Chapter 1341: Soul Essence

Of everything Phei had since awakening, his soul had always been one of the hardest things to properly understand.

He possessed Soul Energy in quantities that even Sienna treated as abnormal, and somewhere inside him existed a Soul Realm that the System occasionally mentioned as though Phei was supposed to know what the hell was going on in there. The problem was that he could assess neither of them properly. He could not enter the Soul Realm, could not inspect its actual size, could not directly cultivate it and could not even measure his Soul Energy beyond whatever scraps of information the System occasionally decided to throw at him.

Eventually, Phei had stopped trying to force the issue.

World Transcendent Stage was supposedly where his Soul Realm would finally open to him properly, so he had decided to be patient and deal with the whole thing when he reached that Realm.

Then Anarctica happened:

[Ding! You have corrupted a World Transcendent with desire.

You have killed a World Transcendent’s Soul and absorbed their Soul Essence.]

[Ding! You have corrupted a World Transcendent with desire.

You have killed a World Transcendent’s Soul and absorbed their Soul Essence.]

[Ding! You have—

[Ding! You have—

That message had repeated itself every time one of the World Transcendents died while trapped inside a Lust Reality built from their own desires.

Bromgar, the Half Behemoth-Dwarf, and Cassian had been the first to die when the Void took over. Before that happened, Phei had already trapped them inside Lust Reality using his own power, and although death would eventually have come, it would have been a slow process.

Their souls were after all absurdly powerful, their wills had been tempered through lives far beyond anything most cultivators on Earth could imagine, and even Lust Reality needed time to drown beings of that level completely.

Then the Void entered the equation and turned a slow corruption into something thousands of times more vicious.

Whatever resistance Bromgar and Cassian still possessed collapsed almost instantly as the Void consumed the distance between desire and reality, deepening the worlds around their souls until escape became meaningless. Others followed afterward, each locked inside whatever desire sat deepest within them, and although the System insisted on calling what happened corruption, Phei still thought the wording was a little dramatic.

Sure—

Corruption it is then.

Whatever made the System proud of itself.

The important part was what happened when those souls died.

Phei had not merely destroyed them. He had absorbed their Soul Essence.

Soul Essence and Soul Energy although related, but they were not the same thing.

Every living being possessed Soul Essence, whether mortal, awakened, cultivator or something infinitely higher, because Soul Essence was tied to any living soul itself.

The Soul Essence quantity and potency depended upon the strength of that soul, the life behind it, the force of will accumulated over time and the sheer weight of the existence carrying it. The stronger the being became and the harder its will had been forged, the richer their Soul Essence naturally became.

World Transcendents possessed monstrous amounts of it.

Their wills alone were something else.

Yet Lust Reality added another factor Phei had not properly understood until Anarctica:

’Satisfaction!’

Desire had always been what made Lust Reality terrifying, but desire was broader than just lust alone.

Ambition, hunger, victory, love, vengeance, pride, possession, acceptance and whatever private obsession made someone feel that their life had finally reached the thing they wanted most could all become fuel. The deeper the desire and the stronger the drive attached to it, the more violently the soul reacted once Lust Reality convinced that person they had finally obtained it all.

Making them reach the very pinnacle!

A World Transcendent who had spent centuries chasing a single impossible wish could suddenly live inside a reality where that wish had already come true.

For those few moments, the soul surged!

Their satisfaction, accomplishment, longing, relief and every other emotion tied to that deepest desire caused their Soul Essence to flare far beyond its ordinary state. Lust Reality dragged those sensations out completely instead of allowing the soul to experience them faintly, and when Phei killed the victim while that soul was still drowning in its greatest desire, all of that swelling amounts Soul Essence flowed into him and became pure Soul Energy.

The purest kind he could receive.

Phei stared at the old notifications with a faint smile.

’Sinister ability, right?’

What made it worse was that this had not happened once or twice.

Five World Transcendents had fed him that way in Anarctica, and later the seven World Transcendents guarding the imprisoned Elves had suffered the same fate. Twelve beings who had already crossed a Realm most cultivators would never see had poured the final surges of their souls into Phei.

His soul had changed under that flood.

His will upon the world had strengthened. The foundation of his soul had become harder and more difficult to shake, while his Soul Energy had exploded until the amount he possessed was more than a thousand times greater than before those deaths. Even the Soul Realm he could not yet enter had expanded so violently that the System had informed him it was now approximately 100x times larger than it had once been.

Phei still had absolutely no idea how large the original Soul Realm had been, which made the number almost useless.

For the sake of imagining it, though, suppose the old Soul Realm had possessed an internal space comparable to a mansion. That example was already stupid considering the thing supposedly contained enough Soul Energy to stabilize the Nether Goddess herself, but Phei needed some kind of picture in his head.

A hundred times that capacity would no longer resemble a house at all.

It would be closer to an enormous private estate spreading across an entire district, with enough internal space for dozens upon dozens of large residences, courtyards, roads, gardens and open land before reaching the boundary.

The comparison probably still failed spectacularly because Soul Realms did not necessarily obey normal measurements, but it gave Phei something better than imagining one comically oversized realm.

And even that tremendous expansion had happened before everything that came afterward.

Enslavement itself could feed his soul.

Phei had not noticed it with Jonathan because Jonathan had given him practically nothing worth noticing, but Kyle had been different. Enslaving him produced a considerable influx of Soul Energy, while the Soul Realm and a new Element Phei received around the same time had been separate rewards directly granted by the System.

That experience revealed another hidden benefit of his slavery abilities.

Getting Soul Energy from enslavement did not stop at Progenitors.

Whenever Phei enslaved an awakened being or cultivator with sufficient spiritual strength, part of the process would grant him Soul Energy. The stronger the being, the more significant that gain became, which meant every powerful slave added another stream to an ocean that was already becoming ridiculous.

The World Transcendents he enslaved had therefore increased it again.

Then, only a short while ago, Phei had enslaved an Astral Wraith standing on the edge of Godhood.

Phei slowly leaned back against the pelts while considering that.

Twelve World Transcendent souls had already flooded him with their final Soul Essence after being consumed within Lust Reality. Others had added their own portions through enslavement. His Soul Realm had expanded with each great surge, his Soul Energy had multiplied beyond anything he could personally measure, and now a Sacred-ranked soul belonging to god had entered his Soul Realm through the Tiamat Slave Mark.

Just how much Soul Energy did he have now?

How enormous had the Soul Realm become?

Phei had no fucking clue.

He would have to reach World Transcendent before seeing the place for himself, and at this point Phei suspected opening that Realm for the first time was going to be considerably more interesting than originally expected.

The next old notification came from the elixir Sienna had prepared for him, and this one made his expression gradually lose some of its amusement.