Although Huo Yuhao kept the matter of providing support at any time in mind, it did not affect his daily studies.
His study routine had changed since he joined the team.
He studied in the mornings, joined the team to engrave core arrays and conduct experiments in the afternoons, kept his early evenings flexible, and cultivated all night, every night. His days were very full.
The outer region of the Star Dou Great Forest.
Inside a cave, purple poison gas billowed out in thick clouds.
With three soul rings-two yellow and one purple-behind him, Tang Yin was in tatters. Only the belt around his waist remained intact, and his body was stained with the blood of who knew how many soul beasts.
He stood at the cave entrance, watching coldly. Only when the poison gas gradually subsided did he look inside.
Following his gaze, a purple soul ring drifted out from within, with great masses of white soul rings crowding outward alongside it.
They truly could not rest even in death.
Frowning and stooping, Tang Yin cautiously entered the cave with the Godly Zhuge Crossbow in hand.
Amid the corpses of hundreds of ten-year Man Faced Demon Spiders the size of washbasins lay the corpse of a thousand-year Man Faced Demon Spider.
The Man Faced Demon Spider corpses were still hissing with corrosion.
With practiced ease, Tang Yin pried open the thousand-year Man Faced Demon Spider's corpse. After rummaging around for a while, his expression turned furious.
"Almost two months have passed. I've killed more than a dozen ten-thousand-year Man Faced Demon Spiders, hundreds of thousand-year ones, and tens of thousands of hundred-year ones..."
"The Man Faced Demon Spiders outside the mixed region of the Star Dou Great Forest are nearly extinct, and they still won't drop the Eight Spider Lances?"
"Will of the world, how dare you bully me like this?"
After a torrent of curses, Tang Yin quickly calmed down.
Expressionless, he dismembered the corpses of this nest of Man Faced Demon Spiders that had only just reached ten years of age.
After piling the Man Faced Demon Spider corpses into a small mound, Tang Yin finally felt something different beneath his fingers!
Wait!
Tang Yin's hands paused. He abruptly pulled the object out of this ten-year Man Faced Demon Spider's corpse.
The object was only palm-sized, with eight slender spider legs joined by a round, disc-shaped piece of bone.
They're back! They're back!
Tang Yin was wild with joy. An external soul bone really had dropped!
Even if it was only ten years old, an external soul bone's growth potential was immeasurable!
Ten thousand years ago, he had repeatedly relied on the Eight Spider Lances to turn peril into safety, taking opponents such as the three brothers of the Thousand Ton Ant Emperor, the Deep Sea Demonic Whale King, and even god-level opponents like Bibi Dong, the Rakshasa God.
He had turned them all into nourishment.
Tang Yin burst into laughter.
He had figured it out.
He would find the child of destiny, control him, and then drive him to do his bidding.
But this avatar was not limited to that one purpose. He could also walk the path to godhood again.
With the Eight Spider Lances, combined with the information about the Ice and Fire Yin Yang Well in his mind, no difficulty he faced in the future could stump him!
Still can't find the child of destiny?
No matter.
The child of destiny will eventually make his mark on the continent. I should still play the Wang Dong card as much as possible. After all, half of Xiao Qi's split soul is in her sea of consciousness.
It won't matter if using Xiao Qi to tie down the child of destiny fails. This avatar's potential is already at the pinnacle.
When the time comes, I'll beat the child of destiny to his knees, drag him to the Qiankun Asking Love Valley, contact my original body, and kill the child of destiny a few hundred times.
Once the child of destiny's soul collapses, won't I be able to brainwash him?
Tang Yin glanced outside the cave entrance, took beast-repelling powder out of the Twenty-Four Moonlit Bridges, then gathered dry branches to conceal the entrance.
Finally, he took the new Eight Spider Lances and headed deeper into the cave.
This Man Faced Demon Spider nest was already somewhere many soul beasts dared not approach. With these preparations, absorbing a ten-year soul bone would certainly be safe.
After absorbing the Eight Spider Lances, Tang Yin left this boundary between the mixed region and the outer region at full speed.
He had barely taken a few steps when he heard wild, cackling laughter.
He stopped, held his breath, suppressed his presence, and hid behind a large tree to peer out.
