Soul in the outside world, on the Inner World the Soul Clone was still in ‘perfect’ condition. Calling it perfect was a bit of an exaggeration as the Soul Clone had used its strength to create the many clones that the Sea King had killed off first. It was only after that ploy failed that Sage split his core Nascent Soul in half to fake his death. The Nascent Soul of the Soul Clone was greatly weakened, but it was still stronger than his main Nascent Soul.

On the Inner World, Sage in his Soul Clone form, was currently experimenting with some of the eggs he’d created in the past using the Soul Spawn technique. The foundation of Sage’s rise out of mediocrity relied so heavily upon the combination of the Insect Immortal Index and the first creature he’d Merged with: the Twin Ringed Soul Serpent. He hadn’t made use of Anima Devour, or Anima Cannibal ever since he’d evolved the Avatar of Excess, his Twin Soul, into a full Soul Clone. The Cerulean Cloud was a decent stealth technique, but the real winner here was the Soul Spawn ability. The limited ability of resurrection was arguably more important to him than his clone had been given how it had saved his life in the past and now helped him to recover from this near death far more easily.

For those at the sixth rank the loss of the body wasn’t the end. A Nascent Soul was strong enough to survive without a body or very special resources and conditions to protect it. It also incorporated the Cultivator’s Core which meant only the body had to be rebuilt. For those at a lower rank they’d need a specially prepared vessel to keep their soul together for longer than a few days and to protect them from sunlight or other energies that could easily harm spirit type beings. Worse yet, even if they had a recipe to create a new body and the expensive resources needed to create it, they’d still have to start their Qi Cultivation over from scratch.

Soul Spawn had taken care of the need for a special recipe and resources to create a new body, but when he’d died previously he started from scratch as a little serpent-like beast and thankfully Tao Ba had given him a little assistance to get him through that most dangerous time when he was just a mindless animal. This time was a little different, after forming his Nascent Soul he would no longer be forced to start his Qi Cultivation all over again. His body would still start from a tiny hatchling and slowly grow larger and stronger, rebuilding all the proper meridians and pathways until they were once again strong enough to handle the full flow of his Qi. While he wouldn’t be turned into a mindless beast, he wouldn’t be much better. While his mind was safely encapsulated within his Nascent Soul and retained in full, the new body would not be able to withstand it, just like it wouldn’t be able to handle his Qi. It was sort of like being an adult trapped in an infant’s body. Even if he still knew how to talk and run, the new body didn’t have the capabilities. The new body would have very weak hardware, so even if the software and memory retained their great capability, the actual performance would be highly limited.

How did he know all this?

First-hand experience. On the Inner World, Sage used his Soul Clone to create Soul Spawns and conducted the full rebirth experience. Now that he was in a somewhat safe place, he didn’t need to keep his Soul Clone around as a backup plan. The decade of downtime was also not that big of a deal when taking into account the time dilation of the Inner World. It was also an opportunity to figure out the most optimal method of using the Soul Spawn. Could they accelerate its growth with certain resources? Was it better to create a Soul Spawn from a very weak body and then fuse other beasts and insects back into it afterwards? Were there any adverse effects from Mutating the Soul Spawn egg?

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Sage’s Soul Clone wasn’t the only one experimenting in this manner, as other researchers of the Lang Clan had been studying these areas for a while now already. The problem was that there was a limited number of Nascent Souls willing to experiment with the technique, so the Soul Clone participated in the studies itself to verify whether certain methods that worked on lower ranked Cultivators would work on higher ranked Cultivators. Due to the time dilation, the 10 year recovery turned into less than four days. Some of the experiments were failures, but in those cases they could just kill the body and start over again. Combining just a few months of experiments with the already thousands of years worth of testing finally led to the construction of a special incubation device.

While they didn’t find any way to speed up the growing process once the Soul Spawn was born, they did find a way to turn the ‘Mature’ technique into a Magical Tool. It didn’t speed up the time required for the egg to hatch, but instead accelerated the processes of growth for the unborn creature. When it hatched, the new body had a higher quality of body. Muscles were stronger, flesh was tougher, bones were harder, everything was simply of a higher quality than the newborn would normally be. This cut out quite a bit of the time required for the new body to grow up to its full size and capability.

Better yet, this new tool: The Chrysalis Chamber, was not only useful for the Soul Spawn technique. It was also effective for any incubating egg and even more surprisingly it could assist in metamorphosis. While undergoing a ‘Merge’, the Chrysalis Chamber could be used to funnel more energy into the process to accelerate its progress. The tool incorporated a Qi Gathering Array as well as having room to slot in Spirit Stones, Spirit Crystals and other energy sources. Lastly, it also included a few defensive arrays to protect the user while they were incapacitated.

Unfortunately, any other changes provided marginal improvements at best, but on the plus side the Chrysalis Chamber was impressive enough on its own as it accelerated the Soul Spawn process from around a decade down to just three years. Sage waited around for six months in order to save seven years. He had to leave the safety of the Peachwood Ring and his hiding spot on Guan Zhenyan’s finger, but he hid a Chrysalis Chamber within Zhenyan’s rooms, which was almost as safe. The egg incubated for a few weeks in the chamber before hatching and releasing a large and strange looking mantis. Altering the body didn’t reduce the growing time, so this new body was the same as his last, simply using the most recent Soul Spawn egg he’d created.

Guan Zhenyan had reserved this chamber for him on purpose. It was normally a Cultivation Room, strengthened to resist attacks and isolate the user from the outside world so they could train without interruption. In this case, the room was modified to extend its defenses against its own occupant and the standard door was changed to include a one way defensive array so the door could be opened and food delivered without the occupant being able to escape. This was just a safety measure, since most of the food or needed supplies could be brought out from the Inner World. The issue was that the body had to allow the mind to access the Inner World and if there were any problems they could feed him manually. There were a few instances in the first few weeks that required intervention when the beast body was too primal for the Soul Clone to influence, but after that the chamber remained sealed for a few years before finally the arrays were deactivated and a golden eyed man walked out with a smile on his face.

“Finally, I’m free!”