Chapter 1669: Infusing Infinite Spirituality
Chapter 1669: Infusing Infinite Spirituality
A yellow light wove the path forward.
Dotted footprints drifted out from the void, not only pointing the way for the group but also serving as stepping stones for their crossing of the Eternal Silent Void Realm.
Their perception of the outside world was already distorted.
The crossing seemed to take but an instant, yet also felt as if it had consumed millions of years.
Beyond the yellow light was an endless, ink-black expanse.
Although sheltered by the yellow light, each pass through the darkness was merely a fleeting touch.
But the Eternal Silent Void Realm still pressed down on them with a terrifying, icy weight.
With the exception of Li Fan, the very foundation of everyone else’s existence—including the Venerables—inevitably began to crumble. The most direct manifestation was the varying degrees of decline in their cultivation.
A drop in cultivation realm could perhaps be recovered through slow practice. But if their spirituality was lost...
Geniuses would fall from grace, and prodigies would fade into obscurity.
Under normal circumstances, the consequences were irreversible.
However...
Just as everyone was steadying their minds, trying to protect themselves, Li Fan’s gaze was sharp, fixed on the Eternal Silent Void Realm outside.
He faintly sensed that within the boundless darkness, something else existed besides the cold silence.
"This is..."
"The aura of coalescing spirituality?"
"The Eternal Silent Void Realm is supposed to be completely empty. Why is there such a dense aura of true spirit here?"
At first, Li Fan was puzzled.
But after a moment of observation, he quickly understood.
"This is the sediment of spirituality, left behind after the Mountain and Sea was devoured by the Dao Annihilation. It’s like the ashes after a forest fire, or the fine sand washed ashore by crashing waves."
Possessing infinite spirituality himself, Li Fan was naturally unmoved by the spiritual sediment within the Eternal Silent Void Realm.
However, when he noticed the people from the Life and Death Realm struggling, an idea sparked in his mind.
"Although I have infinite spirituality, I can only use it for myself. If I want to bestow it upon others, I have to take a roundabout approach through the inheritance option of [Truth]."
"But what about these ownerless things before me?"
"I've now reached the Saint realm, but my power still seems to fall short of what I imagined a [Saint] to be. Only by successfully crossing the Eternal Silent Void Realm can one be worthy of the title of Saint. Traversing this void will inevitably expose one to this spiritual sediment. The Saints of the Other Shore are so powerful... could it be related to acquiring more spirituality?"
A thousand thoughts flashed through his mind in an instant. Li Fan reached out toward the boundless darkness above.
An invisible vortex seemed to materialize from nothing.
With a light wave of his hand, Li Fan stirred an unimaginable mass of accumulated sludge.
Like a geyser erupting violently, it was drawn from the Eternal Silent Void Realm and descended.
The yellow light protecting everyone distorted abruptly, looking as if it might shatter at any moment.
But this gust came and went quickly.
As Li Fan withdrew his hand, the swarm of accumulated true spirit in the Eternal Silent Void Realm ceased its motion.
And in Li Fan’s hand...
a mass of converged true spirit, nearly imperceptible by any means yet clearly sensed by him, swirled without dissipating.
"It comes when I call and goes when I dismiss it."
"Is it really this easy to command the accumulated true spirit?"
Li Fan mused, puzzled.
His intuition told him that was likely not the case.
He looked at the others crossing the Eternal Silent Void Realm with him; they seemed completely unaware of the boundless true spirit accumulating outside.
They could only continue to rely on their own strength to endure.
They couldn't even detect it, let alone absorb and utilize it.
Li Fan had a dawning realization.
The reason he could draw it out with such ease and grace was perhaps related to his own infinite spirituality.
This accumulated spirituality drawn from the Eternal Silent Void Realm did not belong to him, yet he could command it as easily as his own limbs, manipulating it at will. Like a general commanding his troops.
First, Li Fan tried to absorb this true spirit himself.
Like a clay ox entering the sea, more than half of the extracted true spirit was instantly devoured without any effect.
This outcome was within his expectations.
After all, his own spirituality was already "infinite"; no matter how much more he absorbed from the outside, it was unlikely to produce any change.
Li Fan shook his head inwardly and ceased this pointless action.
Next, looking at the people from the Life and Death Realm whose own true spirits were dissipating, Li Fan slowly tried to channel and distribute the remaining accumulated true spirit among them.
It was much more difficult than he had imagined.
The formless, accumulated true spirit was indeed under his control to some extent. It quickly divided into seven portions, gathering above the heads of the Venerables, excluding Qiu Xinhui.
