Soul

But doing so would mean Huang Si revealing himself to the public.

Huang Si ignored things that were meaningless.

Huang Si had no interest in becoming a god to these ape-men like an artificial intelligence, healing their wounded and saving their dying. However, Shu Zi, as the new generation leader of the Ape-man Tribe, had made great contributions, and it was only right that he should be compensated for losing his lover like this.

These thoughts flickered through Huang Si's mind for just a moment before he immediately made a decision.

His consciousness instantly pierced through Xiao Hua's body, extracted a few cells, and then protected them with his mental energy, isolating them from the outside world.

Huang Si's idea was to first extract a small number of cells for preservation, and later use cloning technology to recreate a woman exactly like Xiao Hua to compensate Shu Zi.

Whether Shu Zi would accept the replica was not within Huang Si's consideration.

Next, seeing that Xiao Hua had not completely died, Huang Si began to concentrate his attention, condensing his Mental Force Field to scan Xiao Hua's entire body layer by layer like a CT scan.

He wanted to record this person incidentally. After all, she was the victim of the very first murder case in this world; it would be too much of a pity for her to die like this.

Although there was a precedent for recording plants, an ape-man was not a tiny Dreamy Flower.

A complete ape-man was composed of tens of trillions of cells. If Huang Si were to interpret and record every cell in Xiao Hua's entire body in a book before she completely died, Huang Si felt he might not be able to do it.

Fortunately, Xiao Hua's injury was not to her head.

Huang Si used his mental energy to block Xiao Hua's bleeding arteries, delaying her death.

Only when Xiao Hua's life had completely vanished did Huang Si barely manage to finish recording the data of the entire person.

The pages of the Creation Book turned by themselves, and Xiao Hua's data was recorded by Huang Si, occupying nearly a full page.

Huang Si: "??? Why does my data take up 102 pages?"

However, before Huang Si could argue with the Creation Book, he felt a strange sensation.

He didn't know if it was because his Mental Force Field had been sweeping over Xiao Hua just now, causing some change, but at the moment of Xiao Hua's death, Huang Si detected an extremely faint fluctuation.

It was like a magnetic field, but fundamentally different from a magnetic field.

A biological magnetic field?

Huang Si immediately tried to capture the magnetic field fluctuation with his consciousness. He felt something that was neither energy nor matter. It seemed to want to fly away, but Huang Si trapped it with his Mental Force Field.

Now, Huang Si's Mental Force Field had been tempered by the storm in the Dark Space. Once condensed, its density was such that nothing he knew of, material or energy, could break through it.

This strange, non-material, non-energetic thing was no exception.

Huang Si circled around with that thing for a while and felt something was wrong. This thing seemed to have self-awareness?

A life form? No, that couldn't be right. What kind of life form was like this?

Could it be?

Combining the timing and location of this thing's appearance, Huang Si suddenly had a bold guess.

"Could this thing be the ape-man's soul?"

The soul was truly a mysterious realm. Huang Si had been in this world for so many years, and apart from understanding his own soul, he had never seen anyone else's soul.

Initially, Huang Si thought it was because other species lacked higher intelligence. Now it seemed that was not the case; it was just that the soul's fluctuations were too weak for him to notice normally.

Since it was a soul, could he try to communicate with it?

Huang Si tried to call out to the soul softly with his consciousness.

After a very, very long time, there was a slight reaction from the other side.

A fainter thought wave emanated from the soul: "Who is calling me?"

Huang Si replied with his mind: "I just saved you. Do you know who you are?"

After a long while, the soul weakly replied: "I don't know..."

Huang Si frowned. Souls were indeed not bound to memories. This soul was like a blank sheet of paper; apart from basic self-awareness and the ability to think, it knew almost nothing.

What use was such a memoryless soul?

It couldn't even be used for a soul-revival ceremony for Shu Zi to reunite with his wife.

But at this moment, the soul slowly spoke again: "But, I want to go back, I don't want to leave, go back..."

After that, the words "go back" echoed in Huang Si's consciousness.♙♕  😲✌

Huang Si was speechless. This soul had forgotten who it was, yet it remembered wanting to go back. How persistent it must be.

"Since you want to go back so badly, look at the corpse below. This is your own body. Now try to return to your body and see?"

Huang Si wasn't speaking sarcastically; he was just curious, wanting to see if a soul that had left its body could suddenly come back to life, like in Earth's folklore.

But this suggestion made the soul seem confused. It sent a thought: "I don't know where... I can't see..."

Huang Si was helpless. Fine, so the soul had no eyes. Did it have perception?

Huang Si's consciousness roamed around the soul, but apart from its original body, the soul had no trace of anything similar to Huang Si's mental perception field. It was extremely weak overall.

If Huang Si hadn't been protecting it with his mental energy, it probably would have dispersed with a gust of wind.

After a while, the soul seemed to realize something and asked: "You... who... are you?"

Huang Si replied, "Your savior."

Although he hadn't saved the body, Huang Si felt that saving the soul counted as a rescue. He didn't yet know how to handle this soul.

The soul's fluctuations were so weak that if Huang Si hadn't immediately protected it with his Mental Force Field, it might have been scattered by the slightest breeze.

