Chapter 137 A Historic Discovery

In his research report, Odis wrote:

<..It is hardly surprising that microorganisms thrive so actively in the soil of the Forsaken Land of the Gods. After all, such creatures possess incredible resilience; as I recall, even the vacuum of outer space fails to exterminate certain microbes.

However, the microorganisms in the Forsaken Land of the Gods are distinctly more aggressive, and they have likely undergone mutations of their own. If my deductions are correct, the viruses there must be far more lethal as well.

Should an outsider venture into that realm, their most probable demise, aside from being slaughtered by monsters lurking in the shadows, would undoubtedly be succumbing to disease.

Insects have likewise always exhibited remarkable tenacity. I still recall seeing the fossil of a giant dragonfly with a one-meter wingspan from 300 million years ago in a museum before transmigrating.

The sheer vitality of such creatures is truly enviable; they have weathered multiple mass extinctions…>

Writing up to this point, Odis glanced toward the workbench and caught a faint glint within the vessel heating the silt.

He stood up to inspect it, discovering several extremely tiny crystals nestled in the warmed silt. The deeper he looked, the denser the crystals became.

He soon realized that the heat had catalyzed their formation. He continuously stirred with a glass rod, watching the crystals multiply until they were evenly dispersed throughout the drying soil.

This reaction left Odis baffled. When he examined the soil under the microscope earlier, he detected no minerals capable of yielding crystals. So why would heating produce such a phenomenon?

“Could there be even smaller minerals within that require more specialized equipment to observe?”

Once the crystals ceased multiplying, he used fine tweezers to place a grain-sized crystal onto a glass slide. He then inspected it through a magnifying glass and discovered that despite its minuscule size, it formed a remarkably regular hexagon.

It was crystal-clear and translucent, emitting a soft, faint shimmer, though the glow was gradually dimming.

As Odis gazed at the crystal, he suddenly felt a subtle connection between his spirituality and the crystal.

A bold thought crossed his mind. Using the tweezers, he placed the crystal onto the pad of his index finger and gently infused a sliver of Spirituality into it.

The crystal’s radiance instantly brightened again! The tiny thing cast a soft, luminous glow, appearing extraordinarily exquisite.

Odis set the crystal back onto the glass slide and took a deep breath: “My hypothesis was right, these crystals can actually store Spirituality! The question now is, how long can they hold it?”

He quietly watched the crystal before him, estimating it would last only a few minutes, or perhaps a dozen at most.

Minute after minute slipped by, but to his astonishment, even after half an hour, the crystal’s brilliance showed no sign of fading!

“Strange…” Odis was certain he had only channeled a wisp of Spirituality into it, “With the crystal constantly glowing, why hadn’t that sliver of Spirituality depleted after 30 minutes?”

Then, realization struck him… This faint glow was the intrinsic color of Spirituality itself, it wasn’t emitted through consumption!

Spirituality was inherently invisible and intangible, but through earlier experiments, he discovered that certain crystalline spiritual materials could reflect the true colors of Spirituality itself.

That color was a faint luminosity, something Odis could not explain through experiments or scientific logic, because colors in the natural world did not emit light; they only reflected it.

But the color reflected by Spirituality was a soft glow. This light could be understood as a hue akin to red or yellow, an inherent ‘color’ it possessed.

Seeing that there was no telling how long he would have to wait, Odis immediately used the power of the Knowledge Moor to Replicate the tiny crystal on the glass slide and accelerated the flow of time for the replica.

At this moment, he discovered a second ingenious use for this Replication ability: the Knowledge Moor couldn’t accelerate an original’s flow of time, only that of replicas.

This ability could be used to conduct experiments that normally required vast amounts of time to complete.

As time sped up, Odis became increasingly astonished, because this tiny crystal actually glowed faintly for three whole months before it began to dim. Once all light faded, the crystal cracked and reverted to ordinary soil.

“This is a monumental discovery!” He got up and paced back and forth with a trace of excitement.

In the mystical domain, materials capable of storing Spirituality existed as well, and they were generally crystalline substances.

The applications for such materials were broad. For instance, the containment of many Sealed Artifacts could be accomplished simply by using a Wall of Spirituality.

Beyonder characteristics and main ingredients for advancement could also be sealed and preserved for a long time through use of a Wall of Spirituality.

However, if it were a Sealed Artifact with negative side effects, the Wall of Spirituality would deplete rapidly, requiring frequent replenishment of Spirituality. To be safe, Beyonders would place a crystal capable of storing Spirituality on the artifact’s outer layer.

This kept the Wall of Spirituality operating over extended periods, preventing accidents caused by forgetfulness or similar basic oversights.

Another application was creating an environment to preserve high-grade spiritual materials. Certain precious high-grade materials not only required a Wall of Spirituality, but also a high-Spirituality environment within it.

