As Xu Yuan’s consciousness sank inward, the state of his own soul appeared before him once more. Those drifting, dust-like motes had already spread across every corner of its surface, packed so densely and layered so thickly that they rose and rolled like waves of wheat in an autumn field.
The secret soul cultivation art paired with the Blood Origin Heartfall Art was, in truth, very simple in the way it dealt with enemies. A lot could be said about it, but in the end it all came down to two things, sever and devour.
First, condense and shape the soul into a blade, cut apart the enemy soul, then use a special method to swallow and refine it. The first part was difficult. Unless someone was a heaven-blessed monster with absurd comprehension, there was no way they could learn it the moment they saw it.
But in the current situation, Xu Yuan did not need to use that first step at all. These floating particles, perhaps for the sake of concealment, had already crushed themselves into bite-sized pieces and delivered themselves straight to his mouth. All he needed to do now was use these drifting motes as practice.
Xu Yuan carefully began guiding his soul and tried circulating the secret art. His Innate Soul Physique gave him precise and delicate control over his soul.
The moment he set the art in motion, several floating particles quietly vanished from the rolling wheat-wave on its surface. Wrapped up with the utmost care, they began moving along the route prescribed by the secret art, slowly being refined and absorbed.
While absorbing them, Xu Yuan also kept a close eye on the movement of the particles on the surface of his soul. A handful at a time did not seem to attract the woman beside him. The wheat-wave rhythm on the soul’s surface remained unchanged.
When the absorption was complete, those few particles turned into a wisp of almost imperceptibly pure soul energy and flowed into Xu Yuan’s sea of consciousness, adding the slightest bit more strength to the defensive line on the surface of his soul.
After repeating the process several times, Xu Yuan was no longer as clumsy with the secret art as he had been at the start.
After making a rough estimate of how quickly those floating motes were grinding away at the surface of his soul, Xu Yuan came to a conclusion. If he really opened up and devoured them to his heart’s content, Su Jinxuan would have no way to deal with his Innate Soul Physique.
But Xu Yuan did not choose to startle the grass and alert the snake. Su Jinxuan’s upper limit was still an unknown. At present, she indeed had no answer for him, but Xu Yuan could not be sure whether she had some last resort that would drag them both down together.
There’s a lot of these floating particles clinging to the surface of my soul. If Su Jinxuan had some way to make them all explode at once… Xu Yuan steadied his thoughts. The lesson from his earlier arrogance was still fresh in his mind. Better to be a little more careful.
So through one small act of theft after another, Xu Yuan kept probing the limits of Su Jinxuan’s perception. A few motes, a dozen, several dozen, more than a hundred… Only when Xu Yuan absorbed over a thousand floating particles in one go did the swarm plastered across the surface of his soul finally stir.
Once Xu Yuan had a rough idea of the limit, he stopped getting greedy. Each time, he would evenly pick out eight hundred lucky victims from the surface of his soul and devour them.
And so, as the cycle repeated, time slowly passed.
Su Jinxuan truly seemed unable to stay too far away from him. For several days in a row, she kept his body under control with those floating particles and made him remain in her room. Whether he was using the toilet or washing himself, Su Jinxuan never left a radius of ten meters around him.
As time passed and the total number of particles Xu Yuan had devoured continued to pile up, Su Jinxuan’s complexion gradually changed from seductive and rosy to pale and drained.
Then came another dawn.
Xu Yuan was just about to pick a few hundred more lucky soul particles for breakfast when Su Jinxuan’s aggrieved voice drifted softly from beside him.
“Third Young Master, what exactly did you do to me last night?”