Chapter 314 - A Nascent Soul Problem

Chapter 314: Chapter 314 - A Nascent Soul Problem

Morning light spread across Clear Cloud Peak while Su Bai remained seated on the flat stone.

He did not immediately celebrate reaching the peak of the Golden Core Realm.

Instead, he turned his attention inward and carefully examined everything that would soon become involved in his breakthrough.

That inspection lasted considerably longer than he expected.

Eventually, Su Bai opened his eyes and sighed.

If he had possessed an ordinary Golden Core, the next step would have been much easier to understand.

A normal cultivator refined a single Golden Core until it reached completion.

During the Nascent Soul breakthrough, Qi, spirit, and accumulated comprehension were drawn into that core. The Golden Core became the foundation from which the Nascent Soul was born, gradually transforming from a condensed cultivation core into a spiritual embodiment of the cultivator.

Su Bai knew the theory.

His problem was applying any of it to himself.

He looked down at his own body.

"My whole body is the Golden Core."

The sentence sounded ridiculous even when spoken quietly.

Unfortunately, it was true.

His Black-Ice Golden Core remained the central core of his cultivation, but it was not the entirety of his Golden Core foundation.

His physical body, Infinite Dantian, nine Gateway Dantians, Myriad-Path Meridian Web, and Black-Ice Golden Core had all become connected parts of the Greater Golden Core.

An ordinary cultivator only had to transform one central foundation.

Su Bai had somehow turned himself into the foundation.

He stared into the distance for several breaths before retrieving a notebook from his System Inventory.

This was not something he wanted to solve entirely inside his head.

He opened to a clean page.

The first line was reassuring enough.

Golden Core Realm: Peak Ninth Stage.

Su Bai placed a mark beside it.

That condition was settled.

The normal breakthrough would also require enormous reserves of energy. Under ordinary circumstances, that alone could delay a cultivator for years.

Su Bai glanced toward the Immortal storage ring.

He slowly placed another mark.

Energy was unlikely to be his greatest problem.

Comprehension should have been similarly troublesome, but he possessed the Dao-Shattering Jade, and even a tiny trace of Immortal Qi produced a state of clarity that made comprehending difficult concepts considerably easier.

Another mark followed.

After that, the notebook became less encouraging.

Su Bai drew a rough circle representing an ordinary Golden Core, then beside it sketched a simplified outline of a human body.

He stared at the second drawing.

If the Golden Core normally transformed into the foundation of the Nascent Soul, what exactly was supposed to happen when the entire body had become part of the Golden Core?

Was his whole body supposed to transform?

Su Bai imagined himself somehow becoming one enormous Nascent Soul and immediately crossed out the thought.

"That cannot possibly be right."

He continued.

The Black-Ice Golden Core might remain the center of the transformation, but his Crystalline Tree Spirit Root was rooted directly into it.

That Spirit Root was no longer simple either.

Its crystalline trunk remained fused with his central cultivation foundation.

If the Black-Ice Golden Core underwent the ordinary transformation, what happened to the Spirit Root growing from it?

Su Bai tapped the brush against the page.

The nine Gateway Dantians created another problem.

Each one now contained a sprouted Root Seed.

His Myriad-Path Meridian Web linked all ten cultivation centers together, while the Macro-Taiji treated the entire network as a single system.

Trying to make only the Black-Ice Golden Core undergo a normal Nascent Soul transformation suddenly seemed less like cultivation and more like removing the center of an operating formation while hoping everything else remained connected.

Su Bai continued writing.

Hours passed.

He drew pathways, crossed them out, rewrote possible transformations, and compared them against the way his current cultivation actually circulated.

By midday, he had spent more time writing than meditating.

Lu Canghai eventually noticed.

The old man had been restoring his own cultivation nearby when he opened his eyes and found Su Bai surrounded by several pages of notes.

"Disciple, what are you doing?"

Su Bai looked up.

"Master, I’m preparing for my Nascent Soul breakthrough."

Lu Canghai froze.

He had known this was coming.

He had personally made reaching Nascent Soul a condition for leaving the sect.

