After drowning himself in the illustrious dream of walking sagely around his satisfyingly empty courtroom, without a single case in sight, Yang Qing pulled his mind back to reality to savor his present tangible benefits.
The fourth stage of the palace realm. With this level of strength, he was qualified to start a sect that would instantly gain respectable status despite its youth, solely due to his realm. Of course, the mortality rate for such a sect would still be high, no different from that of a rank four or rank five sect, but at least when his sect was destroyed, it would go out with a bang, leaving faint shockwaves across the continent at its disappearance.
He was now a strong ant, finally worthy of showing his face above the earth.
Yang Qing clenched and unclenched his fist as he subtly felt the power coursing through his body. It was exhilarating, to say the least. Though it was only a single jump from the third to the fourth stage of the palace realm, that leap alone made his entire being feel as if he had undergone a complete rebirth.
His raw physical strength was now twice what it had been at the third stage, and as soone whose peerless jade physique granted him balanced growth of both body and soul, his soul received the sa incrental benefit that his body had from the breakthrough. With a single swing, he could safely punch through a dozen mountains.
As for his spiritual sense, its range had increased by another thousand kiloters. But it wasn’t just the distance that grew—the level of detail he could capture also transford.
The boost brought by his strengthened soul made him feel as though he had been half-blind before, and only now had his sight been fully corrected. The clarity was so sharp he found himself questioning if it was truly still his spiritual sense. Within a five-hundred-ter radius, he could granually discern the elental composition of the surrounding spiritual qi. He had already been able to do this as a first-stage palace realm expert, but now the intricacies were revealed with far finer detail—even when he wasn’t deliberately focusing that deeply.
Other than elental composition, the information he could read from the living and non-living things around him had grown from their properties to their states.
For example, he could sense a group of crane fly larvae feeding on the pure life aura released during his breakthrough. They were two hundred ters below him, yet Yang Qing perceived them with such clarity it was as if he held them in his palm, watching each subtle movent.
From the way they absorbed the life energy he had released, he could trace nearly every change it brought to their bodies, no matter how minuscule. From that alone, he could even judge their potential. One of those larvae, without a doubt, had the capacity to at least reach the core formation stage based on how it assimilated his energy.
As his spiritual sense stretched further below the crane fly larvae’s nest, about three thousand ters down, Yang Qing perceived an underground river.
His spiritual sense could distinguish the density of spiritual qi across its various regions, its temperature, the organisms inhabiting it, and the properties of those organisms—their strength, their quality, their elental affinities, what they absorbed from the river, and how it affected them.
He could even sense their very emotions through the fluctuations of their souls, yet another dinsion of detail his spiritual sense could now accurately grasp with more detail.
For example, there was a mossback crayfish nibbling on so azure spirit grass before it suddenly paused its actions as it gazed deeply at the grass. Through the soul fluctuations it released, Yang Qing could tell the mossback crayfish was feeling confused—suspiciously confused—and the reason for that was likely the unusual flavor of the spirit grass.
Outwardly, the azure spirit grass looked perfectly normal, its blue light shimring across the veins coursing with gentle nourishing energy. However, that particular batch had been invaded with cold energy, far more than usual, which altered the nature of the spiritual energy within its blades. The source of that disturbance was three shadow lotus shrimp eggs carefully hidden a few ters below the grass.
Their placent had been deliberate. The spiritual energy of azure spirit grass had nourishing properties that made it excellent for eggs about to hatch, and it could even enhance the potential of the hatchlings.
The shadow lotus shrimp eggs were leeching off the spiritual qi released by the grass through its roots. At the sa ti, their shells were repaying what they absorbed by releasing cavern well yin qi imbued within them. Azure spirit grass thrived on yin qi—but not all kinds. Its favored nourishnt ca from the more moderate types, such as cavern well yin qi or fresh water yin qi.
So the azure spirit grass was absorbing the cavern well yin qi released by the three eggs, while in turn those eggs received the gentle, nourishing wood-based spiritual qi they needed from the azure spirit grass. What should have been a perfect symbiotic balance between the two sides was disrupted by the greed of the mother of those shrimp eggs, who was currently monitoring the situation apprehensively from behind the prop roots of a dusk garnet mangrove.
That mother looked on worriedly as the mossback crayfish sniffed the water around the azure spirit grass, suspiciously trying to find the culprit behind why his azure spirit grass tasted odd. It lacked the warm softness it usually carried and instead felt a little brittle and cold, though the energy within remained the sa. The true culprit behind that difference was the trio of shadow lotus eggs.
The cavern well yin qi they released had oversaturated the azure spirit grass, throwing it into imbalance as it struggled to absorb and refine the excess yin qi it was being fed.
Had it been only two eggs, the balance between the cavern well yin qi being absorbed and the gentle nourishing spiritual qi being released would have been perfect. In that case, the suspicious mossback crayfish would have been none the wiser that a shadow lotus shrimp was using his azure spirit grass to incubate and hatch its eggs.
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