Soul of Blades - Chapter 77: Hidden Treasure (Patreon)

The voices abruptly stopped. The immense pressure surrounding Alex ceased. The silence was violent, leaving an emptiness in its wake.

He could breathe, but agony remained. His body was a battleground, pain, and energy warring within him.

His skill was still destroying his body.

"Whatever you're doing, you need to stop!" Mei shouted, her voice laced with urgency as she rushed to his downed form. "My healing skill... it’s not that strong!"

Blood spurted from Alex's mouth, red and visceral. He searched inward, through the agony, desperate to find his Qi.

He found a storm instead.

His skill's energy raced through him, a wild horse tearing his body apart. Yet there, in his navel, faint hints of his Qi blazed defiantly. Realization struck like a lightning bolt – he needed to find a way to release this skill from his body, as he had the first time.

"My sword..." Alex gasped at Mei, desperation painting his words crimson.

With a swift motion, Mei’s hand reached out. A shield of energy manifested beneath Alex’s abandoned spare sword, floating it towards his spasming palm. She placed the sword into his hand with determined precision.

"RUN," Alex yelled, his voice raw and torn. "Keep your distance no matter what happens."

Mei's eyes, wide and vibrant, flashed skepticism and worry. But she nodded. She jumped back—a blur, a streak of purpose—matching Alex's speed effortlessly.

Alex focused within. He remembered the sensation the first time the skill activated; it had surged from his navel to his heart, then to his arm and out into his sword in a trail of fire.

He outstretched his arm—spasming, yet determined. He attempted to seize the energy and guide it to his heart. It bucked and brayed the entire time, and was impossibly difficult to control. A wild animal refusing the reins.

But Alex held on, through clenched, gnashing, and bloody teeth. He tried anyway.

With difficulty, the energy moved. Once the energy reached his heart, it shot towards his arm and out into his sword. His arm tore in multiple places as the skill travelled through it, but his body was finally free from the trapped skill energy's constant destruction. He focused, his muscles straining, and sweat mixing with blood on his face. He glanced at his sword's tip. His heart both soared and plummeted at what he saw.

A vortex.

Voracious and hungry. It tugged viciously at Alex’s hair and his clothes, gnawing at the world as wind whipped around him. It began to consume his sword and the surrounding rocks, grass, and earth with violent suction.

It was then he realised he couldn’t move.

Panic and uncertainty assaulted Alex as he realized he was unsure of how exactly he was reborn, and he had no guarantee that he would survive a third death. After all, he didn't even understand how his skill worked.

He clawed at the earth, desperate to escape the vortex’s merciless pull.

"Alex!" Mei yelled taking a single step closer, her face a vivid streak of concern.

“STAY BACK!” Was all Alex could manage to yell as he struggled.

It was futile. Alex was rooted in place, a prisoner to the voracious forces for a second time.

The vortex completely consumed the demonic sword and his entire arm, along with everything close by in a sphere of destruction.

Mei's hands were a blur, conjuring symbols in the air—seal after seal, intricate and precise. She attempted to form large barriers between Alex and the chaotic vortex that still swirled around beside him like a bulwark holding back a storm.

But they shattered. Each and every time.

"Damn it!" Mei spat out, her fingers moving frantically as she hissed an endless string of words. The raw frustration in her voice was a physical thing, as tangible as the wild energy that still raged around them.

It was skill names, Alex realised, she was summoning countless skills to keep him safe.

Mei began to summon shield after shield in earnest, her face a portrait of desperate determination. She shifted, frantically trying to protect and move him and began layering shields. But each shield crumbled to sparkling particles of mana, swiftly consumed by the portal.

And the blood. There was so much blood.

Alex’s arm was missing to the shoulder, and pain continued to engulf every facet of his being.

Then, as suddenly as it had appeared, the vortex winked from existence in a burst of sound and compression, both collapsing in on and consuming itself with a sound like the rush of a violent vacuum.

