Chapter 241 - The Root and the Simple Answer
The sealed sources had already recovered much of the flesh Su Bai had cut from them before.
That recovery did not last long.
Su Bai stood near the altar while the ancient weapons helped him tear into the flesh masses again. Their weapon bodies were too damaged for another prolonged battle, but cutting restrained enemies was a different matter entirely.
This time, there were no Void-Shattering Returnees to interfere.
The altar belonged to Su Bai now.
The flesh masses still refused to accept that.
"YOU THINK THIS CHANGES ANYTHING?"
"YOU CAN CUT UNTIL YOUR BONES ROT."
"WE WILL STILL REMAIN."
The saber carved through another thick layer of flesh.
"You sound very certain for something currently being sliced apart."
A violent tremor ran through the sealed source beneath it.
Su Bai ignored the exchange and continued watching the exposed flesh.
One of the masses behaved differently from the others.
The one pinned beneath the enormous ancient spear remained noticeably thinner.
Su Bai remembered how it had once lured him into cutting away more and more of its flesh, likely hoping he would eventually expose enough of the ancient weapon or disturb the seal in a way it could exploit.
Because of that, the contours of the enormous spear were much easier to see now.
In the past, Su Bai had been reluctant to keep cutting whenever the sealed sources deliberately withdrew essence from damaged flesh. He had assumed they were depriving him of the most valuable part.
The brood organ had changed his understanding.
Ashen-Blood essence did not simply disappear when the sealed sources abandoned a piece of flesh.
It retreated.
What left one section gathered somewhere else. The result was often flesh with even denser essence.
Su Bai almost wanted to thank them for concentrating it for him.
Almost.
His attention was elsewhere now.
The roots.
The sealed sources had mentioned them before.
More importantly, the ancient memories Su Bai had inherited contained fragments concerning the same thing.
The Immortals who had fought these creatures had known about their roots.
Yet the sealed sources were still here.
Su Bai’s expression gradually became more serious.
He stopped cutting.
The surrounding ancient weapons noticed and slowed as well.
Su Bai closed his eyes and reached back through the memories he had absorbed, searching for one scene in particular.
He had seen it before.
An Immortal stood above one of the flesh masses while terrifying fire swallowed everything below. The heat had been so overwhelming that even the memory carried a suffocating pressure.
The flesh mass burned. Its outer layers vanished first, followed by everything beneath them.
Eventually, nothing remained except ash.
Su Bai had originally focused on what happened afterward.
The creature regenerated.
That alone had been enough to make the scene horrifying.
This time, he watched differently.
The Dao-Shattering Jade awakened.
The memory became clearer.
Su Bai slowed the memory in his mind and focused on the brief interval between destruction and rebirth. As the ashes shifted, something began taking shape before the rest of the flesh could return.
He replayed the scene once more, this time watching that moment carefully.
The same thing happened.
Before the enormous mass reconstructed itself, a smaller structure formed first within the ashes.
It resembled an organ.
It’s not like the brood organ he had just eaten. This one was denser, smaller, and somehow more fundamental.
The rest of the body grew around it.
Su Bai’s breathing slowed.
’So that’s it.’
He replayed the memory again.
The organ appeared first. Flesh followed. The complete body came last.
The sequence had been so fast that he had overlooked it before.
Su Bai opened his eyes and looked at the restrained flesh masses.
Their confidence suddenly made much more sense.
Destroying the body clearly was not enough.
Even after being reduced to ash, the sealed source had somehow returned to its previous state. The small organ appearing first was important, but Su Bai still did not know whether it was the cause of that regeneration or merely the first part to recover.
He searched through the fragments of memory he had absorbed from the three ancient remnant souls, looking for anything that might explain what he had just noticed.
The first gave him nothing.
The second contained only scattered references to the roots.
The third made him pause.
A memory surfaced from a distant corridor inside the ancient battlefield.
The remnant had been badly injured at the time and hiding nearby when two Immortals passed through.
Their voices had been low, but the memory had preserved enough.
One of them sounded exhausted.
"IT’S USELESS. EVEN IF WE KNOW ABOUT THE ROOT, IF WE CANNOT SEVER IT FROM THEIR ORIGIN, WE ARE ONLY WAITING TO DIE."
The second Immortal remained silent for a moment before answering.
"THEN SEALING THEM IS THE ONLY CHOICE. DO NOT WASTE YOUR STRENGTH ANY FURTHER. BE PREPARED. THIS IS ALL FOR THE GREAT DAO."
The memory ended there.
Su Bai remained still.
The Dao-Shattering Jade continued glowing faintly inside his consciousness.
Several details that had never quite fit together finally began to make sense.
The roots were not simply organs that allowed the sealed sources to regenerate.
The Immortals had spoken of severing them from their origin, which meant the roots were connected to something beyond the bodies pinned beneath the altar.
That connection was likely the real reason the sealed sources could return even after being reduced to ash. Their flesh was not merely difficult to destroy. Some part of their existence remained anchored elsewhere.
As long as that connection remained, destroying the body meant very little. Even burning one completely to ash only forced the root to reconstruct itself before rebuilding everything around it.
Su Bai slowly looked toward the flesh masses.
No wonder they had never truly feared death.
No wonder they endured thousands of years beneath the seals.
