Li Chen looked at the object in his hand with mild interest.
It had a brownish, ironlike form, resembling rusty iron ore, though its color was somewhat grayer. It felt light in his hand, like a stone, weighing considerably less than an ordinary lump of iron.
When Li Chen had previously examined it with his Primordial Spirit-realm divine sense, he had indeed detected no spiritual essence or fluctuations within it. That was not his main concern, however. What he truly wanted to understand was what changes would occur once spiritual essence was infused into it again.
Probing it with his divine sense, Li Chen immediately discovered that a trace of spiritual essence had been infused back into the iron, which then quickly returned to the low-spirit level achieved through the earlier special treatment.
Yet this low-spirit level was entirely different from its previous low-spirit level.
It was like dropping a piece of raw meat into boiling water to cook it, then cooling it down again.
If the meat's original state was labeled "raw," and its state after cooking was labeled "cooked," then its nature was not determined by its current temperature after cooling.
Under normal natural conditions, meat would only go from raw to cooked. It would not become cooked when heated, then turn raw again when cooled.
Without the intervention of supernatural power, not only would returning it to its former low temperature fail to restore it, even freezing it with ice would not return it to its original state.
The internal composition of this object had already undergone tremendous changes in that brief instant. Even if it combined with spiritual essence again now, its fundamental nature was entirely different from before.
Sure enough, as soon as he emerged from the formation's focal point, Li Chen sensed spiritual essence