Chapter 1338: Soul Rank and the Awaiting Annihilation!

Phei’s eyes narrowed.

[The Astral Wraith’s cultivation is indeed in the God stage. Her soul itself, however, currently stands at the Sacred soul Rank.]

[While Host’s soul has already reached the Primordial Rank.]

That caught him.

[The only restriction sealing Host’s Soul Realm and Energy is entirely about your cultivation base. Host must reach the World Transcendent Stage before personally entering your Soul Realm and freely manipulating the Soul Realm, not because your Soul is weak!]

[The Realm’s intrinsic stability and capacity, however, are heavily influenced by Host’s soul rank.]

[A Primordial-ranked soul can safely house a Sacred-ranked soul.]

Phei leaned back slightly as understanding settled in.

His cultivation remained vastly beneath the Astral Wraith’s, but the rank of his soul was far beyond what his present cultivation suggested. His Soul Realm was therefore strong enough to contain her even though Phei himself remained locked outside until reaching World Transcendent.

"So basically my Soul Realm is already a mansion capable of housing her no matter how fat she is, right?, but the owner himself still doesn’t have the keys."

[An oversimplification. But sure, if that’s the hill you’re dying on.]

Phei smiled. "Still accurate."

The System wisely declined to argue.

The Astral Wraith possessed a complete Soul Realm of her own, existed in a pure spiritual state and had the Tiamat Slave Mark providing a direct path into Phei’s sealed realm, while his Primordial Soul Rank ensured that her Sacred-ranked soul could actually remain there without tearing anything apart.

"Okay, that is genuinely fucking cool."

He leaned back onto one hand before a different concern emerged. "System, how much Soul Energy is she actually consuming compared to what i currently have?"

A suspicious pause followed.

[Within sustainable parameters.]

Phei narrowed his eyes. "That sounded exactly like the kind of answer someone gives when they don’t want to tell me the number."

[Host possesses an exceptionally abundant Soul Energy reserve.]

"You did it again."

The Dragon Lady snorted quietly from across the cavern wondering what he was arguing about and with whom.

Phei looked toward her. "I heard that."

Only after resolving that did he finally turn his attention toward the mass of notifications waiting beyond the current messages, and there were enough of them to make him wonder whether the System had been quietly hoarding paperwork for revenge.

Phei had spent almost an entire year ignoring large portions of his System.

Once upon a time, one unfamiliar notification would have distracted him until he read every line twice, yet the Primordial Frozen Zone had broken that habit quickly because pausing in the middle of a hunt to study a Skill description while something Half-Divine wanted to introduce his skull to a glacier was generally considered poor survival etiquette.

’That’s not entirely the reason really,’

Some of those notifications stretched all the way back to Anarctica and the beings he had killed there. Others were about the six World Transcendents he had enslaved, awakening of his Void Element, chnages within Primordial Blood, his body tempering, evolved abilities and rewards he had understood only partially because surviving whatever was happening at the time deserved far more attention than reading blue screens.

’Also not entirely true since i can kill them now with my eyes closed.’

He knew many of the broad results because he had spent an entire year using the new powers themselves like the Void and even developed new skills, but now his training was finished, the Zone Lord belonged to him and his little sister was finally safe. The frozen zone had stopped demanding every heartbeat of his concentration, which meant Phei could finally sit down and discover exactly what all that long night suffering had bought him.

He cracked his neck, looked toward the ridiculous collection of notifications crowding the edge of his vision and smiled. "All right, System. Pull everything up at once. I’m not spending the next three hours opening boxes like it’s my birthday."

Blue-white light flooded his vision.

***

What Phei did not know was that while almost an entire year had passed for him inside the Primordial Frozen Zone, now two weeks had moved across Paradise Island, and those two weeks had been anything but empty.

The Price family’s engagement celebration was only a few days away, with preparations already expanding toward the wedding that would follow. Servants moved constantly through the estates, invitations and confirmations passed between families, and quiet discussions accumulated behind closed doors as arrangements became increasingly elaborate.

Beneath that respectable activity, however, another preparation was approaching completion.

The night chosen to extract the power of the First Witch from Eleanor was drawing closer, and what appeared from outside to be a period filled with engagements, wedding plans and family celebration concealed something considerably older and more ancient as it was merciless was underneath.

Far away from Paradise Island, deep beneath the Indian Ocean, Danton widened his eyes inside the sphere that had imprisoned him for the past two weeks of endless war with it.

The prison had remained flawless throughout that time, resisting every attempt but now a hair-thin fracture crossed part of its surface, so faint that ordinary sight might have missed it entirely.

Danton did not, and with that thin crack; he could fanally draw more of his essence for another and more attack; another crack slowly branched away from the first.

His imprisonment was beginning to weaken.

Back on Paradise Island, Sienna drew a slow breath as something she had been waiting for finally changed. Phei’s training had ended, and the distant isolation surrounding him had loosened enough for the Nether Goddess to begin preparing for his return.

The girls could hardly have been happier.

From their perspective, Phei had been gone for only two weeks, which by the standards of Paradise Island almost qualified as a quiet vacation. She expected him to return stronger because sending Phei anywhere dangerous for training she knew would be an habit of producing powers nobody had approved beforehand, but she possessed little understanding of just how much had changed from his perspective.

He had lived almost an entire year inside the Frozen Zone. His body had been tempered until World Transcendent weapons could break against him, his command of Void-Ice and Primordial Blood had grown monstrous, and battles that once would have ended his life instantly had become things he could survive through skill, regeneration, cunning and a frankly unreasonable collection of abilities.

Saints and Divine Lords had become creatures he could tear through, while even World Transcendents now had reason to take the seventeen-year-old seriously before he claimed their lives.

Six World Transcendents were already bound beneath him, with the Undead Queen bringing five World Transcendent undeads of her own and an immense legion of dead behind them. An Astral Wraith was approaching her ascension to a formidable Godhood as she now cultivated inside Phei’s Soul Realm using Soul Energy vastly superior to anything she had possessed before.

And accompanying him home would be an enormous young Dragon who had somehow transformed from a prisoner he once rescued into the little sister he never knew he wanted.

None of them knew about her yet.

They did not know that Phei had spent months building a home beneath auroras with a shy Dragon who secretly transformed into human form and slept beneath warm pelts whenever he went outside. They did not know that he had hunted beside her, flown with her, fed her cores, healed her wounds and slowly stopped thinking of her as someone he had rescued.

She had become family.

For two weeks, Paradise Island had enjoyed something approaching peace while all of these pieces quietly moved toward one another. Danton’s prison was beginning to crack beneath the ocean, the Price engagement drew closer, wedding preparations were underway, the First Witch waited for the night chosen to take her power and Sienna had finally begun preparing to retrieve Phei.

Far away beneath an aurora, Phei sat inside the frozen home with his little sister while an entire year of System notifications opened before his eyes, completely unaware of how many things were waiting for him on the other side.

The rest was over, and Paradise Island was about to become very loud again.