Extreme Ice Miasma Bugs were soul beasts that lived in cold miasma, but they differed from ordinary soul beasts. They were a species that reproduced rapidly and asexually, yet their population was never large. The reason was that Extreme Ice Miasma Bugs could devour one another.
An Extreme Ice Miasma Bug King with forty-nine thousand years of cultivation lived in the Extreme Ice Valley. This bug king had clearly reached the very limit of that age and was about to break through to fifty thousand years. Although fifty thousand years was not comparable to a hundred thousand, it was still a tremendous threshold for soul beasts. The bug king had evidently devoured all the other Extreme Ice Miasma Bugs in an attempt to complete its breakthrough.
Xue Linglong's expression was grim. The bug king having devoured every other Extreme Ice Miasma Bug meant that it was the only one left in the Extreme Ice Valley. But its age was already approaching fifty thousand years. For Jiang Hai, who was only acquiring his fourth soul ring, absorbing the soul ring of an Extreme Ice Miasma Bug that old was virtually impossible.
Soul beasts over fifty thousand years old normally represented the upper limit of the soul rings humans could absorb. There was no qualitative transformation between fifty thousand and ninety thousand years, and many Titled Douluos only absorbed seventy- or eighty-thousand-year soul rings as their ninth soul rings. Even geniuses like Ma Xiaotao and Zhang Lexuan would only attempt to absorb a fifty-thousand-year soul ring when acquiring their seventh. By then, their bodies had been tempered by at least six soul rings, including at least two Ten Thousand Year Soul Rings, and were already immensely powerful. Absorbing a fifty-thousand-year soul beast's soul ring as a fourth soul ring was impossible even