Chapter 251: Light
"I can finally come out." After two years, Bai Mo was at last able to leave his self-sealed chamber. Yet, the white light swirling around his body almost entirely enveloped him, making him appear as a being of pure light to any observer.
The ceaseless battles on the virtual network, combined with the support of abundant Spirit Materials, allowed him to swiftly break through the barriers of the Eight Orifices and Nine Orifices, reaching the state of Nine Orifices Perfection. But at this point, he discovered he was facing the same problem as Zhang Xu.
While he could gradually rein in his surging power, the unconscious empathic aura was like thermal radiation, impossible to contain.
Even without manifesting his Starry Sky Dharma Body, its starlight already enshrouded most of Bai Mo's being, simply awaiting his step into the Nine Orifices Unification.
Anyone within three hundred meters of his body, if their willpower was insufficient, would feel their minds suddenly enlightened, and many cultivation-related questions would find their answers.
Within a hundred meters, thoughts would gush forth like a spring, and an instinctive urge to draw closer, step by step, would overwhelm them.
Upon reaching the twenty-meter death zone, the vast majority of people would be assimilated by the endless information flooding their minds, becoming a part of the soft white light, all while wearing smiles that made onlookers break out in a cold sweat.
Under these circumstances, Bai Mo could only rely on his avatars to move about and handle his affairs. At the very least, when his avatars didn't manifest the Starry Sky Dharma Body, they wouldn't unleash this indiscriminate, calamity-like attack.
His main body, meanwhile, remained confined to the core zone of the experimental facility, protected by layer upon layer of defensive structures.
Referencing Zhang Xu's Golden Body defense against his starlight in the past, Bai Mo continuously compressed his Xuanhua into a protective layer to weaken the starlight's potency.
However, Xuanhua's defense was more geared towards physical protection, and its effectiveness in intercepting information streams was poor.
Therefore, he simultaneously used the underground Spirit Energy Network as a foundation to construct four additional layers of extremely energy-intensive barriers, ensuring that external staff passing by wouldn't be unconsciously assimilated by him.
Plans never quite kept pace with changes. Even Bai Mo himself hadn't anticipated that the peculiar starlight, which possessed no physical offensive power and was purely a sharing of information streams, would become so lethally potent towards living beings after integrating the insights of countless cultivators through combat power tests within the VR network.
The more knowledge it absorbed, the stronger the white light's ability to assimilate minds became.
Over these past two years, everyone, regardless of whether they had participated in the combat power tests, was intensely curious about one thing: How exactly was the mirror in the third stage created?!
Precisely because of the endless knowledge and insights contained within this mirror, it was as powerful as a divine artifact. They had even given it a mythological name like "Haotian Mirror."
Of course, the upper echelons of Huaxia were well aware of Bai Mo's unfathomable depths, hidden behind the mirror. Even if they harbored other intentions regarding this mirror, they managed to restrain themselves, absolutely refusing to act without considerable certainty.
For if they were to act, it would be tantamount to inciting a civil war across the entire Huaxia Federation. Destroying half the nation for a single mirror was clearly not a profitable endeavor.
And after several years of exploration, people gained a deeper understanding of various Spirit Hubs, discovering Spirit Materials capable of promoting the growth and strengthening of specific Spirit Hubs.
Naturally, a significant portion of this was due to "The Spirit Hub Codex," a book Bai Mo had publicly released on the system two years prior, which documented detailed information on most known Spirit Hubs and some of his experimental results.
The sheer amount of dark secrets hidden behind the compilation of such comprehensive data within just a few years was unfathomable.
Just by estimating that a normal Ability User possesses only two to three Spirit Hubs, the seventeen hundred-plus Spirit Hubs recorded in "The Spirit Hub Codex" would require obtaining information from at least several hundred individuals, even if none of them had duplicate hubs.
Much of this information, furthermore, could only be obtained through destructive experiments.
In reality, to complete this investigative work, Bai Mo and other researchers had utilized samples from nearly fifty thousand Ability Users.
However, the weak of the new era had no human rights to speak of. So-called equality was merely a hollow shell. Organizations that dared to speak up for human rights were all silenced in the face of absolute violence.
Some were silenced by the formidable power of the Huaxia authorities, while those who refused to yield were simply erased, body and records alike, effectively silenced.
Even though many suspected that "The Spirit Hub Codex" was entirely written in blood, a book where every word wept with sin and sorrow, they still pretended not to notice and continued to use it.
There was no other particular reason, it was simply its credibility. "The Spirit Hub Codex," compiled through the accumulation of a vast number of real experimental samples, was unparalleled in terms of trustworthiness and detail.
To glean the most detailed information on Spirit Hubs, one either had to conduct experiments personally, yet the vast majority of people lacked such conditions. Thus, they could only refer to this extensive compendium.
The Void Profound Crystal was named by Bai Mo himself because it could be absorbed by the Abyss Sky Void Profound Spirit Picture, thereby strengthening its spatial abilities.
He exhausted every method to obtain Void Profound Crystals, all to enhance his "A Thousand Miles in a Foot" ability to a degree sufficient to prevent him from inadvertently assimilating the minds of others.
Within one centimeter of his body's surface, Bai Mo forcibly compressed over two hundred meters of space. This, combined with Xuanhua's defense, finally ensured that the white light swirling around him wouldn't indiscriminately kill.
To the astonishment of countless staff members, he left the experimental facility and made his way to the new vampire breeding base.
"Our agreed time has arrived." Bai Mo brought out the three vampires he had captured seven years ago.
Clearly, life inside hadn't been kind to them. They looked listless and had probably assumed their captor had long forgotten their agreement, intending to keep them perpetually confined as food.
"We can finally leave this hellhole?!" Only then did Mary, their leader, react.
Over these past few years, they had finally come to realize the truly unfathomable depths of humanity's depravity; to acquire precious resources, humans could even raise their own kind as food.
They, however, conveniently forgot that they themselves had always, in essence, subsisted on humans as food.
Bai Mo nodded, no longer paying attention to the three excited vampires behind him. Having been detached from this rapidly changing society for seven years, the world outside was now beyond their wildest imagination.
He walked through the breeding base, observing each artificial blood kin, and began to deduce his own food cultivation method.
Behind Sa Qia Si Ji lay a colossal civilization. Cultivation techniques like "The Immortal Body" had undergone countless optimizations before finally taking shape, ensuring no exploitable loopholes for backlash. For Bai Mo to deduce it to such a level would require an immense amount of time.
For the past two years, most of his thoughts had been occupied with controlling his explosively surging power. Many less time-sensitive plans had been consequently postponed, and he simply hadn't had the mental capacity to research fallback strategies for unforeseen circumstances like this.
Comments