Chapter 417: Butterfly Shadow, Purple Qi
The white shadow that appeared in the forest at this moment was precisely Bai Mo, who had just finished dealing with the matter in the Secret Realm Forest and was on his way out.
Two strange young people seemed to be premeditatedly waiting along his projected route, so Bai Mo approached them...
A swirling, indistinct white shadow twisted and reshaped itself into a human form within a few seconds.
Bai Mo was, in fact, quite unkempt in matters of no importance.
Especially after entering the Myriad Phases Realm, his true form in daily life had become utterly casual. He frequently appeared as a floating white shadow, devoid of facial features or limbs, much like a traditional ghost.
Nearly all his perceptions were handled by his divine sense and the Skyweb. These two powerful abilities served as his source of various information, while all control over the external world was accomplished through telekinesis.
From his appearance, Bai Mo shared no commonalities with ordinary humans; he was indeed more like a ghost than a person.
Only when communicating with others would Bai Mo bother to sculpt a face for himself and reappear in human form.
However, with the advent of the Destiny System, such opportunities had become increasingly rare. More often than not, he merely needed to issue commands through the system, directly conveying his will.
Especially since one, or perhaps half, of them was an old acquaintance.
"What's going on with Yue Die?!" Min Tian Ci, his heart ablaze with anxiety after his beloved suddenly fell unconscious, roared at Bai Mo, his eyes bloodshot.
Everything before him pointed to the white shadow, slowly "sprouting" limbs, as the culprit.
If not for needing to support the fainted Yue Die, Min Tian Ci would have truly wanted to grab the white shadow and demand an explanation.
"Interesting."
The entire sequence of events was already contained within the information carried by the flowing light.
Now, after witnessing the realization of this ingenious concept, even Bai Mo couldn't help but sigh in admiration.
He was even more fortunate that he hadn't chosen to rapidly expand his power in the short term by devouring stars, but instead had embarked on a new path: gathering collective wisdom and harvesting the fruits of thought.
Standing at the pinnacle of the world, he was qualified to choose his future direction.
Bai Mo restored his original appearance and lightly tapped Yue Die's forehead with a finger, completing their transaction.
"You!" It wasn't until he retracted his hand that Min Tian Ci, still holding Yue Die, finally voiced his protest.
The temporal perception gap between them was too vast. Bai Mo's thoughts and actions were almost always measured in milliseconds; even trivial matters were sometimes measured in microseconds.
He often completed an action or turned a thought in less than a millisecond. In Bai Mo's eyes, everything was simply too slow, too agonizingly slow.
Only by relying on an implanted system that directly read mental fluctuations could he communicate normally with ordinary people; otherwise, he would have to endure what he considered to be extremely severe delays.
It wasn't until Five Tiers and above that reaction speeds could truly keep pace with his rhythm, without him needing to deliberately accommodate. Thus, later on, unless absolutely necessary, Bai Mo couldn't even be bothered to speak to most people.
On such a scale, Min Tian Ci, whose neural reaction speed was several times faster than an ordinary person's and whose shortest reaction time hovered around twenty milliseconds, could only catch a fleeting glimpse of an afterimage.
With a touch as light as a dragonfly skimming water, Yue Die, who had been tightly closing her eyes, slowly began to open them. Yet, her unusually cold gaze foreshadowed that matters were not so simple.
"Thank you," said Yue Die, now completely different from before, as she rose from Min Tian Ci's embrace and softly thanked Bai Mo.
Then, she looked at the man before her with a complex gaze. The icy aura constantly emanating from her right hand caused the surrounding temperature to involuntarily drop by several degrees.
"Yue Die, you're awake?" At first, Min Tian Ci was delighted and moved to embrace her, but he immediately noticed something was amiss. "No, you're not her. Her eyes couldn't possibly look like this!"
After hundreds of days and nights spent together, Min Tian Ci could naturally detect subtleties in her slightest expressions.
"What have you done to her! Give me back Yue Die!" He stood for a moment, then uttered the words almost tearfully, before suddenly throwing caution to the wind and collapsing onto the ground, finally abandoning himself to beating the earth.
Min Tian Ci once again felt his powerlessness. The man and woman standing before him had even stripped him of the courage to raise a fist.
The gap in life levels was so vast that if the opponents merely became slightly serious and released their aura, any thought of opposing them would be impossible to realize. For the body would instinctively resist accepting such a suicidal command.
Thus, no matter how much hatred or sorrow he felt, until his will grew strong enough to regain control of his body, he couldn't even make a single gesture to express hostility, beyond his resentful gaze and the tears in his eyes.
"Five years, then you are free to go as you please." Bai Mo ignored Min Tian Ci, who was sobbing with his head in his hands nearby, and simply stated his condition to the awakened Yue Die.
Or perhaps it would be more fitting to call her Ye Zi, for in essence, Ye Zi and Yue Die were two sides of the same person.
When she reached a bottleneck in her Spirit Hub System cultivation, she began to concurrently cultivate the Martial Path, and thus came into contact with the unique cultivation method known as the "Hua Gai Splitting Soul Scripture."
At that time, she had already left the Huaxia Federation, and thus did not participate in the transaction with Bai Mo, nor did she use the method he provided to break through to the Six Tiers.
To forge her own path, she integrated the "Hua Gai Splitting Soul Scripture" from her memories with the Ten Thousand Phantoms Sutra, adding her own insights, and finally created a set of cultivation techniques that could assist her in stepping into the Six Tiers—the Purple Qi Transformation.
The general principle was that she utilized the Splitting Soul Scripture to create multiple sub-personalities, then allowed these sub-personalities to each cultivate to the peak of the Five Tiers, before finally merging them into one. This qualitative transformation, driven by quantitative accumulation, allowed her to smoothly enter the Six Tiers.
Her original plan was proceeding normally, but after Ye Zi left the center of power and decided to travel the world alone, those who had previously been severely punished by her and harbored resentment saw an opportunity.
They decided to unite, bribing Ye Zi's acquaintances with massive sums of money to create a meticulously designed trap, preparing to besiege and kill her.
Although she ultimately managed to kill all those involved in plotting against her due to her formidable strength, she herself, due to a moment of carelessness after being injured, had her main consciousness jointly sealed by her internal sub-personalities in the deepest part of her sea of consciousness.
In the instant before being sealed, she erupted with all the power her main consciousness could muster.
Mental Storm, Ye Zi's long-hidden second ability, played a crucial role in this battle for the body. Through an overdrafting use, it pulverized all the rebellious sub-personalities into a mush.
But ultimately, using this move on herself was akin to killing eight hundred enemies while incurring eight thousand losses upon oneself. So, while turning the sub-personalities into mush, her main personality was also forced into a deep slumber.
Her uncontrolled body fell into a river, and with the current, eventually drifted into the Secret Realm Forest, where she first encountered Min Tian Ci.
As for Yue Die herself, she was actually a new personality born from the merged sub-personalities after they lost almost all their memories.
The intuitive ability she relied upon was, in truth, merely a limited mobilization of Ye Zi's own formidable perception as a peak Five Tiers expert.
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