Chapter 1291: Great Immortal God’s Core

Ashworth’s eyes snapped upward.

The root-treasure surrounding what appeared to be a Corrupted Core shuddered violently and dozen interwoven restraints cracked at once. Dark-golden corruption erupted through the openings in thick streams, reaching hungrily into the air before fresh roots burst from the cage and strangled the escaping power back toward the Core.

Ashworth’s face changed.

The Core beat again.

THOOM.

More roots fractured.

Sienna slowly turned her head.

She could feel Phei through their Dual-Nether Souls; she could feel the dead Great Immortal’s essence being stripped, refined and swallowed inside his body.

And she could feel the Core reacting to that.

The core had sensed its own power disappearing.

For the first time since Sienna tore it from the Great corpse, something resembling agitation entered the corrupted core.

Its dark-golden tendrils thrashed harder against the treasure.

A faint smile touched Sienna’s lips.

’So it has recognized something about him.’

Interesting.

She looked back toward Phei.

He had consumed scarcely 5% of the spring’s true medicinal essence.

Yet his physique had already crossed a frightening boundary.

In pure bodily foundation, Phei now stood comparable to a Grandmaster Body Cultivator, despite remaining Mortal Sovereign and despite this being only the beginning of the tempering. His muscles, bones, marrow, organs, meridians and circulation had all surpassed their previous state by a margin that would have taken ordinary body cultivators years of brutal refinement to achieve.

Five percent.

And his body was still pulling harder.

Sienna nodded to herself.

Phei no longer needed her watching every breath; the more interesting problem had just begun waking elsewhere. Darkness gathered beneath her feet and swallowed her from the chamber without disturbing Phei’s concentration.

Sienna appeared beside Ashworth as another section of the root-cage cracked.

The elderly man barely glanced toward her.

His eyes remained fixed above where the Core hung between them with the patience of something that had already decided both were close enough to infect.

Dark gold covered it, though the color had become diseased beyond anything that deserved to be called divine. The Core looked almost wet, a dense mass of corrupted radiance pulsing in slow contractions that resembled a heart torn from an Immortal and left beating after death had already claimed everything around it.

Blood that had once carried divinity and now remembered only rot.

The pressure followed each pulse, sliding through one’s chest and throat until breathing felt less like instinct and more like something the Core had temporarily allowed.

Ashworth felt it inside his veins.

Every beat from it tried to introduce another rhythm beside his own.

Sienna tasted the corruption behind her teeth, sour and golden, searching for somewhere inside her to take root.

She ignored it.

Dark-golden tendrils uncoiled from the Core and pressed against the root-like treasure containing it now.

The restraints cracked but more roots grew.

One tendril slipped through a narrow opening and touched a root for less than a heartbeat.

Ashworth’s expression darkened.

The corruption changed; its surface began developing tiny branching patterns that resembled the structure of the treasure restraining it.

"It is trying to break the seal again," Ashworth murmured.

"Mhmm."

Sienna stepped closer.

The root it had touched blackened before splitting apart. Three fresh restraints immediately grew around the escaped tendril and dragged it backward, but the corruption coating the Core had already begun repeating fragments of the same root-pattern along its surface.

It was adapting slowly and patiently.

The dead Great Immortal God had lost body, soul and will, but what remained inside the Core still carried instincts formed across an existence immeasurably beyond mortal cultivation.

It wanted to spread.

It wanted to enter something... it wanted everything around it to become a continuation of itself.

Ashworth finally turned toward Sienna.

"Goddess, get ready."

She looked at him: "Phei’s first tempering should finish within a day or two. After that his body may be able to withstand the first attempt at harnessing this Core and making it part of himself. But maybe I’ll wait until he finishes his train, who knows."

Ashworth stared at her for several breaths.

Then his expression became genuinely weary: "I don’t know."

Sienna’s brows rose faintly.

Ashworth looked back toward the Core just as another pulse fractured several more roots.

"I truly do not know how you expect him to harness something like this and make it part of himself, Goddess. Even an Immortal Emperor would call this suicide. Even standing here, I can feel the corruption probing my bloodline and learning the rhythm of my cultivation. If that Core enters a living body...<anno data-annotation-id="761901ec-387e-1173-d0db-80910993f007" data-title=""">"<sup>1</anno>

A dark-golden strand struck the root-cage hard enough to make the entire treasure groan.

Ashworth’s jaw tightened: "It won’t simply release power. It will devour him from inside until his whole body and soul belongs to Habin’s corruption."

Sienna watched the Core and said: "For an Immortal Emperor."

Ashworth went quiet.

