Chapter 137
Soren smiled and kneaded her shoulders.
Then he gestured for her to stand aside and wait.
"I have some business to attend to first."
"Once that’s done."
"I’ll take you home with me."
Cecilia nodded like a chick pecking rice, deeply curious about what the business was.
She knew better than to ask, she stepped aside to watch.
Soren walked over to the pool of blood on the floor, out of what the Falling Cherry Spirit Emperor had left behind, he drew a single drop of concentrated blood essence.
The Strategy Encyclopedia opened in his mind.
It slid into Six Paths Form Diagram mode.
The Hungry Ghost Path answered his will.
It opened its eyes, that pair of crimson eyes glowed like fresh blood, bewitching and deeply wrong.
A flick of his wrist, he tossed the drop of blood essence into the air ahead of him.
A demonic pattern array pushed out of his palm and caught the droplet, holding it up.
What happened next pulled a gasp out of Cecilia before she could stop it, the drop of blood writhed, then it burst with a crack.
The vaporized mist condensed into a crimson phantom, soul pressure came off it, unmistakable.
Cecilia stood there with nothing in her head at all.
Holy hell.
This monster is absurd.
Is he summoning the Falling Cherry Spirit Emperor’s soul back?
The Alliance has its own methods for extracting a cultivator’s soul, I watched the Heaven Demon Ancestor perform one personally.
This is nothing like what we do.
Pulling a soul out of a living body, or eating a living person’s soul power, is comparatively simple. Plenty of techniques for it.
But once a person dies, the soul scatters into the void, and this one has been dead for days.
Cold bones and dried blood at this point.
How does anyone call a scattered soul back out of nothing?
Soren is too damned devilish.
These techniques of his are a hundred times stranger than the techniques banned back in the Immemorial Era.
Cecilia’s lip twitched.
Privately she filed him as a peerless demon lord who had earned his reputation as the man who killed the Blood Demon Ancestor.
She’d need to study his habits down to the smallest detail if she wanted to kill him.
Soren flicked a finger and shot out a dense pulse of demonic energy.
It resonated in step with the Hungry Ghost Path Demonic Form, it surged forward and wrapped around the crimson phantom above the formation.
And then the Falling Cherry Spirit Emperor, dead for two days, was standing there again, using Soren’s demonic energy as a body.
His soul was fusing with the vessel fast and by force, which meant being torn apart and rebuilt from nothing, and he screamed the whole way through it.
The screaming ran seven or eight seconds, then it stopped.
The vessel had achieved a clean fusion with his soul and that single drop of blood essence, apart from being made entirely of pitch-black demonic energy, his build and face were what they had been in life.
And because the original soul had come back intact, so had every memory and every thought.
He held up his shaking hands, his face went from confused to something far worse.
He looked himself over, this body that felt like his and felt like nobody’s.
He had no idea what had happened to him.
The last thing in his memory was his own body being wrung into a knot by Soren’s coercion.
"I’m dead?"
"I’m alive?"
"Why does my body give off demon race fluctuations?"
"And why is the blood essence circulating in it unmistakably mine?"
"Th-th-this..."
"What in the world is going on?"
His head felt ready to catch fire, he couldn’t make it come together, he spun around, he saw Soren and Cecilia standing a short way behind him, and his expression went dark.
He stared at Soren and registered that apart from sheer volume, the demonic energy in his new body ran on exactly the same frequency as the man’s aura.
He was being worn, puppeted, after death.
The realization went through his mind like a bolt into the skull, his eyelids jumped.
Heavens above.
Is this a joke you’re playing on me?
You won’t even let me rest after killing me?
"Soren! What exactly do you think you’re..."
Soren flicked a finger and concussive force tore across the vault.
The Spirit Emperor’s mouth blew apart before he could finish, his body wasn’t flesh, so there was no gore.
A dense plume of black energy jetted out of the ruin instead, like a squid inking the water. Satisfying to look at, frankly.
The core ability of the Hungry Ghost Path Demonic Form was calling the dead back and binding them into a shell.
The shell could be built out of Soren’s demonic energy, or it could be a living body.
Whichever it was, Soren’s imprint stayed branded in its core.
Through that imprint he could reclaim the vessel and shatter the soul inside whenever he liked.
He could also take total control of the body in a fraction of a second.
Soren formed a seal, slowly, control went out of the Falling Cherry Spirit Emperor at once, his body moved against his will.
It moved on its own.
The residual Spirit energy scattered around the vault came rushing toward him.
Building a vessel out of demonic energy wasn’t the same as seizing a biological body.
The inside of a demonic energy vessel was hollow, so it could function as an artificial dantian outright.
That was its main advantage.
The drawback was that every action burned the demonic energy the vessel was made of, so it was no good for the long term.
Once the puppet had gathered enough Spirit energy to trigger a spatial resonance, Soren forced the storage open.
The Nine-Headed Serpent skeleton came out of the void, several hundred meters of it, and hit the stone floor hard enough to fracture the ground and shake debris off the ceiling.
The Spirit Emperor’s eyes nearly came out of his head, his mouth was gone, but his throat still produced urgent muffled noises, it sounded like a detailed commentary on Soren’s ancestors.
Off to the side, Cecilia watched it all.
Looking at the skeleton, her eyes filled with naked greed.
Good heavens.
How is he this devilish?