A sudden ‘womph’ that rumbled the earth.

Dried streaks of tears mixed with torn earth swam across Alex’s cheeks as he rolled over to realized his arm was now missing. His heart sank before a surge of energy from the Qi in his navel caused him once more to seize.

Residual energies from the vortex- a rush of swirling indescribable energies and a collection of Qi, swirl chaotically, before streaking to Alex's amputated arm.

His small flame of Qi shot forth, traveling through his body in strange patterns, before racing to his severed and torn shoulder and surrounding it in a fiery dark light. At the same time, the gathering of residual energies left by the vortex swirled in chaos before streaking to Alex’s amputated arm.

A tingling and tearing pain appeared as his arm seemed to regrow at pace. Alex could see hints of metal and a swirling mess of energies, including both mana and Qi, coalesce and form in the void where his arm used to be. The swirling energies of mana, energies, and Qi were solidifying.

Rebuilding.

"That is one freaky ass skill you've got there," Mei commented, her voice a mix of awe and curiosity as she watched his arm slowly regenerate. She stepped closer, tentatively, observing the strange phenomena with eyes lit with mana.

Alex, sensing an opportunity, employed his Dao of True Immortality to speed up his healing. His mind went back to his first entry into the void through the spatial anomaly on Pyra, and his entry into the higher-ranked martial world. Both times, he experienced the excruciating pain of destruction and rebirth. And both times, he experienced its liberation.

He wished he had been conscious during his rebirth from the death caused by his skill. He suspected he would have made considerable gains if he had been awake to experience it. But in a way, he had. He had felt his very being being deconstructed piece by piece, he had experienced the vicious cycle of instant decay and growth. He had experienced life and death twice now.

The pain of destruction, the liberation of rebirth. He had experienced it all.

[Dao: ‘True Immortality’ - Progress 0.16 > 0.19%]

With a burst, his arm regenerated, aided by the vortex's consumed materials and energies and his application of the Dao. It felt like all of his life and death experiences and all of the times he’d been torn apart and remade had consolidated into this single moment.

Both Alex and Mei gasped in shock, surprise etched on their faces.

"That skill... what rank is it?" Mei asked, with eyes wide and jaw hung open, and a voice tinged with genuine intrigue.

Ignoring her questions, Alex examined his new arm—pristine, a seamless blend of flesh and foreign materials. He checked his status; not much had changed, but his wisdom had raised by ten points.

He concluded that it must be from the vortex absorbing the magical shields Mei cast in her attempts to save him.

It seemed the vortex could even absorb mana from other people’s skills. That was useful to know.

Extremely useful.

But that healing had been intense. His Dao's healing had never been that powerful, it had to be the reconstructive aspect of his glitched skill that had supercharged his Dao-healing. He struggled to smile through the blinding flash of light that assaulted him and pounding in his head that accompanied each crippling flash. But in the end, his realisation caused a smile to break through, even through all the pain.

This confirmed that the next time he used his glitched skill, he could recover any limb he had lost or wound he had sustained. However severe.

But to do so he would have to find and subdue a cultivator, an imperial weak enough for him to defeat.

Fat chance of that he sighed, as he imagined himself trying to fight someone as strong as Jun Li a second time and winning… Maybe he could ambush them?

Struggling, he sat up, pain a constant companion but bearable now. He peered at his navel, his limited ‘True Sight’ passive revealing the mysteries within.

After intense focus and scrutiny, he could finally make out the Qi in his navel, in what Mei had described as what must be his 'Dantian'.

It was... a little smaller than the last time he inspected it.

Yan Hau had called it a 'permanent source of Qi' when she questioned him, which implied it should be unchanging.

Unless he used it.

Alex gasped as realization dawned. The glitched skill—it used Qi. It must be why he needed to be depleted with Mana Burn for it to even activate, and why it only ever activated when he had confronted a cultivator for the first time. His passive 'Nascent Body' had said he’d absorbed energies into his body. Maybe it took Qi to regrow his arm, to be reborn. That would explain the decrease in the size of his dantian.

