Dismantling the cathedral the next day, I fly into the desert again, using a dragon construct as bait to lure the worms.

Today I am lucky, for not even an hour after starting, a slightly smaller worm jumps out of the sand, devouring the dragon only to have it vanish inside its mouth, and have a two bladed fork being impaled in its head.

With a single tug I take more than half of its body out of the sand. More than enough space to have the other two chains stuck in its body.

Not even ten minutes later I am left with a one hundred and fifty meters long dead body on the ground, and a dantian on my hands.

Absorbing the ki and using it to cultivate the Earth God Body Technique for some hours, I went back to the hunt.

I seem to have found some sort of birthplace for the Bottomless Worms, for in the past seven hours I've already killed three juvenile worms, and a fourth one just jumped out of the sand.

With the now almost completely mechanical moves, I kill it in less than a minute.

Taking its core and letting the huge body fall to the ground, i see as the sands tremble for a second due to the shockwave.

But oddly enough, the one second vibrations continue to two seconds, then three.

The small trembling grows into an earthquake, destroying the nearby sand dunes, and creating a fifty meters wide hole on the ground, with such a strong suction force that even the air in the surroundings is sucked inside violently.

Without even a second to think, I send the four chains to intercept it, and make the Moon Chaser Ray ascend as fast as it can.

As I send these commands, a huge worm's head rises from the ground at an astonishing speed.

The four chains miss its head, but hits slightly below. Thanks to the sharp tips and the momentum of the worm, all four hooks enter the body deeply.

As the locking array turns on, the four chains are pulled to the max, and not even a second later are uprooted from the ground.

Noticing that the speed of ascension of the mouth was barely affected by the chains, and that the Moon Chaser Ray formation is not fast enough to escape, i make the ray vanish, take out the Drilling Array, hold it as if holding a shield in front of me, and dive down into the Bottomless Worm's mouth.

Given how fast it is ascending, and how wide its mouth is, I manage to pass through the first fifty meters where the mouth is filled with thousands of teeth safely.

Turning on my Flame Armor Array to the max, creating a ball of fire around me, I dive into the worm's throat.

If I just continue through its throat I'll hit the stomach in no time, but who knows what type of acid it is that they have. So I use the jets of fire on my array to redirect me to the walls of its throat.

Powering on the Drilling Array, it makes quick work of the meat, cutting through extremely fast.

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Making my way drilling and burning the worms body, i can feel it convulsing and hitting the ground, trying to smash me.

Activating the durability arrays on my scales, i continue drilling down to the place the dantian normally is.

If i manage to take its dantian, it will die instantly.

After some seconds drilling around in an almost blind search, guided only by the vague sense of direction of where his ki is coming from, i feel that the worm stoped hitting the ground and the position of its body that were previously horizontal is now upside down.

Not wanting to wait for it to arrive wherever it wants, I tighten my pace.

After drilling for some minutes more, I start to be able to pinpoint where his dantian is exactly, thanks to the proximity.

Arriving in the head-sized dantian, i for the first time have the opportunity to see a working dantian in all its glory.

There's thousands of big and small strands of meridians connecting the dantian to the rest of the body. Ki flows in and out of them in a continuous motion, never stopping.

After taking a few seconds to imprint that image into my brain, I raise the drill, and start going around the dantian, cutting every piece of meridians or tissue that links the body to the dantian.

With every meridian that I cut, I can feel the body of the worm contorting in pain.

The ki that was flowing through the meridians escaped, flowing through my body.

Mobilizing all my ki to form a barrier on my skin, i place all my willpower on not letting any of the worms ki inside me.

I've read in multiple books that if one lets unrestrained, owned ki enter one's body, the ki will fight with the ki inside your body, leaving deep wounds or even killing the person.

Hastening my pace, I cut the last strand connecting the dantian to the body, and with a last powerful shake, the worm dies.

Immediately, the ki that was exiting the meridians lost its owner, so it became just pure earth ki.

Not wasting this opportunity, i get into a meditation state, and start to pull all the ki from the surroundings into myself.

The amount of ki that this huge Bottomless Worm's body had is hundreds of times bigger than mine. Doing my best to absorb everything, I manage to more than double my cultivation, now in the middle stages of ki liquefying, before all the ki dissipates on the soil surrounding me.

Using the ki from the dantian to cultivate the Earth God Body Technique, i cultivate nonstop for some days, even losing count of how many.

As the ki in the dantian is close to being completely absorbed by me, I finally go through the first threshold of ten percent.

Ten percent of the structure of my bones are now earth ki. This is one minor step in the cultivation of the Earth God Body Technique.

Digging my way out of the Bottomless Worm's body, all I see is rocks to all sides. Even though I did my best to kill it as fast as I could, it still managed to take us beep in the ground.

Taking the huge dantian, I inscribe the same array I placed on the Moon Chaser Ray, and activate it. Immediately a one hundred and fifty meters long worm is created around me, and starts to swim through the rocks.

As I am going up, I pick up on a radiation of earth ki way more powerful than I've ever seen before.

I can feel that it is still thousands of meters below me, but even so its presence is so palpable.

Of course I start heading down.

Going straight to the direction I'm feeling the ki for some minutes, the head of my worm suddenly passes through a ceiling of a huge cave.

The same instant that the head pops off the ceiling, I feel an intense feeling of danger.

Instantly retracting the Bottomless Worms Array, making it vanish and leaving a corridor with me inside, I see a huge blade pass through the hole I've created, sealing the hole in the process.

In the moments that I got to look into the cave, I could see a huge crystal shining with an ethereal light.

Sending some ki out of my body and into the walls in front of me, i control the earth to move to the sides, creating a hole on the wall again, but not going through this time.

Instantly I see the crystal in the middle of a small lake of muddy water.

But again, after some instants, the blade that I now perceive is part of an Array, moves from the ground and seals the hole shut by moving the earth back to its original position as it passes.

Tinkering a little with the earth and feeling how the array moves to deal with it, i send some ki into the wall, creating a ten meters wide circle of runes, i connect them with the walls of this protection array.

My little modification makes the previous perfect dome deform a little, expanding in my direction and going past me.

As the blade moves my way to rearrange the dome, it moves around me, through the deformation that I just created.

Now safe, I walk into the dome and feel how dense the accumulation of earth ki is here.

This fifty meters tall amalgamation of different crystals must be an Earth Ki Vein. Something extremely rare to find, that I've read about in the library.

Ki veins can be found in all places of huge concentrations of mana in this world. Some even speculate that they are the origins of all the ki in the planet.

They have hundreds of variations, with innumerous ki veins to each type of ki in existence.

This one is clearly an earth ki vein, and the liquid lake below it is liquefied earth ki.

Immediately losing to temptation, i sit by the shore of the lake, place my hand into it, and start cultivating by absorbing the liquefied ki.

This is the best way possible to cultivate, the richness of this ki, the easiness it is absorbed by me, and the abundance makes me almost salivate.

Starting the circle of absorbing this ki to grow the capacity of my dantian, and sending it into my bones to cultivate the Earth God Body, I lose myself to cultivation and fall into a deep meditation state.

Almost like a statue, i stay motionless, kneeling on the shore and with the back straight, only the slight movement of my chest rising due to breathing can indicate that I'm not just a statue.