After confirming that all the zombies in the room had been cleared out, Lu Yan finally had the time to examine the illusory wandering souls stripped from their bodies.
He reached out and grabbed one of the wandering souls. Its face wore a dazed, muddled expression, completely lacking the intelligence Gongyang Xuanming's soul had displayed in the Urban Version.
With a slight circulation of magical power, Lu Yan could clearly see that these wandering souls had separated from their rotting bodies and were as fragile as sheets of paper.
He did not even need to use a spell. A few strands of magical power alone were enough to dissolve them.
"How can these souls be so fragile?"
Lu Yan slightly furrowed his brow and took out a low-grade First Level Spirit Eye Talisman from his Storage Bag.
As he circulated his magical power, the talisman transformed into a streak of spiritual light and merged into Lu Yan's eyes. Brilliant light burst from his gaze, and everything around him seemed to become sharply defined. He could even vaguely see the paths of the flowing spiritual energy.
Lu Yan then gathered his focus and looked at the dazed wandering soul before him.
With that one glance, Lu Yan immediately discovered the reason for the wandering soul's fragility.
"Of the Heaven Earth Human Three Souls, the Heaven and Earth Souls are missing, leaving only the Human Soul and Seven Spirits trapped within the rotting body.
Even after the body died, the Human Soul and Seven Spirits still could not leave the corpse. Over the long years, the body rotted while the soul sank into oblivion, ultimately turning the corpse into a zombie, a walking corpse.
The zombies' rotting bodies restrained the Human Soul and Seven Spirits, but in another sense, the existence of the Human Soul and Seven Spirits also slowed the decay of the zombies' bodies.
Otherwise, after so many years, ordinary corpses should have rotted away completely long ago.
That was also why, once the wandering soul was stripped away, the zombie's body lost the support of its soul and rapidly rotted into a pile of white bones."
The Spirit Eye Art in Lu Yan's eyes slowly faded. A sharp glint flashed in his gaze, as though he had discovered an entirely new continent.
Lu Yan had never expected that the birth of zombies concealed such a "cultivation" explanation.
"If that's the case, where did the Heaven and Earth Souls of these zombies go? Why was the Human Soul trapped inside a dead body? What exactly is the source of the Apocalypse Version?"
A string of questions rose in Lu Yan's heart. However, he had only just entered the Apocalypse Version, and the information he currently possessed could not answer any of them.
After dispelling the spiritual light in his eyes, Lu Yan looked at the fifteen wandering souls before him, each missing its Heaven and Earth Souls, and had already made up his mind.
These wandering souls had rotted alongside the zombies' bodies for decades and had long since fallen into a daze. Their Heaven and Earth Souls were nowhere to be found, and they did not even have the qualifications to enter reincarnation again.
After these feeble wandering souls left their bodies, they would completely disperse into the heavens and earth within a few days.
Rather than let them naturally vanish, he might as well use them to assist Lu Yan in refining the Soul Banner.
With that thought, Lu Yan did not hesitate and directly used the Soul Banner to begin refining.
Lu Yan might not be able to slaughter innocents on a large scale to refine the Soul Banner, but he felt no psychological burden using the wandering souls of long-dead zombies.
Since the low-grade Soul Banner had already been completed, refining it further no longer required redrawing the formation. The Ghost Mist within the Soul Banner instantly enveloped the entire room.
Under the Ghost Mist, the fifteen dazed zombie wandering souls melted away like snow and were refined into part of the Soul Banner.
Holding the Soul Banner, Lu Yan sensed the changes within it.
Normally, once a Soul Banner had been completed, subsequent refinement would become much easier. It would no longer be like before, when more than twenty Qi Refining cultivators had only barely refined four Vengeful Souls.
The problem was that the souls of the zombie wandering souls were far too incomplete and feeble. After more than a dozen wandering souls had been refined, the fifth Vengeful Soul within the Soul Banner had only barely taken shape, its quality far inferior to the souls of Gongyang Xuanming and those bodyguards.
By this estimate, it would probably take more than a hundred wandering souls to completely refine the fifth Vengeful Soul to the First Level of Qi Refining.
If this had been the Urban Version or the Xianxia Version, such a rate would have been absolutely despair-inducing. Refining a First Level of Qi Refining Vengeful Soul required sacrificing a hundred wandering souls. Even the most frenzied Demonic Path Cultivator would not dare harvest souls on such a massive scale.
The modern military of the Urban Version and the Law Enforcement Teams of the Xianxia Version's sects would be enough to hunt Demonic Path Cultivators to the ends of the earth.
But in the Apocalypse Version, in this doomsday city that had long since fallen, the one thing there was never a shortage of was zombies.
Refining one Vengeful Soul with a hundred wandering souls was a completely costless transaction for Lu Yan. The only thing that could limit him was the speed at which he harvested wandering souls!
Lu Yan immediately revealed a delighted expression. Without bothering to conserve his magical power, he waved the Soul Banner and ordered the four Vengeful Souls:
"Search the upper floors. Kill all the zombies and bring their wandering souls to me!"
As his voice fell, the four Vengeful Souls immediately passed through the walls and began searching the other rooms and floors.
Lu Yan took a Spirit Stone from his Storage Bag so that he could maintain a sufficient supply of magical power to the Soul Banner at any time, then headed toward the upper floors the Vengeful Souls had already searched.
Before long, furious roars began to ring out from upstairs, accompanied by loud banging against the walls.
Lu Yan formed a hand seal, and his gaze instantly grew incomparably deep. Borrowing the Vengeful Souls' vision, he could clearly see that dozens of zombies had gathered on the building's top floor.
Some were large and some small. Around them lay several tools that had long since rotted away, along with traces of leftover food that had decayed.
Some zombies even still gripped fire axes and iron hammers tightly in their hands. It was obvious that they had once been survivors who had treated the top floor as a defensive line against the zombies' invasion.
But in the end, they had failed to survive. Perhaps someone had been infected during a hunt and kept silent about it. Perhaps they had been targeted by an even more powerful zombie. In any case, when disaster struck, all the survivors had died and turned into zombies. Not one on the top floor had escaped.
The instinct-driven zombies still clutched their weapons and attacked the Vengeful Souls, but it was all futile in the end.
The Vengeful Souls, which ignored physical attacks, did not even need to dodge. With a thrust of their Ghost Claws, they could strip away the zombies' wandering souls and turn those rotting monsters into piles of white bones.
One zombie after another fell. Dazed wandering souls appeared where they had died, radiating a pale, shimmering ghostly light.
By the time Lu Yan reached the top floor, every zombie had already been slaughtered, and countless wandering souls filled the entire corridor.
Black mist spread from the Soul Banner in Lu Yan's hand, enveloping all the wandering souls in an instant.
As the black mist surged, countless wandering souls were refined by the Soul Banner. Lu Yan could clearly sense the fifth Vengeful Soul taking shape.
A moment later, the black mist dispersed, and the fifth Vengeful Soul appeared before Lu Yan.
This Vengeful Soul had been formed entirely from feeble wandering souls. Even so, it had still reached the First Level of Qi Refining.
Embedded in its soul body were pale, numb, dazed faces, making the Vengeful Soul appear even more sinister and terrifying.
Lu Yan swept his gaze across the ruins of the top floor, then pointed the Soul Banner in his hand toward the unexplored floors below.
"Continue!"
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