Ai glanced nervously back at Yunfei; the gale winds were strong, but they pressed on. With sails trimmed, Ai piloted the sloop across the devastation. Smoke and heat radiated from the ruined island; the once noble forest island was reduced to a smoldering wasteland of charred bones and melted rock.
Ai glanced at the sky and failed to process what she was seeing. Twenty-eight concentric rings of dark clouds went into the distance as far as she could see. Multiple core advancements.
There was a reason cultivators didn’t cultivate multiple cores. Besides the obvious requirement of acquiring more spiritual energy, there was another reason. Each core advancement came with a heavenly tribulation, and each subsequent tribulation was twice as destructive as the one before. A dual-core cultivator’s last core formation tribulation was twice as strong. A three-core cultivator’s final tribulation was four times as powerful.
She’d known of cultivators who would shield themselves during a tribulation, rich cultivators whose family could afford complex spiritual arrays, or who owned some shield-type spiritual treasure, but in those cases, the cost of advancing multiple cores rose exponentially. In contrast, the benefits of numerous cores increased linearly. In the whole world of cultivation, there was a consensus. Advancing multiple cores just wasn’t worth it.
That was the prevailing theory. Looking at the destroyed island, she suspected the danger curve of heavenly tribulations was even steeper than previously thought. Seven cores.
“By all the immortals,” Bao swore under her breath. Ai understood Bao’s reaction; Bao was a life energy cultivator. With so much death all around, it was little wonder she felt oppressed.
The closer they got to the epicenter of the tribulation, the hotter it got. The hundreds of powerful lightning bolts had melted the earth into slag in small patches here and there, but closer to the epicenter, the ground had been transformed into glass and rivers of molten rock.
Ai trimmed the airfoil, then dropped anchor.
“The rest is on foot,” she called out, “can’t risk the damage to our ship.” She turned a handle to crank the anchor chain taut before checking her supplies, then leaping from the sloop down to the dry and cracked earth.
Bao and Song jumped down. Yunfie glided down, the wind helping her descend.
“Still good?” Ai asked Song.
Song nodded and signed, “That was the last of them. We should be good.” For the last two days, high-level cultivators from every sect had come to inspect the site. Word must have spread of a twenty-eight-ring heavenly tribulation; cultivators capable of fast travel, near enough to look for themselves, had appeared in twos and threes at first, then in scores. She and her team had stayed far away - off the island and watched and waited for the masters and grandmasters to come and go.
She couldn’t tell what they sensed, but it was clear they didn’t find anything they wanted because they all came and left after a short inspection. She suspected they all felt his corpse at the center of the tribulation sight and concluded he hadn’t survived. That’s what she would have supposed had she not known he was dead when the tribulations started.
“Watch your step,” Bao looked at the various pits of slag that still radiated heat. “Some of this earth may still be soft.”
Yunfei swallowed nervously but gritted her teeth in determination.
“We just have to recover his body,” Ai said. How hard could that be?
They looked down into the mile-wide pit that went from patches of slag to solid sheets of dark glass where the tribulation had annihilated all life and melted the very mountains like wax. Down there, somewhere in the bottom of this hell pit, was a child’s corpse.
Ai swallowed and started down the slope.
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Kai rested in a meditative posture, taking deep and regular breaths. Opening and advancing all his cores hadn’t been complex. Contrary to his expectation, each additional core was faster to advance. He’d learned something about advanced cores. They produced their own spiritual energy. That advancement would have been a massive boon to an ordinary cultivator, but it wasn’t so much for him. He already had a limitless supply of spiritual energy, so creating more seemed pointless, and yet with each core he advanced, it became much easier to advance the next one. Each of his completed cores contributed some energy to assist - the thicker, more responsive variety, which reduced the difficulty in compression.
Even still, he was exhausted. First, from lack of sleep, he didn’t think he needed to sleep as a soul, but the last few days of stress and difficulty had forced him to change his opinion. He wanted to sleep. He needed it. Like a thirsty man who needs water, he longed to close his eyes, stop thinking, and slip into bliss for a while. He tried to but couldn’t fall asleep in his soul space. He couldn’t fall asleep even when his awareness was anchored to his body.
