Fang Yuan pulled his hand from the White-Eyed Demon Tiger King's skull, shook it clean, and turned his gaze toward his spoils.
"Oh? An unexpected gain?"
Fang Yuan raised an eyebrow. In his perception, aside from the Soul Ring that had condensed within the White-Eyed Demon Tiger King's corpse, another surge of energy remained in its right forelimb.
Fang Yuan naturally knew what this meant—it was a sign that the Soul Beast had produced a Soul Bone.
"It seems that the terror before its death, intertwined with the fury of being hunted down, caused the White-Eyed Demon Tiger King's emotions to fluctuate violently. That was why it produced a Soul Bone."
Whether a Soul Bone formed within a Soul Beast after its death was a matter of chance. Generally speaking, however, the greater a Soul Beast's emotional turmoil before death, the higher the likelihood of producing one.
With a beckoning gesture, Fang Yuan summoned the Sovereign Immortal Fetus Martial Soul and effortlessly drew the Soul Ring from the tiger corpse.
Then, without any visible movement from him, the energy within the Soul Ring surged violently, transforming into a stream of black air that entered Fang Yuan's body. In an instant, it became his seventh Soul Ring.
Just like the pill Fang Yuan had previously consumed, refined from the Singular Velvet Sky Chrysanthemum and the Nine-Grade Purple Ganoderma, the Soul Ring produced by the White-Eyed Demon Tiger King was instantly refined and absorbed by the Supreme Immortal Embryo Physique.
Afterward, Fang Yuan pressed his fingers together like a blade and thrust them directly into the White-Eyed Demon Tiger King's corpse, extracting the Soul Bone from within.
It was a white right arm bone, completely unstained by blood. Under the light, it looked like an exquisite work of art carved from flawless white jade.
Fang Yuan looked at the right arm Soul Bone, his feelings somewhat complicated.
Up to this point, he had not absorbed a single Soul Bone.
It was not because he could not obtain one. With the strength he had displayed when beating Dugu Bo senseless, Soul Bones might have been rare, but getting a full set would not have been difficult for Fang Yuan.
It was simply because he was a little greedy.
After being reborn into this world and awakening the Sovereign Immortal Fetus Martial Soul, every Soul Skill Fang Yuan had acquired had been a power possessed by the Gu worms from his previous life.
Those Gu worms possessed all manner of abilities and were exceptionally practical. However, constrained by this world's Martial Soul cultivation system, Fang Yuan could attach at most nine Soul Rings and six Soul Bones to himself.
Naturally, the more Gu worm powers he possessed, the better. Therefore, until he obtained Hundred Thousand Year Soul Bones, he had never attached even a single Soul Bone to himself.
Yet Fang Yuan also knew that gathering six Hundred Thousand Year Soul Bones for his entire body would be exceedingly difficult. Hundred-Thousand-Year Soul Beasts were scarce, and even if he raised the quality of a Soul Bone to the hundred-thousand-year level through divine trials, it would not grant an additional skill.
The White-Eyed Demon Tiger King he had just hunted was a tiger-type Soul Beast with cultivation nearing sixty or seventy thousand years.
It could be said that the Soul Bone it had dropped was practically one of the finest Soul Bones below the hundred-thousand-year level.
Should he abandon his pursuit of a full set of Hundred Thousand Year Soul Bones and absorb it directly, or should he keep striving to gather them all?
Fang Yuan pondered for a long while before ultimately placing the Soul Bone into his storage Soul Tool.
His combat system had already begun to take shape, and he was not in urgent need of Soul Bones to increase his combat power. His need for them was not yet pressing.
Everyone needed dreams. Otherwise, what was the difference between them and salted fish?
He should keep trying to gather them.
After putting away the Soul Bone, Fang Yuan finally began to sense the effects brought by his seventh Soul Ring.
In a Soul Master's cultivation journey, level seventy was the most important dividing line. Once one became a level-seventy Soul Saint, one could possess a Martial Soul Avatar, greatly increasing one's combat power. Every Soul Master's seventh Soul Skill was their Martial Soul Avatar.
Of course, the other important dividing points were levels ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, eighty, and ninety.
A pitch-black Soul Ring lit up beneath Fang Yuan's feet—the seventh Soul Ring he had just absorbed. He activated his Martial Soul Avatar and quietly sensed the changes it brought him.
Before long, Fang Yuan's eyes snapped open, filled with disbelief!
Fang Yuan already possessed every enhancement that a Martial Soul Avatar granted to a Soul Master. Yet beyond those ordinary boosts, his Martial Soul seemed to have undergone some other unimaginable changes.
The Supreme Immortal Embryo Physique had been a rank-nine human-path Immortal Gu painstakingly refined by the strongest expert at the pinnacle of the continent in Fang Yuan's previous life. That person had spent a hundred thousand years plotting and accumulating resources, battling wits against heaven's will, and enduring untold hardships to create it.
Although this Immortal Gu had not been refined by Fang Yuan himself, but rather gifted to him amicably by that fellow Daoist, who had later applied for a refund before reaching one hundred and eighty thousand years old, Fang Yuan had already become familiar with its effects through using it.
One characteristic of the Sovereign Immortal Fetus Gu was that the dao marks upon it did not conflict with one another. This characteristic had already shown its effects when Fang Yuan absorbed pills and Soul Rings earlier.
However, after gaining the Martial Soul Avatar and further strengthening his Martial Soul, Fang Yuan was astonished to discover that his Sovereign Immortal Embryo Martial Soul was no longer merely non-conflicting toward energy—it did not conflict with other Martial Souls, either.
In other words, he could now use Martial Soul Fusion Skills with other people.
There were no restrictions whatsoever on who those "other people" could be.
Whether they were level-one trash or a level-ninety-nine Limit Douluo; whether they possessed worthless Martial Souls like hoes and mosquitoes, or supreme Martial Souls like the Six-Winged Angel and Golden Sacred Dragon; whether they were pure-blooded human Soul Masters or nonhuman Soul Masters transformed from Soul Beasts.
He welcomed them all without discrimination, practically becoming the social butterfly of the Soul Master world.
This left Fang Yuan with mixed feelings. He somehow felt as though he would become unclean in the future.
Aside from this effect that turned Fang Yuan into the succubus of the Soul Master world, another change in the Supreme Immortal Embryo was what truly shook him to the core.
Fang Yuan slowly closed his eyes again and immersed his mind within the Supreme Immortal Embryo.
Then, what appeared before him was another incomparably vast expanse of space.
The land before him covered a full fifty million mu.
By the standards of Fang Yuan's previous world, this landmass was roughly the size of a province situated on an island.
This land was divided neatly into five regions.
The central region possessed fertile soil and varied terrain.
The southern region consisted mostly of hills and mountains, humid and shrouded in mist.
The northern region was primarily grassland, swept by fierce winds and blanketed in ice and snow.
The western region consisted chiefly of Gobi and desert terrain, with a desolate climate.
The eastern region was a vast ocean, dotted with islands like stars scattered across the sky.
The five regions were clearly distinct, together forming this expansive space.
Yet this space consisted of more than merely the land of five regions. Above the land was also a sky.
The sky was divided into nine layers. Though entirely empty, they displayed nine different colors.
Aside from the white sky and black sky, there were also skies of red, orange, yellow, green, cyan, blue, and purple.
Each layer of sky was equal in area to the land, and the five regions and nine heavens combined amounted to a space of five hundred million mu.
Fang Yuan could not have been more familiar with this arrangement of five regions and nine heavens.
It was precisely the Supreme Immortal Aperture within the Supreme Immortal Embryo from his previous life, lodged at a single point within his body—an internalized space of his own!
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