Knowing it in principle and hearing his disciple announce that he was actively preparing for it were apparently two different experiences.

Lu Canghai’s first reaction was satisfaction.

His disciple was finally going to enter Nascent Soul.

His second reaction arrived immediately afterward.

He remembered Su Bai’s previous breakthrough.

The smile that had almost appeared vanished.

Radiant Sky Sect had benefited greatly from that incident.

Lu Canghai’s heart had benefited considerably less.

He looked at the pages around Su Bai and felt his concern rise further.

"What exactly are you planning?"

"I haven’t decided yet."

That answer was somehow worse.

Su Bai noticed his master’s expression.

"My cultivation structure is too different now. I don’t want to force a normal breakthrough before figuring out how the Greater Golden Core will respond."

Lu Canghai’s gaze moved over Su Bai.

The boy had a whole-body Golden Core structure, a mutated Spirit Root arrangement, ten Tribulation Marks, and enough strange things inside him that Lu Canghai had stopped attempting to count them accurately.

The heavens had never been particularly gentle with unusual cultivators.

Su Bai was practically an invitation.

Lu Canghai stood.

"I’ll speak with Old Li and the others. We’ll prepare a breakthrough ground sturdy enough to withstand whatever the heavens decide to do this time."

Su Bai opened his mouth, but Lu Canghai raised a hand before he could speak.

"Your last breakthrough ended with the sect benefiting from the Heavenly Blessing while you were being corroded by it. I am not taking chances with Nascent Soul."

Su Bai thought about arguing, then decided his master had a point.

The old man left soon afterward.

Su Bai watched him disappear through the clouds before returning his attention to his notebook.

There was one thing he had not told his master.

His awareness moved toward the tenth Tribulation Mark.

The Void Ring remained quiet within his foundation.

Su Bai had already discovered how completely its Null State could conceal his existence when activated. If that concealment extended deeply enough during the Nascent Soul breakthrough, there was a possibility that he could complete the internal transformation without drawing the heavens’ attention at all.

He was not certain.

Testing that possibility during an actual breakthrough would be a terrible time to discover he was wrong.

More importantly, Su Bai was not particularly interested in avoiding the tribulation.

His attention moved toward his body.

The Myriad-Calamity Vajra Body grew through genuine exposure to harmful forces. Repeated damage allowed it to understand and resist what had injured him before.

A Nascent Soul tribulation would be dangerous, but it would also be exceptionally valuable.

If his body could record the properties of tribulation lightning, the benefits would remain long after the breakthrough itself ended.

Su Bai’s thoughts continued moving.

His attention eventually settled on one of the Gateway Dantians.

The faint golden leaf rested quietly inside it.

Lian Qingyue’s blessing had once been beneficial energy.

Reversal turned that blessing into harm, and after the Immortal Qi broke it apart, part of what remained had been absorbed by the Root Sprout. The result had been the first distinct property among the nine sprouts.

Su Bai stared at the golden leaf.

His previous tribulation immediately came to mind.

If his Nascent Soul tribulation produced another Heavenly Blessing, there was a chance the sprout might absorb part of it just as it had absorbed the remnants of Lian Qingyue’s blessing.

The possibility made his heartbeat quicken.

Su Bai looked upward.

The sky above Clear Cloud Peak remained completely clear.

He immediately corrected his expression.

Getting visibly excited about heavenly tribulation felt unnecessarily provocative.

’Respectful caution.’

That seemed safer.

He lowered his head and returned to his notebook.

The Nascent Soul breakthrough was no longer simply a question of surviving the transformation.

His Greater Golden Core had to transform without destroying the structure that made his cultivation possible.

The more Su Bai considered it, the clearer one thing became.

He could not copy someone else’s path.

His current cultivation had already moved too far beyond the structure that ordinary Nascent Soul methods assumed.

That did not discourage him.

It made the problem more interesting.

Su Bai lowered his brush and began drawing another circulation diagram.

By the time Lu Canghai returned, he intended to have a breakthrough plan capable of surviving both his own cultivation and whatever the heavens decided to throw at it.