They found the beast we needed quickly. A water dragon of the Emperor Profound Realm. Not what I needed for a first test, but better than nothing.
Why a dragon? I wanted to change my soul imprint, not become a cadaver. And my questionable ethics didn't allow me to eat human souls.
I know. That's racism. The little dragon was a thinking creature too. But I had to compromise with my conscience.
Even then, what I was doing felt very wrong until...
The moment the empress and I came within a kilometer of the beast's territory, that asshole spat a water sphere at us pumped to the limit with profound energy.
Ah. No, everything's fine. My conscience just signed the final permit authorizing me to devour this specific soul.
The only serious problem? The Emperor Profound Realm was somewhat like the True and Spirit Profound Realms. At that stage, cultivation placed special emphasis on strengthening the soul.
I would have preferred to start with someone easier, but... there was no time for a long search. I had to run the test quickly.
So I ran at the dragon at full speed, only without a weapon. I needed to knock out this enormous hose so I could begin my experiments. Not the easiest task.
I dodged all the water projectiles and even the long jet easily. I even managed to jump up to the dragon's head—about fifteen meters—and hammer it with both hands.
But dragons are tough. Almost all of them. The beast staggered but wasn't fully knocked out. A moment later, its tail hit me and sent me flying.
Good thing Caiyi listened to me and didn't join the fight. She couldn't help me here. Her fire would simply burn the poor bastard to death.
Unpleasant. My body wasn't as tough as it could have been if I hadn't changed the configuration of the Great Way of the Buddha. Though with each drop of dragon blood produced by my marrow it became tougher. For now, though, I felt pain and my ribs cracked.
But that pain was nothing compared with the pain the goddess had left inside me. So I paid it little attention and went in for a second pass.
Huan Caiyi—and let me remind you, that's the name of the cutie who works as empress in this area—watched me with concern. Her expression didn't change, but her little fists clenched. Nice.
The second blow, this time with my leg instead of my hands, was much more effective. After jumping, I spun my body forward so my heel came down on the dragon's head. It must have looked impressive.
I'm not some damn monk or spiritually enlightened god of purity and grandeur. When a beautiful girl is watching me, I naturally start acting impressively rather than efficiently.
I know my flaws and I'm quite proud of them. Let the perfect Kryptonians with supreme morality go to hell and keep living their boring, worthless lives.
Still, that didn't hurt the result. My heel drove into the dragon's skull with a crack, and this time the dragon collapsed face-first into the ground, knocked unconscious.
Now the Little Empress really was stunned. Our short fight at night had been effective, but it hadn't clearly demonstrated the sheer strength of my body. Me knocking out an Emperor Profound dragon without profound energy was something entirely different.
That was visual proof.
I unleashed my soul pressure at full strength, and the water dragon lost consciousness.
I had no more than a minute. Now the hardest part began. With another leap, I landed on the creature's head, dropped to one knee for stability, placed my hands on its head, and concentrated on the task ahead.
First, I created channels. Quickly and precisely. Fortunately, I know the structure of my profound veins extremely well thanks to the fire chicken from the neighboring continent. I'd endured pain along their entire length for years and managed to memorize them very well.
But I didn't need to duplicate everything. Only the main lines.
The walls were made of ice. And yes, it hurt. I know I'm getting repetitive. I know all of this reads like a masochist's diary, but it really hurt. Unlike profound veins, which were semi-material, the ice was very much material.
Next, as soon as the ice was ready, came the skills.
The Yun clan's spiritual hand—purple, by the way—very quickly fused with a small amount of Golden Crow fire that I managed to condense on the fly from neutral profound energy, and that hand, burning gold, entered the dragon's head.
Searching a soul was pretty fascinating. Fragments of someone else's memories flashed chaotically past and... burned in the fire. That simplified many things. Made everything much easier. Most importantly, not all information could be burned. Unlike humans, beasts—at least this specific beast—had a completely different perception. Less of some things, like the visual component, and much more of others, like soul perception, smell, touch.
This mattered because the beast had comprehended the water element through its own paths. Slowly, terribly slowly, I tried not to touch that particular information, not to burn it to ash.
There was a double purpose here. I needed to leave at least something of the beast so part of its imprint would remain. That defect changed my own soul.
As for the possibility of going slightly insane, I knew the risks, and I had a plan for that too.
The absorption process was easy. Though I'm not ashamed to admit I was very afraid of it right until the end. You don't joke around with souls; ask Tom Riddle. But it worked out.
The burned soul, almost completely stripped of personality, offered no resistance. This wasn't a battle with the soul of the Primordial Azure Dragon God.
Thirty minutes and it was done. Now, the test. For that I had a technique that displayed the soul itself. Local practitioners considered it a rather useless thing.
Learning it was ridiculously hard. Even I spent a month just roughly understanding the concept and seeing traces of the soul in a practitioner's profound energy.
And even then, I only managed to barely reach the beginner level of the technique.
But don't forget that thanks to the inheritance I received from my wife, I had very high comprehension. Plus, comprehension directly depended on the 'size' of the soul. It's like RAM: it doesn't directly determine processing speed, but you can hold more information at once while processing it, which makes everything faster. Back to the technique.
