The balance between destruction and recovery had been broken, and the scales were gradually tipping. As Shen Feng's body slowly recovered, he stayed conscious for longer and longer.
Once he understood the crisis he was trapped in, Shen Feng immediately abandoned the idea of ending his life.
After all, he had already seen hope. How could he give up so easily on this hard-won opportunity?
During his brief periods of consciousness, Shen Feng began deliberately mobilizing the power within his body, gradually refining the extreme water and fire energy released by the Water and Fire Dragon Crystals.
At first, the refinement did not go smoothly.
The reason was simple: the energy within the Water and Fire Dragon Crystals was far too dense, far exceeding the Soul Power in Shen Feng's body.
After all, the Water and Fire Dragon Kings had been god-king-level powerhouses in life. The power contained in their Dragon Crystals was naturally divine power, a level above Soul Power.
Although the passage of time had worn it down, and the energy density on the Douluo Continent was far too low, the power had also dissipated over tens of thousands of years. Its quality had naturally fallen below the level of divine power.
Even so, its density was still beyond comparison with ordinary Soul Power.
If Soul Power were gas and divine power were solid, then the energy inside the Dragon Crystals was liquid, somewhere between gas and solid.
Trying to refine liquid, semi-divine power with gaseous Soul Power was obviously no easy task.
It was no different from trying to wear a stone away with water droplets.
Fortunately, this slow, painstaking process was not entirely without shortcuts.
After completely refining the Octagonal Mysterious Ice Grass and the Infernal Delicate Apricot, Shen Feng's body had already contained a trace of extreme water and fire elemental power.
Carefully drawing out that power, Shen Feng used a small amount to leverage a much greater force. After a month of constant attempts, he finally refined a trace of the power within the Water and Fire Dragon Crystals.
After that, everything began to proceed smoothly and methodically.
Pain made time lose all meaning, and cultivation was no different.
It might have been three months, or it might have been four. As Shen Feng refined the Water and Fire Dragon Crystals, all the Soul Power in his body became imbued with the extreme water and fire elements. Even his dantian turned half red and half blue.
By then, Shen Feng had also reached the limit of what his dantian could hold.
He was still only a little forty-level Soul Elder. Even with his Innate Full Soul Power, without a fourth Soul Ring, his dantian could not possibly be larger than that of the most ordinary Soul Ancestor.
What was more, he had already completely refined the Octagonal Mysterious Ice Grass and the Infernal Delicate Apricot, then refined all that water and fire elemental power. The Soul Power inside Shen Feng's body had long since far exceeded what a Soul Ancestor could contain.
By Shen Feng's own estimate, if he absorbed a fourth Soul Ring now, he would immediately be able to obtain a fifth.
The fact that his dantian, at the Soul Elder level, could store Soul Power equivalent to that of a Soul King without his body exploding was proof enough of how tough Shen Feng was.
But that was not the biggest problem. Even now, Shen Feng still could not escape the force field created by the Water and Fire Dragon Crystals.
If he could not escape, then everything he had done before had been in vain. Even though the water and fire elements had stopped corroding him, he still had no way to return to land.
In other words, Shen Feng had now been sealed here by the power of the Water and Fire Dragon Crystals.
If he did not want to grow old and die in this wretched place, he had no choice but to find another way and change his approach.
Since the size of his dantian was fixed, he could compress his Soul Power instead—compress gaseous Soul Power into liquid Soul Power, or even solid.
That way, the same-sized dantian could hold more Soul Power, and Soul Power of higher quality would naturally bring greater strength.
However, compressing gaseous Soul Power into liquid Soul Power was no simple matter.
First of all, a Soul Master's realm placed limits on the amount of gaseous Soul Power in their dantian. No matter how hard they tried, they could not condense even a trace of liquid Soul Power if they did not have enough.
Shen Feng had tested this himself back then.
As a transmigrator who had been steeped in countless web novels in his previous life, how could Shen Feng not have thought of compressing his Soul Power to build a sturdier foundation, become invincible among his peers, and fight across levels?
Besides, he had Innate Full Soul Power. Even if higher-density Soul Power slowed his cultivation, he had believed he would not fall too far behind others.
But a guess was only a guess. Reality was always harsher than theory; otherwise, Yu Xiaogang would have become famous throughout the world long ago.
There were things you simply could not see until you reached that realm.
When he was a One-Ring Soul Master, Shen Feng had secretly tried compressing his Soul Power, but he had been completely unable to do it.
Later, after asking his parents, he learned that there was simply not enough gaseous Soul Power in a dantian to compress it into liquid.
At least, the amount of Soul Power possessed by a Soul King was not enough.
