CHAPTER 5 - Spirit Realm

Marven returned to the sect premises. Harel was watching over Gabrias just as he had told her to.

He decided to leave Neave to his own devices. Neave would be fine. Well, for now at least.

Marven felt completely lost as to what to do with Neave. A big part of him felt pride that Neave had become such a realm-shattering prodigy. But the other part of him felt ashamed.

Ashamed of himself for thinking like that. Ashamed for allowing all of this to happen.

“What do I do with that boy…?”

***

Once Marven had left Neave finally allowed himself to properly go monster hunting. The old man was a massive distraction.

Currently, Neave was deep within the cave and fighting silver-rank monsters on average. He had encountered something of a problem. While Neave could load his body up with near-unlimited life force, there seemed to be a soft cap of sorts. It was true that life force seeped out of his body slowly, but this sped up drastically the higher his reserves got.

Currently, he had even more life force within his body than he had back when he was being chased by the gold path cultivators.

A lot more life force than he had back then.

Neave pulled out of the cave and decided it was time to go do some experimenting. He found a secluded part of the forest and felt that there were no monsters nearby. Neave focused on his nervous system and probed around a bit.

That proved to be an unwise idea. Severe hallucinations, intense headaches, and extreme fear were among the lesser problems he caused for himself. Among the bigger ones, he lost eyesight within the entire left side of his vision and he couldn’t quite remember who he was.

Giving it a bit of time he regained himself and his brain recovered. Rather than do the wise thing and stop, Neave continued probing around. Eventually, everything went black and he lost consciousness.

ÞÞÞÞÞÞ

Neave found himself within the spooky realm again. Not even a second later, he was forced to dodge as a horde of the altered demons rushed at him.

“What the fuck is this shit!”

Are these things multiplying!?

Neave sped up his perception and flushed his entire body with life force. True strike after true strike proved to be rather ineffective, as he didn’t have the necessary time to execute a slow strike. Neave fueled his strikes with excessive life force and just barely got a few decent strikes in before getting overwhelmed and eaten alive.

ReÞÞÞÞÞ

Neave was back to reality again. Not much time had passed. It had maybe been a few minutes at most. His experiment was partially a success, but there was another thing he wanted to figure out.

So he made himself pass out again.

ÞÞÞÞÞ

Neave appeared within the realm again. And this time, he was truly surrounded. There were countless demons around him, throwing themselves over one another as they rushed to devour him. Neave used a movement technique and ran past the mass of bodies.

“Are these fucking things multiplying every time I die!?”

If that was the case, then he was in for a lot of trouble. Neave had no idea what the consequences of dying too many times within this realm could be, and he didn’t want to find out.

He flooded his body with life force again, this time using it to accelerate far above his usual, already monstrous speed.

Even this didn’t seem to be enough. These creatures were truly fast beyond belief. Neave was rapidly running out of qi and he didn’t want to find himself in a situation where he had to run from these things without any qi.

Neave used a movement technique and changed directions. He flew right into one of the abysses scattering the realm. As he fell deeper and deeper he dodged the endless metallic spikes. Soon enough, the demons were falling right after him. Some of them were suffering a bit of damage from the spikes, but not nearly enough to slow them down.

Neave flew through the air and he focused. Suddenly, he blinked and slammed hard into the side of the abyss.

No luck there.

Then he did it again. Several times Neave smacked right into the wall of the pit. He was losing both precious time and wasting qi. But he didn’t stop. Eventually, he spun in the air and landed on one of the spikes.

Neave phased through the wall and appeared within a cave.

“Hehehe, eat my shit, losers!”

Neave didn’t want to tempt fate by waiting for them to also find a way inside the cave. He ran as deep as he possibly could into the cave. Eventually, he reached a dead end. Neave took a deep breath, ran at the wall, and appeared on the other side.

“Yes!”

He was inside another cave. After exploring around for a bit, he found that indeed, there was no entrance.

Neave cackled to himself. The first time he had ended up inside this realm, he noticed something strange. He didn’t wake up the moment he died in here. This could mean a few things. Either the flow of time was skewed somehow or…

This place worked the same way the loop did. This was to say that no matter how long he spent inside here, that wouldn’t reflect on the outside world.

He didn’t know exactly what this realm was. His scholarly mind had connected a few dots, however. This probably had something to do with those statues he had found within the loop.

Neave had no interest in that whatsoever, there were more important things to be done. First of all, this realm effectively meant that he had yet another place where he could experiment without consequences!

The hordes of immensely powerful demons were a slight inconvenience, yes, but that could be dealt with once he gained more power.

Now that he found himself in a place like this, Neave was truly overwhelmed with choice paralysis. There were simply so many things that he wanted to experiment with.

True strikes, life force, weaponsmithing, spirit powers, qi techniques!

And so, so much more.

Back when he was in the loop, he didn’t hesitate to experiment on one thing at a time since he truly had as much time as he wanted. This place wasn’t quite the same. There was a limit here. Even if he could turn an instant into weeks, he only slept so often. Yes, he could just knock himself out, but what about the creatures?

Perhaps if he died a few more times, he would find himself so utterly surrounded by those monstrosities that he couldn’t move an inch from the very instant he stepped into here. Sure, perhaps all that meant was that he would lose the precious opportunity to experiment.

But what if there was more to it?

He couldn’t shake off this nasty feeling that something was wrong. What was this place anyway?

Neave remembered that dream he had once, back in the mansion.

Was that just a dream?

It felt like a dream. The realm he found himself in within that dream was completely identical to the one he found himself in right now. And this place most certainly didn’t feel like a dream.

