The last, sorrowful echo of Fengliu's cry faded, leaving the Ashen Maw in a state of profound, ringing silence. The Roc King stood upon the broken corpse of the Molten Heart Colossus, his great body heaving, the fires of a three-hundred-year-old rage finally banked, leaving behind the cold, heavy ashes of grief.
A great burden had been lifted from his soul, but the true source of his pain, the human who had directed the monster, still remained a phantom in his memory. This was a victory, but it was not the end of his war.
While Fengliu was lost in his own world of memory and mourning, a new, far more practical energy began to stir. Kui, his colossal Behemoth Turtle-Snake form lumbering forward, surveyed the scene not with the eyes of a warrior, but with the gleam of a merchant appraising a treasure-filled warehouse that had just survived a fire.
"A terrible tragedy, of course," he boomed, his cheerful voice a stark, almost comical, contrast to the grim atmosphere. "But waste not, want not! The corpse of a powerful beast is a mountain of treasures! We must begin the cleanup at once before the ambient energy begins to dissipate!"
He was, as always, brutally pragmatic. The lesser fire-beasts they had slain on the way in, the Molten Heart Colossus itself—these were not just vanquished foes; they were a trove of priceless materials.
Xylia, reverting to her powerful human form, strode forward, her new clawed gauntlets still dripping with the black, oily blood of the colossus's followers. "The turtle is right," she stated, her voice a rough rumble. "The hides of those Magma-Crawlers are high-grade defensive materials. Their cores are pure fire essence. We should harvest what we can."
And so, the grim work began. Khaos, his part in the drama complete, had already vanished back into the silent void of the sanctuary, utterly uninterested in the menial labor of butchery. Spine, with a respectful nod to Li Yu, also returned to his master's inner world, his duty as a silent guardian fulfilled for the moment.
Kui and Xylia, however, were masters of this craft. They moved with a practiced, terrifying efficiency. Kui, despite his portly human form, produced a set of masterfully crafted flensing knives from his storage ring, his movements as he began to carve into the corpses of the lesser beasts precise and economical. Xylia was more direct, her clawed gauntlets proving to be the perfect tools for cracking open tough, armored carapaces and extracting the glowing, fist-sized beast cores within.
The greatest prize, of course, was the Molten Heart Colossus. Its massive, obsidian-like hide was a defensive material of the highest grade. Its bones, tempered by a thousand years of volcanic fire, could be forged into legendary weapons. And its core…
With a great heave, Kui and Xylia worked together to pry open the great beast's shattered chest cavity. There, in the center, a sphere of pure, white-hot magma, the size of a small boulder, still pulsed with a terrifying, residual power. It was the core of a Peak Core Formation beast, a great treasure that could buy a small kingdom if sold.
"Wise Host," Kui said, his face beaded with sweat from the intense heat. "This… this is a treasure beyond price. To sell it would attract too much unwanted attention."
Li Yu, who had been watching the process with a quiet, scholarly interest, stepped forward. "We will not sell it," he said calmly. He placed a hand over the core, and with a gentle, pulling motion of his will, the massive, superheated sphere was drawn into his storage ring.
For the next few hours, Li Yu followed his two retainers as they worked, a silent student learning from masters. He watched how Kui expertly separated muscle from hide, how he identified the most potent spiritual veins within a beast's body. He observed as Xylia demonstrated how to properly drain the venom from a fire-lizard's fangs without neutralizing its potency. It was a bloody, gruesome, but deeply educational experience, a practical lesson in the anatomy.
Fengliu, after a long while, finally stirred from his grief-stricken state. He saw them working, and with a silent nod of understanding, he joined in, his own sharp beak and talons proving to be peerless tools for the task at hand.
It was as he was watching Fengliu carefully extract the sharp, obsidian claws from one of the Colossus's mangled feet that Li Yu felt it. A strange, profound stirring deep within his own being.
He had just witnessed a vengeance three centuries in the making. He had processed his own history, his own desire for revenge, and had come to a new, more profound understanding of his own path in the world. His heart, his very will had been tempered and solidified by the events..
This profound, internal solidification seemed to have created a resonance, a new harmony between his mind and his soul. He felt his nascent soul stirring as if calling him to visit it. He sat down, cross-legged, amidst the bloody, valuable wreckage of the battlefield, and closed his eyes.
He sank his consciousness into the abyss-black ocean of his spiritual core. He saw his nascent soul, the crimson-gold leviathan, swimming its usual, majestic circles in the star-dusted depths. But this time, something was different. As he focused his attention on it, the leviathan stirred.
It paused in its endless circling and turned, its formless, light-woven eyes seeming to look directly at his point of consciousness. Then, with a slow, deliberate grace, it swam upwards, rising from the profound depths to meet him, an act it had never performed before.
