Heart of Shadow
That was the name given by the Unified Bureau's Technical Department.
The heart of a Great Reaper from the Sea of Thunder—a ruler's mutated organ, a distorted crystal formed after absorbing an unknown amount of calamity.
What was valuable was that, unlike the remains of most rulers, it had not lost its vitality or scattered its power after being separated from its main body for too long.
In other words...
A strange guess surfaced in Huai Shi's mind: when Feathered Serpent tore the Great Reaper into four pieces and packed it away, it might have... still been alive.
Was its vitality simply that tenacious, or had Feathered Serpent done it deliberately?
There were too many vague possibilities to speculate on, but the immediate result was probably that America had gained a great deal of fresh material for all kinds of experiments and construction.
And Huai Shi now had a still-warm heart in his hands.
Even without the command and application of the Solidified Soul, the moment it broke free of its restraints, it instinctively began trying to seize the surrounding shadows and transform them into Negative Origin Essence.
Had another Ascender with insufficient resistance been standing here, they would likely have been dissolved by the heart's gravitational pull in the first instant. Their entire body, soul, Stigmata, everything, would have dissolved into shadow-aspected Source Matter and flowed into that ceaselessly throbbing heart.
Then came every living thing around it, all life within a fifteen-kilometer radius... If it was not suppressed and contained, after absorbing enough Source Matter, it might trigger another eruption and cause its area of influence to expand further.
The attached notes and warnings had mentioned it—within an unobstructed experimental environment, this heart alone could transform an entire Beta-class protected laboratory into hell.
And inside