CHAPTER 321: FIRST PROJECTION

Victor smirked to himself and leapt into the air, jumping across the fifty feet wide chasm with ease.

When he landed on the opposite side, he surveyed the landscape ahead. It was strange in a deadly sort of way and quiet... too quiet.

He stepped forward and spotted a small marked rock.

This was his final stopping position the last time, which meant that anything further from here would be new territory that he hadn’t explored yet.

Victor proceeded to activate Wind Dash and charged forward at a speed of over fifty feet per second.

The wind pushed him past a bunch of strange looking areas and even sinking terrains but he still didn’t see anything new.

Except for some vines lashing out at his figure, which he evaded and some strange massive multicolored corals above land, there was nothing noteworthy.

After about fifteen minutes of exploration, Victor deactivated Wind Dash and came to a stop.

He had gone pretty far and still, there was nothing except barren eerie lands that extended for miles.

He proceeded to mark another place as his stopping point and turned around.

Now it was time to head towards the west.

...

...

The western horizon stretched endlessly like a wasteland. Victor’s boots made soft squelching sounds as he moved across the liquid soaked ground.

He had already been walking for about three hours and only just arrived at his last stopping point.

The moment he spotted the marked area, he activated Wind Dash, causing a stream of compressed air to swirl around his legs as he shot forward like a blur.

As Victor shot past the point he had marked the last time, he noticed a subtle shift. The air grew colder.

"Huh," he muttered while rubbing his arms. "Don’t tell me we’re suddenly in Antarctica now."

He kept going as his breath began to fog while he dashed further. Every few hundred meters, the temperature dipped lower and the wind turned quieter. At first, he thought he might be nearing the boundary of a frost-type zone or perhaps this was a rare natural phenomenon.

However, the more he thought about it, the more he felt something amiss.

"Last time I went further east, it got hotter. Now I’m headed further west and it’s freezing?" Victor murmured while scratching his head. "South didn’t change... but still, this is a little suspicious."

This felt like one of those moments in Ascendant Realms where everything looked calm until something absolutely horrifying crawled out of the mist.

After a couple of minutes using Wind Dash, Victor finally decided to stop. He reached the daily quota he set for travel distance since he was doing his best to optimise use of qi.

Normally, this was where he’d plant a marker, jot down coordinates, and return another day. But this time... he hesitated.

He really wanted to see if there was something further ahead. Cold? Hot? It had to mean something, right?

Victor frowned. "If only I could just... peek ahead without wasting qi."

In as much as he would have loved to keep traveling further, it could end up being a waste of time and energy if there was nothing further ahead. He still had to check other directions and there was no way to restore his qi, after all.

Almost as soon as he said that, something stirred within him.

A deep, resonant thrum that came not from his body but from somewhere within.

His vision blurred and then the world fell away.

When he opened his eyes again, he wasn’t in the lost eerie plain anymore.

He was standing in a strange vast space of blue mist and slow-moving motes of light.

The air glimmered like liquid crystal, and there was no ground or sky, only an endless sea of light stretching into infinity.

In front of him lay a small seren pond that glowed faintly with blue light.

Victor blinked with an utterly confused expression. "...How did I get here? This looks nothing like Lingyun Realm... and I’m awake so it couldn’t be Lingyun Realm anyways."

He curiously looked down and froze. He was... naked.

"For heaven’s sake!" he groaned while covering himself. "Where did all my clothes go?"

Despite his complaints, he slowly approached the pond.

It looked quite mesmerizing and mythical. Victor could feel a strange connection to it.

Its surface rippled faintly, reflecting his form and this was when he realised that he wasn’t entirely physical.

His reflection was blue and fairly translucent. The blue reflection of himself that stared back at him had faint glowing marks... the same arrow-like runes that appeared whenever he activated his Void Emperor Bloodline.

However, his bloodline wasn’t activated right now.

"This place..." he whispered. "So this is what Lingyun meant by the Inner Bank."

A ripple of understanding suddenly flowed through him.

He recalled a line from one of the scrolls he had read long ago in Ascendant Realms:

"The Nascent Soul cultivator houses within them the Inner Bank — a sanctum where spirit meets consciousness. Through it, one may draw upon the essence of the soul to touch what lies beyond sight."

Victor crouched beside the pond, peering into his reflection. He reached out a hand and the moment his fingertips touched the surface, a ripple ran across it like liquid glass.

A deep vibration spread through his entire being, and for a split second, he felt weightless as a sense of deeper understanding flowed into him.

So this was it. His spiritual essence. The pool of pure soul energy that wasn’t tied to qi.

He suddenly recalled when he used a soul attack for the first time after Aeri Fan gave him guidance. He didn’t expend a single wisp of qi. Apparently, this was the source of that power and it had nothing to do with qi.

Once a cultivator reached Nascent Soul Realm, they were privy to a bunch of abilities that only them could use.

And the soul attack was one of such abilities.

However, now that Victor had found himself here, he suddenly realized that there was more.

And one of those abilities, happened to be the answer he was looking for....

His heart raced. "So... I can use this to project myself?" he murmured. "To scout ahead... without actually moving?"

He straightened as his expression slowly shifted from curiosity to sheer excitement. "If this works, I could explore dangerous areas ahead without risking a single strand of hair and know exactly what path to avoid. Perhaps now, I can finally find some food and shelter."

Victor closed his eyes and focused on the pond again. He imagined himself stretching outward, beyond his body, beyond the physical limits of flesh and bone.

The blue water began to glow brighter.

Ripples turned to waves, waves to pulses, and then —

BOOM.

A surge of radiant energy exploded outward from Victor’s being, flooding the space around him with light.

When his eyes opened again, he was hovering in the sky — or rather, something that looked like him was.

A towering blue phantom that was over a hundred feet tall, semi-transparent, and glowing like a celestial flame, gazed upon the earth like an ancient god awakened. It had his face, his eyes, even the faint smirk that crept up when Victor was feeling smug.

The phantom tilted its head slightly as if testing its movement, and Victor’s consciousness inside it, laughed in disbelief.

"Holy... This is me?"

His voice reverberated across the plains below.

He looked down and to his astonishment, he could see everything from this altitude. Miles and miles of terrain unfolded beneath him ranging from frozen valleys to distant cliffs, and faint, barely perceptible energy lines running like veins across the landscape.

It was as if the world had been peeled open before his eyes.

Victor’s eyes widened. "Well, well, what do we have here?"

He willed the astral form forward and it moved. Effortlessly, smoothly, as though the very air bent to his will.

"So this is what real astral projection feels like," he muttered while grinning. "Way better than the VR version."

His Astral Projection shimmered with a translucent radiance as its enormous form stretched out like a phantom comet blazing across the endless white void.

Below him stretched an icy terrain so vast it felt like it had swallowed the horizon.

But this was no ordinary glacial field, it was alive with unnatural phenomena.

The plains weren’t just snow and frost; they were a labyrinth of rough crystalline structures rising and falling like an army of frozen giants.

And scattered among them were tilted colossal skyscrapers void of windows with crumbled walls... A couple of lopsided electric mast completely covered in frost could also be spotted jutting from the ground.

It seemed as though this place had once been a city and now everything in sight were like past relics with a few strang additions.

Massive skeletons, the size of buildings could be spotted in some areas completely frozen. They were like canopies with their curvature protruding from the ground and shooting into the air.

Victor narrowed his astral eyes as his gaze swept across the region.

Within a half-buried crystalline cavern, something moved.