He looked at the screen. Three layers of defense, that’s how Kai thought of it. The outer layer was the molten rock that was cooling into a hard shell. The second layer was a dead bear-like spirit beast that had killed the tiger, ripped it to pieces, then eaten it. The third layer was the tiger who had consumed him. He was in the center.
The battle between the monstrous bear-like spirit beast and the tiger hadn’t taken long. The bear was much larger than the tiger and somehow hid and waited for the tiger to approach. The tiger was able to jump around, but one hit from a massive claw was able to severely injure it. The bear tore it to pieces before downing the core, taking Kai inside.
Then the lightning reached them. It took longer than Kai wanted to admit, but he and Relay had finally deduced it was lightning from the patterns in the energy. At first, the bear shrugged it off, but as the bolts continued increasing in destructive power, the bear started digging down into the earth, its claws rending rock and moving dirt, allowing it to tunnel deeper.
Still, the lightning came down with such force that it eventually liquefied the rock around them until they were surrounded by magma deep in the earth.
He watched in frustration as the soul of the tiger and the bear left their bodies and dissipated away, him helpless to reach out and capture them for his collection. He tried. He moved his spirit body, tried to - to move it from his dead body to catch the two sparkling souls. Each soul's treasures were priceless to him, but it didn’t matter. He couldn’t move from his dead body. He could only look on in despair as the souls slowly faded into nothing.
The loss of that opportunity further exhausted him.
So he was locked inside a partially digested tiger, inside a bear-like spirit beast, he could see the beast's bones, but the skin, organs, and every other part had been melted together into a shell - like a corpse candy surrounded by a cooling rock shell.
Relay hovered before the screen - having shed his white fox body. He floated as a blue orb covered in metal plating. Kai noticed Relay changed form after watching the bear spirit beast dismember the tiger and swallow it. Kai didn’t ask him about it. Maybe he just felt safer like this.
“I’ve been monitoring your cores - tracking energy levels, output. We must start recording energy consumption once ready to move onto the next step.”
He turned, his blue orb pulsed with a deep light whenever he spoke. Kai was just glad he hadn’t included a human mouth.
“I don’t have any standards to qualify the power of the spiritual energy. Maybe if we can run some physical experiments, eventually we can figure it out, but for now, I’m using one second of normal energy transferred from your soul space to your spirit body as a basic unit of measurement. One second of transfer is one sec. Based on my measurements, this is what your cores are doing.”
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
A chart on the screen outlined the different cores' current energy levels and generation.
Crown core: 22,000 secs, +5 secs per hour
Eye core: 25,000 secs, +6 secs per hour
Throat core: 19,000 secs, +5 secs per hour
Heart core: 29,000 secs, +7 secs per hour
Sternum core: 20,000 secs, +4 secs per hour
Abdomenm core: 21,000 secs. +5 secs per hour
Pelvic core: 22,000 secs, +5 secs per hour
“My normal transfer rate is 10,000 secs per hour, so not much of an improvement,” Kai observed.
“True, but the whole point of this exercise was to measure how much energy it takes to use the Eye of God skill. We know the conservation principles. You can’t just make something from nothing. Whatever we need will be converted from your spiritual energy.”
Kai nodded. Then closed his eyes. The Eye of God skill was complex, and he was getting increasingly tired with every passing moment. The way things were going, if he couldn’t achieve something soon, he may never be able to.
Kai turned to look at the protocols they outlined for the next series of experiments. The Eye of God skill requires precise control of one’s spiritual energy, the ability to visualize what you want, and enough power to push that visualization from abstract fields of awareness to concrete ones. Kai thought of it like a building a wave in one field of reality that rippled to related fields, which rippled to others, eventually manifesting a change in reality itself.
Kai reviewed the first experiment. Atomic positioning. The goal of the first push was to nudge one atom into a slightly different position. After evaluating all the materials close to his body, they found several metals woven into the thread of his garments. With practice, he could reduce his awareness until he could focus at the atomic level. His eye-core was so much better at perception than his human eyes. Kai estimated that to see silver at the atomic level, he needed to magnify the image 100 million times, which took time but was otherwise not an issue.
