The experts from the Argent Moon Sect left the restaurant and returned to their chambers.
Xue Wei and his friends finished their meal in peace and quickly forgot about the ones who had barged into their dining room.
When they finished their meal, the four of them returned to the King’s Floor where they split up into different rooms and started cultivating on their own.
“Ah, the lively city,” Bai Tianyi said happily, taking a deep breath. “Today we killed quite a few experts, and I managed to snatch their soul power before it dissipated. It will take me some time to fully refine all of it into spiritual energy, but I should be able to get it done before the auction.”
“Not to mention the air around here.” Bai Tianyi was excited. “There are dead people all around. People get killed every single day and leave their soul power in the air, making it so that every breath I take is filled with soul power. It’s great!”
Xue Wei smiled wryly when he heard what Bai Tianyi said, but he understood him.
He too could feel that his spiritual energy was getting many times stronger from just breathing in. He was so close to a breakthrough that he believed a single night in this atmosphere would be enough.
Xue Wei excused himself and headed to one of the bedrooms. He quickly found that Hei Gou, Bai Tianyi, and Wang Xiaoyun had already entered their rooms.
The King’s Floor had a lot of rooms. It was marvelous, and the bedrooms were massive, each with a large canopy bed at one end and a table plus chairs at the other end.
There were windows that could be opened and displayed a magnificent sight of the city. The Three Legged Golden Crow Hotel was one of the tallest buildings in the city, which gave him a view of the entire skyline.
Xue Wei opened a window and sat down on the windowsill. He could feel the cold evening air float in, and he felt the soul power that accompanied it.
“I don’t know how to cultivate the soul,” Xue Wei muttered to himself in dismay.
“I know how to enhance my soul by exhausting my spiritual energy and then restoring it. I know of how to increase it with the use of herbs and pills. I even know it’s possible to absorb the souls of others, but I don’t know how to cultivate my soul. My Azure Dragon Scripture focuses on Qi cultivation and cultivation of the body.”
Xue Wei pondered on the issue for some time. He was close to a breakthrough, he could feel it, but he also knew that this breakthrough could be a challenge to him since he had no frame of reference to the way it was supposed to be done.
“That’s it!” he said, deciding on what to do. “I guess I don’t have any other option than to make formation and use the spiritual energy that I have. Having more formations is never a bad thing.”
Xue Wei was a High Sky Warrior ranked expert in terms of spiritual energy, just an iota away from breaking through into the Low Heavenly Warrior rank.
If his spiritual energy reached the Heavenly Warrior stage, he would be capable of creating even more intricate runes for his formations, and he would be able to fight in an even more dominating fashion than before.
Having come to a conclusion, Xue Wei dragged the table and one of the chairs next to the window and sat down.
He took out a paper from the storage ring alongside a calligraphy pen and ink.
The runes were written down on the formation paper. They were incredibly difficult to write, but he did not give up.
The formation he tried to make was a Blazing Light Formation, something that would release a blazing inferno upon the target and engulf them in a flame that was far from simple to deal with.
If the opponent was beneath the Heavenly Warrior stage, they would burn to death without a doubt.
Xue Wei spent the following hours trying to inscribe the formation. He had never made this formation before so he had problems with the runes. But after failing the first six times, Xue Wei had reached his goal of using up his spiritual energy.
The last of his attempts resulted in a fierce flame erupting from the partly made formation on the paper. It was strong enough to cause the kind of damage where Xue Wei’s clothes were filled with black soot afterwards. Were it not for him quickly encapsulating the explosion with his Qi, it would have been disastrous for the entire room.
As he had used up all of his spiritual energy, and nearly sucked his soul dry, he decided to cultivate his qi while his spiritual energy gradually recovered.
Xue Wei felt how at first the spiritual energy had begun slowly recovering in his mind, but it was like a wave gathering strength. Soon, the speed with which it was restoring itself became faster than the speed he was absorbing heaven-and-earth essence.
He stopped trying to multitask and focused fully on the changes happening to his body. He could feel how the wavelike energy crashed into his soul, filling his soul with spiritual energy. And then suddenly he had reached his max capacity of spiritual energy.
However, the wavelike energies did not diminish.
The waves kept crashing into his mind. His soul swelled up and expanded, and small cracks started appearing on it.
The waves kept coming, and incomparable pain soon followed.
With every wave, he felt excruciating pain. His body trembled. He was incapable of doing anything but resist the pain.