Their imprisonment could last for ages, but as long as the roots remained connected to their origin, destruction itself might never be permanent.
Su Bai’s gaze lingered on the restrained flesh masses for a moment before he looked away.
The sealed sources continued struggling against the ancient restraints.
"YOU WILL ACHIEVE NOTHING."
"THE ONES WHO CAME BEFORE YOU WERE STRONGER."
"THEY STILL FAILED."
Su Bai did not respond.
Their arrogance was understandable. They had survived Immortals, endured thousands of years beneath the seals, and recovered even after one of their bodies had been burned completely to ash.
As far as they were concerned, Su Bai was only repeating an old failure.
He returned his attention to the words preserved in the Immortal’s memory.
Sever the root from its origin.
That was where the problem had defeated them.
How did someone sever a connection to a place they could not even reach?
How did one cut something that might not exist entirely within the Fallen-Star Sanctuary?
Even the Immortals had failed.
Su Bai fell silent.
The ancient weapons waited nearby.
No one interrupted him.
The Dao-Shattering Jade continued simplifying the problem inside his thoughts.
The root regenerated because its connection remained. Destroying the root was therefore insufficient. The connection itself had to be removed.
Su Bai stared at the altar for several breaths.
An increasingly ridiculous thought appeared.
His lips twitched.
He tried to think of a more profound solution.
But, there wasn’t one.
Su Bai almost laughed.
Why did he need to sever the connection?
Why bother cutting something that could simply be taken whole?
His gaze returned to the sealed sources.
If the root belonged to them because it was connected to their origin, the solution was painfully simple.
He would eat it.
The thought settled into place so naturally that Su Bai wondered whether he had missed something.
He examined it again.
If he destroyed the root, it could regenerate.
If he left it behind, the connection remained.
But everything Su Bai had consumed from these creatures had stayed inside him.
Their flesh had not returned.
Their essence had not escaped.
Even the brood organ had become nourishment for his own foundation.
The sealed sources’ corruption had repeatedly entered his body only to be overturned by Reversal.
Su Bai’s expression slowly changed.
For the Immortals, severing an existence from its distant origin might have required some incomprehensible technique.
For him, perhaps it required teeth.
That thought was so absurd that he finally laughed under his breath.
The saber shifted.
"What did you discover?"
Su Bai looked at the flesh masses.
"I think the Immortals made this too complicated."
The sealed sources stirred.
"ARROGANCE."
"YOU THINK YOURSELF ABOVE IMMORTALS?"
Su Bai shook his head.
"No."
He stepped closer to the altar.
"I just eat stranger things than they did."
The ancient weapons went quiet.
Even the sealed sources seemed to hesitate.
Su Bai raised his hand.
"Let’s find the root."
The cutting resumed.
This time, Su Bai was not interested in harvesting ordinary flesh.
He followed the structure he had seen in the memory.
The ancient weapons opened the outer layers while Su Bai used spiritual sense and the Dao-Shattering Jade to examine what lay beneath.
The sealed sources realized what he was looking for.
Their confidence did not disappear immediately. Instead, the layered voices grew colder.
"YOU CANNOT REACH IT."
"EVEN IF YOU FIND THE ROOT, YOU CANNOT DESTROY IT."
"IMMORTALS FAILED WHERE YOU NOW STAND."
Su Bai kept cutting.
The flesh around the ancient weapons thickened and contracted as the sealed sources tried to protect something deeper within.
That reaction was enough.
Su Bai changed direction.
The saber followed his guidance and sliced through another dense layer.
The hammer forced aside a mass of regenerating tissue before it could close the opening.
Su Bai’s Qi Needles entered next and pinned several contracting vessels away from the center.
Something different appeared underneath.
The surrounding flesh was dark and wet with Ashen-Blood essence.
At the center rested an organ no larger than Su Bai’s torso.
Its surface looked almost crystalline beneath the flesh.
Each pulse sent a strange sensation through his spiritual sense.
Su Bai immediately recognized it.
It was the same structure he had seen forming first within the Immortal’s memory.
The root organ.
The sealed source stopped speaking.
Su Bai stared at it.
The vast ancient weapon passed directly through the organ and pinned it into the formation beneath the altar.
For several breaths, he said nothing.
The Immortals had known exactly where the root was.
They had not merely restrained the creature’s flesh.
They had driven their weapons through the very structures responsible for rebuilding it.
They had done everything they could.
It still had not been enough.
The root pulsed around the ancient weapon as though the wound had ceased mattering thousands of years ago.
A faint pressure came from somewhere Su Bai could not identify.
It did not feel like Qi.
It did not feel like anything belonging to the Heavenly Dao that he understood.
The sensation vanished almost as soon as he noticed it.
Su Bai’s smile slowly returned.
The sealed source cut by Su Bai finally spoke.
"YOU CANNOT SEVER IT."
Another voice joined.
"YOU CANNOT REACH OUR ORIGIN."
Su Bai crouched beside the exposed root organ.
"No."
He looked at the pulsing flesh.
"I probably can’t."
His hand settled against its surface.
The ancient weapons watched him.
The sealed sources remained strangely still.
Su Bai’s smile widened.
"But I don’t need to."
For the first time since he had approached the altar, the confidence inside the layered voices faltered.