His glitched skill, and his rebirths, were all tied to that precious resource; Qi. Like glue that held all of the energies together as it coalesced and solidified to remake him.

Without Qi, the next time he triggered the glitched skill, he would simply die, without a source for the Vortex’s remnants to recreate him.

What a strange skill.

And those voices, that message— the hints of meaning still haunted him, a lingering nightmare.

What had that been?

He shuddered as he recalled them.

"Alex!" Mei’s voice pulled him back from the brink of his thoughts as she placed an arm on his shoulder. "You're not hearing me. Is your head even there?" Her voice was rich with concern but carried a loud, commanding tone as she worriedly attempted to meet his gaze.

"I'm here, Mei," Alex responded weakly, flexing his newly formed hand into a fist and then relaxing it. His eyes, though, were still riveted on the small collection of swirling Qi in his dantian. Every movement was a harmony of pain and wonder.

Mei stomped her foot impatiently, causing a small cloud of dust to rise. "You’re reckless!" she exclaimed, crossing her arms over her chest defiantly. Her eyes, a tempest of emotion, were locked on Alex. “Do you have any control over that at all? You could have died!”

"You... you're right," Alex admitted, finally lifting his gaze to meet Mei’s. His voice quivered, but he forced himself to steady it. "But I had to try something. It worked. I figured out a lot." His newly formed arm trembled subtly, but it was strong and whole. "It's a class skill. My class... it involves swords." He lied, thinking the less she knew the better. He wished he could come up with something more convincing, but the pounding in his head from over-using his Dao was making it hard to think.

Mei eyed him skeptically as she paused, before walking away in silence.

Days later, Alex and Mei trod down a familiar path, he had experimented with his skills and discovered the true nature of his latest class skill; Divine Fist.

The skill unleashed a devastating punch, which imparted a packet of mana into the area of impact. Whether it was a person or an object, it didn't matter what he hit as long as he hit something. The packet of mana would remain on the person or object and act as a homing beacon, and with a flex of his will, any sword in his hand would shoot toward the mana at frightening speeds. The skill, despite using his fists, would turn his swords into homing missiles. His excitement grew as he thought of all the possibilities. he could use it mid-swing to alter his trajectory, surprise attack an enemy in any direction by throwing a sword and summoning another from his inventory as his airborne sword attacked them.

It could be a useful counter to Tarabyzans gravity control, when coupled with Phoenix leap, he would need to increase both skills mastery before the expedition reached its end.

Mei sang a strange tune next to him as they walked back toward the dragon's palace. It sounded like a cross between different earth genres. Alex wasn't a fan.

Ugh, maybe I don't want to visit her world He thought as they continued their trek through the wilderness.

There was only a day left before the expedition to seize the Jade departed. Alex mentally checked the contents of his inventory and saw two items he had yet to inspect.

The incursion crystal, and Jun Li's globe.

The cultivators treasure.

As a matter of fact, he had been ignoring the treasure stored away in his inventory. He was worried it had some kind of homing beacon or signal and keeping it on him would send a stream of monstrous cultivators after him. But he decided it was time to inspect it.

Perhaps Mei had already seen something like it. If so, he could show it to her and stash it away in his pocket dimension before anything awry took place. He'd be able to find out what it is and any potential danger it held without setting off any alarms.

He hoped.

"Hey Mei," he called as he slowed his walk. "Come here, take a look at this, you know what this is?"

He extended his arm as she drew near with a cheery smile on her face, and summoned the cultivator's globe in his palm.

It shined and sparkled with endless and uncountable energies.

At the sight, Mei's cheery face instantly dropped and turned into one of disbelief and wonderment.

And horror.

"Alex. She started, her words drawn out slowly, cautiously. "How..."

"Why do you have an Imperials World-treasure?"