So far, every breakthrough he had experienced was more or less painless, so he went in wholly unprepared for the harsh lesson he was about to receive.
The reason was easy to guess. He had accumulated a lot of spiritual energy and his soul was bursting.
This was risky. Only now did Xue Wei realize the dangers that accompanied his breakthrough.
He had never expected that it was so painful to make a breakthrough without a cultivation method. But he knew that he could not give up now.
His soul was slowly breaking apart at the seams, and he knew it was because of his crude method, but it was similarly true that he would grow much stronger if he made it through.
Gritting his teeth, Xue Wei tried to hold on. Right as the world started to blacken and his consciousness was slipping, a dragon roar pulsed through and out of his body.
The dragon spirit in his dantian had roared loudly, preventing Xue Wei from entering a pain-induced coma.
Xue Wei’s mind was suddenly very clear. He felt as if he had transcended the pain.
The waves of spiritual energy had continued to wreak havoc in his mind, but Xue Wei could observe it without being implicated.
Suddenly, his soul started to shake. The extreme amount of spiritual energy that was flooding his soul had caused cracks to appear all over it.
The final wave of energy caused the soul to shatter. It collapsed into a thousand pieces, after which the dragon spirit roared a second time.
This time, a roar was not enough, so the spirit vanished from the dantian and appeared in the mind where the shattered soul was located.
It consumed every single shattered piece of soul. It was as if the soul was nourishment for the spirit, but Xue Wei was horrified. This was his soul!
After eating all the shards of the shattered soul, the dragon spirit started shining like a golden bell.
Suddenly the body of the azure dragon spirit grew blurry before it split into two. However, where the original dragon spirit was azure in color, the second one was golden.
They looked completely similar with the exception of their colors.
When it was done, the azure dragon spirit nodded its head in approval before it flashed and returned to the dantian.
Xue Wei was stupefied. His soul had mutated. It now looked like a dragon. What changes would this mean for him?
He tried using his spiritual energy and discovered that the range of his spiritual energy sense had increased by more than three times.
He also found that his spiritual energy was much more vigorous than before. It was as if it had attained a trace of majesty and endlessness that had not been there before.
Xue Wei was surprised. His soul was far stronger than before. It was as if he was awakening from a long sleep and the world was suddenly much clearer than it had been before.
He felt much more complete now than he was before. It was as if his mutated soul was more compatible with him.
Sighing, he shook his head. He had never before heard about a mutated soul before. Since he did not understand it, he believed it would be a good idea to consult Bai Tianyi about it.
“Anyways, I need to get my hands on a spiritual energy cultivation method.” Xue Wei sighed and pondered for a bit.
“I should be able to get a standard cultivation technique from the Golden Chambers,” he muttered to himself, “and then I can always change it when I get a better skill. Even a bad skill is better than no skill.”
With that matter settled and knowing that more thought on the mutated soul would yield him nothing, Xue Wei opted to try his hand at the Blazing Light Formation again
The brush flowed smoothly and he had no problems creating the formation.
After confirming that he had no problem inscribing the formation, he sat down cross-legged and began to meditate.
Xue Wei spent the rest of the night cultivating his qi. The night was calm but never silent. The city that spanned out in every direction out from the hotel was never quiet, and life bustled even in the darkest hour.
Wang Xiaoyun was in deep thought. Her beautiful eyes were flashing from time to time with unspoken and complicated emotions.
Bai Tianyi sat by the open window, gazing down at the stream of people beneath him while greedily absorbing the soul power in the air.
Hei Gou was also busy. He cultivated his body and Qi the entire night.
The following days, the group of friends went to the shopping districts daily to buy necessities for their future travels. Before they knew it, the day of the auction had drawn close.
Xue Wei and his friends all made their preparations. Soon, it was time to depart the Three Legged Crow Hotel.
The entire city was in turmoil. Many experts were rushing to the auction house to stand in line and get a spot in the auction hall.
As Xue Wei arrived, he was instantly recognized by some people from the Golden Chambers and thus a group of guards came to escort them.
“This way, please,” the leader of the guards said smilingly. “We have reserved Sky Room Number One for your use. please let us escort you to the destination, my lords.”
Many surrounding people heard this and their eyes almost popped out of their sockets. Sky Room Number One was without a doubt the most prestigious room in the entire auction house.
Seeing the ones who were allowed to use this room was already a great honor.