Chapter 190 - The Seed and the Stele
Su Bai grabbed the Petrified Calamity-Magnet at once.
A twenty-foot clearing appeared.
The red mist flowed upward in thin streams, gathered around the Petrified Calamity-Magnet, and was pulled into Su Bai through the inverted lotus barrier around his body.
The clearing was not perfectly clean, but it was stable enough for the others to move and breathe without being swallowed by the mist immediately.
Su Bai turned to the group.
"Stay in the clear zone. I will meditate for a while."
After saying that, he sat down directly.
He did not wait for an answer.
The others froze for only a breath before reacting.
Qin Baoshan raised his shield and stood at the front of the clearing. Ji Ruyue moved to one side, frost gathering around her sword. Tang Ziyan’s hidden weapons slid silently into position. Lin Weiyang released several bronze mechanisms, and they crawled to the edge of the clear zone. Bai Zhi and Mu Qing stayed closer to Su Bai, watching his body.
Zhuge Jing opened his fan and looked toward the mist.
"Guard him."
No one argued.
By now, everyone here had adjusted to Su Bai’s peculiarities to some degree.
He had just swallowed something suspicious, called it candy, raised a strange magnet, and entered meditation in the Inner Area of the Fallen-Star Sanctuary.
If this had happened when they first met him, someone would have panicked.
Now, they only felt their hearts tighten.
After all, this was Su Bai.
The more absurd the situation became, the more likely it was that he had found some benefit inside it.
At the center of the clear zone, Su Bai’s breathing slowed.
His consciousness sank inward.
The Soul-Bloom Seed had opened inside his sea of consciousness.
It was still shaped like a red marble, but cracks had spread across its surface. Red-black roots stretched out from those cracks. They tried to pierce into his consciousness like poisonous vines looking for soil.
Inside the seed, tiny sparks woke one after another. Those sparks were the soul fragments. Each one carried a faint remnant of a cultivator.
Su Bai quietly watched the roots spread.
For an ordinary cultivator, this would have been the beginning of disaster.
For him, it was more like watching a poisonous seed trying to plant itself in someone else’s field.
But before the red-black roots could dig deeper, something in his Dantian reacted.
In the infinite darkness of his Dantian, the Crystalline Tree Spirit Root moved.
Its dark crystalline roots stretched upward, crossing the boundary between foundation and consciousness. They reached the Soul-Bloom Seed with a strange calmness, as if the tree had merely discovered a foreign seed falling into its territory.
The Soul-Bloom Seed tried to grow.
The Crystalline Tree Spirit Root wrapped around it.
The red-black roots struggled, but every root that tried to spread outward was caught by crystalline threads. The seed wanted to take root in Su Bai’s sea of consciousness, but the Crystalline Tree pulled it toward itself instead.
Su Bai was slightly surprised.
"So it really is still a seed."
The red marble trembled violently. Its cracks widened, and the soul fragments inside flickered like frightened fireflies. Before the seed could force itself to bloom, the Dao-Devouring Blank Stele embedded in the trunk of the Crystalline Tree suddenly trembled.
Su Bai’s expression changed.
Its original effect was terrifying. It could forcibly extract and consume a cultivator’s active Cultivation Method, leaving their foundation completely empty and useless.
But inside Su Bai, its effect had reversed.
Instead of emptying his foundation, it had once read his foundation and corrected his path. It took the Sunflower Method, stripped away what did not fit, completed what was missing, and transformed it into something that matched his infinite void Dantian.
That was why the Sunflower Method evolved into the Void Sunflower Supreme Method.
Later, with further changes in Su Bai’s foundation, the method had been refined again until it became the Binary Void-Sun Supreme Method.
The stele did not simply devour. Inside Su Bai, it completed.
Now, marks appeared on the stele’s blank surface.
One soul fragment was pulled out from the Soul-Bloom Seed.
It struck the stele.
A flash of light appeared.
Lines of text shifted.
Su Bai immediately sensed what had happened.
The stele had just extracted the cultivation method hidden inside that soul fragment!
The fragment was broken. The original cultivator had long since disappeared, leaving only a stained remnant inside the Soul-Bloom Seed.
But the stele did not care.
It devoured the remnant method, stripped away the corruption, filled in the missing parts, and completed it.
New words appeared beneath the Binary Void-Sun Supreme Method.
Su Bai became silent.
Another soul fragment entered the stele.
The surface flashed again.
Another method appeared.
A third fragment followed, then a fourth, then a fifth.
Each time, the Dao-Devouring Blank Stele trembled. Each time, the broken method trace was extracted, purified, completed, and recorded. At the same time, information flowed into Su Bai’s mind.
The stele installed the completed methods inside his mind like sealed jade slips arranged on a shelf. He could sense them. He could understand their general structure. If he wanted to study them carefully, he could open them later one by one.
Su Bai was truly speechless this time.
Because the cultivation methods were not ordinary.
Perhaps because the Soul-Bloom Seed came from the system, the soul fragments inside it were not the remnants of common cultivators. Even after being broken and polluted, their methods carried the weight of an ancient battlefield.
One completed record burned with dark-gold text.
[War-Ghost Iron Body Scripture]
A body cultivation method. It used battlefield pressure, killing intent, heavy spiritual force, and hostile energy to temper flesh, bone, organs, and marrow.
