Looking at the string of prayer beads, Yotsuya Miko hesitated. If what Godmother had said was true, the beads might suppress the Soul Devouring Sensation inside her for quite a long time.
"Mm. Thanks to you, young lady, I've finally come to my senses, too."
Seeing this, Yotsuya Miko hesitated no longer. She reached out and put the beads on her right wrist, then—broke into an utterly satisfied smile.
Such powerful energy.
Watching Miko put on the beads, Granny Saegusa smiled as well.
They contain the power I had at my peak. This third-rate fraud's time is up. Godmother is about to be reborn...
Before she could finish the thought, she watched the beads on Yotsuya Miko's wrist suddenly snap apart one after another.
From a perspective she couldn't see, the Ghost let out a violent roar the moment Miko put on the beads. It seemed to be suffering from their powerful energy. The force of the beads even caused a human face to appear out of nowhere in the hollow of its body, as it tried to resist their power.
But that wouldn't do.
Having learned from her previous mistake, Yotsuya Miko had already gathered spiritual energy in her right hand. Hundreds of strands—no, more than a thousand tiny threads of spiritual energy tugged at the power within the beads. As the Ghost's influence caused them to start breaking apart, she forcibly siphoned out most of the energy inside.
"AAAAAAAH...!!!"
The Ghost let out a bloodcurdling scream. Meanwhile, Yotsuya Miko covered her lips with her left hand, hiding the smile she could no longer keep off her face.
Thank you, Godmother.
The instant the beads shattered, three streaks of black light were torn from Yotsuya Miko's Spiritual Sense and shot toward the Ghost all at once.
The Soul Collision Art had been used once more, for the first time in a long while.
The chunks torn from her Spiritual Sense brought with them a sharp, violent pain, but Yotsuya Miko didn't mind in the slightest. That pain only proved how powerful those Soul Collision Arts would be.
To deal with this Ghost, she had used nearly thirty times as many fragments of Spiritual Sense as she would against an ordinary Ghost.
The black light shot toward the Ghost in the blink of an eye. The Ghost, having just resisted the beads' power, was caught off guard and struck by all three Soul Collision Arts at once. Three huge holes were punched through its body. But that was only the beginning. The Soul Collision Art wasn't a bullet; it was an explosive.
The places torn open at almost the same moment were hit by a tremendous shockwave, which ripped their Soul Bodies outward. In the span of a single breath, the original holes were torn into even larger cavities. The enormous Ghost's body was like a battered doll, with only its neck and left leg still intact.
It was over.
Another Soul Collision Art flew from her Spiritual Sense, shooting straight toward the Ghost's head. With the sound of a watermelon bursting, the dull thud of its body hitting the ground was audible only to Yotsuya Miko.
Next, it was time to—
"Granny, are you all right?"
Yurikawa Hana's anxious voice made the spiritual energy Yotsuya Miko had sent out in another volley come to a halt. The threads swiftly gathered the shattered Ghost's Soul Body into her own, while the gentle energy from the prayer beads was rapidly consumed once more to suppress the sudden onset of the Soul Devouring Sensation.
Only after all that was done did Yotsuya Miko finally come back to herself.
"Mm. Are you all right?"
Seeing Yurikawa Hana help Godmother to her feet after she'd been struck by the flying beads, Miko hurried over to help.
She was overwhelmed with relief.
That was close. I almost—
Chapter 17: Ten Thousandfold Profound Nether Qi
When they left the fortune-telling booth, the sky was already beginning to change.
The crimson-gold of dusk bathed the entire sky, soon turning orange-red. The blazing sun sank slowly, leaving a hazy outline on the horizon.
Things had turned out a little differently from what she expected, but the fact that they'd resolved everything without incident was the best outcome she could've hoped for.
That was what Yotsuya Miko thought as she looked up at the red-stained pedestrian bridge.
Godmother and her cultivation system didn't seem to have anything to do with each other. While helping Yurikawa Hana support Granny Saegusa, who'd been struck by the beads, Miko had cautiously sent some spiritual energy into Godmother's body.
There was a considerable amount of the same gentle energy found in the beads inside her. But when faced with the spiritual energy Yotsuya Miko had sent into her, Godmother didn't react at all, as if she couldn't sense it.
The discovery made Miko pause.
It seemed to be the same when dealing with Ghosts. The beads had contained so much energy, yet they hadn't been able to destroy the Ghost. They'd even been influenced by it and forced to self-destruct. So what exactly was the Profound Nether Qi inside her?
