Chapter 79: Refinement (Physics)

Collecting Souls… Well, generally speaking, the Soul Quality obtained by killing a being was not only not very high, but it also easily attracted trouble!

This trouble wasn’t the kind where you beat up the young one and the old one comes looking for revenge. Carelessly collecting Souls was more likely to draw the attention of ‘Death’ in this world. Being noticed was definitely not a good thing. Being noticed by Death only brought the noticed one closer to death!

That was the processed way of saying it. To put it more plainly, you could even choke to death while drinking water. This side effect became even more prominent when collecting the Souls of intelligent beings. Of course, if an individual’s strength was great enough, they could simply ignore this influence.

No one wanted to die. Having one’s Soul extracted upon death, never to be reborn, a Soul filled with hatred was hard to reach a high quality.

The core of an Alchemical Puppet made from low-quality Souls would also be affected. Of course, there were still ways to obtain high-quality Souls. For example, if the person involved willingly opened their heart and offered their Soul, or through other methods, like… a Contract. Loris’s kind of Contract was one way to collect Souls.

However, the quality of Souls collected this way, though high, could not compare to those willingly offered with one’s whole heart. The easiest way to make someone do this was brainwashing. This was also one of the reasons why various Cults in this world kept springing up endlessly, like weeds after a spring breeze.

A high-quality Soul was an extremely expensive currency. As long as you were willing to pay, your Soul was especially valuable.

“Hmm… Can’t get that kind of Soul for now, so I’ll choose ordinary ones,” Zheng Yichen muttered. There were many ways to collect Souls. Bona Kaine’s Magic Book recorded many: Soul Drain, Soul Extraction, Soul Siphon, Soul Harvest, and so on. As long as there was a carrier, Souls could be collected. However, Zheng Yichen was not lacking in Souls.

He summoned the Magic Weapon Summoning Book. Zheng Yichen flipped to the page imprinted with Frostmourne and directly summoned a Projection with its full power. This sword was the fastest-growing among all the Magic Arms. The number of Souls imprisoned inside it increased every day. Who knew who was casually using this sword to kill people every day…

Or perhaps a group of people were using this sword to kill people?

As for the price of maliciously harvesting Souls, Zheng Yichen didn’t mind. Although he was the master of the Magic Arms, it wasn’t him wielding them to kill people. Even if accounts were settled, it wouldn’t be settled with him. Well, perhaps because this Magic Arm was the most powerful, it had become the most popular one.

If the Magic Arms in the current Magic Weapon Summoning Book were to be ranked on a summoning list, Frostmourne would definitely be number one!

He extracted a few damaged Souls from it. Most of their consciousness had long been worn away by the imprisonment, completely occupied by full resentment. The quality of such Souls went without saying. Zheng Yichen looked at the Soul confined within a light shield before him, rubbing his chin in thought. Hmm… What to do? Although Zheng Yichen didn’t have high requirements for the quality of the ‘intelligent’ core he was making now, if what he made ended up almost being garbage, that was also unacceptable.

“So, still need to think of a way,” Zheng Yichen scratched his head and reached out to touch this Soul. Upon contact, his brow couldn’t help but rise. The feeling of directly touching a Soul was actually quite similar to reaching into Magic?

He searched through Frostmourne again. Zheng Yichen picked out a Soul whose consciousness had not been completely worn away and pulled it out. When bound, the other looked at Zheng Yichen in terror. Hmm, having an emotional response was good. He was afraid of it being dull and sluggish, only capable of violently attacking living things. “Cooperate with me in an experiment, and I’ll let you go, how about that?”

The terrified Soul frantically nodded its head. Having been killed and imprisoned in that Magic Sword, being in an environment filled with a large number of Wraiths with little consciousness, he was almost driven mad himself. In such an environment, before long, he would also be affected by it, either becoming one of the Wraiths or being torn apart by them!

Anyway, while imprisoned, even if torn apart, not a shred would be wasted. Strengthening the Wraiths also strengthened Frostmourne.

Seeing his agreement, Zheng Yichen reached into the magic shield binding the Soul and grabbed the Soul inside. With conscious Souls, there was also that sensation of grasping Magic, though it was a bit strange. If the grasped Magic felt like a water balloon, a conscious Soul felt like a water balloon with stones added inside, where you could clearly feel the foreign objects within.

This foreign object… was it consciousness?

If consciousness was discarded, a Soul should just be a form of energy. Having reasoned this out, Zheng Yichen released the binding on him. The Soul, now directly exposed to the air, immediately began to show signs of dispersing and collapsing. This situation was normal. An ordinary Soul was like unfocused Mana scattered into the air—it would be assimilated immediately.

A Soul could only persist a bit longer. Moreover, this was already a damaged Soul. The dispersing Soul Power dissipated extremely quickly. Zheng Yichen didn’t even have a chance to collect it. When this Soul had almost dissipated, the Soul abruptly stopped dispersing, completely aggregated, and suddenly disappeared before Zheng Yichen’s eyes.

The speed was dozens of times faster than the previous dissipation! It gave Zheng Yichen not even a sliver of a chance to react. “The last thing that disappeared… that was the consciousness, right?”

He muttered. That’s right, the bit of Soul that completely aggregated at the end didn’t dissipate; it vanished!

In any case, now that he discovered he could handle Souls, everything was simpler. Zheng Yichen directly grabbed a handful of damaged Souls, clenched them tightly in both hands, and with added force, forcefully compressed them into a sphere. Different broken Souls were forcibly fused together by him in this manner.

“Not finished yet!” Zheng Yichen stared at the dirty, murky gray sphere in the center of his palm. He continued to add new Souls into it. The color of the sphere grew darker and darker. What Zheng Yichen continued to do was to desperately press and hammer it. Only when the surface of this sphere turned completely black did he decisively release a prepared Magic spell: Purification!

Light Element Purification had a strong suppressing effect on Negative Energy. The surface of this Soul sphere was covered in Negative Energy that Zheng Yichen had squeezed out through forceful compression. This energy was mixed with the Soul, inseparable. So, even as Zheng Yichen further compressed the Soul, they would only be squeezed to the surface under the Soul’s increasingly dense mass, never truly separating.

Therefore, external force was needed to solve it!

Under the power of Purification, the thick Negative Energy on the sphere was quickly cleared away. When the black color completely faded and the Soul sphere’s color returned to a half-gray, half-white state, its volume had already shrunk by half.