Chapter 254: Cloning [PART 1]
Xiang Yu floated in his spiritual sea, his form was no longer the simple blob like before. Multiple tentacles now extended from his body in every direction. The sight would have terrified most cultivators, yet as he examined his transformed state, Xiang Yu found the sensation surprisingly comfortable.
He wondered if he could maintain this form when he returned to his physical body. The tentacles moved so fluidly, responding to his every command, with this, he could cook a thousand dishes at once and make a million pills 💀. But he quickly dismissed the idea. Walking around looking like an eldritch horror would definitely send people running in terror.
Focusing his attention, Xiang Yu concentrated on his numerous tentacles. Carefully, he severed them from his main "body". As each appendage separated, he felt an odd sensation—despite being detached, he could still sense and control them, though not quite to the extent he desired.
Using the Mind Partition Scripture, Xiang Yu divided his consciousness, managing to create ten fully conscious partitions before hitting a limit. When he attempted to form additional partitions beyond that number, they emerged but they weren’t fully conscious, just simple creations that responded to commands but lacked true awareness. Dismissing these inferior copies, he focused on working with his ten successful partitions.
One by one, he guided each partition toward a severed tentacle. The moment a partition entered a tentacle, the tentacle began reshaping itself, transforming from its elongated form back into a blob-like shape identical to his original form. Eyes then materialized on each newly formed body.
"Hmm, it actually works," spoke one of the partitions, bouncing with excitement.
Xiang Yu couldn’t help but feel a surge of pride. "What do you think? Am I smart?"
"Yay!" the other partitions responded in unison, forming tiny hands and clapping enthusiastically.
Xiang Yu blushed slightly in embarrassment. Playing with himself like this was a little cringe, thankfully he was the only one who saw that.
"Ahem," he cleared his thoughts, forcing himself to focus on more serious matters. While the partitioning appeared successful, this was just within his spiritual sea, something he could already accomplish before. The real test lay ahead.
He needed to determine whether these partitions could exist independently outside his body and, more importantly, whether they could inhabit separate physical forms.
Opening his eyes in the physical world, Xiang Yu immediately began inspecting his body for any changes. His hands roamed over his arms and torso, searching for any sign of transformation. Finding none, he was a little disappointed. He had secretly hoped that merging with the flame might give him some ancient primordial bloodline, but it seemed he was dreaming too much.
Shifting his attention back to more important matters, Xiang Yu concentrated on his consciousness partitions and began summoning them into the physical realm. The first partition emerged from his body, followed by the second, then the third. One by one, all ten partitions materialized around him.
But this wasn’t particularly impressive—his original soul had always been capable of leaving his body. So he decided to see how long these partitions could remain outside his body without him feeling any discomfort or strain.
An hour went by quickly as he carefully observed. To his surprise, he felt no discomfort whatsoever. While this success might be attributed to his recently strengthened soul, he didn’t have unlimited time for extensive testing. He chose to mark this as a victory and proceed to the final, most crucial phase.
Activating his Regeneration Scripture, Xiang Yu stimulated his body’s healing abilities. Thanks to recent upgrades, his regeneration had improved even more. Within seconds, a complete duplicate of his body materialized before him, growing from nothing into a perfect copy down to the smallest detail.
This was the moment of truth. He slowly guided one of his soul partitions toward the newly generated body. He clasped his hands together internally as he silently hoped that this would work.
The clone’s eyes snapped open.
Without warning, it immediately threw a punch directly at him.
...
Xiang Yu raised a single finger, effortlessly stopping the clone’s incoming fist mere inches from his face. The punch, which had been thrown with considerable force, came to a complete halt against his finger.
The clone body paused mid-attack, then thoughtfully held its chin in contemplation. "Hmm, the controls are fine, it’s just lacking in power," Xiang Yu spoke through the clone’s mouth.
Through his original body’s perspective, Xiang Yu reflected on what this brief test had revealed. The clone clearly lacked a spiritual root, which meant it couldn’t mobilize qi or access any spiritual energy-based abilities. Additionally, it didn’t carry his bloodlines—no dragon scales would manifest for defense, no phoenix regeneration would activate during combat, and none of his other inherent abilities like physiques were present in the clone.
Despite these limitations, the clone was genuinely impressive in its own right. Since it had been regenerated directly from his skin and tissue, it retained all the benefits of his current body refining cultivation. At his present level of body refining, even without the various boosts from his bloodlines and special physiques, this clone should be capable of holding its own against a peak Nascent Soul opponent in purely physical combat.
Although it was quite weak by Xiang Yu’s standards, it was passable considering he hadn’t created this clone for combat, instead, he wanted to use it primarily for mundane tasks like teaching students and other stuff to free up his cultivation time.
Xiang Yu began walking around using its body to further test it. Each step felt natural and responsive, the movements flowing smoothly as if he were controlling his own body. The clone turned its head left and right, flexed its fingers, and performed various basic motions. Everything responded exactly as expected, confirming that the consciousness partition was successfully interfacing with the body.
Meanwhile, his original body remained stationary, deep in thought. This experiment proved that his concept could work. The consciousness partitioning, body regeneration, and remote control mechanisms all functioned as intended. Now he just needed to refine the process and add the finishing touches.
The three scriptures he had developed needed significant reworking to better align with his new abilities. Once he had optimized each individual scripture, he would use the system’s fusion function to merge them into a single cloning technique.
While he could theoretically continue using this ability without fusion, since it had essentially become a natural capability of his mutated soul, Xiang Yu strongly preferred to have it as a proper technique. If it existed as a system-recognized technique, it would continue growing stronger as the system doubled its experience points. More importantly, having it as a technique would make the ability much easier to use.
Xiang Yu spent the next several hours reworking each scripture, sometimes rebuilding them almost entirely from scratch. He refined the consciousness partition method to create more stable and independent mental segments. The regeneration scripture was enhanced to produce more durable and responsive clone bodies...
When he was finally satisfied with all three refined scriptures, it was time for the fusion process. He opened the system interface and prepared to merge them.
Just as he was about to initiate the fusion, he suddenly had an idea. In the selection field for fusion, he decided to also add his now perfectly mastered elemental techniques.
The main reason for this addition was to test a fascinating hypothesis he had. Since the clones lacked spiritual roots and couldn’t access spiritual energy, what would happen if he merged techniques that specifically required spiritual energy into the clone creation process? Would this somehow force the clones to develop spiritual roots?
He didn’t expect this to succeed, but since he wasn’t losing anything by trying, why not explore this possibility?