Annie, Seraphina, and Thalion sat at a giant table with over 50 seats, while butlers brought them food and drinks as they discussed various topics.
"So, is it true that you fought three nobles simultaneously while bombarding the city?" Seraphina asked excitedly.
"Wait, you just told us that you killed a bit more slaves than us, but instead, you fought three nobles in the sky above the city and killed over four hundred?" Annie exclaid.
"Well, I just didn’t want to talk about it that much," Thalion murmured.
"And you’re a shapeshifter? How does that actually work?" Seraphina asked, intrigued.
"It’s pretty simple. You touch the beast after you kill it and take its form. You also gain all the skills the beast had before its demise," Thalion explained. "On that topic, what are the strongest beasts underwater?"
"Hm, it’s hard to say because it highly depends on whether the beast is a high variant, but there are so sea snakes that are very powerful, maybe sharks too," Seraphina said.
"Would it be a lot of trouble if you two helped slay one of the stronger beasts?" Thalion asked with a smile. This had gone better than expected; Seraphina wasn’t mad at all that he had killed many of Nerissa’s people.
"Gladly! What water-related skills do you have, and can you breathe underwater?" Seraphina asked.
"No to both. Are we not going fishing with a boat?" he asked.
"Haha, of course not. The strong beasts reside in the depths of the ocean," Seraphina explained with a smile. "That you can’t breathe underwater will make things difficult."
"Shouldn’t be that much of a problem. If I manage to kill a weak water beast, I can take its form to dive down. Maybe I can switch between forms and use the water form just for breathing," Thalion said, deep in thought.
"That could work, but Annie will need so training first. I’m not sure I’d be able to protect her from the stronger ones," Seraphina said, waving for her butler to bring another plate of seafood.
"On that topic, did you buy the body-tempering our patron provided in the system shop?" Seraphina asked Annie.
"Yes, I bought it before we started the journey," Annie said.
"Good, then don’t wait any longer. You can use my pond. It should get you to the second stage by tomorrow," Seraphina said.
That’s how their first eting ended. Thalion was led to the guest room, which was larger than so palaces of the old world, while Seraphina and Annie began their body-tempering. Thalion sat down on a four-ter-long couch and started with his soul cultivation.
Stage 1: Soul Awakening
The first stage involves awakening the dormant potential within your soul. By ditating and attuning to your spiritual core, you begin to sense the true depth of your soul. This stage builds your foundation and allows your soul to start absorbing ambient energy from the environnt.
Information flooded his mind after reading the description of the first stage, and he knew exactly what he had to do next. Thalion fell into a deep ditation, searching for his soul. Normally, you would let mana rush through your body, and where it lingered the longest was likely where a large part of your soul resided. But Thalion had a better option. He used the heartbeat of the sanguine archon to let mana rush through his body. In combination with his heightened senses through the Guardian’s Remnant title, he quickly found the parts of his soul.
The soul was like an overlay on the physical body, but it took longer to grow than the body itself. His soul seed to have torn into pieces inside his body, connected only by thin spiritual veins. His goal in the first stage was to find his complete soul and strengthen the connections between its parts. The second step was to build a soul-body overlaying his real body. The stronger his spirit body beca, the better the connection to his limbs, allowing him to use skills faster and more effectively, but that would co at a later stage. For now, the first stage would only result in a crude ghostly overlay, while in the higher stages, he’d have to rebuild every muscle fiber and blood vessel, which would be a massive undertaking.
The largest part of his soul resided in his head, as was normal for most beings. The second largest gathered around his heart. Over ti, he found two parts in each of his arms and legs, and a small one near his belly. That seed to be all the spirituality he had. Next, he worked on strengthening the connection between the different parts of his soul with mana strings, but it was so difficult. It took forever for each part of his soul to absorb the mana he provided, and the mana strings were even more challenging. After six hours, he gave up on the mana strings and focused entirely on growing the parts of his soul.
On the positive side, he didn’t need to alter the form much. After the soul part he worked on grew, it already resembled the part of his body it resided in, and he only had to make minor adjustnts. The night passed quickly as Thalion worked tirelessly on his soul without stopping once.
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