The World's Suppression

Deon continued tossing herbs and ores, liquids and powders, directly into the cauldron. He added countless materials, yet he did not place one single spirit into the cauldron.

Forbidden spirits were created from nothing, there were no precursor spirits. This was impossible, creating a living spirit from nothing went against the way off the world, which is why the world forbade them, and why they were rejected and extinguished as soon as they were created.

Deon's angering enlightenment was clearly assisting with his progression of the refinement. It's not like the state of enlightenment helped all spirit refinements. Actually, sometimes, it could even be a hindrance! Spirit refinement required immense concentration, it was impossible to perfect the fine details if you were in a trance like this.

Somehow though, Deon's seemingly random and careless actions continued to work. It was as if his refinement enlightenment had resonated with this specific refinement, as if the refinement of the forbidden sage refinement spirit was supposed to be conducted in this way…

Part of Deon's mind remained in the state of enlightenment, whilst part of his mind focussed on the refinement with rational intent. These two separate intents fused together, causing the mixture in the cauldron to undergo a unique transformation.

Gradually, the white mixture in the cauldron turned black, then back to white, then black again. Eventually, the two colours settled down into two halves, forming a rotating disk with two semi-circles, half black, half white. Gradually, part of the black and part of the white began to trail behind, whilst the rotation caused the straight line separating the two colours to curve into an S shape.

Indeed, the refinement mixture now resembled a yin-yang symbol!

At this moment, Deon suddenly attained the level of a triple refining spirit refiner. With this improvement in his abilities, he would now be able to refine three spirits simultaneously!

Blood God mentioned that successfully refining and using the forbidden sage refinement spirit would increase a spirit refiner's multiple refining ability by two complete orders.

Multiple refining was the practise of refining multiple spirits simultaneously, which required the spirit refiner to split their mind into multiple portion, focussing on multiple streams of actions at the same time. Deon was already able to dual refine, and now, this ability had mysteriously improved to the level of triple refining!

His triple refining ability was quite poor though, it was beyond taxing on his mind as he was only barely capable of splitting his mind into three portions. His attention when doing this would be split three ways, so his abilities would also be cut down by two thirds, though the impact on his refining ability would be much greater than a two thirds reduction.

Without even realising it, Deon had unknowingly achieved the final criteria needed to successfully refine this forbidden spirit; the refiner needed to improve their multiple refinement ability to a new level during the refinement of the spirit itself! That said, success was still extremely unlikely, even with a perfect refinement…

Deon suddenly stopped throwing in anymore resources and sat there motionlessly as the cauldron was lit from below. He didn't continue to fuel the flame, and three hours later, the flame went out on its own.

"Uh…"

Any residual effects from his brief moment of minor enlightenment finally came to an end, leaving Deon staring dumbly at the slowly rotating yin-yang symbol before him. An illusion of a giant yin-yang disk was beginning to form above the cauldron, whilst the corporeal yin-yang liquid in the cauldron was beginning to fade, losing its bright colour and turning into a lifeless grey soup.

"Haha, there's no way, right?" Deon laughed in disbelief.

For the most part, he had never actually expected to succeed in refining this spirit. Forbidden spirits were too bizarre, even if the shaman carried out the refinement to perfection, failure would still occur almost 100% of the time.

But this…

"Seriously?!" Deon suddenly leapt to his feet and his mind trembled. The yin-yang illusion began to rapidly condense and a heavy aura filled the room. Deon felt an intense suppression of his soul from two different forces. He immediately realised that one of these forces originated from the forming spirit, and the other from the world's suppression!

"I actually succeeded in refining a forbidden spirit?! Could it be that Blood God's guess was correct, and achieving success is actually much easier for lower rank shamans?"

Deon didn't have time to ponder on this for long. The very moment the mixture in the cauldron began turning grey, whilst the illusion above reached the point of being half-corporeal and half-illusory, the liquid in the cauldron suddenly shot upwards, colliding with the illusion and creating a shocking impact.

BANG!

Deon was blown backwards by the shockwave along with countless precious resources and spirits around him. Deon coughed out a lungful of blood and grimaced as he felt his ribs shatter, but he didn't so much as blink his eyes, not wanting to look away from the cauldron for a single second. He grit his teeth and prepared himself to act.

Thud!

The moment his feet hit the ground, he rushed past the scattered resources, towards the cauldron. His body ached like hell and felt like it was about to give out at any moment, but he ignored the pain and crazily rushed towards the cauldron. The illusion from before was nowhere to be seen; on the surface, everything seemed to have disappeared.

Truthfully, it wasn't until Deon reached the cauldron and quickly looked down into its interior that his anxiety finally vanished and was replaced by an extreme shock and joy.

In the bottom of the cauldron, there was a single spirit. This spirit possessed a faint aura, as if it was about to extinguish at any moment. The aura was rapidly declining and the spirit was fading away, becoming increasingly illusory.

The spirit was shaped like a grey ball, about as large as Deon's fist. Its appearance was extremely blurry, and although the aura was weak, it seemed to contain profound mysteries within its being.

'Forbidden sage refinement spirit!' Deon exclaimed within his mind in excitement. Without hesitation, he plunged his hand down into the cauldron, worried that he wouldn't be fast enough and that this miracle of a spirit would vanish from this world before he could even use it.

So then, what rank was this strange spirit exactly?

Bizarrely, all forbidden spirits, these miraculous spirits which made many powerful shamans on the continent drool with desire, were all 0-Star. Or to be precise, forbidden spirits were forcefully suppressed to the rank of 0-Star by the world's suppression before they even formed.

That said, this spirit was not weak just because it was 0-Star! It should be known that ordinarily, only naturally formed spirits could exist at 0-Star, but forbidden spirits were the sole exception to this rule! Although suppressed to 0-Star, their power was more overwhelming than any other type of 0-Star spirit in this world.

In fact, it didn't really make sense to look at forbidden spirits in terms of rank. These spirits all had extremely mysterious effects, almost always improving the user's comprehension, insight, foundation, or even talent, often in more ways than one.

As for the forbidden sage refinement spirit, it was the spirit deemed by Blood God to be the most beneficial to a shaman's talent in spirit refining.

When Deon's palm made contact with the rapidly dissipating spirit, a mass of origin energy was already coating his hand. The origin energy connected to the grey ball and suddenly, its form stabilised. The ball paused, looking like it had frozen in space and time.

Deon was rapidly injecting his origin energy into the ball without a trace of restraint. He was even about to remove his bound spirits to give him access to more energy, but he quickly hit a wall and found that he was completely unable to inject any more origin energy.

As for the activation of this spirit…there was none. Deon stared with wide eyes, not daring to blink, until his mind trembled.

The forbidden sage refinement spirit vanished!

Deon's heart lurched, but he didn't panic. He knew from Blood God's records that after filling this spirit to the brim with his origin energy, it would bind to his soul space and activate on its own accord in the same instant. This process was so rapid that a 2-Star shaman like Deon could not hope to track it. So, even though there was no trace of the spirit in his body or soul space, this was to be expected.

The world force that was previously assaulting the forbidden spirit, changed its target to Deon, who now held the lingering aura of the forbidden spirit.

Deon instantly passed out. He was unable to resist even the slightest trace of pressure from the world law itself.