Stealing Essence Blood

Song Wen returned to his cave dwelling in high spirits, having reaped quite a harvest.

Before he even had time to tally tonight's gains, Song Wen discovered that his purse had gone thin again. Fewer than thirty spirit stones remained.

On his way back, he had spent another two spirit stones to buy blank talisman paper for drawing low-grade first-rank talismans.

Song Wen's talent for drawing talismans was clearly inferior to his talent for spells. He used up every sheet of talisman paper he had obtained from Extreme Yin, yet failed to draw even a single Fireball Talisman.

Still, he had no intention of giving up. If he could successfully draw talismans, not only would it improve his combat ability, but he could also sell them for a handsome profit.

He had learned at the market that even low-grade talismans such as Fireball Talismans had a good market. Two of them could sell for one spirit stone, while he had spent two spirit stones to buy a full fifty sheets of blank talisman paper.

The spirit stones from selling the furnace cauldron had barely warmed in his pocket before they were nearly spent clean. He had only ten Corpse Blood Pills left, and at his current cultivation speed, they would last at most ten days. If he wanted to raise his cultivation as quickly as possible, he had to keep buying Corpse Blood Pills or other pills that aided cultivation.

"Sigh! I need to find a way to get some spirit stones."

Song Wen muttered inwardly as he took out today's spoils.

The first thing he took out was the Soul-Banishing Technique, which he was still not certain he could cultivate.

At the time, he had read the first portion of the technique's first layer and felt that it might help him refine the souls he had devoured.

Ever since he had devoured someone else's soul, Song Wen had only been able to digest and absorb it slowly. From the time he killed the little beggar until now, he had noticed a certain increase in his spiritual power. His spiritual power was stronger than that of others at the same realm.

Yet the increase was extremely limited. Most of the souls he had devoured had not been fully digested; instead, they slowly dissipated and went to waste.

Moreover, the Corpse Dissection Cave contained a great number of lingering soul fragments. After absorbing a large amount of them, he could not refine them in time, leaving his sea of consciousness saturated for long periods. This also greatly hindered him from devouring more soul fragments.

If this technique could help him solve that problem, it would undoubtedly greatly strengthen Song Wen's soul and allow him to make the fullest use of his golden finger.

He peeled away the sheet of paper concealing the technique. Just as he had expected, the first layer of the Soul-Banishing Technique contained only a little over three hundred words.

The paper recording the technique was ancient and weighty. Its authenticity should have been guaranteed; it did not seem like something someone had made up at random. It was highly likely that it was a technique left behind after the Ten Thousand Souls Sect's destruction.

Song Wen quickly finished reading the three hundred-odd words.

Then he began attempting cultivation, using the Soul-Banishing Technique to refine the soul fragments he had devoured and stored within his sea of consciousness.

To Song Wen's delight, cultivating the Soul-Banishing Technique was extraordinarily easy for him. It was as natural as eating and drinking—he learned it the moment he tried.

The soul fragments filling his sea of consciousness were rapidly consumed, while the strength of his soul and his spiritual power rose swiftly.

Song Wen guessed that the missing outline of the Soul-Banishing Technique must have contained the method for devouring other people's souls and turning them into soul fragments to be stored in the sea of consciousness.

Song Wen's guess was somewhat reasonable, but it was far from the true contents of the Soul-Banishing Technique.

He had vastly underestimated the effectiveness of his body's ability to devour others' souls. According to the technique's actual records, to break down and devour another person's soul, one needed to expend vast resources to construct an array, first turn the soul into soul fragments, then slowly draw them into the sea of consciousness step by step. Even devouring soul fragments was an extremely slow process.

After all, the sea of consciousness was the most mysterious part of the human body. Even in the cultivation world, no one could peer into all the mysteries of the soul and the sea of consciousness.

The human sea of consciousness was mysterious, powerful, and fragile. The slightest carelessness could result in an incomplete soul—or even one's soul scattering into nothingness.

