The secret realm closed a few days ago and all the remaining survivors were transported out.
The small number of survivors made everyone despair, and the various sects' elders began questioning everyone about what happened inside. To add insult to injury, the few survivors did not gain more than a few common herbs and ores, making this trip the greatest loss in the history of all present sects.
I just told them the same story the others told them about hiding underground from the immortal shadows. All elders swore to investigate the disaster further, the loss of so many disciples was hard to swallow but the death of the geniuses who they had spent so many resources on was unacceptable.
The trip back to the sect was quiet and the aura of dread could be seen above us. The remaining survivors would be hunted by this disaster for the rest of their lives, some swore never to enter a secret realm again, no matter how much wealth it had, and some, like Lin Fan, became for determined to get stronger so that they didn't have to endure the shame of running for their lives again.
The aura of doom every survivor was carrying with him was quickly overshadowed by the lively aura of the sect, making everyone go back to their previous lives like nothing ever happened.
After settling back in, I went back to cultivation to break through to the Spiritual Sea realm. With the massive pile of resources, I now have, this should be a piece of cake. I orderly laid out the giant pile around me and started floating in the middle, even if cultivators seemed to be immune to hemorrhoids, I still didn't want to sit on the hard ground for years at a time.
While the True Sun Fire was busy melting all treasures into pure essence for me to absorb, I ate the strange tomato and started opening my spiritual sea, I had some big plans for it.
The scorching stream of energy from the lava tomato brute forced the sea open, creating a puddle of lava in my mind. Before I could start to absorb the pure essence around me, two other essences appeared from inside my body, the golden liquid and the sword.
The molten skeleton just mixed with the magma, giving it a golden glow and drastically increasing its viscosity and heat. The sword on the other hand decided to make itself at home inside my spiritual sea like it owned this place. It had a weak consciousness that was a bit too arrogant but it wouldn't last long, once I started feeding my sea with NE, it and everything connected to it would be corrupted by it.
While the sword was just lying in my sea, enjoying living there for free while being nurtured by it, I started ingesting the blood of the ancient prisoner. All the energies and traits of the spiritual seas of the countless ancient beasts he had in his blood started to enter my inner sea.
The sea increased by thousands of times, turning into a large lake, and the countless different natures and remnant wills started clashing against each other, causing my sea to shake violently. This wouldn't do, controlling the spiritual sea when there were so many remnant wills would be a pain in the ass.
If I wanted this recipe to work, it was time to add NE to the list of ingredients but I needed to do it slowly. The first wisp appeared above the sea, insignificant in size compared to the entire spiritual sea but its effect was immediate.
The moment it fell into the red-golden liquid, all the will suddenly stopped fighting each other and started attacking the intruder. These wills wanted to take over my mind and the new wisp of another, insurmountable will was a massive threat to their goal.
It didn't take long before the wisp of NE started to slowly corrupt and absorb the remnant wills of dragons, phoenixes, nine-tailed foxes, ancient giants, and more, slowly turning the red-golden sea purple.
The takeover was slow and the resistance strong, the previously mentioned remnant wills were not from the mortal or even immortal realm, they all originated from beings nearing the end of the god realm. With the combined might of thousands of gods, the radius of corruption a single wisp could do was small.
The previously violent red-golden sea was now peaceful except for the whirlpool forming around a purple spot with a radius of 10m. The wills were ancient and powerful and they refused to go down with a fight but their struggle was meant to be futile.
The wills of thousands of gods were just barely able to content a hair strand worth of my NE. Since my inner sea had already started to change, it was time to open the floodgates and let the rest in.
While the ancient wills were trying their best to regain their dominance while also being careful not to be absorbed by the strange energy, the sky suddenly started turning dark and it started raining purple drops. The remnant wills didn't even have time to scream or blow themselves up before the drops hit them and swallowed them.
I watched as my sea was expanding rapidly, the reason why I didn't just start by introducing my entire NE was because my NE and spiritual sea were like two different entities, if I just smashed my infinitely strong energy into my newly born spiritual sea, it would just shatter and be replaced and I didn't want that.
Once my spiritual sea had a bit of my NE, it became a lot more welcoming to my NE. The more my spiritual sea grew, the more energy I could flood it with without collapsing it. The reason why I was so careful with my NE was not because it had all the energies in existence inside but because I wanted to use it to create new forms of energy.
Just because I already reached the absolute peak it didn't mean I would ever stop growing and perfecting myself. Cultivators refined their Qi, Immortal Qi, and Divine Qi but my NE already had all these energies, I wanted to know what would happen if I refined my NE just like they did to their Qi, what would it turn into?
I watched my spiritual sea expand infinitely with no sense of time, I had been cut off from the outside of my mind for too long and it would remain that way for much longer. Creating the Spiritual Sea was all there was to the 8th realm, it would give the cultivator the Divine Sense, and both their radius would expand with their cultivation but I was just starting.
My spiritual sea was now infinite, far surpassing even those Transcendents, and so was my Divine Sense yet my plan for my Spiritual Sea was just beginning.