Nether Flame gave the exact same reply in the same tone and with the same nonchalant attitude. This made Loki confirm his suspicions about what was going on.
Nether Flame was a rank 7 cultivator and an old one at that, so he should know how much he pays for life-leech and what the limit of the size of Cave Heaven for rank 7 cultivators can be. Yet, he is lying with a straight face to Loki that he doesn’t know.
Since it was obvious that he was lying, Loki was able to glean the underlying information from that sentence. Without being stated explicitly, he was able to ascertain that Nether Flame didn’t want to tell him the answer for unknown reasons.
In fact, the most likely reason for withholding information was that Nether Flame didn’t like him and didn’t have an obligation to answer his questions.
If it were another fresh divine being, they would take the hint and give up at this point. But Loki still wasn’t willing to let things go.
He glanced at Nether Flame as he said to himself, "I have already been called inexperienced and ignorant, so there is no harm for me in playing the part. He called me those things, so he should be the one to pay the price."
Nether Flame had called him weak and ignorant. In Loki’s humble opinion, Nether is very wrong about him being weak, but half right about him being ignorant.
It is true that there are a lot of things that he doesn’t know about the world of divine beings. But that didn’t mean that he was clueless.
However, since he wanted to learn a lot of information, he decided to play the part of the clueless and fresh divine being. So he began to pester Nether Flame with more questions.
Each time he asked a question, Nether Flame would reply, saying, "I don’t know."
Nether Flame didn’t tell him to stop asking questions. The man also didn’t get angry because he was asking so many questions. He only said the same line over and over again.
Loki was impressed by Nether Flame’s patience, but he still refused to give up. He continued to ask a different question every second. This continued for more than a minute.
After a minute and sixty occasions of asking different questions and getting the same nonchalant answer, he already knew that Nether Flame wasn’t going to answer his questions. But he continued to ask questions for fun.
At this point, he was only asking questions to see how far he could push being a nuisance before Nether Flame would snap. Since Nether Flame couldn’t kill him without paying a heavy price, he felt confident about his chances of getting away with being a nuisance.
Eventually, he asked a question that got Nether Flame to say something different. He said, "What are these people anyway? They look identical to products manufactured in a factory. If not for the fact that they behave differently and have individuality, I would have thought they were puppets."
He was talking about the humans working on the rings. When he asked this question, Nether Flame sighed.
Loki was wondering what he was sighing when he heard Nether Flame say, "They are homunculi, so they were made in a factory."
Loki didn’t expect to hear an actual helpful answer. What he expected was why he was constantly enhancing the defensive power of his body in preparation to be hit.
But not only did Nether Flame answer his question, but the answer also wasn’t something Loki expected. This gave him a double dose of surprise.
His voice was tinged with surprise as he said, "But they are different beings. I can tell that they have different souls and different minds."
To which Nether Flame rolled his eyes and said, "Only their bodies were produced in a factory. I don’t think the death pathway can be used to produce souls. But I’m sure that the death pathway can be used to manipulate souls."
"That aside, their souls came from normal people. All of them are people who owed the sect money and couldn’t pay. So all of them used to be disciples of the sect. One of them might even have been an elder like us."
"They couldn’t pay their debts, so the sect took their souls and stuffed them into a manufactured body. Then they were put to work to pay back their debts."
At this point, Nether Flame’s nonchalant attitude was gone. His detached behavior was slowly being replaced by another emotion.
Loki couldn’t determine the identity of the emotion Nether Flame was feeling, so he was confused for a while. His confusion was not helped by the fact that Nether Flame became proactive with information.
Even though he didn’t ask for more information, Nether Flame was still talking. His tone had a hint of a strange emotion as he said, "It is interesting, really. These people literally can’t die. Anytime their bodies give out for whatever reason, their souls are yanked out and stuffed into another body."
Then he chuckled and said, "To be fair, I might have exaggerated when I said they couldn’t die. The truth is that there is a limit to how many times they can be resurrected like this."
"The limit exists because their resurrection is not perfect. Each time they are resurrected, they lose a little bit of their souls. So over time, their souls shrink until they can’t be used anymore."
"The reduction to their souls erodes both their willpower and the upper limit of their souls. So the erosion of their souls isn’t something that can be healed. This is why the sect needs a continuous supply of fresh souls to maintain the activity of their homunculi."
"If their soul breaks before they can pay off their debt, then the sect will have to bear the loss. But if they manage to pay back their debt before their soul breaks down, they will be set free and let back into the cycle of reincarnation to be born anew."
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