Just three strands of Profound Nether Qi, along with a few thousand strands of spiritual energy, had been enough for her to use the Soul Collision Art to destroy such a powerful Ghost. If she had as much Profound Nether Qi as Godmother—or, no, even if she had as much spiritual energy as Godmother—she could probably wipe out every Ghost within a hundred miles in one go.
This comparison only made Yotsuya Miko feel more conflicted about the Nine Nether Profound Soul Treasure Record.
She'd originally thought the cultivation method was merely sinister, but she hadn't realized how powerful it was. Then again, it had allowed an ordinary person like her to achieve, in just a few days, what ordinary spirit mediums couldn't accomplish in decades. Its negative effects were indeed negligible by comparison.
"Prayer beads really do break so easily."
Yurikawa Hana sighed beside her. She held out both hands, but the two strings of beads she'd been wearing were gone, too.
"My beads broke just now, too."
"...I suppose they did."
Ordinary prayer beads might protect regular people from Ghosts, but they were completely useless against a powerful one.
Maybe she should find Hana something that could protect her better...
As she thought about it, she couldn't help sensing the Ghost's Soul Body inside her mind. It hadn't moved since she'd killed it. She'd used up a fair amount of the energy in Godmother's beads suppressing her desire for high-quality food, and she didn't know how many more times the remaining energy would hold out.
Besides, it was still being consumed.
With a sigh, her consciousness entered that dark space once more. The enormous Ghost appeared before her again, this time in the form of food.
Large amounts of gray-black granules were converted from its body, occasionally mixed with a few even darker ones.
This time, it tasted much less bitter than the previous Ghosts. More than bitterness, there was a sourness to it—stronger than a lime.
Maybe this Ghost had been particularly high-quality. Or maybe she was simply getting more and more used to the awful taste.
When the Ghost's Soul Body had been completely transformed into Soul Extract, Yotsuya Miko looked inside herself and saw that there was a generous amount of it.
"Miko?"
Yurikawa Hana had been thinking about the prayer beads. Seeing Miko suddenly stop, she looked at her in confusion.
"What's wrong?"
"Nothing. I just remembered something."
Yotsuya Miko shook her head and set the Soul Extract inside her body flowing through her, gradually condensing it into Profound Nether Qi. She'd already done this three times, so she was getting used to the process. And now that it had been transformed into Soul Extract, refining it into Profound Nether Qi again posed no danger at all. She could even let it remain inside her for a long time and eventually allow it to dissipate on its own.
"What is it?"
"When should we go to Butt Mochi again?"
"Oh, the mochi there is really good, isn't it?"
"Mm."
They chatted casually, and the Soul Extract inside her slowly transformed into Profound Nether Qi.
One strand, two strands...
The newly formed Profound Nether Qi soon joined the earlier strands, exhaling spiritual energy to nourish Yotsuya Miko's Spiritual Sense and make up for what she'd used up that day.
By the time the two reached the bus stop and were about to part ways, all the Soul Extract had been converted.
Unexpectedly, that batch of Soul Extract had given her a full eleven strands of Profound Nether Qi. And perhaps because they'd come from a huge Ghost, each strand could exhale more spiritual energy than the three strands she'd had before—probably more than ten thousand strands in total?
Miko pondered this as she smiled and waved goodbye to Yurikawa Hana, then boarded the bus home.
She still didn't have a clear understanding of the units of measurement in the Xuanhui Realm, such as how strands and threads compared, or how to measure the amount of spiritual energy inside her. She didn't understand much about how Profound Nether Qi produced spiritual energy, either. According to the Nine Nether Profound Soul Treasure Record, the spiritual energy consumed by Profound Nether Qi was supposed to be replenished from the outside world. Yet Profound Nether Qi seemed able to produce spiritual energy endlessly. The amount it produced was simply limited by its quality.
At present, a strand of Profound Nether Qi of the poorest quality could produce three hundred and twenty-one strands of spiritual energy, while the best could produce one thousand two hundred and thirty-seven.
That might sound like an enormous amount, but it wasn't. Using a single Soul Collision Art consumed one hundred to two hundred strands of spiritual energy, and restoring what had been used up took Profound Nether Qi several hours. Mm, with two strands, the time was cut in half.
So compared to using "strand" as the unit, using "hundred strands" was actually simpler and more convenient. But measuring spiritual energy in strands was a characteristic of Profound Nether Qi.
Take Miko, for example. She could manipulate hundreds, even nearly a thousand, strands of spiritual energy to perform relatively simple fine control, like using scattered threads to pull each scattered piece of a Soul Body back.
With a little more practice, she could treat the ten thousand strands of spiritual energy inside her as separate subunits and control them with different directions and simple commands.