Attack potential: zero. And it wasn't much good for reconnaissance either. For the locals, the technique was almost useless. Just rare.
For me, it was a priceless gift. How nice it was to have the resources of an entire empire. I could have searched for that many techniques for centuries, while the empress simply demanded them and a pack of sycophants happily rushed to rummage through clan vaults.
So, the technique showed specks. Just specks. Originally, my soul had been bright azure, and now there were blue specks in it. Even then, you had to look very carefully to see them.
"Are you finished?" the empress asked when she sensed the beast's death and approached me.
"Yes. A few more beasts like this and I'll be completely fine."
Now I needed beasts of a different element. I wanted lightning, though finding one would be harder.
Viewed as a whole, our hunt was a success. A resounding one.
I didn't even go very insane when foreign fragments appeared in my memory.
I could just ignore them. At that moment, I tried to do exactly that and leave the rest for later.
As for dragon pride, greed, lust, and other quirks, all of those were already there. I'd absorbed the Azure Dragon's soul, after all.
The empress only looked at me with a mixed expression.
"You burned eighty percent of its soul. Why?"
"Memories. Isn't that why people went insane?"
"There are also instincts, sensations—everything that made the beast a beast."
"Won't hurt. I already have an inheritance from a dragon, so all those drawbacks are integrated into my nature fairly smoothly."
"That explains a lot," the girl finally concluded, and it seemed something clicked in her head.
It wasn't hard to guess she'd assembled the wrong picture, but... I wasn't going to correct her.
"But this still isn't enough. Now I need to digest what I ate. That's where the hard part begins."
"How?"
"The same way. Tempering with fire. Just not with Golden Crow fire. I won't volunteer for that kind of madness."
"Ordinary fire cannot harm a soul."
"I know. We'll need to dilute the golden fire with something weaker."
"Nonsense," now the empress was angry. "No flame can contend with the Golden—"
She had to shut up when cleansing fire from another chicken appeared in my palm, but one of the same caliber.
"What was that?"
"Phoenix."
"You stole that fire too with your body-tempering technique?"
"No. I was born with it. That doesn't matter. What matters is that it can weaken the golden fire."
"So you want to temper your soul? Like your body?"
"Exactly. That is the goal. Yes."
"How can you use profound energy right now?"
"Tricks. It would take too long to explain. Let's go back. We'll have a feast tonight. I hope you have good cooks?"
The girl became embarrassed. She actually got embarrassed and looked away.
And then it hit me.
They'd tried to poison her, more than once. A bunch of professional cooks had literally burned out on the job. The only ones left in the palace now were people nobody would miss.
I had mixed feelings. On the one hand, I wanted to strangle this sadist who had gotten a lot of people killed. It was genuinely horrible.
On the other hand, what a rotten life she had. Seriously. The girl couldn't trust anyone. Literally anyone. Not only had all her loved ones died, the people left around her had begun making attempts on her life again and again. And after so many years, surely some of those attempts had nearly succeeded.
How many times had she survived only because Golden Crow fire burned away the poison, and how much pain had she endured?
With a past like that, how hard must it be for the poor girl to trust anyone even a little? And this wasn't even about me needing to win her trust. That was secondary. The main thing was that she should be able to stop being afraid around at least one person. So:
"Huan Caiyi, let me make you just one promise. If I ever become your enemy, I will look you in the eyes and tell you so directly before I attack. Do you believe me?"
I was looking directly into the girl's eyes when she flinched at the abrupt change of topic. Then even I couldn't tell exactly what emotions flashed there: relief, pain, sadness, regret, a hint of joy. A little of everything.
That complicated cocktail of emotions, which I hoped wasn't bitter, kept the Little Empress silent for a full minute.
"I believe you. You're insolent enough to say everything directly to my face."
"Exactly. You've got me figured out. Come on, I'll cook dragon-meat shashlik for the two of us myself. It's not the sort of dish that tastes good with spicy poisonous seasoning."
We both deliberately avoided returning to that conversation because it was unpleasant and awkward for the girl, and I did possess tact.
Returning to the palace felt especially unpleasant. Especially for me. While the Little Empress was used to her prison, after that short conversation I felt even more sympathy for the cutie, though I understood it would affect me strongly.
And I didn't want to begin the second part of my plan, and there was a reason. Golden Crow fire. Inside the water dragon's soul, it hadn't obeyed me very well. When a part of the soul I didn't want to burn burned anyway, fear was born in me.
The iron will I'd honed under barrages of enemy artillery fire, where freezing in place was equivalent to death, let me finish the job. My experience as a career soldier who had been through more than a few scrapes and survived hell helped me this time too. But when I was done...
Had the Little Empress noticed how my hands trembled? So the episode of burning in the Phoenix's flames had left much deeper wounds that still hadn't healed?
I raised my hand, palm up, and a tongue of red Phoenix flame appeared there. My hands were still trembling.
The bravado in front of Yue by the campfire had been just bravado. I don't like lying to myself. The fear was still buried deep in my soul, and dealing with it through simple methods would be hard.
I needed to rethink this and find a solution.