The stronger the Ghost, the more clearly it could be sensed through her Spiritual Sense.
With Spiritual Sense that was practically radar, Yotsuya Miko finally realized just how rampant these Ghosts were.
Whether at school or on the streets, her Spiritual Sense kept warning her of large numbers of Ghosts. Even in tiny corners, several Ghosts crouched in wait. Even the Xuanhui Realm described in the Nine Nether Profound Soul Treasure Record rarely had scenes like this.
Although powerful Ghosts existed in the Xuanhui Realm, they usually gathered in one place and formed a Ghost Domain. Scattered Ghosts, meanwhile, would be accepted by a place underground known as the Netherworld. There, they would be broken down into the most primitive spiritual energy and returned to the earth.
This world, however, seemed to have no concept of the underworld. The Ghosts neither feared sunlight nor dissipated from remaining aboveground too long due to a lack of material to maintain their forms. It was as though they had mistaken the human world for the underworld.
What a strange world.
That was all Miko could say. According to the knowledge of the Xuanhui Realm she had received, this phenomenon defied common sense.
"I'm home."
She passed through the crowds of people and Ghosts, ignoring the latter like an ordinary human, and returned home much faster than usual.
There was no one in the house. Her mother, Yotsuya Touko, and her younger brother, Kyosuke, had not returned yet.
There was, however, a Ghost.
Yotsuya Miko removed her loafers, changed into house slippers, and walked back to her room.
With a crisp click of the door, a huge, distorted face soon appeared before her.
"Can you see me?"
The deformed Ghost asked in a deep, muffled voice, as though speaking from its chest. Miko paid it no attention and walked straight through its body. These creatures were even more conceptual than she had imagined. Only after confirming that she could see them could the Ghosts turn their bodies into physical objects and interfere with or harm her.
Normally, they remained in a void-like state, much like 3D projections.
Even with the curtains drawn open, many parts of the room remained dim. The setting sun slanted through the window, dividing the room into three sections: two dark and one bright.
The boundary between light and shadow was especially distinct, creating a stark contrast.
Miko silently closed the door and hung the shoulder bag from the wall. Then she fell into thought.
She turned and looked at the full-length mirror behind her. The mirror happened to be in the shadows, while the setting sun illuminated her completely.
Her reflection looked radiant. The sunset coated her in a layer of golden light, like the gilded body spoken of in Buddhist teachings.
Her long black hair fell over her shoulders, her pupils shone gold, and her fair, elegant features were all revealed in the mirror. The girl's beautiful appearance was laid bare—except for the Ghost that continued harassing her without tiring.
"Can you see me?"
These Ghosts seemed to love pressing close to people's faces, using their own distorted faces to block their victims' vision at close range. It was as if doing so would somehow make people see them.
This Malevolent Ghost was no exception. Its haphazardly assembled features blocked Miko's view of the mirror as it repeatedly questioned her.
"...Sigh."
Miko suddenly sighed and turned her gaze toward the Ghost before her.
"That's about enough... isn't it?"
This was the first time she had spoken to a Ghost, and she forced the words out with difficulty.
Before the Ghost could react, a streak of black light shot from Miko's forehead and darted into its head like lightning.
At almost the same instant, the Ghost's head shattered like a watermelon being smashed on a beach.
Even calling it shattered was an understatement. Fragments splattered everywhere, filling the room. Where the Malevolent Ghost's head had been was now nothing but empty space. Its twisted body froze for a few seconds after losing its head, then toppled backward and crumbled into debris.
After doing all this, Yotsuya Miko continued staring at her reflection.
The setting sun sank lower, and the clear boundaries of light in the room shifted as well. At some point, a dividing line crawled over Miko, casting two completely different patterns of light and shadow across her body.
One half still glittered with golden radiance, bright and vivid. The other half was dim.
She stood there blankly until the fragments on the floor were almost gone, finally coming back to her senses.
"My head... hurts."
Transformation and Things That Had Never Changed
Killing a Ghost for the first time had gone far more smoothly than Yotsuya Miko had imagined.
She had merely clumsily manipulated the spiritual energy released by her Profound Nether Qi, cutting a small piece of the substance called Spiritual Sense from her mind as if with a table knife. She then wrapped that mass in spiritual energy, refined it into a streak of black light, and shot it out from between her brows.
Her Spiritual Sense—or rather, her spirit body—quickly transmitted the pain of being severed. It reflected the burning pain of flesh being cut away, but unlike the body, it could not clearly indicate exactly which flesh had been injured. Instead, it spread the pain throughout her entire body.