Perhaps he should visit the underground structure first?

His heart sped up at that thought. He didn’t know why, but a deep fear overwhelmed him at the thought of doing that.

What would he find if he went there?

He put that off for now.

When he finally decided that he wanted to do that, he would come prepared.

For now, it was time for him to choose what he wanted to experiment with. One of the things he wanted to do the most was to figure out a way to progress in his cultivation. Qi techniques were of limited use to him due to his painfully low qi reserves. He could recover qi by eating either living or just-dead monsters, but that was only a viable option when he was fighting to kill.

In situations like a duel, the qi he had in his reserves was all that he had available to him. Once that ran out, that was it. He could technically just repeatedly use qi restoration treasures, but that was intense for his spirit. Restoring his qi once, twice, or even thrice was fine, but further than that the damage to his spirit grew exponentially.

There were many ways to circumvent this problem. Qi restoration treasures coupled with spirit healing treasures would be expensive, but it wasn’t out of the question. Perhaps he could use a spirit power that could achieve a similar effect to using one of his movement techniques. He could also just get more powerful so that he didn’t need to rely on movement techniques so much in the first place.

But the qi techniques…

Neave craved the wayfarer’s authority. He wanted to make qi techniques and wow the world with his impossible talent. He quite enjoyed his father’s reaction when he used that technique. People reacting with pure shock when he pulled off something mind-bendingly impressive was addicting.

For now, he decided to take a step back and try to at least somewhat objectively decide on what he wanted to do. He had a few criteria that his next experiment needed to fulfill.

Criteria one!

Whatever he experimented with needed to be something that he couldn’t do outside.

Criteria two!

It had to be something that would allow him to gain a significant boost to power before he returned here next time.

And finally, criteria three!

It had to be something that could provide satisfactory results immediately.

After combing through all of his ideas, one stood out as best for now.

Evolving his spirit powers.

They were very unpredictable when evolved, which was why he hesitated to evolve them haphazardly. It wasn’t a matter of danger per se, but it wasn’t possible to undo an evolution once it was forced.

Neave could technically remove spirit powers, but with his current method, it was an all-or-nothing approach. Meaning that if he wanted to get rid of a spirit power, he had to remove all of them. Judging by what happened to Gabrias, removing spirit powers wasn’t safe either.

This place was extremely useful for the opportunity to try out different spirit power evolutions and make the best choice he could once he was out.

And there was one more thing he wanted to try while inside.

Neave wanted to just pick a power at random and evolve all of them one by one, but it was extremely unlikely that he would be able to survive through the evolutions at some point, so he had to prioritize those he felt could have the most potential.

Neave started with the most logical choice. Troll muscle. Once he initiated the spirit trial, he was second-guessing his choices. The troll had evolved into a, well, he didn’t have a name for this creature. It was the same as the troll, but much less fat and a whole load more muscular.

After fighting through the spirit trial, Neave came the absolute closest he had ever come to losing a trial. This evolved troll was a menace. Its strength was just insane and its regeneration was in an entirely different realm of holy crapness. Neave managed to fight through the spirit trial, but just as he was about to finish off the final creature, the immobilized toxic abominid, he paused. He remembered the experiment he wanted to conduct.

Neave stepped back. He summoned life force into his hand. Or at least he tried to, but there was nothing there. He tried manifesting qi as well, but it just felt locked to the inside of his body.

He sighed. Did that mean that generating spirit within the spirit realm was a no-go? However, Neave didn’t quite give up. It wasn’t strictly necessary to combine the forces inside the spirit realm to get them there.

Neave could fix the manifestation of his spirit by loading his spirit up with life force. Inside of this realm, what he had probably wasn’t ‘real’ qi and life force, but rather some sort of spiritual construct equivalent to these energies. It wasn’t like using qi inside this realm drained his real qi reserves outside.

This meant that he had to inject his actual life force as well as his qi into his spirit somehow.

Neave just tried the first thing that came to his mind, he did the same thing as when he pushed life force into his spirit, but he joined that together with qi in the ratio needed to make crystallized qi.

Immediately, the entire realm around him began cracking and he screamed.

“Aaah, what the fuck is that!”

He immediately fixed the damage to his spirit and stopped doing that. That was a fucking terrible idea. What about liquid spirit, however? He tried that next and it just didn’t work. There was no pain this time luckily, but also the liquid spirit seemed to have just evaporated.

Next up he used ethereal spirit. Immediately, all around him morphing masses of unusual shapes appeared out of nowhere. This wasn’t the same situation as with crystallized spirit. There was no pain or damage this time. Neave reached out to one of the floating pieces of indistinct, morphing matter.

It was hard keeping a hold of it. It was constantly shifting from one random object to another, but Neave could tell that as time went on, the objects that the shape was morphing into were getting more and more restricted. They went from entirely random stuff like chairs, paintings, stands, bricks, rocks, piles of dirt, plants, and broken bottles to less random stuff like blood, black ooze, obsidian, the sword he held in his hands, rocks that looked a whole load like the random rocks lying around his spirit realm.

Eventually, the morphing fully slowed down and the object that appeared was just another obsidian plant.

Neave repeated the same thing. This time he grabbed the morphing shape with all his strength and focused his life force into it. Then he focused the liquid spirit directly into the shape.

The feeling was extremely uncomfortable, but he pushed through it and forced his will into the object. Eventually, the object that popped out wasn’t just a random object already found within his realm.

Neave created another sword, just like the one he acquired when entering a spirit trial.

Oh, this is about to become very fun.