That was how Zhang Qiudao had earned his title, Myriad Transformation Devil Venerable. At the height of his power, he could spread his threads of spiritual energy across the entire Xuanhui Realm, then completely infect every living being touched by them, pulling their Soul Bodies toward his true self. Otherwise, no matter how much spiritual energy he had, he couldn't have infected trillions of living beings at once. Even so, he'd still relied on the power of an array formation to accomplish it.
Sitting on the bus, she idly browsed her phone and looked at the fourteen strands of Profound Nether Qi inside her, wondering if they might amount to one thread yet.
As if to give her day the perfect ending, her Spiritual Sense detected a familiar Ghost on the bus.
"...Fate works in mysterious ways."
Before long, she had gained four more strands of Profound Nether Qi.
Chapter 18: Zhang Qiudao Explains
When she got home, the sky had just grown dark. She took off her light-gray ankle boots by the door and changed into the slippers beside them, looking utterly exhausted.
"I'm home."
"Ah, you're back, Sis."
Yotsuya Kyosuke's voice came from the living room.
"Hurry up and come over. We're about to eat."
"Okay, okay."
She answered as she dragged her feet toward the living room. She wasn't very hungry. She'd eaten a piece of mochi with Yurikawa Hana and had also "eaten" two malevolent Ghosts along the way. Physically and mentally, she felt full of energy.
Still, she could manage a little food.
She walked quietly to the table, sat down, and picked up her bowl and chopsticks. Looking at her family of four, she closed her eyes.
"Let's eat."
Her younger brother Kyosuke, her mother Touko, herself, Miko—and across from her, as usual, sat her father Masamori, reading a newspaper without any bowls or chopsticks.
That was right. After all, her mother couldn't see him.
Her gaze naturally swept over her father before she began eating at a leisurely pace, like an ordinary high school girl.
It hadn't taken long after she began cultivating the Nine Nether Profound Soul Treasure Record for her to notice one of the house's permanent residents, as well as... his dreadful pet.
Ghosts could appear in the form of ordinary people, as a kind of disguise. And beings like her father, who had retained some degree of reason, really did exist. It was fascinating. Like Bakeneko, like her father, not every being in this world was a malevolent Ghost.
Even so, people and Ghosts were ultimately different. So although she could see her father at home, Yotsuya Miko chose to ignore him.
She also let some of the Ghosts in the house be.
Honestly, couldn't he just "ask" those Ghosts to leave?
Yotsuya Miko chewed as she thought. That pet looked awfully delicious...ahem, awfully powerful. Couldn't a pet like that do something good for once?
Muttering to herself, she hastily finished dinner and then—spent a peaceful evening.
As usual, after taking a bath, she watched Creepy True Stories with her younger brother Kyosuke.
The show specialized in the paranormal—in other words, it was a hoax. It often added special effects to photos and hid one or two faces in them. But as a variety show, it was pretty good.
That was, if you ignored the Ghosts actually serving as background props on the TV to set the mood.
"100 Paranormal Photos. Next, we have this photo..."
I probably don't need to worry about Ghosts anymore, do I?
Yotsuya Miko watched the Ghost on the screen, claws outstretched, and thought.
Aside from the troublesome Soul Devouring Sensation, she could now deal with most Ghosts using the Soul Collision Art. It was like the protagonist of a horror game suddenly getting a weapon, transforming it into an action-packed battle as they slaughtered their way through the game.
Even with such powerful strength, according to the Nine Nether Profound Soul Treasure Record, she'd only just begun cultivating. She hadn't even received any instruction from her "master," Zhang Qiudao, who'd made her his disciple without asking her opinion.
A thread?
Though the show was fake, the production team did an excellent job creating an eerie atmosphere that made viewers feel a genuine chill. That very creepiness had made the program famous. Even students at Nanatsumisaki Academy High School sometimes brought it up for conversation.
By the time the show ended, it was getting late. Yotsuya Miko turned off the TV, and she and Kyosuke each went back to their own rooms.
Would that master come by tonight?
Thinking this, Yotsuya Miko sent Yurikawa Hana a "Good night," set her phone beside her pillow, and closed her eyes.
Although she needed much less sleep now that she was cultivating the Nine Nether Profound Soul Treasure Record, tonight her consciousness still sank away soon after she closed her eyes.
After an indescribable, mysterious sensation, she opened her eyes again. The scene before her had become a landscape of beautiful mountains and rivers.
Green waters wound around verdant mountains; sturdy pines clung to rocky slopes; white egrets flew across the blue sky, and birds sang among the trees.
The red sun blazed overhead, the sky clear of clouds and rain. A cool breeze brushed her face, carrying a faint chill.
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