Because of this property, Miko did not feel intense pain. She only felt somewhat numb all over. However, her unskilled manipulation of spiritual energy had affected her brain's normal functioning, causing it to transmit the sensation of having been struck violently.
Storing spiritual energy in the "Soul Repository" within her mind instead of the traditional Dantian naturally carried such risks. Otherwise, why had no cultivator ever considered storing spiritual energy in the human brain or other vital organs?
It was not that they had never considered it. The risk of gathering energy in those places was simply too great. Qi Refinement and Foundation Establishment might still be manageable, but once one reached Core Formation, whether the resulting Golden Core could be controlled freely was another matter entirely.
Put simply, a Golden Core was much like a kidney stone.
Miko, however, did not need to worry about developing a kidney stone in her head, because she did not cultivate the Golden Core Path.
After recovering somewhat from the headache, Miko looked at the Ghost's fragments on the floor and could not help sighing.
She slowly sat cross-legged on the floor and drew wisps of spiritual energy from her mind. The pale-purple spiritual energy pounced at the scattered fragments like hunting dogs. The instant it touched them, it attached itself and dragged them back.
If anyone could have seen the traces of spiritual energy around Miko, the sight before them would probably have been horrifying.
Although there was only a trace of Profound Nether Qi, the amount of spiritual energy it could store was astonishing. Nearly a hundred pale-purple threads stretched taut from Yotsuya Miko's head, pulling at the fragments on the floor. In an instant, the threads whipped back and surged into Miko's mind once more.
Then Miko entered that dark space again.
Looking at the Ghost assembled before her, she helplessly closed her eyes.
Just like the first Ghost she had absorbed, this Ghost was transformed into gray-black particles outside her field of vision before surging into her mouth without a word. Bitter, sour, and rank—the taste buds of an ordinary person would have immediately caused them to vomit, along with whatever food remained in their stomach. Yet Miko's body, altered by the Nine Nether Profound Soul Treasure Record, urged her to swallow the particles.
It was a very strange reaction. Although her tongue remained normal, her body did not reject particles that her taste buds identified as foul.
After completely devouring the Ghost, the surroundings returned to normal. Miko was back in her room, and she could feel that her body contained a little more of a strange substance: Soul Extract. The Nine Nether Profound Soul Treasure Record refined Soul Bodies into Soul Extract through this peculiar method.
If the substance in those fragments entered a person's body without undergoing this process, it would only cause the body to deteriorate. The large amount of impurities, combined with the Ghost's inherent incompatibility with the human body, made the substance poisonous to humans.
Of course, higher-level Soul Bodies could enter the human body directly without harming it. They did not even need to be processed into Soul Extract in this manner.
Moreover, extracting it this way was not completely safe.
The danger was glaringly obvious: it gradually turned a person into a Ghost Eater monster.
"I seem to be getting used to it."
Miko stood up, sensed the additional Soul Extract inside her body, and circulated the Nine Nether Profound Soul Treasure Record to convert it into Profound Nether Qi.
When she entered the dark space, her body had once again developed a powerful appetite for Malevolent Ghosts—stronger than the previous time. Perhaps after a few more times, she would instinctively salivate whenever she saw a Ghost.
At the thought, Yotsuya Miko's expression darkened.
That was hardly good news.
Changing from prey into a hunter sounded nice, but Miko was very satisfied with her current food and had no intention of changing her taste.
"Right now, I have two strands of Profound Nether Qi. I should practice the Soul Collision Art."
She sensed the Profound Nether Qi in her mind. While she was thinking, the Soul Extract had already been converted into Profound Nether Qi and was nourishing her Spiritual Sense. If nothing went wrong, it would probably take only a few hours to replenish the portion of Spiritual Sense she had severed.
"One wisp... probably means ten strands?"
The Nine Nether Profound Soul Treasure Record did not provide precise unit definitions. Its division of cultivation realms only distinguished between major realms. Perception and Object Manipulation, for example, were two different realms, corresponding to Qi Refinement and Foundation Establishment in the Golden Core Path. Perception was the realm she currently occupied, allowing her to sense the existence of Ghosts through Spiritual Sense. Object Manipulation meant that her Spiritual Sense had grown strong enough to move objects. Its standard was lifting oneself.
Once one could use Spiritual Sense to lift oneself, one had entered the Object Manipulation realm.
