"Because before long, the strength of the Heaven Dou Empire's Body Sect will increase dramatically. You need to preserve more of your strength."
"And Your Highness should already have received the reports: strange changes have occurred throughout heaven and earth lately, and low-ranking Soul Masters have begun breaking through their cultivation bottlenecks without needing Soul Rings."
"Your enemy now is the Body Sect, and joining the Soul Hunting Operation called for by Shrek at this point offers little benefit to an empire that does not excel at Soul Master cultivation."
In the dim interrogation chamber, Huo Yuhao stood beside Xu Tianran, wearing a mask under the identity of "Spirit Ice," and spoke these words to him.
As he listened to Huo Yuhao, Xu Tianran watched Wang Shaojie, a trace of amusement appearing on his face.
"You. What position do you hold in the Royal Household Disciplinary Squad, and how many people do you know?"
After glancing at Ye Guyi, who had fainted from physical weakness, Xu Tianran looked at Wang Shaojie, who was kowtowing as frantically as someone pounding garlic. Contempt filled his face.
Lost in terror, Wang Shaojie seemed not to have heard the Crown Prince's question at all. He simply kept begging for his life.
As the saying went, when the tree fell, the monkeys scattered. Hearing Xu Tianran's tone, the people in the interrogation chamber knew Wang Shaojie had provoked someone he should never have crossed. They began throwing stones at a man already down a well, reporting all the ways Wang Shaojie had used this chamber as his private torture room for those who opposed him, and soon presented evidence of every kind.
"To think a member of the imperial clan like you had so many inventive amusements." Xu Tianran's smile never reached his eyes.
"Very well. Since you enjoy torturing people to death on this Dragon-Peeling Pillar, I shall grant you that very death!"
Although Xu Tianran remained skeptical of Huo Yuhao's prediction that the Body Sect's strength would soon increase dramatically, he did believe Huo Yuhao's claim that Ye Guyi could become a useful card in his hand against the Holy Spirit Cult in the future.
As for Ye Guyi being a remnant of Spirit Hall? Having sinful blood? Why must our Sun Moon Empire swallow your Douluo Continent's account of history whole?
After promising that day to send Huo Yuhao and Snow Girl to Shrek Academy as Exchange Students, Xu Tianran had realized as soon as he returned to the palace that he had fallen into a trap at the closing ceremony.
An ambitious man like him might admire Shrek's glorious accomplishments, but he could distinguish between an ideal he yearned for and his practical interests.
"By the way, Lord Spirit Ice, you said the Heaven Dou Empire's strength would increase dramatically. Do you think we should continue fighting the Heaven Dou Empire now?" Something seemed to have occurred to Xu Tianran, and he put this question to Huo Yuhao.
"That is entirely for Your Highness to decide! I cannot presume to make that decision!" Huo Yuhao could hear the probing intent behind Xu Tianran asking him whether something should be done.
In his previous life, whether in the Douluo God Realm or the Great God Realm, Huo Yuhao had faced far too many such tests from the Tang Family. Reading expressions and weighing words had become instinctive.
Only after Xu Tianran left under the protection of the Garrison Troops did Huo Yuhao scoop Ye Guyi's naked body up from the floor in a bridal carry.
Huo Yuhao draped a camouflage soul-tool coat over her, then carried her back to the Sun Moon Royal Soul Engineer Academy.
Looking at her haggard face, Huo Yuhao murmured, "I'm sorry, Sister Guyi! It's my fault you've suffered like this!"
When he noticed that many of the hardships he had endured in the mortal world before attaining enlightenment and ascending in his previous life were now happening to Ye Guyi, Huo Yuhao immediately understood why. In this life, he had not gone to Shrek Academy to meet Wang Dong. The first girl he had met was Ye Guyi, completely ruining the Tang Family's arrangements for class and dormitory assignments at Shrek Academy and bringing their malice down upon her.
Huo Yuhao did not know when the Tang Family would let go of their anger over this, but pinning his hopes on them someday softening toward Sister Guyi was not in his nature in this life.
"Fortunately, the second ability of the Eye of Destiny is almost complete."
