Chapter 244 - The Root Feast and the Crystalline Soul
A melodious burp escaped Su Bai’s mouth.
He rubbed his stomach with considerable satisfaction.
This was a meal he would probably remember for the rest of his life.
Around the altar, the atmosphere was considerably less cheerful.
Another enormous flesh mass had already gone still beneath the ancient weapon pinning it down. Its swollen body had lost the strange vitality that had sustained it for countless years, while the place where its Root Organ had once existed remained hollow.
Su Bai looked toward the next one.
The restrained creature immediately tightened around the weapon piercing through it.
It had spent thousands of years resisting Immortals.
Now, apparently, it had developed the instinct to shrink whenever Su Bai looked hungry.
The saber released an amused spiritual fluctuation.
"You have frightened it."
Su Bai wiped the corner of his mouth.
"It will get over it."
The flesh mass shuddered.
The hammer rumbled.
"I do not believe it will."
Su Bai ignored that unnecessary observation and continued his feast.
Once he understood how to expose the Root Organs, the remaining process became considerably easier.
The ancient weapons accompanying him helped cut away the dense outer flesh, while the enormous sealing weapons continued pinning the creatures in place. Whenever a Root Organ became exposed, Su Bai no longer wasted time wondering whether eating it was a good idea.
The first one had answered that question thoroughly.
He simply started eating.
The sealed sources reacted with the same agony every time.
Their cries shook the clearing, their bodies convulsed beneath the restraints, and the ancient formations responded by pressing them back down whenever their struggling became too violent.
None escaped.
None regenerated after their Root Organs disappeared into Su Bai’s stomach.
One by one, existences that had survived the passing of countless years finally stopped moving.
The strangest part came whenever Su Bai swallowed the final piece of a Root Organ.
The distant pull returned.
His perception slipped away from the altar, crossed the remaining connection, and entered that endless dark expanse once again.
The second time it happened, Su Bai was prepared.
The enormous eye was already there.
Its pupil shifted toward him almost immediately, and the same incomprehensible pressure descended upon his consciousness.
Su Bai’s expression remained calm.
He had already experienced it once.
Instead of staring uselessly at the eye, he turned his spiritual perception toward the darkness surrounding it.
The expanse seemed endless.
There were no stars, no familiar spiritual fluctuations, and nothing resembling the structure of any secret realm or independent space he had encountered before.
More importantly, he still could not sense the Heavenly Dao.
Su Bai attempted to extend his perception farther.
The enormous eye narrowed.
Pressure surged.
His consciousness tightened beneath it, but before the strain could become dangerous, Reversal had already begun spreading through the foreign connection.
The link twisted. The dark expanse faded.
A moment later, Su Bai found himself crouched beside another dead sealed source.
His eyes brightened slightly.
’So it really can’t keep me there.’
At least, that appeared to be the case.
Whatever the enormous eye was, it could perceive him through the connection and exert terrifying pressure upon his consciousness, but it had not shown any ability to reach directly through that connection and drag his physical body away.
That did not mean Su Bai considered it harmless.
Something capable of making his consciousness strain merely by looking at him was probably not a creature he should casually provoke.
Unfortunately, every Root Organ he ate forced them to meet again.
By the third visit, Su Bai had begun treating the enormous eye more like an unpleasant feature of the scenery.
The pupil focused on him.
Pressure descended.
Su Bai looked somewhere else.
He noticed faint distortions running through the darkness, stretching farther than his perception could follow. They appeared only briefly before the pressure intensified and Reversal began collapsing the connection again.
On the fourth visit, he tried examining those distortions more closely.
On the fifth, he attempted to determine whether they were separate connections.
He never remained long enough to confirm anything.
Every encounter ended the same way.
The eye noticed him, the pressure increased, and Reversal overturned the remaining foreign connection before throwing his perception back into his body.
Su Bai gradually stopped finding the experience frightening.
It remained dangerous, but there was a limit to how terrified he could remain of something he kept seeing between mouthfuls.
The sealed sources seemed considerably more disturbed by this development than he was.
Every time Su Bai returned from the dark expanse alive, another portion of their confidence disappeared.
By the time he moved toward the next Root Organ, none of them bothered telling him that their Origin would destroy him.
They had already watched their Origin notice him several times.
Su Bai was still hungry.
That was difficult to argue with.
The repeated Root Organs also continued changing him.
The anchoring principle accumulated.
With every consumed root, the strange internal stability inside his nine Gateway Qi Reservoirs grew stronger.
Their internal spaces became firmer, while the anchors forming within them gradually gained definition.
They were still connected through the Myriad-Path Meridian Web and remained part of the same cultivation system, but they no longer felt like simple qi reservoirs.
Something was taking shape within each of them.
Su Bai could feel that the transformation was approaching a threshold.
Yet the Gateway Reservoirs were not the only things benefiting.
The spirituality contained within every Root Organ was immense.
The Dao-Devouring Blank Stele continued swallowing the foreign spiritual remnants, but just as before, no cultivation inheritance formed.
Even so, processing such dense spirituality repeatedly had an enormous effect on Su Bai’s own soul.
His sea of consciousness continued expanding while the spiritual essence within it became increasingly refined.
The difference gradually became impossible to ignore.
Su Bai turned part of his attention inward while chewing another piece of Root Organ.
What he sensed made him stop for a moment.
His soul had changed.
Previously, when Su Bai examined it closely, his spiritual existence had always felt intangible despite its strength, as though the boundary between soul and consciousness could never be completely defined.
That haziness had diminished.
The repeated refinement from the Root Organs had condensed his soul until its presence felt remarkably cohesive.
Within his sea of consciousness, Su Bai could vaguely perceive the outline of his own spiritual form with a clarity he had never possessed before. It remained translucent and incorporeal, but a faint crystalline quality seemed to run through it whenever his spiritual sense moved.
The change was not merely visual.
His thoughts were clearer.
His spiritual perception responded almost the instant he directed it somewhere, and dividing that perception into several independent streams became considerably easier.
Su Bai carefully compressed a strand of spiritual sense.
Instead of dispersing outward like an invisible wave, it gathered.
The strand grew thinner beneath his control.
A sharp sensation appeared at its tip.
Su Bai stared inwardly.
’Can I actually hit someone’s soul with this now?’
He tested the idea cautiously against an empty portion of his sea of consciousness.
The condensed spiritual strand pierced forward.
There was no inheritance behind the movement, and compared with a true soul-cultivation art, the method was probably embarrassingly crude.
But it carried force.
Su Bai slowly withdrew it.
His spiritual sense had become concentrated enough that he could directly pressure or strike another person’s consciousness instead of merely using it to observe.
Against someone with a weak soul, the result would probably be unpleasant.
Against a genuine Nascent Soul cultivator, things were less certain.
Su Bai compared his current spiritual sense with the Nascent Soul presences he had encountered before.
His raw spiritual power had climbed frighteningly close to that level.
More importantly, his control and concealment had improved even further.
If he restrained his spiritual sense carefully, Su Bai suspected an ordinary Nascent Soul cultivator might not notice him probing from a distance.
That possibility made his expression strange.
He was still at the Golden Core Realm.
His spiritual sense apparently had not received the message.