Chapter 1289: The First Bite of Core Formation

"Core?!"

Phei’s voice travelled through the dim stone hall and received absolutely nothing in return.

Sienna had already gone silent. His True Void Sense could still find her presence elsewhere within the structure, so she had not vanished merely to torment him. She was simply refusing to answer.

Phei exhaled through his nose and looked down at the dark-golden elixir rolling beneath the steam.

"Core," he muttered. "Just casually throw that word at me and disappear."

Sienna heard him but she did not respond.

Somewhere beyond the chamber, however, her violet eyes remained fixed upon him; he was naked in enough concentrated Immortal essence to make every instinct in his body pull toward the spring.

The three enormous feathers lying inside with him had already lost more of their original shape. Their dark-golden barbs softened continuously into luminous threads, each strand dissolving into the steaming liquid and deepening the frightening richness within it. They belonged to a Great Immortal God whose corpse had rested within Sienna’s Soul Realm, and even after death, the essence carried by three feathers alone made the surrounding Mana bow beneath their presence.

The elixir touched had sunk deeper in him and now though, suddenly, something black tore out of him.

Phei’s eyes sharpened as a thin stream of foul darkness started bursting from his pores and rose immediately toward the surface. More followed before he could properly examine the first in tiny black beads that seeped from his calf, followed by grey threads, cloudy residue and traces of impurities so deeply embedded within his flesh; he had never noticed them.

Yet none entered the medicinal liquid.

The elixir rejected every impurity the instant it left him:

The black residue lifted several inches above the dark-golden surface, hanging there in an ugly suspended mist while the elixir beneath remained utterly pristine and some hidden formation or whatever was within the chamber continuously pulled the filth upward and away, refusing to allow so much as a grain of corruption back into what Sienna had prepared.

Beneath thousands of tiny impurities were being forced out of skin and everywhere the elixir had enveloped him, his body began shedding things he had genuinely believed were no longer inside him.

His expression became increasingly strange.

Weeks ago, the Molting Card had already cleansed him; or so he’d thought.

At the time, the transformation had been extraordinary enough that Phei had assumed his body had been purged almost completely. His skin, organs maybe too, bones and blood had all felt renewed, his entire physique cleaner and more perfect than anything his old mortal self could have possessed.

The black cloud gathering above this pool though, disagreed with humiliating enthusiasm.

Phei watched another vile strand rise from his thigh and gave it a deeply offended look.

’Where the fuck were all of you hiding? Maybe each passing day, a minute really, my body seems to have been gathering more and more.’

The elixir surged; his abdomen tightened immediately as impurities were dragged from deeper his body, to Phei it felt like some were carrying the stale remnants of old medicines perhaps, food too and energies that had once entered his body before being refined imperfectly.

The Molting Card had cleansed yes but it had done that on what his foundation could surrender at that time but this was different; the elixir was reaching into his foundation and demanding the filth surrender whether it wished to or not.

Phei finally relaxed completely inside the sunken pool even the pain felt no longer that bad either anymore.

’Thank fuuck, well, my goddess wife, thank my goddess wife for this!’

Dark gold climbed over his chest and shoulders; and for one breath, everything became still.

Then his body opened.

Sienna’s gaze sharpened.

The elixir suddenly bent toward him and the entire spring lurched inward more stronger than before as though something beneath Phei’s skin had seized it with both hands. Dark-golden currents formed around him almost immediately, rotating faster with each breath while the liquid level visibly dipped along the stone.

Primordial Blood had surged once more; the three towering feathers trembled and their dissolving edges began peeling away faster, long ribbons of Great Immortal God’s essence left the barbs and pouring into the pool as if the spring itself had realized it was no longer feeding an ordinary cultivator.

Phei inhaled and the hall groaned; dark-golden energy rushed toward him and disappeared into his body as he drunk it so greedily; the elixir pressed against everything in Phei even his soul too simultaneously, then invaded his flesh with enough force that Phei’s entire body stiffened:

A crack sounded from inside his arm.

His radius split, the ulna followed; dark-golden radiance flooded immediately through both fractures. Phei looked down at his arm just as the bones softened from within.

Then his ribs began cracking.

One after another, fine fractures raced through his skeleton, spreading from his chest into his spine, shoulders, hips and legs. There was no outside impact; his own body had become the battlefield as the Great Immortal God’s essence was finding every place beneath the threshold his body demanded improving and started breaking every part of that apart.

His muscles followed:

The fibers throughout his arms tore simultaneously, minute strands separating under the invasion of dark-golden energy before being flooded by new vitality. His shoulders tightened so violently that veins rose beneath the skin, his abdominal muscles contracted and his thighs hardened beneath the water as the same destruction spread through them.

His flesh began to melt too; although it was not visibly enough to deform his body into some shapeless horror, but deep within each layer, cells and fibers that could no longer endure what was being poured into them lost their old structure. They dissolved into blood-rich luminous matter, were drowned in Great Immortal essence and immediately rebuilt.

The Dragon Regeneration joined the process.

At first it did what it had always done.

Repair the injury and restore what was damaged but something changed.

The first rebuilt muscle fiber was stronger than the one that had been destroyed.

Dragon Regeneration seemed to have recognized the pattern and so the next time the same region was torn apart, it refused to restore the weaker version.

The Great Immortal elixir destroyed, Primordial Blood refined, Dragon Regeneration rebuilt.

With every cycle, the body being restored drifted farther from the one Phei had entered the pool with.

Sienna’s eyes narrowed faintly.

That was more interesting.

The dark-golden power carried the ancient imprint of its dead master. Even refined into an elixir, every fragment still remembered the Great Immortal God it had once belonged to and naturally tried to temper whatever absorbed it according to that higher existence.

Against another cultivator, that would have been a blessing.

Against Phei, it became food.

The first dark-golden trace reached his marrow and tried to settle there but his Primordial Blood descended and the amethyst-crimson radiance tore through the foreign essence, stripped away the dead Immortal’s lingering imprint and swallowed everything useful before allowing the purified strength to remain. By the time that energy became part of Phei’s bones, there was no Angelic imprint left within it and nothing belonging to the dead god capable of making a claim.

His body accepted the strength and the Young Dragon kept ownership of his body.

Another fracture spread through his spine.

Phei’s jaw tightened but still, he made no sound.

The pain had already gone beyond anything that could be described as simple burning.

After all, his entire skeleton was being fractured from the inside, softened, saturated and compressed into denser form. Every vertebra carried enough agony that an ordinary cultivator would have lost consciousness several times over. His muscles were repeatedly being destroyed while still attached to the bones undergoing their own refinement, his skin was being peeled clean from beneath, and his organs had only just begun receiving their turn.

Sienna knew exactly what he was feeling.

She had performed body tempering upon beings far stronger than Phei and watched cultivators with thousands of years of discipline scream when their marrow refinement began.

Phei remained sitting straight.

His breathing had slowed while fingers curled over his thighs in pain he’d never let out.

His nails sank into his own flesh hard enough to draw blood before Dragon Regeneration closed the wounds again. A thin line of crimson appeared where his teeth had bitten through the inside of his lower lip, yet even that vanished almost immediately.

He refused to give the pain a voice.

Sienna watched without praise.

Her eyes, however, remained on him longer than before.

The elixir reached his marrow once again and started rebuilding him for the umpteenth time.

Phei’s entire skeleton lit up.