Chapter 366: Uncertain Death
Benton wasn’t all that worried about dying, and that lack of concern wasn’t because he’d been there, done that, either. No, it was simply because Nascent Souls were quite difficult to kill, and him more than most.
As far as he could tell, the whole process of death was different than it had been back on Earth. There, one was declared dead when the body stopped working. On his new planet, death wasn’t final until the soul had actually departed.
Actually, despite having died back on Earth, his knowledge of the metaphysics was quite lacking. For all he knew, the soul leaving the body was the trigger there as well. It was just that Earth had no technology to detect souls. The combination of his high Soul Cultivation and enhanced spiritual sense absolutely could do that, though. In fact, he sensed six of them hanging around outside the bodies of the enemies who had ceased functioning.
Even a normal person took a while to finish dying, including a good five minutes or more for all their systems to stop working even after the brain or heart stopped. After that, the soul would be ejected and would slowly drift away. Only once it was too far away to be called back was death final.
Nascent Souls were even sturdier for two reasons. One, the souls persisted a lot longer, hanging around for hours before giving up and proceeding to whatever awaited them next. And, two, their bodies would continue to heal even after the souls left. If the body became habitable again soon enough, the soul would simply slip back in and, in the process, restart the body.
A normal cultivator at that realm had two big weaknesses—they really couldn’t do anything in soul form to affect the world, and they were reliant on their bodies reconstituting in order to survive. Destroy the body, and the soul would have no place to go.
The five enemies that Benton killed were very unlikely to heal enough before that departure time because Void erased a lot of flesh and bone and muscle and blood. Their healing thus had to completely regrow all that material, a much more qi and time intensive task than simply fixing damage.
As for the one Yuan Yaozu attacked… Well, if Benton’s side won, someone would need to do a bit more damage to keep that one from reviving. He’d not be back until well after the battle was over, but he hadn’t yet been permanently removed from the land of the living.
He was sturdy.
Benton was even sturdier still. Not only could his soul persist for literal days instead of only a couple of hours, but if his body were destroyed, he could use his Soul Material Manipulation and Soul Transference techniques to create a brand new body and slip his soul inside it, bringing him back to life.
Unless someone had a way to destroy his soul—which was unlikely considering that he couldn’t even do that at his maxed Soul Cultivation level—death would not be permanent for him.
His biggest concern, therefore, was that restoring himself would take time. Hours at least. Maybe even a full day. And during that time, he’d have no way to interact with the world. There would be no one to protect the kids from the overwhelming force of the remaining Nascent Souls.