Promoted to Soul Douluo (2)

Bibi Dong sat by the window, listlessly gazing at the distant scenery.

"Sigh..."

Bibi Dong let out a sigh, her whole body going limp with laziness as she casually leaned against the windowsill.

She had never noticed it before, but it was only after Hals left without a word this time that Bibi Dong realized she had grown used to having someone by her side. With Hals suddenly gone, she couldn't help feeling that something was off.

Suddenly, a snowflake drifted down and landed softly on the back of Bibi Dong's hand. She looked up in surprise and gazed at the sky. Snowflakes danced through the air, chaotic yet graceful.

"It's been almost half a month." Bibi Dong's eyes went blank as she stared off into nowhere.

The distant Extreme North was battered by blizzards all year round. Everywhere one looked, there was nothing but a glaring expanse of white.

Yet in this boundless sea of white, a tiny black speck moved slowly onward.

That speck was Hals. For more than ten days, he had traveled a long way from the main Spirit Hall, hunting along the way as he made his way toward the Extreme North.

Before reaching the seventh ring, Hals had never seriously tried to understand his Martial Soul—the Soul-Guiding Lantern. He had only used it crudely, relying on instinct and some vague sense of direction. His so-called Self-Created Soul Skill had amounted to releasing all the souls inside the lantern and using them to strike his enemies.

Still, that was one way to use the Soul-Guiding Lantern. You could say he had stumbled onto it by accident.

It wasn't until Hals became a Spirit Saint and gained his Martial Soul Avatar that he truly understood the meaning of his Martial Soul. Imprisoning souls was only the most basic function. Its deeper purpose was to make those souls his own and give them physical form.

And the easiest physical form to find in nature was ice. The lower the temperature, the harder the ice became, and it was also highly malleable.

Hals had traveled countless miles and endured great hardship to reach the Extreme North. He had come partly to harvest souls along the way and cultivate them for a ritual before his upcoming Eighth Soul Ring, but also because only the Extreme North had Soul Beasts capable of producing ice crystals at sufficiently low temperatures.

The wind howled, sharp and bone-chilling. Even someone as powerful as Hals had to yield to the biting cold for now. He wrapped his robe tightly around himself and pulled a black Purple Sable Fur Coat over it. Yet no matter how fierce the wind grew, it couldn't extinguish the two Green Flames burning in his hollow eye sockets.

The two Green Flames had remained after his last insight into the Soul-Guiding Lantern. They could continually refine and elevate the level of Hals's soul. Their fuel was every desire he possessed. As long as Hals had even the faintest trace of any desire, the flames would keep burning—and intensify that desire.

Step by laborious step, Hals trudged through the snow, which reached his knees. He had no idea how long he walked. The black fur coat was soon buried beneath the blizzard's snow and turned white, blending completely into the snow-covered landscape.

Hals was alone and silent, simply walking onward. At last, a "bamboo grove" formed by dozens of towering ice pillars came into view on the horizon. The stiffness in his face eased a little, but the Green Flames in his eye sockets burned even more fiercely. They were fueled by his joy at finally obtaining his Eighth Soul Ring, and by his thirst for power. Those desires kept feeding the flames, while the blazing Green Flames in turn strengthened Hals's soul...

"At last... I'm here..." Hals's voice came out low and hoarse.

The ice pillars before him towered into the clouds. Some were thick enough to take four people standing shoulder to shoulder to encircle.

Hals stepped forward. A faint green glow flickered over his hands, like a thin layer of flame. He gently pressed his palm against an ice pillar. A green speck of light drifted out of the lantern and merged with the flames in his palm. In an instant, the flames surged skyward, then went out just as quickly. When he looked down, the flesh on Hals's right hand had vanished, leaving only a skeletal hand.

This was the latest ability Hals had gained from understanding his Martial Soul: he could burn souls to strengthen his bones. The price, however, was that each use brought him immense pain, and the souls used as fuel vanished forever. In a way, it was like having their souls scattered beyond recovery.