Ordinary cultivators would need special medicine, dangerous battlefields, and repeated life-and-death pressure to cultivate it.
Su Bai looked at the name for a long moment.
A complete body cultivation method.
He had swallowed a dangerous seed that could turn ordinary cultivators into abominations, and the first proper benefit it gave him was a body cultivation method.
For a moment, Su Bai did not know whether to praise the system or report it.
Another completed method appeared.
[Ancient Star Furnace Scripture]
A cultivation method that refined spiritual energy as if the Dantian were a furnace beneath the stars. It used external pressure, heavenly starlight, and internal fire to forge the foundation again and again until the cultivator’s Qi became heavy, pure, and difficult to exhaust.
A third method settled onto the stele.
[Ten Thousand Rivers Returning to Origin Sutra]
A supreme-grade method focused on vastness and accumulation. It gathered spiritual energy through countless minor circulation routes before returning everything to the Dantian, allowing the cultivator’s foundation to become broad, stable, and difficult to shake.
A fourth method appeared with pale silver marks.
[Moon-Devouring Yin Scripture]
A cold Yin cultivation method that refined moon essence and negative spiritual energy into a quiet, condensed foundation. Its Qi was restrained, silent, and extremely difficult to detect before eruption.
A fifth method unfolded slowly.
[Great Sun Burning Meridian Canon]
A Yang-based cultivation method that tempered the meridians through blazing circulation. It made spiritual energy fierce, explosive, and difficult to suppress, but required a body and foundation strong enough to endure its heat.
A sixth method appeared beneath the others.
[Nine Abyss Heavy Qi Scripture]
A deep-earth cultivation method that compressed Qi layer by layer until it became heavy as stone and dense as metal. Cultivators who practiced it would have slow progress at first, but their foundation would become extremely stable.
There were more.
None of them were useless.
The Dao-Devouring Blank Stele completed them all.
That was the most ridiculous part.
A broken method trace should have been nothing more than useless residue. But the stele treated incompleteness as a problem to be solved.
Missing beginning?
Completed.
Missing ending?
Completed.
Su Bai’s silence deepened.
This did not mean he could casually switch methods.
His foundation already belonged to the Binary Void-Sun Supreme Method. Randomly changing his main method now would be no different from tearing out a house’s pillars just because someone offered him prettier roof tiles.
But he could bring them back to Radiant Sky Sect.
If these methods were copied, sealed, studied, and distributed properly, they would not only strengthen one person. They could become part of the sect’s foundation.
Su Bai suddenly felt that the Soul-Bloom Seed did not look as ugly anymore.
It was still ugly, but it was the kind of ugly thing that came with benefits.
The Dao-Devouring Blank Stele slowly dimmed after the last soul fragment was devoured. Beneath the Binary Void-Sun Supreme Method, new completed methods remained engraved on the stone like stars arranged beneath a dark sky.
At the same time, the Soul-Bloom Seed changed.
The soul fragments inside it had become empty.
Their strongest traces were gone. The cultivator foundation that the seed needed to reconstruct a Soul-Bloom Returnee had been devoured by the stele.
But the seed itself had not disappeared.
It still had Ashen-Blood Miasma. It still had the structure of blooming. It still had the instinct to open.
The red marble trembled.
A flower forced its way out of the cracked shell.
It was red-black, ragged, and soaked in miasma. It had lost the strongest soul fragment it needed, but it still tried to bloom by force.
The Crystalline Tree Spirit Root moved again.
A crystalline branch lowered.
A root pierced the broken shell.
The half-open flower froze.
The Crystalline Tree did not allow another bloom to steal its place.
The red-black flower opened halfway.
The next moment, its petals reversed.
They folded inward.
The miasma that should have burst outward was dragged back. The bloom structure twisted in reverse. The petals curled into themselves layer by layer until the flower became a tightly closed bud.
The Crystalline Tree swallowed the failed bloom.
A black-red crystalline bud appeared on one of its branches.
It hung there silently. No miasma leaked out from it. Instead, the Crystalline Tree slowly absorbed the remaining bloom force inside the bud.
Understanding dawned in Su Bai’s mind.
The bud was not simply a sealed remnant. It was the failed Soul-Bloom Seed after being absorbed by the Crystalline Tree Spirit Root.
The dangerous part had reversed. It could no longer bloom outward and turn Su Bai into a Returnee.
However, not everything inside the seed had disappeared.
Soul-Bloom Returnees could recognize each other because each one carried a similar bloom structure beneath their stolen appearances.
The closed bud still retained that recognition.
Since the bud had become part of Su Bai’s Crystalline Tree Spirit Root, that recognition now belonged to him.
That meant he no longer needed to guess blindly.
If something nearby carried an active bloom structure, if a Returnee was close to blooming, or if a Soul-Bloom Seed was awakening, the bud would react.
More importantly, Su Bai felt he could control it.
His throat moved. He gulped.
This was another form of ridiculousness.
Su Bai had just eaten the enemy’s seed and gained a way to recognize the enemy’s bloom traces.
The enemy might even recognize him back. But that recognition was wrong.
They would sense a bloom.
What they would not know was that his bloom was closed, reversed, and hungry.
Su Bai gave a grin that was not quite a grin.