Chapter 4: Scratching The Surface

Having just finished reading the letter I am at a lose for words.

Something never felt quite right when I was around my Grand Uncle and that felling has only gotten stronger. Once he found out the amount of soul force I had at age 9 he started to train me in demon spirit cultivation. He gave me an art that requires you to train both the mind and body to maintain a balance between them to make the flow of soul force accelerate, therefore allowing me to cultivate faster and improve my chances to survive a demon beast attack.

Now that art was a big shock to younger me as, my grandpa was a 5-star Bronze rank demon spiritualist and he had once been at 3-star Silver rank in his youth but that is a story for another day, I thought I had seen truly powerful people but they all felt like ants compared to my Grand Uncle. From my memories he must have been a Black Gold rank demon spiritualist but the shocks kept coming. As I go through the my memories the glaring issues I find.

This situation I find my self in is difficult.

On one hand he could be from the Nether realm and is apart of one of the families there and on the other he could be a Dark Guild member. Now I don't have evidence to prove either one but I could gain various advantages from either of his possible allegiance's and have various plan that include joining his preferred ally or selling him out to the guard. But as I think about these thoughts I come to the conclusion that I should just focus on becoming stronger then deal with all this temporarily unnecessary mess.

I decide to take out one of the soul crystals and inject my soul force into the shard so as to find out how much soul force I have since in my memory I should only have 43 soul force. After a minute I look into the crystal and see my soul force is at 67.

'Why is it so high... two souls right. So 'our' souls mixed and now it's 50% larger. No that's not right either.'

I meditate for a moment and look into my soul realm as my Grandfather taught me when I was younger. There is a strangeness to the soul realm and I can't figure it out. Seconds turn to minutes and soon 30 minutes has gone by before I find the anomaly.

I find a tiny soul realm, at most the size of a grain of rice, orbiting my own. the two soul realms soul force flows in and out, between and back again through the realms. This back and forth flow between the realms increased the amount of soul force over all. The small soul sea was increasing at a rapid pace until it seemed to be around the size of a tennis ball while my soul realm has decreased to the size of a basket ball.

I watch these 2 soul realms, 'floating' in the pitch black void, swirling like a vortex, drawing the soul force into the core of both soul realms. I stop meditating at use the soul crystal and it was 69.

I spend a few minutes trying to 'cut' the connection to the smaller soul realm and It works eventually. Trying the crystal and it's 53. I re-establish the link to the smaller soul realm and cut off the connection to my larger one and the count is16. So they did merge partially but not all the way so now I have two separate soul realms I guess.

Next I take out the pen of Harmony or whatever it was called. Still in awe of what I just experienced and imagining all the possible effects 2 soul realms might have. Going off of the knowledge in my memories I can put a demon spirit into the pen and use it's soul force instead of my own so as to allow me to create scrolls even though I don't have enough soul force.

I take the already full pen, an unused scroll and roll it out over the table. I summon a bronze rank inscription book, hidden behind the snow wind empire's language, I quickly skim through the book until page 14 giving me the synopsis of the Crimson Flare inscription.

Having spent 5 minutes reading about the inscription and the step by step process on how to make said inscription. I use this moment to test my growing theory on how I could possibly use perfect memory to create the inscription and if the 'muscle memory' of old Ye Xing was still there.

...

30 minutes later...

...

After half an hour of trial and error Ye Xing managed to make the Crimson Flare inscription. The inscription is perfect with not a single imperfection to be seen or line out of order. Ye Xing makes 5 more scrolls back to back without fail and once pleased with the scrolls he tucks them under his arm, reaches out for the 13 wasted scrolls, then walks outside.

Ye Xing looks at the sky and realizes it's getting very late as the sun is almost beyond the horizon.

Ye Xing places the wasted scrolls in a haphazard pile some 5 meters from his dorm room, walks back to the dorm and turns to face the scrolls. Taking one of the Crimson flare scrolls from a neat pile next to him. He unfurls the scroll and three fist sized fireballs fly out and explode. The power behind the blast sends stones and dirt flying everywhere.

Thankfully nobody was in the dorms or if anyone was they aren't any more. The pit is 30cm deep and 200cm in diameter. Having just realised the strength of his Grand Uncles 'basic' inscription Ye Xing stands in horror and excitement at the idea of the 'advanced' Black Gold rank books in the ring.

Ye Xing quickly places the 5 remaining scrolls in his spatial ring and runs as fast as he can to the training ground established by Lord Ye Mo and the school principle. He arrives to a Lu Piao in battle armour and a Nie Lie being Nie Lie and overly responding to his friends actions. Both Ye Xing and the narrator will forever be confused by the way Nie Lie is the way he is.

I call out to the three and they wave back at me. After walking up to them Nie Lie tells us the reason for his plan and what this part entails.

"With our current strength we will hunt the Horned Sheep here in the training grounds. Although the Horned Sheep is a herbivore, don't look down on it as it's still a demon beast, so we must be careful. But first we must go to the guard station to prove our student identities before we can enter."

We check in on the guard and get permission to go hunting in the training grounds. We walk in silence for about 10 or so minutes until we are stopped by Nie Lie so we can put the plan into action.

"What is the plan Nie Lie?" asked Lu Piao after failing to hold in his curiosity.

"Well first is we will set up a hunting zone. Then we dig some traps and pit falls to stop the beast. After the traps are done we will need bait" replied Nie Lie.

His face says he is enjoying Lu Piao's face at the prospect of manual labour and that someone needs to be bait. He puts up a noble resistance but joins us in digging the pits and traps. When that was done and we need to choose who was going to be bait there was silence. My 'enhanced' body made such quick work of the digging that I wanted to test out how fast I could run, so I volunteered and that was that. I realize that I shouldn't be the bait and that it's dangerous but that's for a future Ye Xing to worry about.