Inside the Spirit-Patrol Pavilion, cold air drifted slowly between the great hall's beams and pillars.
Huo Yuhao frowned slightly. His gaze settled on Bi Ji, and disbelief edged his voice as he pressed her. "So you sensed only a twisted force and gained no other insight?"
Bi Ji nodded gently, a trace of confusion in her emerald eyes.
When she had tried to transform just now, her soul had sensed something that felt entirely natural.
It was a shackle Soul Beasts were born with. Transformation seemed like an instinct long since carved into their blood, one that required no thought and would trigger when they reached the requisite age.
Yet that instinct was rigid and tyrannical, like a program set in advance by some creator. Soul Beasts could only passively bear the cost, with no room to control it themselves.
"This is trickier than I expected," Huo Yuhao murmured, his brow deeply furrowed.
The cultivation system he had tailored for Soul Beasts had four major stages: voluntary transformation, blood-and-vitality foundation building, absorbing spiritual aura, and returning to the origin to condense a core.
The Snow Empress had already proven that the blood-and-vitality cultivation method worked, but they were stuck at transformation.
The central problem lay before them: the Transformation Chapter required Soul Beasts to begin cultivating while their intelligence was sufficiently stable, gradually tempering their own essence until the time was ripe for them to transform of their own accord. That would spare them the painful cost of losing all their cultivation when they transformed at a hundred thousand years.
But according to the understanding ingrained in Soul Beasts, reaching a hundred thousand years of cultivation meant they could transform directly.
If they could complete that transformation in one step when the time came, why would they patiently toil over