Li Shunchen stood silently in the pitch-black, foul-smelling sewage, feeling the shell that had been forcibly extracted from the previous simulation cycle and given physical form as his domain, "Ālaya Consciousness," unfolded.
This was no longer a human body of flesh and blood, but the body of a special grade cursed spirit built from pure negative emotion and despair.
Unlike the battered body from the previous simulation, however, this shell bore none of the damage left by Mahito crushing his soul with Idle Transfiguration, nor the tearing sensation of impending collapse caused by forcibly firing those two shots of "Hollow Purple."
It was in an unprecedented state of perfect, peak condition that even Li Shunchen himself found alarming.
But this terrifying power, so abundant that it nearly spilled out of his body, was not what truly concerned Li Shunchen at that moment.
What concerned him was that the murderous urgings that had screamed wildly in his mind every moment he had occupied this shell before, almost swallowing his reason entirely, had now vanished without a trace in this deathly silent sewer.
This proved an exceedingly cruel fact: even though his body and the composition of his cursed energy had completely transformed into those of a pure cursed spirit, his consciousness, the core of his soul, remained the lucid Li Shunchen.
He now understood completely. Rather than bloodthirsty thoughts lingering in this cursed spirit body from before its suicide, those murderous impulses that had once tormented him were a defense mechanism born when his mind approached collapse after Mahito told him the truth of the world and of the countless "stacked souls" within him.
In the previous simulation, the instant Mahito cruelly crushed one of the souls inside Li Shunchen, causing his own cursed energy ceiling to plummet, all his long-held