A black-robed figure stood there, soul power surging, his voice brimming with excitement.
"To think that I, the Death Messenger, would absorb such a heaven-defying soul skill! There will eventually be a place for me on this continent!"
An evil soul master?
Tang Yin frowned and thought, Evil soul masters are actually this rampant? What are all the soul masters in the world doing to earn their keep?
I can run into one just by coming out to hunt for a soul ring.
Despite his distaste, Tang Yin still went around him.
Tang Yin thought, It's not that I'm backing down. Evil soul masters couldn't run this rampant without the world indulging them.
Besides, hunting evil soul masters wasn't my assignment in the first place.
I only asked for a month's leave before. I never expected I'd have to nearly wipe out all the Man Faced Demon Spiders under ten thousand years old in the Star Dou Great Forest before obtaining the Eight Spider Lances.
I should be very far from the academy by now.
I must hurry back to the academy!
The Level 8 Piercing Cannon Laboratory at the Sun Moon Empire Royal Soul Engineer Academy.
Holding a core array that had melted after firing just one live round, Huo Yuhao sank into thought.
Carrying out the entire soul power compression process inside the soul tool... according to the experimental data and calculated conclusions, the heat really is explosive.
It needs a heat-dissipation core array.
But there's limited space inside the soul tool. If only the heat-dissipation core array could be embedded into the high-pressure core array.
Let's give it a try. Huo Yuhao picked up a fresh rare-metal substrate and took out Ice Shard, the Level 6 engraving-knife soul tool Meng Hongchen had given him.
His mind calculated and thought at high speed in real time. None of the strokes he made followed the standard core array engraving methods he had learned.
Yet they precisely matched his calculations.
A quarter of an hour later, Huo Yuhao tried injecting soul power into this Level 2 high-pressure core array, which had a Level 2 heat-dissipation core array embedded in it.
Hum!
The core array lit up, and the soul power was rapidly compressed. Strangely, however, the core array in his hand did not feel particularly hot.
Huo Yuhao assessed it inwardly.
It worked, but the results aren't ideal.
The balance is a little off. Suppressing the high-pressure soul power's temperature to this extent will definitely affect its power. There's still room for optimization and improvement.
Feng Yu made his usual rounds to check on the team members' research.
Of course, the assignment he had given Huo Yuhao was to pursue whatever research he wanted within the project's framework and ask directly about anything he did not understand.
Feng Yu understood perfectly well that the project had only been able to proceed thanks to Huo Yuhao's standing with their teacher.
Standing beside Huo Yuhao, Feng Yu observed the core array in his hand for a moment, then asked:
"Yuhao, when did you learn the Temperature-Difference Embedding Engraving Method? Even among intermediate soul engineers, that's considered a fairly difficult engraving method."
"The Temperature-Difference Embedding Engraving Method?" Huo Yuhao asked in confusion. "Does this even need a special name?"
"Don't you just have to calculate where the engraving knife should land in real time in your head?"
As soon as he finished speaking, Huo Yuhao immediately felt Feng Yu contribute a large amount of chaos energy to him.
Feng Yu took a careful look at Huo Yuhao's expression, then accepted the core array and examined it closely. In the end, his composure shattered.
Although the technique was slightly immature and the details were not handled well enough, he could vaguely see that the embedding method had already taken shape.
Is it really all right for me to barge into a genius's world like this?
Could the graduation piece I spent months honing as a Level 6 Soul Engineer only save my junior brother the time it takes to have afternoon tea?
Seeing that something seemed a little off with Feng Yu, Huo Yuhao hurriedly waved a hand in front of his face.
"Teacher Feng, Teacher Feng, what's wrong? That Temperature-Difference Embedding Engraving Method sounds really impressive. It could definitely save me a lot of work."
"By the way, I noticed our project team hasn't collected any experimental data on soul sniper rifles. Teacher Feng, do you know where I can find some?"
Feng Yu said wearily:
"It's very difficult to design experiments to obtain relevant data for soul sniper rifles. Their floor is very high, but their ceiling is too low, so all the related research was archived."
"I think a graduate researched them a few decades ago. Just look through the library's document management system."
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