Translator: Cinder Translations
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The harvest was quite abundant for Song Wen, and his spirits were high as he returned to his own cave.
Before he could even count last night's harvest, Song Wen found himself embarrassingly short on funds. There were less than thirty spirit stones left in his pouch.
On his way back, he spent another 2 spirit stones to purchase blank talisman papers used for drawing first-level inferior talismans.
Song Wen's talent in drawing talismans was clearly inferior to his talent in spells. Despite obtaining all the talisman papers from Extreme Yin, he failed to successfully draw a single fireball talisman.
However, he was not about to give up. Successfully drawing talismans could not only enhance his combat abilities but also be sold for a substantial profit.
He learned in the market that even low-level inferior talismans like fireball talismans had a market demand, selling for 1 spirit stone per two talismans. Yet, he had spent 2 spirit stones and acquired 50 blank talisman papers.
The spirit stones from selling the furnace cauldron had not been saved, leaving him nearly broke. With only ten corpse blood pills in hand, at his current cultivation speed, they would barely suffice for ten days of cultivation. To expedite his cultivation progress, he needed to continue purchasing corpse blood pills or other auxiliary elixirs.
"Sigh! I need to figure out a way to get more spirit stones."
Song Wen thought to himself as he reviewed last night's harvest.
The first item he took out was something he was unsure about being able to cultivate—'Forbidden Divine Art'.
When he first read the initial part of the cultivation method, he felt that this technique might assist him in refining and devouring souls.
Ever since Song Wen started devouring souls, he could only slowly absorb them. From killing beggars to now, Song Wen realized that his spiritual power had increased somewhat, surpassing others at the same level.
However, the increase in spiritual power was very limited. After he devoured most souls, they did not completely disappear; most of them slowly dissipated and were wasted.
Moreover, there were many residual soul fragments in the Demonic Cave. After absorbing a large number of these fragments, his spiritual sea remained saturated for a long time, greatly affecting his ability to devour more soul fragments.
If this technique could help him solve this problem, it would undoubtedly greatly enhance Song Wen's soul strength and maximize his potential.
Uncovering the parchment of the hidden technique, as expected, the first layer of the Forbidden Divine Art consisted of just over three hundred characters.
The ancient and heavy parchment recording the technique suggested its authenticity, unlike something randomly fabricated. It was highly likely that this technique was left behind after the destruction of the Ten Thousand Souls Sect.
Song Wen quickly finished reading the content.
Afterwards, he began to try and cultivate it, using the Forbidden Divine Art to refine the soul fragments he had devoured into his spiritual sea.
To Song Wen's surprise, cultivating the Forbidden Divine Art was unusually easy. It was as easy as drinking water or eating food, and he learned it in no time.
His spiritual sea was rapidly consuming the soul fragments, and his soul strength and spiritual power were quickly increasing.
Song Wen speculated that the lack of detailed content in the outline of the Forbidden Divine Art should be related to how to devour other people's souls and store them as soul fragments in the spiritual sea.
Song Wen's guess seemed to make sense, but the true content of the Forbidden Divine Art was far from this.
He greatly underestimated the effectiveness of devouring other people's souls with his own body. According to the real records of the Forbidden Divine Art, to decompose and devour other people's souls required a lot of resources and the construction of arrays to slowly absorb the soul fragments into the spiritual sea. Moreover, devouring soul fragments was extremely slow.
After all, the spiritual sea was the most mysterious part of the human body. Even in the world of cultivation, no one could peek into the secrets of the soul and spiritual sea.
The human spiritual sea was mysterious, powerful, and fragile. A slight mistake could lead to a fragmented soul or even the loss of one's soul.
Therefore, for techniques like the Forbidden Divine Art that directly involved the spiritual sea, extreme caution was necessary.
In the original Ten Thousand Souls Sect, only a few with naturally stable spiritual seas and strong souls could possibly succeed in cultivating it. Every year in the Ten Thousand Souls Sect, many self-proclaimed geniuses, eager to cultivate the Forbidden Divine Art, ended up with damaged spiritual seas, fragmented souls, and even losing their sanity."
Having cultivated "Forbidden Divine Art" throughout the night, Song Wen consumed nearly half of the soul fragments stored in his sea of consciousness. This advancement greatly boosted his spiritual power.
Even though Song Wen had been cultivating all night without sleep, he still felt refreshed and not the least bit tired.
After breakfast at the dining hall, Song Wen promptly arrived at the Corpse Dissecting Cave.
While Dissecting corpses, he consciously absorbed the residual soul fragments from the corpses and increased his consumption of the corpses' essence and blood.
Throughout the day, Song Wen remained tense, fearing someone might discover his act of stealing the corpses' essence and blood.
Fortunately, after Dissecting the corpses, he only needed to turn in the skin, bones, and organs, while the blood from the corpses flowed into the large blood pool in the Corpse Dissecting Cave through the drainage channels of the corpse Dissecting platform.
Song Wen's covert consumption of some of the essence and blood went unnoticed.
When Song Wen finished his day's work and prepared to turn in the body parts to Yuan Cheng, he suddenly realized he had consumed an excessive amount of blood essence that day. His body surged with blood energy, and he found it difficult to control the overwhelming blood energy within him.
To avoid raising suspicions from Yuan Cheng, Song Wen had to fully operate the "Corpse King's Blood Refining Technique" to calm down the surging blood energy as much as possible.
After a quarter of an hour, Song Wen's blood energy was mostly stabilized. Just like before, he was the last to leave Yuan Cheng's cave.
Yuan Cheng took the four storage bags handed over by Song Wen and subconsciously asked, "What happened just now? I saw you standing by the corpse Dissecting platform for a full quarter of an hour."
Song Wen hadn't expected Yuan Cheng to notice his efforts to calm his blood energy by the corpse Dissecting platform. Although he felt a bit nervous, his face showed no panic. Instead, he said with a somewhat depressed expression, "I don't know what happened either. I just felt my qi and blood surging uncontrollably, and it took a lot of effort to stabilize my spiritual power."
The symptoms Song Wen described were often experienced by many corpse dissectors in the early stages of being contaminated by the impure qi in the corpse Dissecting cave.
Experiencing these symptoms meant that the person was not far from being possessed.
Yuan Cheng glanced at Song Wen with pity and said nothing more, waving his hand to indicate that Song Wen could leave.
While Song Wen made his way back to his cave, carefully controlling the excessive blood energy within him, he immediately sat down cross-legged upon returning. At the same time, he reversed his blood energy and forced out the excess blood energy from his body.
Gradually, Song Wen's entire body was enveloped in a crimson mist of blood energy. Slowly, the entire cave was filled with a thick, rich blood energy.
A drop of bean-sized crimson essence began to condense on Song Wen's forehead, then dripped down into a jade bottle prepared in advance.
One drop, two drops, three drops...
Drop after drop of pure essence blood fell into the jade bottle.
After more than a hundred drops of essence blood had filled the bottle halfway, Song Wen stopped forcing out the essence blood.
If an outsider were to witness this scene, they would surely be astonished and disbelieving. The amount of essence blood Song Wen forced out was equivalent to the total blood essence of a late-stage Qi Refinement cultivator.
With Song Wen's cultivation at the second level of Qi Refinement, it would be impossible for him to condense so much essence blood even in ten lifetimes.
However, even after forcing out over a hundred drops of essence blood, Song Wen's body remained full of qi and blood, showing no signs of weakness from excessive blood energy consumption.
(End of the Chapter)