Life settled into a routine. In the mornings, Su Ming cleaned and attended class. During free time in the afternoon, he went to the library to read the books he'd copied and search for a Soul Ring that suited him. In the evenings, he focused on cultivation.
Su Ming didn't go to the arranged fight with the upperclassmen. Instead, he stayed in the dorm and cultivated. After the fight, Tang San and the others brought back an injured Wang Sheng.
After treating Wang Sheng, Su Ming took the opportunity to ask about Tang San's First Soul Skill. Once he confirmed it was Entanglement, he returned to his bed and sat down to read.
Sitting on his bed, Su Ming opened the copied materials and began browsing. After several days of reading, he found that Spirit Hall and the Blue Lightning Tyrant Dragon Clan had collected fairly comprehensive records on Soul Beasts.
For example, the common Gale Wolves, Diamond Bears, and Wind Tigers in the Star Dou Great Forest.
Among the rarer Soul Beasts, the records included Man Faced Demon Spiders, Wind Splitting Falcons, and Soul Devouring Spiders.
The Soul Beasts listed further on were even rarer. Only major powers could obtain records of them. They included Golden Earth Dragons, Fear Demon Dragons, Cyclopes, and even Jade Birds.
The Sunset Forest also had records of rare Soul Beasts, such as Life Vines and Queen Medusa.
The records on the Extreme North Land even included the three super Soul Beasts with the bloodlines of the Ice God: Ice Scorpions, Titan Snow Demons, and Ice Field Bears.
The records of the three great Soul Beasts in the Extreme North Land came from Spirit Hall. After all, they had once had a god, thousands of years ago. No wonder they were a major power.
After a quick review, Su Ming settled on his target for his First Soul Ring.
Without a teacher to help him, and needing to hire others to hunt a rare Soul Beast, the easiest targets were the Gale Wolf, then the Wind Tiger. The best choice was probably the Wind Splitting Falcon.
With his target set, all that remained was to cultivate hard and try to absorb a Soul Ring as soon as possible.
Time flew by, and a year passed.
That year, to speed up his cultivation, Su Ming used up all his Soul Power each time before starting to cultivate again.
He converted all the Soul Power he expended into Creation Qi. With his Soul Power at Level 8 and nearing Level 9, he could produce one wisp each day by channeling it into the Creation Furnace.
He had also tried using Creation Qi to create a godhood.
He sent his idea to the Creation Furnace through his thoughts, and to his surprise, it worked. He needed only a hundred thousand units of Creation Power. (Ten wisps made a strand, ten strands made a bar, and ten bars made a unit. One unit equaled a thousand wisps.)
Looking at that enormous number, Su Ming knew it was beyond him for now. So he settled for using his Golden Finger, the Creation Furnace, to create an evolutionary cultivation method that would suit every Martial Soul.
He sent the idea to the Creation Furnace through his thoughts. The result was that it would take only one unit, or a thousand wisps. To collect that much, he remembered the Whale Rubber Huo Yuhao would consume ten thousand years later. Its effects had yet to be discovered at this point.
For now, only nobles used it as an aphrodisiac. When Su Ming asked at an apothecary, he learned that although it was fairly cheap, he had no money and couldn't afford it.
To earn money and obtain that Martial Soul Evolution cultivation method, Su Ming spent the next five months channeling his Soul Power into the Creation Furnace each day to make one wisp, then cultivating hard.
After five months of effort, he successfully reached Level 10. He got leave from the dean of studies and went to Spirit Hall to obtain a token, where he happened to run into Su Yuntao.
After getting his token, Su Ming headed alone to the Soul Hunting Forest.
Since he could fly, he encountered no danger along the way and soon reached the hunting town. He spent two days observing all the Soul Hunting teams in town.
He found a three-person team led by a Soul Elder. The team had a fairly good reputation.
Su Ming approached the captain and struck up a conversation. With his silver tongue, he introduced himself as a support-type Soul Master who could fly and heal. In exchange for helping him hunt his First Soul Ring, he promised to support the team for three months afterward, using his abilities.
The captain agreed. With the team's help, Su Ming hunted down a Wind Splitting Falcon that was over three hundred years old in less than half a month and made it his First Soul Ring.
After absorbing it, Su Ming tested his Soul Skill. As expected, it worked just as he'd imagined: he could control it freely. When he used it on himself, it boosted all his attributes by 10%. When he used it on someone else, it also boosted their attributes by 10%.
On a whim, Su Ming used Creation Qi from the Creation Furnace to strengthen his Soul Ring Skill. He spent ten strands to enhance the Soul Ring and increase its age.
Its age increased by five hundred years, bringing his First Soul Ring to over eight hundred years. The boost rose to 20%, and when used on others, he could freely control whether the enhancement was 10% or 20%.
The price had already been agreed upon when he obtained his Soul Ring: he would support the team for three months, and half his commission during that time would go to the others as compensation.
Su Ming also needed Soul Beast corpses to produce Creation Qi, so he agreed.
At first, the team operated normally. Then, one time, after they'd helped a client hunt a Soul Beast and the client had absorbed its Soul Ring, they encountered a three-thousand-year-old Soul Beast while heading back.
Quick to react, Su Ming summoned his Martial Soul and put clouds beneath the other four people, then flew off with them. The five of them sped away so fast that they left the Soul Beast behind.
The client had already absorbed their Soul Ring, so the five flew straight back to town. The client was very satisfied and helped spread the word.
People in town who were nearing the level to hunt a Soul Beast learned that the team had someone with a group-flight Soul Skill. Their orders increased, and since they were safe—if they couldn't win, they could always run—their commissions soon piled up.
During those three months, Su Ming used his share of the Gold Soul Coins to buy Whale Rubber, along with collecting Soul Beast corpses. By the time the three months were up, he had saved more than 1,200 wisps.
On the night before he left, Su Ming used up a thousand wisps of Creation Qi. The Creation Furnace produced a diagram and a string of information.
The diagram showed clouds filled with lightning and thunder, raging wind and rain, and dark, dense skies.
The message read: When a Martial Soul has a flaw, its wielder can visualize a superior Martial Soul in their mind to suppress the flaw, enabling gradual evolution and strengthening their bloodline.
This evolutionary method suited every Martial Soul, whether it was an object, a plant, food, a Soul Beast, or a Body Martial Soul.
Those with plant-type Martial Souls could imagine their ultimate evolutionary form.
The same applied to Beast Martial Souls.
From then on, all they had to do was cultivate as usual and imagine their Martial Soul becoming the form they desired.
After reading the information, Su Ming immediately realized that, in theory, this visualization method could be used to try to evolve any Martial Soul.
Su Ming immediately gave it a try. He cultivated and visualized all night, but the next day, he felt no change in his Martial Soul.
Thinking it over, he understood. He probably hadn't visualized it for long enough. It would take sustained visualization for any change to occur.
After packing up, he flew toward Nuoding City.
Since Su Ming had hunted a Soul Beast and obtained his First Soul Ring, he was noticeably faster than he'd been on the way there.
The trip from Nuoding City to the Soul Hunting Forest had originally taken half a day of flying with his Martial Soul. Now, by using the enhancement from his First Soul Skill, he made it in just two hours.
He returned to Nuoding City.
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