Compared with the many difficulties involved in progressing from Qi Refinement to Foundation Establishment, such as needing a Foundation Establishment Pill, this division might be imprecise, even crude. But once Spiritual Sense underwent a true qualitative transformation and one could leave the body with one's soul, one could basically contend with Golden Core Great Cultivators, and even resist some Spirit Manifestation Cultivators above the Golden Core stage who had begun Soul Condensing Spirit Manifestation.
Zhang Qiudao, the creator of this technique, had never intended to define the realms corresponding to the Golden Core Path too precisely. By the time he created the technique, he was already a Deity Transformation cultivator. When he later switched to cultivating the Nine Nether Profound Soul Treasure Record, he started from the Yang God realm, which corresponded to the Deity Transformation realm. After that, having no disciples, he never passed the technique on.
Yotsuya Miko was the second person fortunate enough to cultivate this technique, and probably the last.
"So I still need to eat... no, kill eight Ghosts?"
That was not difficult. At least for Miko, who had already begun becoming a demonic cultivator, she could easily make up the number by taking a walk down the street if she did not care about wasting Spiritual Sense.
"Eight Ghosts..."
Miko looked out the window. Only the final afterglow of sunset remained, and night was about to arrive. Watching the Ghosts still wandering aimlessly along the streets, she revealed an indescribable expression.
"I've changed too."
"Ding."
She instinctively pulled the phone from her pocket. Someone had sent her a message on the lock screen.
"Today's dinner."
"[Image]"
Miko opened Yurikawa Hana's chat. Smiling brightly, Hana was lifting a thick piece of meat with a fork. As usual, the table before her was covered with a huge amount of food.
Yotsuya Miko stared at the image for a moment, then could not help smiling.
"Thank you."
By the way, I apologize for the late update. I was revising my thesis. I'll add another chapter this weekend as an apology.
Regarding the technique and cultivation realms Miko is practicing, I'll try to explain them clearly. You can roughly understand it as cultivating only the spirit, then leaving the body to become a deity. So it does not follow the path of Qi Refinement, Foundation Establishment, Core Formation, and Nascent Soul.
As for Spiritual Sense, strictly speaking, Miko's current Spiritual Sense is not true Spiritual Sense. It is more like a sixth sense.
A Troublesome Soul Devouring Sensation
"I'm heading out."
It was a bright noon, and the refreshing streets carried a clean, invigorating atmosphere.
Yotsuya Miko put on a light-blue hoodie and hurried out of the house.
After walking a while, she checked the time on her phone and realized that her schedule was a little tight.
"I'm not going to make it."
She hurried into a jog toward the nearest station to her home.
Her luck was decent. A bus happened to be waiting at the station, though it was just about to leave.
She entered through the front door, tapped her phone to pay, and picked an empty seat at random in the sparsely occupied bus. After setting down the shoulder bag hanging from her shoulder, she finally relaxed a little.
"Whew, I made it."
She leaned back against the seat. Just as she was about to reply to her messages, she suddenly sensed a fairly clear presence and looked toward someone seated to her front right.
Seeing that the person did not seem to be bothering her, she turned her attention back to her phone. Yurikawa Hana had just sent two messages.
"Let's confirm today's plans."
"We're meeting at Tea Buck at two, right?"
The two messages had been sent at 13:37, and two o'clock was nearly here.
"Two o'clock... That's a little tight."
As she thought this, the presence that had drawn somewhat closer within her Spiritual Sense made her raise her head again. She found that the fellow had indeed moved to a seat farther toward the back. Considering that Ghosts generally lacked any real intelligence, he might simply have wanted to change seats, so Yotsuya Miko did not interfere.
She opened the relevant page on her phone and looked at the image of the prayer beads, making up her mind.
"I absolutely have to buy prayer beads today."
Miko was not very confident that prayer beads could purify the desire in her mind to eat Malevolent Ghosts. But since this world contained something like the Nine Nether Profound Soul Treasure Record, it was not impossible that prayer beads might have some effect as well.
Thinking this, she felt that her reasoning made more and more sense.
Looking at the prices displayed on her phone—3,980 yen for a lightweight women's prayer-bead bracelet made of Black Agate, and 4,280 yen for one made of Pagoda Tree Wood—Yotsuya Miko sighed at the cost.
"They're both pretty expensive."
As she spoke, her gaze once again drifted toward the Ghost fumbling into the seat in front of her.
If this fellow could be exchanged for money, that would be rather nice.
"Pretty ridiculous, right?"
"What do you think?"
"It's really hilarious."
"Hahahaha..."
Before you continue