1742 Squid

"We will give you the resources," Scarlet told Alex. "The rest, unfortunately, you will have to plan yourself."

A few minutes after that, the meeting was over.

Alex left the throne room, making his way back to his room, slightly frowning at the thought of getting no help in terms of the ideas of warfare

He would have to rely all on himself to plan the entire war and how he would go about it.

That was a troublesome situation. Surely a nearly 20 thousand-year-old Immortal would know a lot more than him, a mortal who wasn't even 100 years old.

Alex frowned, but worrying wasn't going to help him. He needed to make a concrete plan, but that likely wasn't going to help him either since the Dragon Emperor was most certainly better at coming up with war tactics.

'No,' Alex thought. 'No matter how much I plan, it will all come down to nothing if we can't kill the Dragon Emperor. What we need more than anything else right now is for me to have a strong enough cultivation base to fight him.'

Zhou Linfan was guaranteed to aid him in battle, as he was going to help them in the war entirely just so he could fight and kill the Dragon Emperor.

Hannah was the other person who could fight, and by the time of the war, she would most likely be stronger than the Dragon Emperor too. However, she had no battle skills and it was unlikely that the Dragon Emperor would even dare fight her and put others to distract her.

Not to mention, Hannah hadn't killed anyone before, so that put extra pressure on her which wasn't good during battle.

Aside from the two, there weren't many others who could fight the Dragon Emperor and survive. In the end, Alex was the only last one who could fight, so if he wanted to defeat the Dragon Emperor, he needed to be ready.

Alex was back in his room and had started cultivating once again. He hadn't had the chance to properly cultivate for the past month as he had forced himself to make as many pills as he could for everyone that could need it.

Now that Scarlet was out and about, he decided to leave that task to his mother and finally get serious about his own cultivation.

He was going to break through as soon as he could and force himself to keep doing that even when his cultivation base hadn't properly stabilized.

So, for that, he had to eat another beast core.

This time, the core he ate was from a beast in the Saint Soul 7th realm, and it quickly became apparent what beast it was when a squid formed in Alex's spiritual sea.

Alex was about to attack it when he paused and remembered the last beast core he had eaten. That beast had talked and seemed somewhat aware of who it was. Was this beast the same?

"Can you talk?" Alex asked the squid.

The massive squid turned around slowly, its unusually high 22 tentacles floating around in the air, as though it was in the water.

The squid looked at Alex, and suddenly its color changed to red. "You killed me!" it shouted out of nowhere, surprising Alex, and attacked immediately.

It used its spiritual energy to form spheres of water around itself, from where spears of water were shot toward Alex.

Alex quickly created a shield in front of him, blocking all the attacks. But the squid attacked again.

"I'll kill you!" it shouted.

Alex fought back, defending, trying to understand what the situation was. Last time, the eel hadn't realized what had happened and Alex had to tell it that it had died.

This time around, however, the beast knew it had died and it wanted to kill Alex for it.

'Why so different?' Alex thought. The only difference he could see between the two beasts, other than their slight cultivation base difference was the fact that the eel had died suddenly during Alex's rampage.

As for the squid, it had attacked Alex before the whole ordeal and Alex had killed it just because he was searching for battles for blood and core.

'It remembers our fight?' Alex thought. Maybe that had given enough time for the core to take on the impression left behind by the nascent soul of the beast.

'So it is the timing that matters?' Alex thought.

He quickly got rid of the beast, killing it in just 2 more attacks once he thought he understood the situation. After that, he appeared back outside in his real body and started cultivating as the tremendous amount of energy from the beast's core flowed in through his meridians.

Alex cultivated as much as he could using the Qi from the beast core for nearly 2 days before it ran out. By that time, he felt as though he was halfway through the next bottleneck, and with a significantly strong beast core or two, he could enter the next realm.

That… should not have been a right feeling at all.

Alex frowned. He knew cultivating quickly had its downsides, but… why couldn't he find any? He cultivated for a while longer, searching for instabilities but found nothing again.

'This is so weird,' he thought. What was going on?

'I have to ask someone,' Alex thought.

He found one of the elders first and talked to him about his situation, but the elder had no idea what Alex was talking about.

An instability in one's cultivation base was supposed to be apparent for anyone who had properly hit a bottleneck and broke through beforehand. In Alex's case, he should have been fully aware.

If he didn't, then something was most certainly wrong with his cultivation base. Or maybe most certainly right.

Alex thought for a bit and decided to ask Scarlet next. As a beast, she would be more aware of how it was to cultivate using a beast core.

"We don't cultivate using beast core," Scarlet answered. "In fact, our body simply absorbs the beast's core and makes us strong on its own. It… just happens. Maybe the same is true for you too?"

Alex frowned a little at the information. "Do you have to break through manually when you eat a beast core or does it just happen too?"

"It just happens," Scarlet said.

"Then that is not the same as for me," Alex said with a sigh. "I should be feeling a feeling of instability, but I don't. I'm worried it's a false promise from my body and if I accept this, I will have problems in the future."

"Honestly, I don't know," Scarlet said. "You should ask Bai Jingshen. He knows more than I do thanks to his master."

"Oh… okay," Alex said. "I'll go to him."

Alex found out that Bai Jingshen had left on a trip with his wives to go see the rest of the continent while they were there.

They had left Pearl behind with Helen and the rest so he could spend his time with them which they had taken away for the past few months after his return.

However, at a single call from Pearl, the White Tiger arrived back in the palace within minutes.

"What do you need help with?" Bai Jingshen asked. "This better be worth it for me to leave my wives alone on the trip."