In doing so, extending their storage by another year or six months posed no problem at all.

It was highly impractical to expect a Beyonder to constantly supply Spirituality to the materials around the clock; the cost of doing so would simply be exorbitant.

Therefore, crystals that stored Spirituality were used to continually release it, keeping the environment inside the Wall of Spirituality in a persistent high-Spirituality state to slow the material’s spiritual depletion.

However, those crystals were very expensive because such materials were located deep underground and had meager yields.

But Odis seemed to have found an alternative… he could almost see piles upon piles of gold pounds beckoning to him.

Still, he quickly calmed himself down, because these crystals were far too small, and the Spirituality they could store was very limited.

Odis glanced toward the container he had been heating earlier. There were still many minuscule crystals inside. He wondered if it would work better if he gathered them all into a glass bottle.

With that in mind, he decided to try rinsing with water to see if he could separate the crystals from the soil.

He scooped a few small trowels of soil into a flat-bottomed flask, poured in clean water, and stirred. The water turned murky, and those crystals floated in the turbid liquid.

Odis infused his Spirituality into the flat-bottomed flask to get a better look at the crystals, then, a miraculous scene unfolded!

After emitting a faint glow, the crystals actually drew closer toward one another, coalescing into a tiny sphere that shone with the brilliance of a miniature energy-saving bulb!

Odis stared blankly at this beautiful orb for half a minute before suddenly snapping back to reality and resuming his work.

He swirled the flat-bottomed flask several more times, filtered out the muddy water using a metal mesh, and rinsed it clean with fresh water. In the end, he obtained a glowing sphere whose outer layer was slightly soft.

At this moment, Odis realized that the world’s very first supernatural lamp had come into existence!

The appearance of these crystals provided the final missing link to all of his prior research: an energy storage medium.

He could almost envision a mystical world brimming with a sci-fi ambiance, a world where mysticism symbols covered every surface, and spheres radiating soft light were everywhere.

His hands trembled slightly as he held the orb, then he suddenly remembered that the most urgent task right now was to see whether this light orb could store Spirituality for up to three months as well.

However, Odis noticed that the Spirituality inside the sphere was not yet at saturation.

Since he intended to observe its storage duration, he naturally had to bring the Spirituality to a saturated state first. So he continued to inject Spirituality into the sphere.

Soon, it grew slightly brighter and became as hard as crystal.

Once again utilizing the power of the Knowledge Moor, he Replicated the glowing crystal and sped up the flow of time.

To his astonishment, the orb remained illuminated for over a full year!

Odis excitedly began pacing again, but quickly calmed down.

Now a new question lay before him: how were these tiny crystals formed in the first place?

Next, he picked up a glass rod and turned over the heated soil…

Earlier, the silt and the soil had been heated together, yet tiny crystals had formed in the silt while nothing at all appeared in the soil.

This ruled out, first and foremost, the possibility that the unique environment of the Forsaken Land of the Gods had created those crystals.

Odis paced in contemplation before sitting down to think. Suddenly, he recalled noticing earlier that the mutations in the mutated schistosomiasis and mutated castor were far more pronounced.

Both were found in the swamp, specifically around the area where that bucket of silt had been collected. Odis seemed to see a glimmer of hope.

Pursuing this train of thought, he arrived at a hypothesis: because the Extraordinary power affected the soil and silt with different intensities, the silt, having been subjected to a greater influence, produced those tiny crystals.

Soon, Odis took the hypothesis a step further: this intensity threshold was very likely the influence of the Demigod level. Influences at or above the Demigod level could produce tiny crystals, whereas those below could not.

It could also be at the Angel level, but the probability was low; if such a powerful Sealed Artifact existed in the swamp outside the City of Silver, it would have been impossible for the City of Silver to remain completely unaware of it for so many years.

Odis excitedly stood up again, formulating a way to verify this.

Anyone else would need to seek out a Demigod-level helper, but he had no need for that because following his advancement to Sequence 7, the Central Simulator was already capable of simulating Demigod-level abilities and power.

And so, Odis returned to the real world, pulled out a few potted plants he had been keeping, and sent the pots along with their soil directly into the Knowledge Moor.

After scooping up a handful of dirt, he used the Central Simulator to simulate Demigod-level power, exerting its influence over the soil.

After maintaining the effect for several seconds, he quickly applied heat, and just as expected, those tiny crystals appeared once again.

While maintaining the heat, Odis pondered the matter, quickly arriving at the reason behind the crystals’ formation: Divinity…

Upon reaching Sequence 4, one possessed Divinity; though meager, it was present nonetheless.

Within his Beyonder Model, Divinity played a very vital role. From the looks of it now, Divinity could even alter the base matter of this world to a certain extent, transforming ordinary soil into something Extraordinary…