After reaching the Sun Moon Royal Soul Engineer Academy's infirmary and laying Ye Guyi down, Huo Yuhao scratched his head and considered the current situation.
"Yuhao, I can now recultivate my first through fourth Soul Rings!" Snow Girl had been waiting here. Seeing Huo Yuhao arrive with the unconscious Ye Guyi, she came forward and spoke to him.
"Changes at the level of laws often happen in the subtlest details!" Huo Yuhao nodded and asked her, "When you cultivate now, does it feel like drawing in and breathing out the heaven-and-earth Origin Power, just as you did when you were a Soul Beast? Has only the efficiency that the plane's laws once forcibly slowed returned to normal?"
Snow Girl nodded at Huo Yuhao's question. In the past, as a Soul Beast born from a piece of ten-thousand-year-old glacial ice that had gained sentience, she had always felt the plane's power creating a barrier during her cultivation, cutting her off from the Heavenly Dao.
Now, that barrier of planar power no longer existed.
As a result, her cultivation speed was a hundred times what it had been as a Soul Beast.
This was true cultivation: meticulously guiding every thread of Heaven and Earth Essence into the body, carefully transforming the body while refining that energy into Origin Power, then projecting that power outward to transform the environment in an area centered on oneself.
This kind of breathing practice could not remotely be compared to the meditation of human Soul Masters, which amounted to little more than sitting in a daze.
"Xue'er, don't rush to condense new Soul Rings yet! Use your blood essence to recultivate the first few Soul Rings!" Huo Yuhao reminded her.
"The Soul Power cultivated by Soul Masters is essentially nothing more than using a human body to cultivate the bloodline power Soul Beasts inherited from the Silver Dragon King."
"But how could the efficiency of us humans in cultivating Bloodline Power compare to Dragonkind, with their powerful physiques?"
"Besides, under the set of planar laws that requires Soul Rings obtained through Soul Hunting to break through the shackles between ranks, every transformation a Soul Master undergoes actually carries the curse of the Soul Beast they killed. By the time a Soul Master reaches Nine Rings, barring exceptional circumstances, no matter how outstanding their gifts may be, the many curses laid upon them have effectively destroyed their innate potential."
In his previous life, whether in the Douluo God Realm or the Great God Realm, when it came to the effort devoted to studying the path of Soul Masters, if Huo Yuhao claimed second place, no one could claim first.
In Huo Yuhao's previous life, during the time Tang San traveled to the Falan Star plane to search for his wife, the Supreme Gods of the Great God Realm had gone to Shrek Academy on Douluo Star to pass the time as teachers. What was the first thing they did before teaching their students? Abolish their Martial Souls.
And Huo Yuhao? He was no exception, of course. The first step in cultivating the Way of Emotion was likewise to abolish the Martial Soul.
For normal human cultivation was either the path to divinity: drawing energy into the body, refining energy into spirit, refining spirit to return to the void, refining the void, breaking through the void, and uniting with truth to become a master of some broad category of Heaven and Earth Essence.
Or it was body cultivation, tempering one's physique into bronze skin and iron bones, forging a flawless golden body, and ultimately becoming impervious to all arts.
Both required cultivators to develop a profound, intuitive grasp of the laws governing either the world outside them or the body within.
Yet in the Soul Master system, a Soul Master only began cultivating blood essence at level one hundred, when they used their own blood essence to condense their first Divine Soul Ring.
In other words, a Soul Master's true cultivation only began at level one hundred, when they finally started doing what normal human cultivation systems did from the very first step.
Unless they were a Son of the Plane or someone who had encountered extraordinary fortune, no matter how remarkable a Soul Master's gifts were, they were usually over seventy by the time they reached level one hundred.
Humans were not a long-lived species. For humans who had never cultivated, those who lived to seventy had been rare since ancient times.
And humans were most malleable, with the greatest potential, before the age of sixteen.
How much potential could someone over seventy have left?
"Xue'er, spend these coming days refining all your current Soul Rings into Blood Essence Soul Rings. Leave the curses and vengeful spirits within them to me. I'll deliver them to peace," Huo Yuhao said.
Before you continue