Li Yu felt a jolt of electrifying insight. The events of today, perhaps the events leading up to today awakened something. His epiphany, his solidification of his own will and general understanding had somehow forged a new, more direct, connection with his soul.
He projected a simple, clear thought, a desire, not a command. 'Come.'
The leviathan responded. With a powerful, graceful beat of its primordial fish tail, it surged forward, meeting his consciousness in the center of his inner sea. He felt a sensation he had never experienced before, a perfect, seamless merging of his conscious will and his primordial soul.
In the Ashen Maw, Kui, Xylia, and Fengliu suddenly froze, their bloody work forgotten. A new, terrifying pressure, an aura so profound and ancient it made the Peak Core Formation aura of the dead Colossus feel like a child's tantrum, began to emanate from the meditating form of Li Yu.
"Wise Host…?" Kui whispered, his eyes wide with a mixture of awe and fear.
And then, it happened.
From Li Yu's seated form, a figure of pure, brilliant, crimson-gold light emerged. It was not a physical being, but a spiritual one, yet its presence was so potent, so real, that it displaced the very air. The nascent soul, the ethereal leviathan, had manifested in the outside world.
It soared into the ash-filled sky of the caldera, its long, serpentine body woven from pure light and shadow, its crimson-gold form a stark, divine contrast to the grim, black landscape. Its presence was absolute. The ambient spiritual energy of the world, the chaotic, fiery essence of the volcano, the cold, distant power of the sky—all of it fell silent, bowing before this primordial being.
Kui, Xylia, and Fengliu were not just forced to their knees; they were pressed flat against the ground, their own mighty Core Formation spirits utterly, completely suppressed by the sheer, overwhelming authority of a true nascent soul. They were not being harmed. They were simply in the pressure of a being so fundamentally superior that just it's mere presence sent them to the ground, such is the vastness of the gap between them.
The crimson-gold leviathan soared in a great, majestic circle above the caldera. It opened its mouth, and it let out a roar. The roar seemed like it would shake the very heavens itself.
Yet, there was no sound.
But the entire Blasted Lands, for miles in every direction, trembled. The lake of magma in the Ashen Maw solidified and then shattered. The black, volcanic mountains developed great, deep cracks. It was a roar of the soul, a fundamental assertion of existence that shook the very foundations of reality.
The three sovereigns on the ground could only lie there, their minds a complete blank, their spirits trembling with a primal, instinctual awe. They did not understand what they were seeing. A nascent soul was a thing of legend, a symbol that represented a cultivator's profound connection to their own soul and a level of power most would never achieve. For this to emerge from the body of a young man who was, by all appearances, at the 1st level of the Core Formation realm… it was a truth so impossible that their centuries of experience could offer no explanation.
After a long, eternal moment, the leviathan completed its circle. It folded back in on itself, a stream of crimson-gold light that flowed back into Li Yu's body as if it had never left.
The pressure vanished. The world returned to normal.
Li Yu's eyes opened. He was completely unaware of the effect his epiphany and the resonance his soul and body had had on the outside world. He had felt no pressure, heard no roar. He had only felt a new, profound, and exhilarating sense of control. He could feel his nascent soul, settled once more in his spiritual sea, but it was no longer a separate, distant entity. It was a part of him, an extension of his will, a weapon waiting to be commanded. He knew that his path to creating true soul techniques was now open.
He looked over and saw his three powerful retainers, just now pushing themselves up from the ground, their faces pale, their eyes filled with a new, deeper level of awe that bordered on religious terror.
"Wise Host… what… what was that?" Kui finally managed to stammer, his usual cheerful demeanor completely gone.
"You saw it too? That was my soul," Li Yu replied simply, a thoughtful, excited smile on his face.
Kui stared. "A human… with the soul of a leviathan?" The thought was too profound for him to even process. From what his bloodline memories told him, humans if they developed a nascenl soul generally had human shaped nascent souls and beasts would have their nascent souls be shaped to look like their beast form.
A nascent soul was elusive however, one didn't just get one by reaching a certain cultivation stage. It was something else all together, not everyone manifested a nascent soul and things tied to the soul was always more rare. Nascent souls were extremely rare throughout history is what its memories told him.
It was Xylia who broke the stunned silence. She was pointing, not at Li Yu, but at the corpse of the Molten Heart Colossus.
"Look," her rough voice was strained.
The spiritual roar of the nascent soul had done more than just shake the mountains. The obsidian island upon which the Colossus lay had been shattered by the tremor. A great, deep fissure had split the island in two, and where the rock had fallen away, it had revealed something new.
It was a dark opening. A smooth, perfectly carved tunnel, clearly artificial, that led down into the deep, unknown roots of the volcanic island. It had been hidden for millennia, sealed beneath the very spot where the Colossus had made its lair. A new, unexpected mystery had just been unearthed.