He saw the silver atoms in a chain, the unbroken thread they wove into his burial garments. Recording a picture to compare later, Kai began cycling his eye-core. His core responded quickly, much quicker than he expected. He cycled all his modifiers off, then back on, starting with the four-segment diamond for visible light, then the five-segment for spiritual energy, then the six-segment for motion, and so on. The manual's words didn’t mean much to Kai, but he thought he could guess what some of them showed him.
He was pretty sure he could see gravity, electricity, magnetism, and nuclear forces after motion. After that, the visualizations became much more abstract. He guessed he was looking at probability, with positions constantly shifting, then ranges of possibility, and after that, it became more fluid. When he reached the fifteen-segment shape, he looked at the silver atoms. They constantly changed, moving from one set of positions to another - as though cycling through possible configurations.
Here goes nothing. Kai waited until the possible configurations cycled back around to the one he wanted before cycling down from the fifteen-segment shape to the fourteen-segment shape, then back. He did this three times, alternating as quickly as he could between these two modes of perception before pushing from the fourteen-segment shape to the thirteen-segment shape.
His brow furrowed. Admittedly, his newly advanced energy was much more responsive, but the God’s Eye Skill still required intense focus and control.
He alternated between adjacent modes of awareness, pushing down from thirteen to twelve, and on and on - three complete cycles between adjacent pairs. He made over fifty transitions in pushing from fifteen segments to four, back and forth - in less than a minute.
He took a deep breath and looked at the silver atoms. He looked at the recorded image. Then back to the atoms again.
“You see what I see?” Kai asked.
“You moved the thirty-fifth atom away from the thirty-seventh one.”
“It works.” Kai smiled, “I just used my mind and spiritual energy to move something in the real world.”
“Wow, that took a lot of energy,” Relay thrummed, “you used up four hundred secs from your eye core.”
“It doesn’t matter. It works!” Kai felt such relief. He was prepared for a long series of failed experiments. Had expected that, but this - this was beyond his wildest expectations.
He looked at the next experiment. Atomic duplication.
Kai took a deep breath and got started.
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“We’ll camp here,” Ai yelled over the hot wind. “It’s still too hot. We’ll wait for it to cool down more.” They had trekked halfway down the slag pit, the earth turning into thick glass beneath their feet. A near misstep almost cost Bao her leg as the slag cracked and revealed bright orange glass beneath.
“What we need is for it to rain,” Yunfie complained, “but there’s barely any moisture in the air for miles.” Their youngest team member was doing well, but several slips and brushes against charcoal trees had left her a sorry sight. Bruised and covered in soot, she tucked her braids back and looked around.
“At least we won’t get cold tonight,” Bao said as she looked around at the stumps of trees, many of which were still on fire. Smoke was coming up all around them, but deep underground, a steady column of steam rose in the center.
Ai set to testing the earth, using her sword to determine the thickness of the cold. Satisfied that it was safe, she pulled her leather book from her pouch and drew a spacious tent. After a few minutes of cultivating and controlling her ink energy, they had a comfortable tent.
“Get some rest,” she turned to start patrolling the area, “Bao, I’ll wake you when you’re up.”
Ai left them to settle in and walked around the area. Her thoughts were dark. This wasn’t supposed to be a difficult mission, but they had come close to death twice. They would have died if they could not drop the casket on this island.
She soaked in the ruin and devastation all around her. This was the life of a cultivator. The spirit beast on this island had likely lived undisturbed here for thousands of years. All that ended because she was flying by at the wrong time.
“It wasn’t you, Ai,” her voice was quiet. “It was him.” Her eyes followed the pit down to the center, where the smoke and steam mixed.
She felt powerless earlier when she could only watch the grandmaster from afar. She didn’t dare to approach, and while they could no doubt sense her team, they were so far beneath them that they didn’t spare a thought for them.
She laughed a little, her bright eyes looking at the dark clouds in the sky.
“Even they stood under these clouds, though.” When someone powerful enough came around, the world changed around them, and everyone near felt it. That was the life of a cultivator; to weather to storms of others, to live long enough to create one’s own storms.
Her mouth flattened into a thin line as she looked down into the pit. The soulforger. There was danger there, but also opportunity. Am I strong enough to grasp it?