Chapter 261: Drawing the Sword
In the blink of an eye, more than half a month passed. The entire starry sky was, little by little, finally forced into Bai Mo's body, where it then completely fused with his Nine-Orifice Body, which had been fully stabilized by immense external pressure.
It was precisely at this moment that the last vestiges of ice and snow within his Dharma Body coalesced into a sword, aiming straight for his chest.
Bai Mo used no defensive measures, allowing the sword to pierce him.
Yet, eerily, not a single drop of blood flowed from his body. However, the tight clenching of his jaw revealed that he was undergoing excruciating pain.
The sword's blade slowly began to change color, gradually being dyed from within outwards with a layer of dark gold, departing from its original snowy white. As the color shifted, the expression on Bai Mo's face gradually returned to serenity.
More than half a year ago, when he broke through to the Nine-Orifice Body, Bai Mo, using the self-reflection of his Mind's Eye, had seen a radiant figure representing himself. The vast majority of its surface was covered in a single color: white.
Nevertheless, scattered here and there were specks of mottled, differing colors. These colored patches were slowly merging into the main body, continuously influencing its hue, with the largest among them being a pool of dark gold.
Through constant testing, he finally determined that the object of this Mind's Eye observation was his own consciousness.
White represented his core self, while the scattered, differing colors were the external information influencing him. The largest dark gold patch originated from Hua Taishan.
Moreover, as long as he remained in contact with this world, he was bound to be influenced by the information from others.
After much contemplation and discussion with Zhang Xu and a few others, Bai Mo finally conceived of a method whose success he couldn't predict.
This method involved, simultaneously with achieving his Dharma Body, extracting Hua Taishan's final mental influence on him from before his death.
Before his sacrifice, Hua Taishan had already glimpsed a hint of empathy. Thus, at his final moment, he attempted to use this method, employing his remaining will to influence Bai Mo's consciousness, guiding him back onto what he believed was the right path.
Hua Taishan's will, carrying the intent of the "Sealing Heaven and Earth" move, hadn't actually dissipated. Instead, it had diffused throughout various parts of Bai Mo's body, subtly guiding his character to transform in a hopeful direction.
It was simply that Bai Mo's Martial Path cultivation at the time hadn't yet reached the Nine-Orifice Body, preventing him from detecting this hidden maneuver.
Controlling his muscles, Bai Mo slowly squeezed the dark golden ice sword out of his body, then laid it flat on his hand, examining it carefully.
Just moments before it was extracted, the sword had continuously absorbed the blood that had threatened to flow from his body, resulting in the eerie phenomenon of bloodlessness.
It seemed that due to the fusion of the blood and will of two powerful individuals, the material composing the sword's blade underwent a unique transformation, becoming a dark golden longsword with a crystalline, translucent blade.
"A pity it's not suitable for me." Bai Mo gazed at the longsword, harboring no resentment towards Hua Taishan for attempting to change him through this method. After all, the man was dead; what was there to hate?
With his current terrifying recovery ability, the wound on his chest vanished in less than three minutes. He held the sword, strolling and observing the surrounding ice surface, which had been left in utter disarray by his breakthrough, gradually falling into contemplation...
Perhaps using "Golden Body" to describe his current state wasn't entirely fitting. Unlike Zhang Xu's body, which resembled a bronze figure upon his breakthrough, Bai Mo was more akin to having donned a ceremonial robe adorned with a myriad of stars.
The previously uncontrollable white light had completely vanished. The stellar radiance that his newly formed Starry Sky Dharma Body could contain clearly far surpassed what his previous, merely illusory Dharma Body could hold.
From afar, Bai Mo at this moment resembled a moving expanse of starry sky. The stars upon it appeared immeasurably distant to the observer, yet their light strangely exerted an influence on him, gradually assimilating one's consciousness.
As he pondered, the scattered ice shards on the ground once again stirred, beginning to autonomously combine. The surrounding magnetic field also grew restless.
Vast amounts of ice shards danced in the air, continuously etching more and more onto the pockmarked ice surface.
What appeared on the ice surface wasn't any known text, but rather runes imbued with far greater information.
Bai Mo recalled everything related to cultivation that he had seen and thought of over the past few years, integrating them and storing them in this place in the form of runes and electromagnetic waves.
"Starless Aspect," he etched these four characters onto an ice brick he dug from the ground with his longsword, then set the ice brick upright beside him like a stele.
With the Spirit Arts he applied, the traces he left in this polar region would be preserved for many years, awaiting any fated individuals who might come to discover them.
Having reached his current level, he now saw many things with greater clarity. The experiences and knowledge he had once hoarded like treasured brooms now seemed, in retrospect, to be nothing more than that.
The power one possessed largely determined one's perspective and magnanimity. Someone who had to fight desperately for survival every day naturally wouldn't harbor much courtesy or a desire to share in their thoughts.
Only those standing at the apex, free from the pressure of survival and without the worry of being surpassed by rivals, would be able to consider such things more deeply.
Among the myriad of living beings, there would always be individuals of astonishing talent and brilliance.
Long before the book *Arcana* was published, there were already people researching the feasibility of Spirit Hub combinations for transplantation. However, just like Bai Mo, they had all hidden their findings in the deepest recesses.
It wasn't until a year and a half ago that he discovered the existence of a third Spirit Picture with powerful derivative abilities, found within the memory of a Four-tier ability user participating in a combat power assessment. This was the first time Bai Mo had fully discovered a Spirit Picture conceived by someone else.
While these individuals were excited by the abundant harvests they gained from the Haotian Mirror, all their hidden secrets were simultaneously extracted by the Mirror's owner.
Where there was one, there would be two. Subsequently, the fourth and fifth Spirit Pictures were successively plundered from the memories of others participating in combat power assessments. Regrettably, for him, they held only reference value.
The two Spirit Pictures continuously growing both inside and outside his body were already two bottomless pits of spirit energy. He couldn't possibly support the existence of a third Spirit Picture.
In the book *Arcana*, Bai Mo had briefly mentioned the existence of Spirit Pictures, but he hadn't provided any description of the Spirit Pictures he himself possessed, effectively drawing a close to this secret he had kept hidden for nearly seven years.
To a certain extent, Xiao Changqing's team had also realized that the Xuanhuang Fruit would obliterate the possibility of Spirit Pictures appearing, which was why they decided to launch a public opinion offensive against it.
However, gathering the specified dozen or so Spirit Hubs was far from easy. Those truly willing and capable of assembling a Spirit Picture were exceedingly few.
Moreover, with a diverse array of Spirit Arts now available, wasting a significant amount of time and resources to assemble a Spirit Picture could very likely still result in being thoroughly beaten by someone who spent an equivalent amount of time and resources on upgrading instead.
"Creating Vassals?" Bai Mo, who had already entered the Martial Path Dharma Body realm, a slight deduction later, discovered something rather intriguing.
By mimicking Hua Taishan's methods, he attempted to infuse his spiritual will into a casually picked-up ice shard. The ice shard seemed to gain a consciousness of its own, beginning to deform and move, just like the ice spirits that had previously only been able to move under the starlit sky.
"Unfortunately, it's just a puppet without a self." This was, in essence, merely a construct similar to a clone, imbued with a fragment of Bai Mo's will.
Although the experiment wasn't successful, it sparked an idea in him—that the future path of the Martial Path might involve using one's own will, from influencing minds to "enlightening" inanimate objects.
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