Her violet eyes reflected diseased gold.

He sighed. "Goddess, Phei is refining this being’s essence now, and yes, I understand that he may be the only being with the..."

"Let’s worry about keeping it contained until he’s finished getting ready for it. No matter how that would take."

Ashworth looked at her with the defeated patience of someone who had known Sienna long enough to recognize when an argument had already been declared irrelevant.

Sienna moved closer to the root-cage. Corruption immediately reached toward her.

Black-violet Nether gathered lazily around her fingers and several tendrils recoiled.

She smiled faintly before glancing toward Ashworth: "Little Sage, you keep looking at this from the wrong side."

Ashworth’s eyebrow twitched at the name, but he wisely ignored it.

"Phei is a Cosmic Dragon," Sienna continued. "He’s the only being who can carry more than a single bloodline without those bloodlines eventually tearing the him apart awakened or not. You already know that much."

"I do."

"And yet you think that’s merely as if just his Constitution is unusual, as if the Cosmic Dragon Bloodline is just powerful, or as if the other bloodlines still sleeping inside him do not exist just because he hasn’t awakened yet."

Ashworth’s eyes narrowed.

Sienna looked toward the Core again: "It isn’t."

Another pulse came.

The corrupted gold trembled.

"The moment his eyes changed to have that gold tint too, I knew enough."

Ashworth studied her carefully.

She offered nothing more.

That alone bothered him more than an explanation probably would have.

Sienna’s lips curved faintly as the hidden gold within Phei’s newly deepened amethyst gaze returned to her memory. It had appeared without fighting the violet and attempting to replace it, two impossible traces of one already awakened bloodline and one nearly awakening now existing together as naturally as though they had always known where each belonged.

That was all Ashworth was getting.

For now.

"This isn’t about how powerful the Core is," Sienna said. "And it isn’t about how many realms above Phei Habin stood when she was alive, either."

Ashworth remained silent.

"It’s about what Phei is compared to the dead bastard whose Core you’re staring at."

His mouth tightened. "I know what you’re saying, Goddess, but Habin... she was one of the few Great Immortal Gods of the Angel Race. Their kind..."

"Exactly." Sienna turned fully toward him. "If I could kill Habin, tear this thing out of her and throw what remained into my Soul Realm while I was nowhere near my strongest, why are you speaking as though Phei should be frightened of consuming what’s left when you know this isn’t about how strong the other was to Phei?"

Ashworth looked toward the Core.

The question was unfair but that did not make it wrong.

Sienna stepped nearer until the corrupted pressure licked across her skin and died against the Nether before finding purchase. "You keep measuring Phei toward Habin because Habin was a Great Immortal Godhood. That’s just a cultivation realm, Little Sage."

Her violet eyes became deeper: "Look the other way."

Ashworth’s expression slowly changed.

Sienna gestured toward the Core. "Habin had more cultivation." The Core pulsed. "But Phei is more."

The simplicity of the statement made Ashworth fall silent.

Sienna turned back toward the writhing root-cage. "You should be feeling sorry for the Core."

A small smile touched her mouth: "And perhaps the Angels."

Ashworth breathed out slowly.

He understood what she meant.

He simply disliked how much ordinary cultivation knowledge he had to discard before the argument stopped sounding insane. "If he truly takes this Core and makes it his own," he said at last, watching the corruption crawl beneath another fresh layer of roots, "then he will inherit more than its energy. He’ll..."

"Devour and plunder everything Habin was?" Sienna finished for him, her eyes brightening with actual anticipation. "Yes!"

Ashworth looked at her.

Sienna’s smile became almost youthful for the first time since entering: "Also, don’t ruin the fun with your spoilers, Little Sage."

"Goddess..."

"I mean it."

Another root cracked.

Sienna ignored it completely. "I cannot wait to see Luciffer’s face."

Ashworth’s gaze sharpened at the name.

Sienna looked back toward the corrupted Core, and whatever amusement had entered her expression slowly became colder. "But before Luciffer..."

The dead Great Immortal God’s Core gave another violent beat.

This time, the entire root-cage shuddered. Far away, separated by walls, halls and layers of sealing formations, Phei’s Primordial Blood swallowed another great torrent of Habin’s refined essence; the Core reacted instantly and thew Dark-golden tendrils erupted across its surface as though something dead had finally understood that the thing consuming it had only just begun.

Sienna watched; her smile returned:

"The Heavenchilds."

***

A/N: Never seen a talkative Sienna before, huh?

<annotations style="display: none;">Refer to the cultivation stage Chapter of you want to understand the gap between the stages.</annotations>