Chapter 124
"I’m going in for a look."
"Yes, Master!"
"Understood!"
Bruce and Arcturus watched him step into the vortex, the seven-colored swirl shrank in on itself and disappeared from the sky.
The two pulled their eyes away with some reluctance, Arcturus was shaking with excitement, rubbing his hands as he paced a tight circle.
"Wonderful! This is wonderful!"
"Boundless energy and cosmic destiny in the Kun-Heaven Nether Sea!"
"I don’t ask for much!"
"If the Demon Ancestor lets me absorb even a thousandth of it, I’ll be satisfied! I won’t have lived this life for nothing!"
Boundless energy and cosmic destiny?
Inside the demonic array, the Falling Cherry Spirit Emperor and Mira went very still and very attentive.
"Husband, our Falling Cherry Spirit Domain holds a place like that?"
"Why has no text, no scroll, no record ever mentioned it..."
The Spirit Emperor nodded hard, "So that was his objective the whole time. He didn’t come for our array or our destiny at all. We can put down half our worries."
"Though it still makes no sense, if we had nothing to do with his purpose, why refuse our submission?"
Wrapped in seven-colored glaze, Soren came out of the vortex into a space of its own.
Above him, an expanse of pure white light, beneath his feet, a boundless shimmering ocean.
Nothing else, no sun, no moon, no stars, no trees, nothing alive.
"So this is the Kun-Heaven Nether Sea."
"Vast and empty."
He closed his eyes, and comfort rolled through him as threads of seven-colored energy seeped in through every pore, pure and untainted, it went to work reconditioning muscle, bone, membrane, and organ.
A thin wisp of dark miasma rose off his back, it drifted upward, met the white light, and was gone.
"Good." Soren let out a long breath.
Then his eyes narrowed with appetite.
He plunged into the depths and kicked up a spray of seven-colored water.
Deeper down, the water, which was liquid energy and nothing else, lost its glazed luster and darkened.
Kun-Heaven Nether Pearls drifted everywhere through the depths.
Fireflies over an abyss, or a galaxy, scattered wide.
The spectacle held him a moment, too many pearls to count.
They varied in color too, some held pure spiritual energy and glowed pale blue, others held raw cosmic destiny and shone milk-white, plenty were both at once, shifting through variegated patterns across the dark water according to their ratios.
The variety didn’t end there.
Crimson pearls drifted past, green ones, a few other kinds besides.
Soren checked the Strategy Encyclopedia and identified them fast, crimson were Bloodline Nether Pearls, green were Vitality Nether Pearls.
Now he understood why the Kunpeng Beast Clan called this place their Sea of Origin.
The birth and evolution of the Immemorial Kunpeng were tangled up in these waters.
Soren cared very little for the history.
He reached out and grabbed a crimson pearl.
The Six Paths Form Diagram turned in his mind, and the devouring power of the Heavenly Dao Demonic Form erupted.
His method was crude and effective, where ordinary cultivators needed days of quiet refinement, he ate the thing whole and converted it straight into combat strength.
Even so, draining the primal bloodline source out of that one pearl took two full hours.
The source energy poured into him and fused with his blood essence, hauling the biological foundation of his bloodline up with it.
One pearl.
It pushed Soren’s blood essence intensity to the absolute peak of the supreme tier, past an ordinary Middle-Tier Demon Ancestor, one more and he could ride that primal source to a level matching an Upper-Tier Demon Ancestor.
Blood essence intensity governed the power of blood contracts.
It also governed the body’s strength, a physical body came down to two things, bone and blood, raising bloodline rank and intensity was the most direct road to physical combat strength.
The stronger the physique, the faster the adaptation to higher realms, and the better the footing for fighting above one’s tier.
Soren’s bloodline rank already sat at the ceiling, now his intensity had passed a Middle-Tier Demon Ancestor’s.
Put plainly, without touching a single Demonic Form ability, Soren could crush an ordinary Middle-Tier Demon Ancestor on physique alone, activate the Demonic Forms and holding down a standard Upper-Tier Ancestor became easy.
Against a real monster of an Upper-Tier Ancestor, Orathis’s terrifying older sister for instance, he was still short.
But he’d crossed the threshold where an Upper-Tier Demon Ancestor was something he could stand against, that counted.
A milk-white pearl drifted past his face.
His eyes tracked it.
Then he snatched it out of the water.
Cosmic destiny.
White Nether Pearls were condensed destiny and nothing else, devouring what sat inside would replace the half the barrier outside had stolen from him.
He triggered the devouring power without pausing.
Outside the Nether Sea, inside the demonic formation.
The Falling Cherry Spirit Emperor and Mira had run more than a dozen escape plans and hadn’t found one that got them out intact.
The problem was the formation, simply too overbearing, short of Soren dispelling it himself, or an Ancestor Realm expert breaking it from outside, there was no way through.
Then a faint spatial ripple flickered half a meter in front of the Spirit Emperor.
He assumed his eyes were lying, nothing spatial should bypass a formation like this, the whole purpose of a sealing formation was to lock down local space.
With channels severed both ways, nobody inside could tear out and nobody outside could tear in.
So he ignored it.
A second later, a young woman’s voice spoke directly into his mind. It sounded in his ears alone. Mira, standing at his elbow, heard nothing.
"You’re the Falling Cherry Spirit Emperor, aren’t you?"
"Allow me to introduce myself, my name is Cecilia."
"I’m speaking to you through a technique of my own, it slips past formation lockdowns without alerting anyone outside."
"I can’t hold the connection long, so I’ll be brief."
"I heard everything you said to that woman."
"You want out, badly, don’t you?"
The Spirit Emperor’s pupils shrank to points, he wrapped his voice in Spirit energy and aimed the reply at the ripple’s coordinates. "My conversation with Mira was encrypted with our own Spirit energy! How could you possibly have listened in?"
"Another ability of mine, you don’t need to ask," the woman said.
"Hehe, it seems I’ve stumbled onto a secret worth quite a lot."