The soul seemed bewildered by this answer. "Am I dead? No, I can't be dead yet. I have to go back..."

Its thoughts surged toward Huang Si incessantly. "Please, save me, let me go back, please, please..."

Harassed by its frantic pleas, Huang Si quickly interrupted, "Stop, stop, stop!..."

The soul did not stop and continued to wail.

Huang Si couldn't hold back anymore. "Damn it, pipe down!"

This time, his will carried a hint of mental suppression. The soul shuddered, nearly dissipating from the impact of Huang Si's emotional fluctuation.

Instinctively terrified, it fell silent at once.

Having finally silenced the soul, Huang Si calmed down to think of a solution.

He had never seen a soul before; this was his first time witnessing someone else's.

Externally, the soul appeared transparent. It felt weightless and lacked physical volume or collision properties; only his Mental Force Field could perceive its fluctuations.

Suddenly, a bold idea struck Huang Si: could a soul be recorded?

Acting on impulse was Huang Si's style. He gently enveloped the soul with his consciousness, taking care not to harm it, while simultaneously switching to a microscopic perspective.

In the microscopic world.

Huang Si's consciousness approached the soul. Sure enough, within the microscopic realm, the soul was no longer intangible.

The originally transparent soul remained transparent when magnified. Huang Si saw tiny Transparent Crosses floating within it. These crosses were far smaller than molecules; he couldn't tell if they had internal structures, as they seemed to be a single, unified whole.

The crosses were transparent; if Huang Si weren't observing with his "consciousness" rather than optical light perception, they would have been nearly invisible.

Was this the microscopic composition of a soul? Huang Si was skeptical. Why had he never seen his own soul look like this?

Oh right, he had never seen the microscopic structure of his own soul because he could perceive his soul's state directly through consciousness, just as one knows where their body hurts or feels uncomfortable—there was no need to look, nor was it possible.

However, was it truly impossible?

Huang Si's train of thought wandered again. Driven by curiosity, he inverted his microscopic perspective, effectively having the soul turn around to look at itself.

Then, Huang Si witnessed a truly terrifying scene.

Before him appeared an endless, dense mass of Golden Spheres. The sheer number of them was dizzying.

Huang Si didn't realize the danger yet. He tried to use his consciousness to magnify the image to examine one of the spheres. As the sphere suddenly enlarged, what presented itself before him was a microscopic structure that subdivided infinitely, like a fractal mathematical pattern.

Magnifying it again and again, the sphere seemed capable of infinite expansion.

Moments later, Huang Si's physical body collapsed onto the floor with a thud.

As Huang Si fell, the Creation Book sitting in the living room suddenly flipped open without a breeze.

The pain of his head hitting the floor finally brought Huang Si back to his senses. As soon as he regained consciousness, he received new memories transmitted by the Creation Book.

By this time, Mo Xia was already frightened and rushed over to check on Huang Si.

Huang Si sat up and waved his hand to indicate he was fine. Once his consciousness was restored, the first thing he did was turn his Mental Force Field into a data stream, rushing through the passage back to the Green World to check if the soul was still there.

To be safe, Huang Si immediately descended with his Mental Force Field to the previous location, covering a one-kilometer radius to search for the soul.

Fortunately, the soul had not dissipated or drifted away; it was still hovering in place, its consciousness constantly muttering, "Save me, let me go back, save me..."

Finding the soul put Huang Si at ease. This was a precious experimental specimen; if it were lost, no one knew if he would find another one if someone else died.

Now, it was time to test the content of the new memories.

Huang Si silently reviewed the new memories the Creation Book had just stuffed into his consciousness. Assimilation, was it? Let's give it a try.

At this moment, the soul was still pleading incessantly.

Huang Si said to the soul, "I promise you, so come here."

The soul received Huang Si's response and produced a flicker of emotional fluctuation, as if in joy.

Huang Si pulled the soul closer with his consciousness and switched to a microscopic perspective.

"Golden Sphere, where is that Golden Sphere from before? Let's have another."

Under Huang Si's subconscious guidance, a brilliant golden sphere appeared before his sight. The sphere was actually extremely tiny, yet it possessed an almost infinite microscopic composition that was impossible to analyze. The consequence of forcing an analysis was the total depletion of his mental energy, leading to immediate fainting.

Just like Huang Si had experienced moments ago.

Fortunately, the Creation Book had already stuffed the knowledge and methods related to this object into Huang Si's mind.

Having learned his lesson once, Huang Si tried his best not to look directly at the sphere. Instead, he used his consciousness to control it, gently touching the Transparent Cross within the soul opposite him.

An invisible ring of light erupted from the point of contact between the Golden Sphere and the soul. As if being dyed, countless tiny crosses began to change color from the point of contact with the Golden Sphere, instantly turning the same hue.

The soul opposite him transformed completely into gold.

In that same instant, Huang Si gained total mastery over everything regarding that soul.

From consciousness to subconsciousness, to traits and obsessions, from the inside out, without a single secret, that soul lay completely exposed before Huang Si.

All of its subjective will, objective concepts, knowledge, emotions, and beliefs were thoroughly dominated.