Unwilling to give up, Shen Feng asked the strongest person he could reach at the time: Flender, a Soul Saint.
That was when he learned that the Soul Power within a Soul Saint's body was only somewhere between gas and liquid; it had not yet become truly liquid Soul Power.
Don't ask why. The answer was simple: if there wasn't enough quantity, you couldn't compress it into the so-called "quality."
It was not until many years later, when he met Dugu Bo, a nine-ring Titled Douluo, that all of Shen Feng's questions were finally answered.
Liquid Soul Power, it turned out, was the mark of a Soul Douluo, while solid Soul Power was the mark of a Titled Douluo.
The reason a Soul Saint became weak after using the Seventh Soul Skill, Martial Soul Avatar, was that the semi-liquid Soul Power in their body could not last.
After all, once a Soul Master used their Martial Soul Avatar, their first through sixth Soul Skills had no cooldown and could be used at will.
With such enormous consumption, how could they not grow weak?
By contrast, once a Soul Master reached the eight-ring Soul Douluo realm, all their Soul Power transformed into liquid, giving them a far more abundant supply. Naturally, this so-called period of weakness disappeared.
At the nine-ring Titled Douluo realm, they could fight for three days and three nights without breaking a sweat. If they were determined to flee, they could travel thousands of miles while still retaining some fighting strength.
That was because their Soul Power was a level higher: solid Soul Power, strong enough to sustain days of intense battle.
After all, a Soul Saint could be left weak for a week just by using the Seventh Soul Skill, Martial Soul Avatar. Without the more efficient solid Soul Power, wouldn't a Titled Douluo lose half their life after using the ninth Soul Skill just once?
And Shen Feng was only a three-ring Soul Elder. At most, the amount of Soul Power stored in his body was equivalent to that of a level-fifty pseudo-Soul King.
But he had not forgotten that the two enormous energy sources—the Water and Fire Dragon Crystals—were outside his body, constantly replenishing him.
Recalling the method of refining Soul Power that he had badgered out of Dugu Bo, Shen Feng submerged his consciousness in his dantian and carefully stirred the gaseous Soul Power within, using a small part to influence the whole and form a vortex.
With Shen Feng's control over his Soul Power, this step was easy.
The vortex slowly took shape. If an eighty-level Quasi-Soul Douluo were absorbing an eighth Soul Ring and receiving the immense influx of Soul Power that came with it, they could easily condense liquid Soul Power at this point.
But Shen Feng could not. After all, there was simply too little gaseous Soul Power in his body.
So he could only stabilize the vortex while also diverting his attention to refining the power of the Water and Fire Dragon Crystals. He had to do two things at once, stay fully focused, and patiently build up his strength drop by drop until he could condense the first trace of liquid Soul Power.
The Great Dao was simple. The process of condensing gaseous Soul Power into liquid Soul Power was actually much like the formation of planets in the universe.
The dantian was the universe, the rotating vortex was a nascent galaxy, and the gaseous Soul Power particles were like cosmic dust.
As the vortex rotated, the gaseous Soul Power particles collided, forming larger Soul Power particles.
If one's strength was too low, the dantian lacked resilience and could hold too few gaseous particles. Their chances of colliding would drop sharply.
As a result, true liquid Soul Power could not form.
By constantly refining the power of the Water and Fire Dragon Crystals, Shen Feng was continually sending gaseous Soul Power particles into his dantian, increasing the likelihood of collisions.
This method was extremely dangerous. Shen Feng's dantian had a carrying limit, while the power of the Water and Fire Dragon Crystals was, to him, infinite.
Facing the infinite with the finite, Shen Feng was like a reservoir with a limited capacity.
He had to keep letting water in while also controlling the outflow to keep the reservoir from exceeding its limit, filtering out some of the sediment along the way.
One mistake, and Shen Feng would be like a reservoir overwhelmed by floodwaters. Its dam would burst, and it would collapse in an instant.
So he had to be careful—careful, and more careful still.
Time passed without him noticing. He did not know how many days and nights had gone by. Just as Shen Feng felt he could barely hold on any longer, the gaseous Soul Power in his body finally showed signs of condensing.
The vortex in his dantian slowly grew viscous. The gaseous Soul Power particles joined in pairs, then merged four at a time.
As more and more Soul Power particles gathered, their density increased. The lighter ones rose, while the heavier ones sank.
Drip—
Suddenly, Shen Feng thought he heard the sound of a water droplet falling.
At last, a drop of liquid Soul Power became so heavy that it broke away from the vortex and fell to the bottom of his dantian.
In the next moment, more and more liquid Soul Power formed. A fine rain of liquid Soul Power began to fall inside Shen Feng's dantian.
The fine rain of Soul Power quickly gathered into a small lake in his dantian.
