A little more than an incense stick's worth of time later.
Inside the cave abode's cultivation chamber.
Wang Yu sat cross-legged on the Crimson Jade, his eyes tightly shut and his hands forming a seal. He remained motionless, seemingly deep in meditation, but his face was faintly pale, his lips utterly bloodless. Beads of sweat the size of beans kept rolling down his forehead. He was undergoing some tremendous expenditure of energy.
There were two reasons he had not immediately refined a guardian soul pattern upon obtaining the Soul-Subduing Art: he had possessed no second-tier demon soul at the time, and the refinement process was extremely dangerous.
If his divine sense was not powerful enough, or his control over it was insufficient, a single careless mistake could allow the demon soul to turn on him and reduce him to a walking corpse.
Moreover, the more guardian soul patterns he condensed, the more dangerous refining subsequent patterns became.
Had the Sect Grand Competition not been imminent, and had being a Foundation Establishment cultivator without any defense against spirit soul attacks not put him at such a disadvantage in combat, he would not have rushed to condense his first soul pattern. Instead, he would have waited until he reached the fourth layer of the Star Thought Technique and strengthened his mental power before attempting it.
At that moment, illusory gray-white spirit inscription symbols kept drifting out of the spell pattern diagram within his divine sense sea, sometimes transforming into translucent chains of spirit inscriptions, sometimes into clusters of translucent flames.
At the center of these illusory spirit inscriptions, the illusory Chongyun Rabbit Spirit Soul wrapped in white light had, under their influence, already transformed completely below the neck into a similarly translucent gray-white spirit inscription symbol.
But this gray-white spirit inscription symbol