Li Yu stood in the air for a shuddering moment. The bodies of his twenty-one slain enemies are nothing more than scattered dust and cooling fragments on the basalt below. His head pounded from the battle and his own chaotic thoughts when he thought he was dying. His tattered robes whipped in the wind and his body was overflowing with a chaotic and surging power.

He had no time to process it all. He couldn't face a breakthrough here in the open, exposed and injured.

He retrieved his merit token and sent a message to Jian Xuan. "I was ambushed but I eventually won. Do not leave the fortifications and beware of strong forces around. I am undergoing my breakthrough now and will be delayed."

He didn't wait for a reply. He dove, snatching the only physical corpse left, the purple Nascent Soul-less body of the Xylarri leader and shot towards the nearest nondescript mountain range.

He found a sheer cliff face and in a single explosive burst of Qi, blasted a deep cave into the rock. He shot inside and immediately threw down half a dozen high-grade array disks from his storage ring. Various defensive, concealment and Qi-gathering formations that he had gotten or brought back on his home continent.

The disks were convenient because he only had to power them with his own energy or in this case spirit stones for them to work. They flared to life, sealing the cave entrance, masking his aura and isolating him from the world.

He dropped the purple corpse and he looked at it. It was dead, its soul was eaten and gone, but the physical body still pulsed with the remnant of its potent purple energy. He had burned through most of his high-grade spirit stones and pills in his last cultivation session at Aethelgard.

The fighting against the Xylarri hadn't restored those physical resources as the creatures seemed to carry nothing on them. He briefly thought back to the artifact it brought out. It must store things somewhere but he didn’t know where. This Soul Formation-level corpse was his only external resource left, a battery he might need to fuel the transformation.

His staff materialized in his hand. He brought it down with a final crushing crunch, destroying the creature's head. It was a bit sick but he had to be absolutely certain it was dead. He then sat cross-legged with the corpse in front of him..

The breakthrough began.

Instantly, his Ocean of Qi became a maelstrom. It began to spin with dizzying and terrifying speed. A massive hurricane of all the different types of Qi inside his body was roaring within him. The spiritual Qi from the outside world which had gathered sensing his breakthrough was pulled by his arrays. The raw chaotic energy from the purple corpse next to him was drawn in by his Koi and they all streamed into his body.

His Leviathan Soul was at the center of it all, its massive form absorbing the tidal wave of power. The entire ocean of Qi was compressing, solidifying and being drawn into the Leviathan Soul.

'This is it,' he thought, his mind surprisingly calm. 'The final step. A soul is physically formed. This is Soul Formation.' He had been through this process once, in a way, when he formed his Nascent Soul. He was curious how this breakthrough would go but he was confident. He already had one. This should go smoothly.

He was wrong.

The moment the energy from the purple corpse hit his spiritual sea an agonizing and unprecedented pain erupted through his entire being.

He screamed at the sudden pain. A raw sound that bounced off the cave walls. It wasn't the pain of cultivation. It was the pain of disintegration. His meridians felt like they were being scoured with acid. His bones, tempered by the Abyssal Leviathan Physique felt like they were shattering from the inside out. His flesh felt like it was being torn from his body.

'What's... what's wrong?' he gasped, his body convulsing. 'Is it poison? Is the corpse's energy rejecting me?'

But he knew that shouldn’t be the case. His Koi was filtering the energy, purifying it and turning it into his own. This pain... it was coming from inside his Ocean of Qi.

He forced his spiritual sense, now rattling from the agony to look within.

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The Ocean of Qi was boiling. The Leviathan Soul was roaring, not in triumph but as if it, too, was in pain. And from the absolute and deepest, darkest depths of his spiritual sea, a light was rising.

It was the thing.

The unknown "something" that had been passively siphoning the inert purple energy he couldn’t use but had been collecting from the Xylarri. Along with a lot of the energy he could use. It had been a vague presence before, a subtle drain he had only noticed after his 9th-stage breakthrough. Now with the catalyst of his breakthrough, it was emerging.