Half the lake was milky white, the other half crimson, the two sharply divided. Some unconverted gaseous Soul Power still floated above it, like a veil of mist.
At a glance, it looked exactly like the Ice and Fire Yin Yang Well—beautiful beyond compare.
He had no time to admire what he had accomplished. The moment his Soul Power had transformed into liquid, Shen Feng felt an even more tremendous force sweep through his body and begin to alter it.
Now that his Soul Power had turned liquid, the meridians and other parts of his body naturally had to be upgraded to match.
Fortunately, the Water and Fire Dragon Crystals provided more than enough energy, so Shen Feng's body was transformed at remarkable speed.
His physique was already far beyond that of Soul Masters at the same level, so the transformation was complete in just a few days.
A few days later, Shen Feng woke from his cultivation and found himself feeling completely refreshed. The excess energy from the Water and Fire Dragon Crystals coursed through him, but could no longer harm him.
In other words, after enduring countless hardships, Shen Feng had gained true immunity to the water and fire elements. He had become completely impervious to water and fire.
His physical strength had also increased tremendously.
His physical power was comparable to that of a six-ring Soul Emperor, and his physical defense was comparable to that of a seven-ring Soul Saint. The resilience of his meridians had improved the most; it was now scarcely inferior to that of an eight-ring Soul Douluo.
Even his spiritual power, the hardest thing to improve, had reached the point where he could project it beyond his body after enduring torture like the eighteen layers of hell.
To make a comparison, he was now like Tang San in the original story, after absorbing Wangchuan Autumn Dew and before taking part in the Advanced Soul Master Academy Elite Tournament.
Judging by the age of the Soul Rings he could absorb, Shen Feng estimated that rings between twenty and thirty thousand years would pose no problem.
Yet despite such an enormous improvement, he still couldn't break free of the restraints of the Water and Fire Dragon Crystals.
Shen Feng discovered that although the Soul Power in his body was now liquid, just like the energy inside the Water and Fire Dragon Crystals, the latter still had the upper hand in sheer quantity.
When his Soul Power had been gaseous, he had been utterly powerless to resist and could only endure the pain as excess water and fire elements flooded his body.
Now that his Soul Power had become liquid, the pain was gone, but the vast amount of water and fire energy could still restrain him, forcing him to remain a living transfer station.
He was like a sailboat caught in a whirlpool, with no choice but to endure it all.
With no other option, Shen Feng continued refining the Dragon Crystals in exchange for further increases in strength.
As his dantian gradually filled, Shen Feng immediately discovered another major problem.
His dantian had a limited carrying capacity.
This time, the problem was not a lack of space; it was that his dantian could not bear any more weight.
It was like a person who could only lift a three-hundred-pound object. No matter how high the sky was, it had nothing to do with how much weight he could carry.
That was precisely the problem Shen Feng was facing.
Before, his dantian had been filled with gaseous Soul Power. Even when it was completely full, Shen Feng had only felt a little bloated.
That was why he had been able to continue refining the power of the Dragon Crystals in that state, increasing the density of the Soul Power particles in his dantian until he finally formed liquid Soul Power.
But now that his Soul Power had become liquid, his dantian had reached its carrying limit when it was only one-third full.
Shen Feng's dantian was like a bag. It could be filled with cotton without a problem, but with water, it could only hold one-third of its capacity. Any more, and the bottom would leak.
If the bag were his dantian, then a leak in his dantian would mean certain death.
Without his strength, even the water pressure at the bottom of the Ice and Fire Yin Yang Well would crush him into a flat slab of meat in an instant.
Since he had reached his limit in quantity, Shen Feng could only press on and improve the quality of his Soul Power.
He would compress liquid Soul Power into solid Soul Power and reach the level of a Titled Douluo in one leap.
Although this would make his future cultivation as difficult as that of a Titled Douluo, he could not afford to worry about that now. He needed to escape the barrier formed by the Water and Fire Dragon Crystals.
The method of solidifying Soul Power was not very different from that of liquefying it. The only change was from a gaseous spiral to a liquid one.
Since the liquid Soul Power in his body resembled the Ice and Fire Yin Yang Well, with its twin springs and mutually opposing forces, Shen Feng directly formed two Soul Power vortices to prevent the water and fire Soul Power from repelling each other and making solidification too difficult.
One was milky white; the other was crimson.
The two Soul Power vortices had barely formed when they began interfering with each other. They took on the shape of a taiji symbol, slowly revolving around an invisible point, just like the Water and Fire Dragon Crystals that had trapped him.
There was no sun or moon visible underwater. The only light came from the two Dragon Crystals, so Shen Feng had long since lost track of time.
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