Xie Zhaolin's awareness drifted in the darkness for who knew how long.
When she finally forced her eyelids open, everything was blurred in a blood-red haze. She raised a trembling hand to wipe her face, only to realize the blood seeping from her seven orifices had already dried into a crust.
The queen bee perched on her nose tip, its compound eyes reflecting her disheveled and battered appearance.
"I'm still alive…" Her voice was hoarse, but joy surged uncontrollably in her chest. She'd actually pulled it off. She'd won the gamble!
That joy was quickly suppressed. She pulled out a Nourishing Mind Pill from her storage ring and swallowed it. As the medicinal power spread, the stabbing pain in her head gradually eased.
Only then did she sink her Primordial Soul back into her sea of consciousness. What she saw there made her pause.
The once-clear sea of consciousness now had a faint haze of bluish-purple mist drifting across it. The mist merged seamlessly with her Primordial Soul, as if it had always been part of her. At the center of the mist, fragments of dim blue light floated like broken glass. Those were the remnants of the Soul Chasing Seal that hadn't been completely refined away.
"This is…"
Her pupils shrank. Under such a violent and poisonous attack, there were still fragments left behind?
Not daring to be careless, she cautiously extended her Primordial Soul toward the pieces. To her surprise, the fragments showed no hostility. Instead, they gave off a faint sense of connection. Following that thread of connection, she faintly sensed a vague location at the edge of her consciousness—the place where the gray-robed man was.
"Interesting." Her eyes flashed with sharp light.
These fragments not only let her reverse-track the gray-robed man's position, they also maintained a false connection. In his perception, the Soul Chasing Seal was still running normally, only occasionally giving off faint ripples.
There was no way he'd ever guess that those tiny ripples were illusions she deliberately created. At this very moment, the gray-robed man was probably still brimming with confidence, believing this little Qi Refining cultivator was tightly chained in his palm. He had no clue she'd already broken free of his control completely.
Xie Zhaolin carefully gathered the fragments with her Primordial Soul, wrapping them layer by layer. These shards might be the key to taking him down, since nothing understood the weaknesses of the Soul Chasing Seal better than they did.
Once the fragments were secured, she turned her focus to the bluish-purple mist swirling in her sea of consciousness. This change was completely unheard of. She felt both anticipation and unease. Even in her past life as a Nascent Soul cultivator, she'd never once heard of a sea of consciousness mutating like this.
Maybe it had happened before, but a cultivator's sea of consciousness was their foundation. Even if something went wrong, no one would ever dare reveal it. Not even the countless scrolls of the Hehuan Sect had a single record of such a case.
She tried to stir the mist, and immediately, a strand of energy thin as a hair slipped out from her sea of consciousness.
"A Primordial Soul attack…" she whispered.
This energy was completely different from spiritual power. It was pure consciousness, and when it surfaced at her fingertips, the surrounding air twisted slightly without making a sound.
To test its strength, she aimed at a nearby rock and flicked her finger. That bluish-purple strand shot out in silence.
Ssshh!
A hair-thin crack split open on the rock's surface, deep enough to fit a finger. What shocked her even more was the nature of it. This wasn't just a Primordial Soul attack, it was… corrosion.
Her eyes narrowed. This was unheard of. Normally, a soul attack at best made a cultivator dizzy, and only when crushing lower realms could it cause lasting damage.
But all of that was repairable.
Her new attack was different.
This corrosive energy would latch on like a bone-gnawing parasite. Whether it struck a lower realm or a higher realm, once it touched their sea of consciousness, it would keep eating away without end.
At first, it might not even show, but as time passed, their sea of consciousness would rot away completely. And that was an injury no one could ever recover from. If a cultivator's sea of consciousness was a bucket of water, then a normal soul attack was just poking a hole through it. Patch it up, and the bucket could still hold water.
But her attack? It was like rot spreading through the wood itself. Even if someone rushed to patch it, the decay wouldn't stop. The hole would keep widening, the patches would rot through, and eventually, the whole bucket would collapse.
Against such corrosion, there were only two dead ends. One, wait for the sea of consciousness to rot into nothingness and dream of some heaven-defying method to replace it—something that had never once been heard of in the cultivation world.
Two, cut off the corroded section entirely. But the pain of slicing through one's own sea of consciousness would cause most cultivators to die instantly, body and soul shattered.
Her heart pounded at the thought.
But for now, this was only a guess. She had to test it.
She summoned two puppets, and half an hour later, they returned with a first-rank venomous spider and a second-rank greenstone scorpion. Condensing a wisp of the bluish-purple mist at her fingertip, she sent it into the spider first.
The moment it sank inside, the spider froze. Then it convulsed violently. Through her Primordial Soul, she clearly "saw" the mist spreading through its weak sea of consciousness. Wherever it touched, the spider's soul frayed like rotting silk, riddled with holes.
"As expected…" she murmured.
What shocked her more was that the corrosion seemed contagious. When the spider died, the mist automatically sought out a new target, spreading outward. She quickly retracted it with her Primordial Soul before it ran out of control.
"This power…" She stared at the bluish-purple mist at her fingertip, trembling with both fear and excitement. This was practically a weapon designed to destroy cultivators!
After all, nothing was deadlier to a cultivator than damage to the sea of consciousness. At best, it crippled their cultivation. At worst, it ended with death.
But just as joy filled her, unease surged as well.
This power was too dangerous. If anyone ever found out, the entire cultivation world would brand her its enemy. And worse, she didn't even know if it might one day turn against her.
To test further, she turned to the greenstone scorpion, this time injecting only a minuscule trace of mist.
The scorpion's reaction was much stronger than the spider's. It flailed its stinger wildly, thrashing on the ground. Through her Primordial Soul, she saw the mist spreading much slower within the second-rank beast, but the corrosive effect still remained.
"So it weakens against stronger targets…" she muttered. That made sense. A higher-ranked cultivator's sea of consciousness was far more stable.
But just then, she noticed something strange. The corroded parts of the scorpion's sea of consciousness seemed to be sending information back into her own.