But it only drew near.
It did not truly merge with them.
It seemed an invisible barrier separated their bodies from the accumulated true spirit.
Li Fan applied a bit of pressure, but the barrier remained unshakable.
"It seems I was too naive. If increasing one's spirituality were this easy, the Mountain and Sea would be teeming with Saints."
However, Li Fan didn't give up so easily.
Before reaching the End of Mountain and Sea, he seized this rare opportunity during the crossing to continue his research on the accumulated true spirit.
The path of the crossing seemed endless.
The protective yellow light meandered and drifted, and traces of the path left by the Mountain Sea traveler flashed by continuously.
Li Fan could keenly sense that the fleeting glimmers of the Mountain and Sea flashing towards them were growing dimmer.
And the pressure from the Eternal Silent Void Realm outside grew ever more immense.
The protective yellow light was forced to contract.
The tendency of the people from the Life and Death Realm to collapse was also gradually increasing.
"If this continues, even if they manage to reach the End of Mountain and Sea, they'll all be practically crippled."
"Only the Empty Thought construct I brought along will be of any use."
Although he sat upon an endless mountain of treasure, he couldn't share even a fraction of it with others.
"It seems your fate is in your own hands."
Yet, perhaps bolstered by his infinite spirituality, Li Fan's research proceeded with unexpected smoothness.
As their downstream journey across the void neared its end, he actually found a method to forcibly [infuse] true spirit into others!
He didn't start with the Venerables of the Life and Death Realm. Instead, he began his experiment on a former inhabitant of the Guangwu Xinghai who was on the verge of dissipating.
"The reason I can absorb it without any obstruction is because I possess infinite spirituality. The return of true spirit is like a hundred rivers flowing into the eastern sea—a natural and logical process."
"But for others, the true spirit they possess is weaker than what is about to be infused from the outside. Against an invader stronger than themselves, it's natural to build high walls..."
"In that case, I'll just have to summon a great flood to drown those walls!"
With that thought, Li Fan thrust his hand violently toward the Eternal Silent Void Realm.
With a vicious grasp, he pulled out an unimaginably thick mass of accumulated true spirit.
He manipulated it into the shape of a waterfall descending from the heavens and poured it ferociously onto the test subject's head.
The true spirit didn't enter the body, but neither did it dissipate.
Instead, it continued to pile up above his head.
Though in the midst of an experiment, the test subject, completely unaware of his situation, felt a faint sense of unease.
He glanced around with great vigilance.
But ultimately, he couldn't find the source of his dread.
The true spirit continued to accumulate, forming a vast, dark cloud.
But the barrier within a living being's body was incredibly resilient; even under a hundred times the external pressure, it didn't collapse.
Li Fan had no choice but to up the ante.
In any case, he was drawing upon the accumulated true spirit from the Eternal Silent Void Realm, so nothing was being wasted.
Finally, when the energy level of the true spirit used for the impact was thousands of times greater than that of the test subject, the invisible barrier was crushed with a thunderous roar.
In that instant, as if enlightened, the test subject’s eyes flew wide open. He was completely transformed.
At a speed visible to the naked eye, he became brimming with spirituality.
He could even faintly perceive his own attributes and snapped his head up to glance in Li Fan’s direction.
Yet, that single glance brought disaster upon him.
Li Fan frowned slightly and stopped the infusion.
He grasped the test subject from afar and observed him carefully.
After a scouring that consumed a thousandfold amount of spiritual energy, less than one-thousandth of it was successfully infused into the body.
Even so, for the test subject, this was an earth-shattering change.
"Compared to the spirituality increase from [Truth]'s inheritance, my infusion method is simple and crude. But the price is..."
His own spirituality had increased manifold, but in a short time, he had suddenly seen many things beyond his cognition.
Terror, dread, unease, the unknown—such emotions began to haunt the test subject’s mind.
His once sharp and clear gaze gradually became tinged with madness.
More crucially, now that the invisible barrier inside him had been forcibly shattered by Li Fan, the test subject no longer had any resistance to the external accumulated spirituality.
The immense accumulation that he hadn't absorbed returned.
It surged into his body once more.
The test subject could still absorb a portion of it.
But the speed of his transformation was ultimately limited.
It was far from enough to keep up with the sweeping sludge.
As he was scoured again and again, a scene that chilled even Li Fan occurred.
The test subject's soul, body, and consciousness finally dissolved and disintegrated under the impact of the accumulated true spirit.
In that instant, he vanished without a sound.
