Lin Feng stood in front of the sealed four-tails in the middle of the desert.

He had decided to assimilate the soul of the beast far away from any signs of civilization.

He might trust Rasa to follow his orders, but that was in the situation of an absolute disparity in strength.

If he showed any weakness, the ambitious man would exploit it without a shred of hesitation.

He meditated on the flows of energy all around him, synchronizing with the world.

His form started to become unreal as he tapped into the Void.

Transparent streams of energy, that warped the space around him, flowed into him.

The battle against the four-tails and the Tsuchikage had pushed his control of his newfound powers over sand and given him a glimpse into the mysteries of the Grasping Principles realm.

As such, he had experienced a minor breakthrough in his understanding of Void Force.

While earlier, he could only convert world vitality into Void Force, now he could siphon off a bit of it directly from the Void.

Although, achieving that required him to be in a deep meditative state.

As the concentration of the energy within his body reached a critical level, he tapped into his power over the desert.

For miles centred around him and the orb containing the sealed beast, pillars of sand rose.

They varied in height and girth and were hollow with perforations, at irregular intervals, scattered all over them.

Anyone looking at them, from an appropriate distance, would be startled by their resemblance to flutes.

With an effort of his will, the world vitality began to circulate through these pillars and revolve in a complicated pattern that made the entire formation blur.

It was the signature technique of the Grand Architectural Sect: three-dimensional formations.

It involved using buildings and constructions to reroute the natural circulation of world vitality by imitating the operating principles of Mages and their acupoints.

It was an extremely high-level skill. Formations made in such a manner were exponentially stronger than ordinary runic formations but they were very personalized as acupoints were uniquely distributed from person to person and only the one whose acupoint distribution had been imitated to make the formation could use it.

This skill was not suitable for battles as no opponent would give you set up time for it. But it was the main source of income for the Sect as every Mage worth his title would commission one for his or her stronghold.

Not to mention cities. A regular need to alter citywide formations to work for the new city lords, whenever the previous one’s term ended, provided a stable source of income.

After gaining Shukaku’s power, this was the first application of it he had thought towards.

The formation was basically a gigantic amplifier for him.

His ability to instantly create structures from sand and his profound familiarity with both his own acupoint distribution and the formation technique let him perform a miracle in the desert.

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He could create a small amplification formation within the influence of his sand manipulation. Then he could use the amplified reach to expand the formation which would in turn expand the region of influence. This would create a positive cycle whereby he could expand his influence over the entire desert.

Within the desert, he would be a God.

Theory is happy, but reality is heartless. The mental load of performing the amount of calculations required for erecting such a grand formation, at the degree of precision required for it to be functional, was enough to destroy his mind.

His current limit was a few miles.

Also, it was easy to disrupt, as even a pillar out of place would mess up the circulation.

The citywide formations solved this by using runic formations to protect the components of the 3-D formation. Something which couldn’t be achieved in a short time.

As the formation hummed into life, Lin Feng could feel his senses expand and the power within his grasp increase doubled and redoubled.

With a deep breath, he sat down cross legged in front of the glass orb and placed his palms on it.

The dark blue patterns that covered his body began to glow as Void Force and world vitality emerged into it.

The seal on the orb, too, lit up with a matching blue radiance.

The patterns on his body wriggled and started circulating all over it, as did the seals on the orb.

A connection soon formed between them and the patterns from the orb transferred through one of his palms, circulated around his body and passed back through the other palm.

Slowly, the accumulated world vitality and Void Force poured into the orb along with the seal patterns and washed away some of the four-tails’ energy.

This energy too was added into the circulation, mixing with Lin Feng’s personal mix of energies.

Like a stream wearing away a rock, he persevered, forgetting all sense of time.

Finally, all that was left was the corpse of a robust red-haired man entombed in glass.

Lin Feng sat in meditation beside it, his aura faint and his figure illusory.

The pillars of sand had crumbled as the last of the energy and the seals had flowed into his body.

Currently, he was in the most critical phase of the assimilation: soul combat.

Unlike the sand ninja, whose soul was too weak or Shukaku, whose soul had a fatal flaw, the four-tails’ soul was quite thorny.

The Soul Cultivation technique he practiced was the Four Colour Soul Sutra.

It assigned attributes to the four major components of the soul and allowed them to be used either to augment the soul during cultivation or during combat in the mindscape.

In his mindscape, in a limitless blank white space, he faced off against the enraged ape.

Son Goku, for that was its name, charged at him, its powerful muscles bunching and flexing as it propelled itself toward the hateful human which had ripped it away, painfully, from its previous host.

Lin Feng’s soul stood its ground, unflustered as the behemoth expanded in its line of sight.

With a mutter of “Enthusiasm Fire”, a bright reddish-pink flame emerged baseless on the approaching ape.

Screaming in pain, the beast tumbled mid-charge and passed through his side, ruffling his clothes with the wind of its passing.

It writhed on the ground, trying desperately to extinguish the flames that enveloped it.

As it struggled, it sometimes laughed, sometimes cried, sometimes roared in anger and sometimes cowered in fear. It cycled through the entire gamut of emotions as the Enthusiasm Fire, emotion given spiritual form, seared it.

The face of Lin Feng’s soul form grew pale as he kept up the technique, bringing the beast’s soul to the edge of collapse.

In a bout of anger, the tailed-beast erupted with the considerable amount of soul power it possessed, routing the flame, causing a backlash to his soul.

It roared, emitting globules of light and dark energy that condensed together into a jet-black sphere.

Feeling the constriction from the amount of condensed energy, Lin Feng quickly stabilised his injury and slammed his palms on the ground.

“Resolution Earth.”

The ground rippled where he touched it and multiple thick metallic walls rose between him and the beast.

The four-tails stretched out its neck and swallowed the orb. Its body immediately inflated from the contained forces.

It roared. The world turned white.

After a long time, the reverberations of the mindscape settled, the cracks closing slowly.

Out of nine walls, the beast had breached five. The penetrated ones still glowing red from the heat.

Lin Feng’s soul breathed out a sigh of relief. Thankfully, he had tempered his Will to the Iron will boundary. If he was still stuck in the stone will boundary of Resolution Earth, he would have died from that impact.

He didn’t give the beast any time to recover as he muttered, “River of Recollection.”

A deluge of water formed from his condensed memories washed away the panting beast, destroying the memories in its enfeebled psyche before it could recover.

The four-tails’ struggles grew less intense until they stopped and it just lay there like a good-for-nothing.

“Aeolian thoughts.”

An abrasive breeze picked up and blew upon the soul form of the tailed-beast and it was slowly eroded away to nothingness.

In the real world, Lin Feng’s eyes snapped open as he exited his mindscape.

He had succeeded.