Stealing Essence Blood

Having harvested quite a bit, Song Wen returned to his cave dwelling in high spirits.

Yet before he could even tally the night's gains, he realized his purse had once again grown light, with fewer than thirty Spirit Stones remaining.

On his way back, he had spent another 2 Spirit Stones to buy blank talisman paper for drawing Low Grade, Tier-1 talismans.

His talent for talisman crafting was far inferior to his aptitude for learning techniques. He had already used up all the talisman paper taken from Ji Yin without managing to produce a single Fireball Talisman.

Even so, he had no intention of giving up. Successfully drawing talismans would not only bolster his fighting power, but selling them could yield a substantial profit.

He had learned at the market that even Low Grade, Tier-1 talismans like the Fireball Talisman had high demand, selling at two for 1 Spirit Stone. Meanwhile, 2 Spirit Stones had bought him fifty sheets of blank paper.

Before the Spirit Stones from selling the furnace vessel could even warm in his hands, they were practically gone. With only ten Corpse Blood Pills left, his current cultivation speed meant they would last ten days at most. To raise his cultivation as quickly as possible, he needed a steady supply of Corpse Blood Pills or other auxiliary pills.

"Sigh... I need to find a way to earn more Spirit Stones."

Song Wen sighed to himself and laid out the night's spoils.

First was the manual he was still unsure he could cultivate-the Divine Restriction Technique.

When he skimmed the opening portion of the first layer earlier, he felt this technique might help him refine the souls he swallowed.

Up until now, whenever he devoured someone's soul, he could only digest and absorb it at a crawl. Ever since killing the little beggar, he had noticed a slight increase in his spiritual strength, making it somewhat superior to others at the same realm.

However, that growth remained sharply limited. Most of the souls he swallowed were never fully digested; they simply dissipated into nothing.

Furthermore, the Corpse Dismemberment Cave was packed with residual soul fragments. Absorbing so many without being able to refine them in time kept his Sea of Consciousness bloated and saturated, severely hindering his ability to swallow more.

If this manual could solve that problem, it would immensely strengthen his soul and allow him to push his Gold Finger to its absolute limit.

He peeled back the paper covering the text. Just as expected, the first layer of the Divine Restriction Technique contained only three hundred-odd characters.

The paper recording the technique was heavy and ancient. Its authenticity seemed guaranteed, hardly looking like a cheap forgery; it was almost certainly a remnant from the downfall of the Ten Thousand Souls Sect.

Song Wen swept through the text in moments.

He then sat down and attempted to cultivate it, using the Divine Restriction Technique to refine the soul fragments stored within his Sea of Consciousness.

To his pleasant surprise, cultivating the technique proved exceptionally smooth. It came as easily to him as eating or drinking-he mastered it the moment he tried.

The soul fragments cluttering his Sea of Consciousness were rapidly consumed, driving a swift surge in his soul strength and spiritual power.

Song Wen speculated that the missing introductory section of the manual likely detailed how to swallow another's soul and reduce it into fragments within the Sea of Consciousness.

While his guess carried a grain of logic, it was vastly divorced from the reality of the technique.

He had profoundly underestimated his body's innate power to devour souls. According to the actual records of the Divine Restriction Technique, splitting and consuming another person's soul required immense resources to set up a specialized formation. Only after the soul was ground into fragments could it be slowly absorbed into the Sea of Consciousness, and even then, the refining process was agonizingly slow.

After all, the Sea of Consciousness was the most delicate and obscure part of the human body. Even in the cultivation world, none could truly claim to comprehend all the mysteries of the soul.

It was powerful, yet fragile beyond measure. A single misstep could leave the soul fragmented, or shatter it entirely.

Thus, any technique directly targeting the Sea of Consciousness demanded utmost caution.

In the old Ten Thousand Souls Sect, only a select few born with unusually resilient souls and stable Seas of Consciousness dared to cultivate the Divine Restriction Technique. Every year, countless self-proclaimed geniuses ended up with crippled souls and shattered minds, reduced to mindless fools for forcing the technique.

Having cultivated the Divine Restriction Technique throughout the night, Song Wen consumed more than half of the soul fragments stored in his Sea of Consciousness, yielding a remarkable leap in his spiritual strength.

Despite staying up all night without a wink of sleep, he woke up feeling thoroughly refreshed, without a shred of fatigue.

After eating breakfast at the hall, he arrived early at the Corpse Dismemberment Cave.

As he flayed the bodies that day, he began consciously absorbing the stray soul fragments lingering on the corpses and around the cave.

At the same time, he quietly increased the amount of essence blood he drew from the remains.

His nerves stayed taut all day, terrified that someone might catch him stealing essence blood.

Fortunately, after dismemberment was complete, he only needed to submit three parts: skin and flesh, bones, and internal organs. The blood within the corpses simply flowed along the drainage grooves on the tables straight into the large blood pool deeper in the cave.

His covert siphoning of essence blood went completely unnoticed.

Yet when his workday ended and he prepared to hand over the remains to Yuan Cheng, Song Wen suddenly realized he had swallowed far too much essence blood. His blood vitality was churning violently, on the verge of bursting from his frame.

To keep Yuan Cheng from noticing anything amiss, Song Wen desperately circulated the Corpse King Blood Refinement Technique to quell the surging blood vitality.

A quarter of an hour passed before the blood vitality inside him finally settled down. As usual, he walked toward Yuan Cheng's cave as the last person in line.

Yuan Cheng took the four Storage Bags Song Wen handed over and asked offhandedly,

"What happened back there? I saw you standing still by your table for a full quarter of an hour."

Song Wen's heart skipped a beat-he hadn't expected Yuan Cheng to notice his pause. Though nervous underneath, his face remained calm, adopting a downcast, troubled expression.

"I am not sure either. Just now, my blood vitality suddenly churned and my spiritual energy ran wild. It took me a long time to force it back under control."

The symptoms he described were precisely the early signs of contamination from the turbid corpse Qi in the cave.

Exhibiting such symptoms meant a corpse dismemberer was not far from suffering Qi Deviation.

Yuan Cheng shot him a look of quiet pity and said nothing more, merely waving his hand to dismiss him.

Song Wen carefully suppressed the brimming blood vitality inside him, walking with extreme caution back to his cave dwelling.

The moment he stepped inside, he sat cross-legged and reversed his blood vitality to force out the excess.

Gradually, a thick, blood-red mist enveloped his body, slowly filling the entire cave dwelling with dense blood energy.

A single drop of crimson essence blood condensed at the center of his forehead, grew to the size of a bean, and dripped into a pre-prepared jade bottle.

One drop, two drops, three drops...

Pure drops of essence blood rained steadily into the bottle.

It took more than a hundred drops of essence blood-filling the jade bottle nearly halfway-before Song Wen finally stopped forcing it out.

Any outsider witnessing this would be paralyzed with disbelief. The amount of essence blood Song Wen had just forced out was nearly equivalent to the total sum of a late-stage Qi Refining cultivator's vitality.

With Song Wen's minor cultivation at the second layer of Qi Refining, even ten lives wouldn't yield such a mountain of essence blood.

Yet even after expelling over a hundred drops, Song Wen's body remained brimming with rich blood vitality, showing not the slightest hint of weakness or depletion.

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