He became just another part of the surging true spirit accumulating by Li Fan's hand.
This process of annihilation was too swift.
Li Fan had been anticipating how far the test subject would transform, but he hadn't expected him to melt into the spiritual torrent just moments later.
The infusion experiment was both a success and a failure.
"Theoretically, I just need to control the intensity of the infusion to avoid this outcome of annihilation."
"However..."
Li Fan looked at the large mass of accumulated true spirit swirling by his hand and seemed to see its origin.
The endless living beings that had once existed in the Mountain and Sea.
Like a host of ghostly shadows, they stood in grim ranks, all wearing eerie smiles and staring intently at Li Fan.
An inexplicable sense of discomfort arose in his heart. Li Fan flicked his hand, casting the accumulated true spirit back into the Eternal Silent Void Realm.
"The Mountain and Sea perished, yet its true spirit accumulated."
"The moment the Mountain and Sea is fully restored, the [Star] will be born from the Eternal Silent Void Realm. In that case, isn't this endless accumulated true spirit the very crucible for the [Star]'s birth?"
Instinctively, Li Fan became extremely wary of this spirituality he could command at will.
He temporarily shelved the idea of further experiments.
"Based on what I observed with the test subject, that invisible internal barrier is the fundamental reason why I possess infinite spirituality but cannot wield it freely. If I were to eliminate that barrier..."
The moment the thought arose, [Truth], which remained silent in most situations, immediately sent out a trembling warning!
Li Fan had never felt [Truth] react so intensely.
It was as if breaking the barrier within him would unleash a cataclysm so monstrous that not even [Truth] could reverse it.
The reaction startled Li Fan, and he immediately cut off his wild train of thought.
Seemingly still not reassured, the aftershocks of [Truth]'s warning reverberated in Li Fan’s mind for a long time.
Not until the journey across the void finally ended, as they leaped from the Eternal Silent Void Realm to the End of Mountain and Sea, did Li Fan finally understand the reason for [Truth]'s solemn warning.
"For an ordinary person in the Mountain and Sea, eliminating the barrier would, at most, lead to the loss of their own spirituality or an infusion from the outside. Whether they became a Saint or perished, it would hardly affect the grand scheme of the Mountain and Sea."
"But within me is infinite spirituality."
"It might not be much less than the total accumulation in the Eternal Silent Void Realm after the entire Mountain and Sea perished."
"If the barrier inside me were broken..."
Li Fan suddenly shivered.
"I wouldn't be the only one to suffer."
"The remnants of the Mountain and Sea would probably suffer too!"
Before Li Fan's eyes, an image appeared: endless true spirit, released by the collapse of the barrier, swarming out of his body.
Like a cataclysmic flood unleashed by a broken dam, it surged forth.
It would capsize the Mountain and Sea in an instant.
"It's already barely surviving under the Dao Annihilation. If another disaster like this were to happen,"
"the Mountain and Sea would be destroyed in a heartbeat."
Realizing this, Li Fan understood [Truth]'s reaction.
At the same time, a greater question arose from the depths of his heart.
"Where exactly did the infinite spirituality inside me come from?"
"And if..."
"After I truly die, what will become of this unbound true spirit?"
"Did [Truth] seek me out because of my infinite spirituality? Or did it bind itself to me because it feared that my unrestrained infinite true spirit would destroy the Mountain and Sea?"
A storm of doubts assailed him.
It was enough to make Li Fan, now a Saint, lose himself for a moment.
Fortunately, drastic changes in the outside world soon forced him to shift his focus.
A sliver of light overhead barely held back the darkness.
Like the first light of dawn, though they had left the Eternal Silent Void Realm, they weren't truly far from it.
It felt as if they could be dragged back into that endless, cold darkness at any moment.
"Hold your breath, focus your minds, and stand firm in your will."
The speaker was none other than Qiu Xinhui, who had become so weak during the journey that he had nearly been annihilated.
But now, he seemed like a completely different person.
His entire being radiated an inspiring aura of leadership that commanded instinctual admiration.
Li Fan understood in an instant.
This person before him was not the Empty Thought construct of Qiu Xinhui.
It was the true Qiu Xinhui, the Saint of the Mountain Sea End, who had absorbed the Empty Thought construct that made the journey!
His gaze met Qiu Xinhui's, and it was as if he were once again facing the Saints of the Other Shore.
The external layers of concealment were about to be peeled away, exposing his core.
But things were different now.
The Xuanpin Dao transformed into a cloak, gently covering the secrets that were about to be revealed.
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