Chapter 186: The Significance of the Second Body
Under the allure of immense profit, and after more than half a year of searching, natural mutated fruit trees possessing properties identical to those of artificially induced ones—trees capable of being used for Xuanhuang Fruit production—were successively discovered in several places across the globe. Only then did their respective production efforts truly get underway.
Even so, the price of Xuanhuang Fruit remained stubbornly high. In many places, a single Xuanhuang Fruit could even fetch the price of an entire house.
This was because the propagation of mutated plants was not as easy as ordinary plants, making it very difficult to expand cultivation scale. Furthermore, the source of Spirit Hubs largely still came from grey channels, leading to prohibitively high raw material costs.
The difficulties in propagating mutated plants also led many researchers to focus, for the first time, on the reproductive issues of ability users themselves.
Since ability users constituted a small percentage of the total population—at this stage, less than one percent, even lower than the proportion of homosexuals—their impact on the overall birth rate was negligible, and thus had not attracted much attention.
However, as time passed, the ruling classes of various countries gradually began to be replaced by ability users.
Ability users, whose thinking speed, strength, and all-around qualities far surpassed those of ordinary people, and who possessed powers comparable to thermal weapons, naturally and continuously occupied more and more crucial positions within the social hierarchy.
The existing ruling class, by leveraging their control over the distribution rights of Spirit Stones and other cultivation resources, achieved a rate of evolution far exceeding that of the common populace.
Precisely for this reason, this greatly accelerated the transformation of the upper echelons into ability users.
The ability users from both sides—one rising from the bottom up, the other descending from the top down—gradually formed a complex pyramid through their continuous interplay.
As for Bai Mo, busy with his avatar experiments, the matter of Xuanhuang Fruit, no matter how much profit it contained, no longer needed his attention.
His primary purpose in creating avatars was not for combat; when it came to combat prowess, his high-speed, almost physically immune spirit energy avatar was far more useful. The physical avatar was actually a test subject he used to experiment with stepping into deeper evolution.
Having gotten a faint grasp and found the general direction, Bai Mo had hesitated at the final step, for he only had one life. He had a premonition that passing this threshold would entail genuine mortal danger.
Before this, he had considered "inviting" people to experiment, but it was clearly not feasible.
On one hand, ability users capable of serving as test subjects for this experiment would need to at least reach the Unmelting Realm. Even to this day, there were only over a thousand such ability users in the entire Hua-Ya Federation, and their sudden disappearance would be almost impossible to conceal.
Secondly, if the experimental subject successfully broke through, Bai Mo couldn't predict the extent of their power afterward. The greatest possibility was that he wouldn't be able to suppress them, and then he would be crushed to death by the vengeful experimental subject, becoming one of the countless mad researchers who were killed by their rampaging experimental subjects—the mobile hard drive he picked up earlier served as a stark lesson.
As for publicly inviting volunteers... every ability user who reached the Unmelting Realm lived a very comfortable life. Contending for national governance might make them fight to the death, but they would find it virtually impossible to risk an experiment that even its proposer wasn't confident in.
But now, with an avatar, or a second body as he called it, he could personally use himself as a test subject for many of the more dangerous breakthrough experiments.
Losing an avatar was a completely different concept from losing a limb from his original body. Even rapid recovery potions could only achieve quick wound healing; they were still a long way from limb regeneration.
Using Cui Mengdie's identity, he had the avatar resign from the secret intelligence agency.
Originally, escaping from such a spy organization according to one's own will would have been virtually impossible, but after knocking down everyone who tried to stop her, all problems ceased to be problems. As Cui Mengdie, she officially vanished from everyone's sight.
"The internal structure of the avatar, under the pervasive influence of the Life Field, continuously converged with the original body." He discovered that the new body's existing Spirit Hubs would gradually degenerate and disappear, while the original body's Spirit Picture began to grow within it.
The process of the Spirit Picture growing within the new body continuously consumed a vast amount of his spirit energy. During this period, Bai Mo didn't even have enough spirit energy to create an avatar.
The lack of avatars naturally curbed his desire to continue "devouring people," as the digestion period was simply too long, and he couldn't "eat" again in between. From the initial setup to the final transformation of the avatar, it had already taken nearly a year.
Bai Mo had no patience to wait for the creation of a second avatar before beginning his own experiments.
Because in the nearly two years since returning from Rome, all the structures of his body had successfully integrated into the Life Field. No matter how much he tinkered, his power showed no further increase whatsoever.
Therefore, as soon as the first avatar had completely transformed and become virtually indistinguishable from his original body, save for appearance, he impatiently began his experiment.
On Tianqing's outskirts, in a two-story underground laboratory.
All of Bai Mo's mental power was concentrated in the female body; the positions of his original body and the avatar were instantly swapped.
He closed his divine sense for the first time. Since his sight and hearing had been unified into his divine sense and integrated into the Life Field two years ago, he had never considered turning it off, because the existence of divine sense was simply too convenient; the speed at which it processed incoming information was on a completely different order of magnitude from before.
Having lost most of his external perception, he suddenly plunged into a state of ethereal emptiness, as if a rapidly flowing riverbed had suddenly dried up.
As the primary content of the experiment, Bai Mo began using his mental power to assault the Life Field that originally protected his body. This approach was the most probable hypothesis he had formulated after various summarizations.
The Life Field, as an energy field, permeated every corner of his body, and its defensive capabilities, both internal and external, were consistent.
His initial tentative impacts failed to shake the solid field at all. While not quite "an ant trying to shake a tree," it was merely a breeze across the face.
As the impacts steadily intensified, Bai Mo could feel certain things within his body begin to shatter. His once powerful body developed cracks from the inside out, and blood foam also spilled from the corners of his mouth. The mental power he was expending rapidly diminished.
"Here it comes!" Completely focused, he paid no mind to his injuries. Instead, following his pre-experiment deductions, he used every ounce of his nearly depleted mental power to break through the Life Field, and in the instant it shattered, allowed his mental power to leave his body.
Instantly, he felt as if he had arrived in a new world. His vision was consumed by an endless white light. Information from spirit particles, vast as an abyss and deep as the sea, incessantly poured into his mind.
"Is this the Unity of Heaven and Man?" He only managed to fleetingly consider this thought.
Comments