Chapter 200: A Thousand Souls
"Do you believe me when I say I don't know?" Two days after the attack, Bai Mo was invited to Ziliu Sea to attend a symposium.
"They mobilized a large force, sending an elite squad to risk their lives to snatch something... You, as the original owner, don't know what it's for?"
"If I knew, I wouldn't have had it inlaid into a necklace and worn it around." He chuckled, then lightly flicked the Soul Crystal hanging at his chest.
The symposium suddenly fell silent.
After a long while, Cheng Mu, well-versed in social interactions, took the initiative to restart the conversation.
"That day, they captured a living individual, and Ye Zi froze him."
"That spatial ability user?" Bai Mo reacted instantly.
"We're not entirely clear on his abilities, but we couldn't come up with a method to handle him for a while. The problem is, as soon as he wakes up, he's bound to self-destruct, making interrogation impossible."
"Let me take this person. Within two weeks, I will submit a detailed report." Bai Mo gave a deadline to everyone present.
"Understood."
"Additionally, after this incident, we've decided to accelerate the entire Spirit Energy network deployment plan. The impact of ability users' battles on social stability is simply too immense, particularly within urban areas. If not for their barrier the day before yesterday, your Spirit Energy storm alone could have crippled a quarter of Tianqing City."
"Accelerate? I'll do my best. Give me a target timetable."
"My people will send it over later."
Whether it was compensation or aftermath management, these were not matters Bai Mo needed to concern himself with. The incident had been officially categorized as a terrorist attack, and the dead offered no defense. All blame was pinned entirely on the two dozen-plus individuals who orchestrated the assault, while he himself was given only a brief mention, despite the fact that most of the casualties had, in reality, died by his hand.
The state bore the expenses for the victims' compensation, and related gag orders were also completed immediately, but this storm had clearly only just begun...
That same afternoon, a cargo truck, armed with a military escort yet ostensibly used for transporting chilled goods, drove into Bai Mo’s experimental site, delivering the live captive, Niel, held in ultra-low temperature cold storage.
After repeatedly confirming that he could still access the captive's past conversation records through the network, he picked up a Maysuoan dictionary, along with some related audio learning materials. He started from scratch, learning and analyzing Niel's daily conversations bit by bit. As the matter was of great importance, he did not wish to entrust it to translators.
After ten days of unremitting effort, leveraging his powerful learning ability, Bai Mo had largely completed the analysis of the useful intelligence within Niel's memories. He then continued to keep Niel in cold storage, reserving him for future, further research into his Spirit Hub, as spatial Spirit Hubs were still quite rare.
"A prophet's ability like this is truly impossible to guard against; they find answers directly through mystical methods, disregarding any logical deduction."
Through the records of Niel's communication with others, Bai Mo learned that the origin of their operation was the Great Prophet Ramdo of the One-Wheel Cult. During a divination, Ramdo had received a so-called "divine revelation," declaring it a test bestowed by God upon his followers: those who acquired the Soul Crystal and enshrined it in the Holy Temple would become saints after death!
However, in the conversations between Ka Qi'er and Niel, he discovered that the two were actually father and son, with Niel being Ka Qi'er's illegitimate son. Ka Qi'er, who had always felt he had wronged this son, told him a secret he had inadvertently overheard just before their departure:
The Soul Crystal was, in fact, the very treasure the Great Prophet Ramdo intended to use to truly transform himself into a god! The divination he performed with his abilities was, in truth, an attempt to divine a method for further advancement.
He, too, was stuck at the peak of the Unmelting Realm, unable to advance even an inch. Moreover, for this divination, Ramdo had suffered a tremendous backlash, sustaining severe injuries, which was why he hadn't acted personally.
Otherwise, given the Soul Crystal’s importance, he would undoubtedly have led the team himself to seize it, and the situation might have turned out entirely differently.
To atone for his years of wrongdoing towards his illegitimate son, Niel, the guilt-ridden Ka Qi'er decided to sacrifice his own life to secure his son’s meteoric rise, to obtain the Soul Crystal for him. But their efforts came to naught; both father and son, along with the others who were unaware of the full truth, all perished in a foreign land.
This, however, was not the end. With Ramdo’s divine oracle issued, wave after wave of fanatical believers would continue to come seeking trouble from Bai Mo.
Following Ka Qi’er’s specific description to his son, Bai Mo quickly deduced the actual method for using the Soul Crystal: to leverage the hundreds of millions of remnant souls within it to gradually strengthen and transform his own consciousness, ultimately reaching a state where his thoughts could proliferate into myriad forms.
Having gained such a conceptual breakthrough, Bai Mo, based on his own circumstances and referencing his existing avatar structure as well as Ramdo’s ideas, began compiling this secret manual, which he named the “Thousand Souls Sutra.”
Given the unique nature of his own existence, this manual did not involve any aspects of the physical body whatsoever; it was purely a cultivation method for thought extension.
However, as a trade-off, soul-type cultivation auxiliary materials became particularly crucial. If other cultivators lacked the relevant resources, their progress would be extremely slow.
Five months swiftly passed. During this period, he barely left the basement. The oversight of the Spirit Energy network had also been delegated to an avatar, as the most crucial design of the first phase was already complete, and the supervisory work was, in fact, quite light.
As the highest-priority project for the entire Hua-Ya Federation, detailed reports were submitted to the Central Government weekly. No one dared to take such a significant risk to cut corners. All the avatar needed to do was examine the discrepancies between the plans and the actual construction.
Over these five months of simultaneous exploration and cultivation, Bai Mo had now reached the Hundred-Thought level he had set, but the subsequent Thousand-Thought and Ten-Thousand-Thought levels were still under exploration. This was yet another colossal undertaking.
In the appendix of the “Thousand Souls Sutra,” he provided a relatively vague grading standard: One-Thought, Ten-Thought, Hundred-Thought, Thousand-Thought, Ten-Thousand-Thought... where One-Thought represented the level of an uncultivated ordinary person.
As for ability users whose brains had been developed through Spirit Energy conversion, depending on the specific circumstances, their thought processes generally ranged from One-Thought to Ten-Thought. He himself was originally roughly at the Ten-Thought level, but after five months of targeted cultivation, his thought processes had reached the Hundred-Thought level.
At this point, Bai Mo’s learning speed was nearly a hundred times that of an ordinary person. Theoretically, he could master the knowledge required for a doctoral degree every single month.
But this was only one aspect; the enhancement of his thought processes also brought a massive bonus to the use of Spirit Arts. The previous Spirit Energy storm was the result of multiple thought threads acting simultaneously, forcibly transforming a lowest-tier Spirit Energy missile into a Gatling-speed missile storm. Now that he had achieved another qualitative leap, his concern shifted to the issue of Spirit Energy supply within his body.
However, all of this was actually built upon the existence of the Soul Crystal. According to Bai Mo’s estimation, without the support of soul-type materials, cultivating to his current level would have required at least ten years of persistent effort.
Most importantly, the “Thousand Souls Sutra” had no physical limitations whatsoever. It could be said that even ordinary people without abilities could cultivate to a certain extent to improve themselves..
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