1726 An Uncommon Happenstance

Alex pulled out a cultivation pill and ate it in preparation for the next few days of cultivation. He had already cultivated for nearly 2 years in the Saint Soul 4th realm, so returning to that level wasn't very hard.

As such, his job now was to continue and hopefully break through. Hopefully, he would continue to break through for a long time.

Alex thought of cultivating normally, but with all the beast cores available to him, he decided to use one of them. He took a silvery-pink thumb nail sized core and quickly ate it.

Alex felt the core slide down his throat, past his esophagus, and settle in his stomach. Immediately, his body acted and started consuming the core. Just at that point, Alex felt something enter his Spiritual sea and his mind followed.

At the next moment, he arrived inside his spiritual sea, not far away from the silver mountain atop which Godslayer was cultivating. He made sure to not bring the fight in that direction.

He looked straight to the front where the beast he was to fight had appeared in its spirit form. It was a large eel with a shiny green body that almost looked brown from certain angles.

It had a long fin along its spine that was shiny pink in color and a large tail at the very end with spikes growing out of it. Its mouth was open, showing a thousand different spike-like teeth interlacing with each other.

Alex felt the strength of the beast and knew that defeating it would take no time. "Let's get this done with," he said as he stretched a bit before the fighting started. "It's only in the Saint Soul—"

"Who are you?" the eel suddenly asked.

Alex paused mid-stretch, his eyes wide as he stared at the beast in front of him. It spoke. He was stunned.

"What… did you just say?" Alex asked.

"Who are you?' the eel repeated and looked around at the surroundings, its eyes remaining on the mountain for a short time before moving away. "Where am I?"

'What is going on?' Alex thought, confused. Never before had a beast talked with him when it was just a spirit created from the impression left behind in the beast's core.

"I am Alex," Alex quickly answered, just to get the eel talking. "As for where you are…"

"This looks like a spiritual sea," the beast said suddenly. "But this is not my spiritual sea, is it?"

"No, it is not your spiritual sea," Alex said. "It is mine."

"How did I get here?" the beast asked. "I remember swimming toward something, and…"

Alex was ready to fight the beast, believing that it had remembered how it had been killed. However, it didn't react in any way hostile. Instead, it genuinely seemed confused about the entire situation.

Alex suddenly started feeling bad about killing something that was so genuinely lost. He had already killed this beast when it hadn't attacked him, so killing it again just didn't feel right.

'It's better to get this done with quickly,' Alex thought.

"You're dead." He decided to tell the beast at least that. "I ate your core and now I'm here."

"I… died?" the eel asked in a surprised tone. "How did I die?"

"I am not sure," Alex said.

"I… see," the eel said slowly. "I died… huh? So, this is it."

The spirit of the beast suddenly glimmered a soft blue and started growing transparent. Wisps of smoke made out of spiritual energy floated away from the eel's body, making it more and more transparent.

Then, before Alex could fully take in what had happened, all that was left of the eel was a small cloud of white spiritual energy, rogue to his spiritual sea. As for the spirit of the eel, nothing of it remained.

Alex was more than shocked to see that.

"Did it just… give up?" he asked himself.

Alex swiftly arrived next to the cloud of spiritual energy and put his hand over it, pouring out yellow fog from his body to absorb the spiritual energy. Everything that his yellow fog consumed would then become his own spiritual energy, only making him stronger.

Alex stared at his palm when everything was done, still confused by the entire event. He wanted to ask Godslayer if he knew anything, but the sword spirit seemed plenty occupied with its own cultivation and didn't seem to have paid any attention to what happened to Alex.

Alex shook his head in the end and could feel the trouble outside. He immediately left the spiritual sea and arrived just in time to manage the flood of Qi that left his stomach

The beast's spirit controlled the Qi in the core, and thus it was only after it was defeated that the floodgates would be open and Alex could collect it all.

While the spirit wasn't exactly defeated today, its absence provided the same result.

Alex took control of the Qi he received from the core and immediately used his cultivation technique to pass it around his body. What would have taken him weeks if not months to gather normally, was now collected in just a single second, so Alex had to do his best to not waste any of it.

Thankfully, the pill he ate, combined with his already wide meridians made for the perfect scenario through which the Qi could be absorbed.

Alex spent hours cultivating with the Qi, and the improvement he saw with the Qi was almost unimaginable. It made him wonder why he had even stopped consuming cores in the first place. But of course, that was mostly because this brought stability issues with his cultivation base.

However, at a time like this when a higher cultivation base was more important than its stability, Alex didn't mind using it to break through the many realms that he needed to reach the strength to fight the Dragon Emperor.

At the end of the cultivation session, Alex felt his dantian reach a fullness that came every time he hit a bottleneck. Realizing that it was the perfect time, Alex chose to break through to Saint Soul 5th realm.

The breakthrough lasted no more than a few hours, and that was because he decided to take his time with it. Had he wanted, he could have completed it in just half an hour.

Alex felt his new cultivation base and smiled happily at how strong he had become. He just had to continue this for a while longer.

"I should test with those cores," Alex remembered. "I need to find out if that was a weird scenario, or if those sorts of things happen all the time."

But he was done with cultivation for the time, so testing it was not something he could do at the moment. For now, it was time to leave.

Alex dressed himself in his kingly robes and walked out of the room where the servants were already waiting for him. He asked the servants to call for Linlin first to see if he had anything important to take care of that day.

If he had, he would do it.

If not, then he would go to his aunt and sister and deal with her immediate problem.