It was a brilliant and blindingly white light. However, it was tinged with purple, its edges swirling with the same destructive chaotic energy of the Xylarri.

And as it rose, the pain grew. It ascended through his Ocean of Qi and with every foot it climbed, the feeling of destruction intensified. Li Yu felt his consciousness starting to shred. His refined body was holding on just fine as the pain completely shifted.

This was the pain that came from the soul and Li Yu was just barely keeping conscientious as this thing slowly surfaced. He was losing himself to the agony and didn’t know how much more he could take.

Then, the thing acted.

It reached the surface of the churning ocean, still a formless beacon of white-purple light. It pulsed. A single white line of energy as thin as a spider's silk stretched out from it. It shot across the spiritual sea and latched onto his Leviathan Soul.

The Leviathan didn't resist this thread that had now latched on to it. It hung in the center of the storm completely passive now. It was allowing what came next.

The "thing" pulled.

Li Yu screamed again, a raw mental shriek this time. The purple condensed ball of soul energy that was in the "stomach" of his Leviathan was being dragged out. He felt the purple Nascent Soul's remnants being torn free from his Leviathan and pulled across his spiritual sea by that white line. It felt like the sensation like his very soul was being vivisected.

The purple soul-ball was dragged into the formless white-purple light. His Leviathan Soul was still completely still.

And the "thing" absorbed it.

It glowed brightly, the purple hue intensifying, the white light stabilizing. It pulsed, once, twice...

And then, after what seemed like an eternity, the pain... lessened.

The mental soul-shredding agony faded. Leaving behind a dull echoing throb. Li Yu was panting, his body soaked in a mixture of sweat and blood, his own and from his enemies before. His consciousness barely hanging on by a thread. But he made it.

After another hour of this agonizing transformative stillness, the glowing stopped. Li Yu finally focused his spiritual sense on the "thing" that had now fully surfaced in his Ocean of Qi.

He saw it.

It was no longer a formless light. It had taken a shape and form.

Within his Ocean of Qi, from the glowing bright thing, he saw it. Floating a respectful distance from the massive, golden-black Leviathan, was a second figure.

It was... him.

It was an exact, perfect, miniature copy of himself. It was about one-fifth the size of the Leviathan but it was unmistakably a Nascent Soul. It had his face, his body and his features. It wore a simple white-purple robe, the color of the light it had been born from. It floated cross-legged with its eyes closed. It had an expression of serene calmness, as if in deep meditation.

And it was holding something.

Resting across its lap was a long and slender fishing pole. Its shape looked somewhat similar to his own weapon, Star-Crusher. However, it was longer and much slimmer. It looked to be made out of some dark material that was star-dusted, much like his own staff. It had a thin ethereal line on it, woven from pure spiritual energy and at the end of the line there was a single perfectly sharp barbed fishing hook.

‘Another Nascent Soul?’

Li Yu's mind, which had just endured agony simply... stopped.

He stared at the two figures in his spiritual sea.

On one side, the colossal, ancient and golden-black Leviathan. The monstrous, instinctive and ravenous entity that had been his "soul" this entire time.

On the other, this new, serene and human-shaped Nascent Soul. A perfect miniature of him, holding a fishing pole. From what he has read, been told and recently just witness from that purple creature, that is how his Nascent Soul is supposed to look like. A copy of himself. It would explain the soul tearing pain he had to endure just now.

The step to Soul Formation is to manifest and make physical your soul. There was also an increased step in power but it was not as drastic as the other stages before it. However, it was extremely important as the soul is what controls everything.

The physical soul allows the person to control their body and Qi better and more precise. Using the soul to empower yourself, control the area or fight makes a person become several times stronger than someone without a physical soul. Someone without a physical soul was also much more vulnerable to soul attacks as Li Yu has exploited.

Li Yu had just stepped into Soul Formation and that would point to the mini person there being his soul. But his Leviathan Soul has always also felt like his own soul as well. He had a connection to it and it never felt foreign.

'If that is me... if that is my soul...'

His gaze shifted to the giant beast floating beside it.

'...then what, in the name of all Daos, is this Leviathan?'