Therefore, no amount of caution was excessive when cultivating techniques like the Soul-Banishing Technique, which directly involved the sea of consciousness.

Within the former Ten Thousand Souls Sect, only a small number of people born with stable seas of consciousness and powerful souls had any hope of cultivating this Soul-Banishing Technique successfully. Every year, quite a few self-proclaimed geniuses forcibly cultivated it, only to damage their seas of consciousness and leave their souls incomplete, ending up dull-witted and foolish.

After cultivating the Soul-Banishing Technique for an entire night, Song Wen had consumed more than half of the large quantity of soul fragments stored in his sea of consciousness. His spiritual power had improved by leaps and bounds.

Although Song Wen had cultivated all night without sleeping, he still felt refreshed and clear-headed, without the slightest trace of fatigue.

After eating breakfast at the dining hall, Song Wen arrived early at the Corpse Dissection Cave.

As he dissected corpses, he began consciously absorbing the lingering soul fragments within the Corpse Dissection Cave and on the corpses.

At the same time, he increased the amount of essence blood he devoured from the corpses.

Throughout that day, Song Wen remained tense, terrified that someone would discover he was stealing the corpses' essence blood.

Fortunately, once a dissection was completed, he only needed to hand over the skin and flesh, bones, and internal organs. The blood from the corpses flowed directly through the channels of the dissection table into the great blood pool within the Corpse Dissection Cave.

No one discovered Song Wen's secret act of devouring some of the essence blood.

When Song Wen finished the day's work and prepared to find Yuan Cheng to hand over the corpse parts, he suddenly realized that he had devoured too much essence blood today. Blood qi churned throughout his body, and he could no longer quite control the overflowing blood qi within him.

To prevent Yuan Cheng from noticing anything amiss, Song Wen had no choice but to circulate the Corpse King Blood Refinement Art with all his strength, trying to calm his surging blood qi.

A quarter-hour later, the blood qi within Song Wen had mostly settled. As usual, he was the last to walk toward the cave where Yuan Cheng was.

Yuan Cheng accepted the four storage bags Song Wen handed over and asked instinctively,

"What happened just now? I saw you standing beside the dissection table for a full quarter-hour."

Song Wen had not expected Yuan Cheng to notice him calming his blood qi beside the dissection table. He could not help feeling a little nervous, but his face showed no panic. Instead, he said with a somewhat gloomy expression,

"I don't know what happened either. Just now, I only felt my blood qi churning within me and my spiritual power falling into disorder and running wild. It took great effort for me to calm it down."

The symptoms Song Wen described were the early signs of discomfort many corpse dissectors experienced after being contaminated by the foul qi in the Corpse Dissection Cave.

Once such symptoms appeared, it meant that person was not far from cultivation deviation.

Yuan Cheng gave Song Wen a pitying glance without saying anything more, then waved a hand to indicate that Song Wen could leave.

Song Wen carefully made his way back to his cave dwelling, all the while struggling to control the overflowing blood qi within him.

After returning to his cave dwelling, Song Wen immediately sat cross-legged and reversed his blood qi, forcing the excess blood qi out of his body.

Gradually, a blood-red mist enveloped Song Wen's body. Before long, the entire cave dwelling was filled with extremely dense blood qi.

A scarlet drop of essence blood the size of a soybean began to gather at Song Wen's brow, then fell into a jade vial he had prepared beforehand.

One drop, two drops, three drops...

Drop after drop of pure essence blood fell into the jade vial.

More than a hundred drops of essence blood fell into it. Only after the jade vial was filled nearly halfway did Song Wen stop forcing out essence blood.

If an outsider had witnessed this scene, they would have been too stunned to believe it. The essence blood Song Wen had forced out was nearly equivalent to all the essence blood possessed by a late-stage Qi Refining cultivator.

With Song Wen's strength at the second level of Qi Refining, even ten lives would not have been enough for him to condense so much essence blood.

Yet even after forcing out more than a hundred drops of essence blood, Song Wen's blood qi remained abundant. He showed none of the weakness that came from excessive depletion of blood qi.