Fortunately, Hals still retained the last trace of humanity in his heart. He didn't slaughter innocent civilians, instead targeting sinners whose hands were stained with blood. Of course, he wouldn't spare the souls of ordinary people who had died after being persecuted, either. Ever since the day Hals's Martial Soul awakened, his possessiveness toward souls had grown stronger and stronger. In his eyes, every soul was destined to belong to him in the end.

After being strengthened, his bones were so hard that "cutting through iron like mud" hardly did them justice.

Hals raised his five fingers and clawed at the ice pillar with all his strength. The bone fingers, which could easily gouge marks into a Ten Thousand Year Soul Bone, left only a shallow scratch on the pillar's surface.

This was an uninhabited area. After a brief hesitation, Hals removed his hood. A smile tugged at his scarred face. Clearly, this was the place he had been searching for.

Hals withdrew his hand and headed deeper into the Ice Pillar Forest. Flesh slowly regrew over the hand hanging at his side. The process brought wave after wave of itching and pain, but Hals seemed not to feel it. Not a flicker of emotion crossed his face.

A vast clearing lay in the heart of the Ice Pillar Forest. It held only a few irregular blocks of solid ice, each two or three meters tall and more than four meters wide.

To ordinary people, there was not a single living creature in sight. But through Hals's eyes, where Green Flames now burned, those few brilliant green lights shone unmistakably against the black-and-white landscape.

They were the light of souls—the souls of beings with immense vitality that had lived for a very long time.

"So, you're the rarely seen Dew-Condensing Ice Toads?" Hals asked, studying the ice blocks with an amused expression.

No one answered. Hals didn't mind. He walked toward the blocks, and with every step, a speck of green light flew out of the lantern and landed in his footprint, where it burst into raging flames.

By the time Hals reached the ice blocks, a trail of Green Flames stretched behind him.

Hals stood in front of the ice blocks and waited quietly. Though he was strong enough to break through such hard ice, it would take too much effort. Attacking the souls wouldn't work, either. Unless necessary, these Soul Beasts would live inside their blocks of ice until they died.

The fuel for the flames in the footprints was souls. What the flames released was a substance every living creature dreamed of possessing. It could elevate a creature's soul, which would then influence its body and raise its level of life.

The Soul Essence filling the air caught the Dew-Condensing Ice Toad's attention. The ice blocks before Hals began to tremble slowly, and flakes of ice and snow fell from them. After a long while, a thin crack appeared, winding down from the top of one block. As a series of cracking sounds rang out, the fissure widened.

At last, a deafening crash rang out. The enormous block of ice split in two and fell to the ground. A smooth-skinned, jade-blue ice toad appeared before Hals, about half a meter tall and one meter long.

It paid no attention to the outsider beside it. Instead, it opened its enormous mouth to breathe, rather than breathing through its skin like an ordinary toad.

Green Flames flickered in Hals's eyes as he silently watched.

The ice toad's breathing grew more and more labored. A faint green mist, almost impossible to see with the naked eye, appeared in the air and was drawn into its body. Then a thick layer of glowing green ice formed over the Dew-Condensing Ice Toad's skin.

Only then did a satisfied expression finally appear on Hals's face.

That was right. Each of the enormous ice pillars had been formed by an ice toad. Every ten thousand years, an ice toad would leave its pillar to reproduce, then form a new one. The ice toad before him was already ninety-nine thousand years old. In another thousand years, it would become a Hundred-Thousand-Year Soul Beast. Unfortunately, because of its species, it was destined never to cross that threshold. Even so, it was the oldest member of this group of ice toads.

When the layer of icy dew on the toad's body had grown five fingers thick, Hals finally stepped forward. Seven Soul Rings flared behind him. Raging flames erupted from his body and consumed the fur coat, but left his robe completely unharmed. Beneath the robe, his body turned to bone inch by inch.

"Kehehehe."

Hals laughed.

Countless souls flew out of the lantern and danced through the air. They glared fiercely at the man and the ice toad before them.

"Woooo... kehehehe..."

The souls wailed, then laughed...