Chapter 358 - A Fleeing Soul and a Missing Memory

Chapter 358: Chapter 358 - A Fleeing Soul and a Missing Memory

The movement beneath the corpse’s forehead grew stronger.

Su Bai kept his spiritual sense fixed on it. The receiving formation had begun changing after the body died, but none of the force that had carried the demon away from Radiant Sky Sect appeared.

There was no sacrificed blood, no protective light, and no sign of the strange passage through which the soul had escaped before.

Something inside the dead man was gathering itself for a different attempt.

Several formation plates slipped from Su Bai’s storage ring. He had recovered them from the opened Immortal ring.

They settled around the clearing while Qi entered the first inscription. Before the remaining plates answered, the presence inside the corpse abruptly contracted.

Su Bai drove more Qi into the formation.

Just then, a gray streak shot from beneath the dead man’s forehead.

Ning Shuang barely caught its outline. It passed above the fire pit and headed straight for the trees beyond the camp. The pale boundary closed across its path an instant before it reached them.

The impact made every plate tremble.

Ning Shuang raised her weapon as a small figure tumbled back into the clearing. Its shoulder had come apart, and gray wisps scattered from the damaged edge.

Before they could disperse, the figure pulled them back into itself and darted toward another section of the boundary.

Su Bai strengthened the formation.

The soul stopped short of a second collision. It turned along the barrier and searched the linked inscriptions for an opening. Its eyes followed the flow between two plates, then shifted toward the space above them. Even in its present condition, it understood what had trapped it.

Su Bai moved before it could finish examining the arrangement.

Frictionless Phantom Step carried him past the nearest plate. Qi covered his hand, and his fingers closed around the soul as it tried to rise.

The sudden restraint distorted its shape. A cold force immediately struck his palm at the point where his grip was weakest.

He felt the demon attempt to break through.

Reversal answered before the force could penetrate his circulation. The soul jerked inside his grasp, and Su Bai tightened the Qi surrounding it.

Its second attempt broke against the same restraint.

Only then did Ning Shuang get a clear look at what he held.

The tiny figure resembled the man Su Bai had described earlier. Its face belonged to the visiting elder she remembered from her sect, although the features had become blurred and deeply strained.

Fine cracks crossed its forehead and extended toward one eye. The soul-burning punishment had left injuries far worse than the bruises on the borrowed body.

Its gaze remained alert.

The demon looked from Su Bai’s fingers to his face, then toward the barrier. It had stopped wasting strength on a struggle it could not win. Ning Shuang recognized the calculation behind that stillness and kept her weapon ready.

"You cannot keep me like this forever," it said.

The voice was faint, but the old authority remained inside it.

Su Bai studied the damaged form.

Whatever strength the demon had once possessed, very little of it had survived the loss of its original body, the unstable possession, and Ning Shuang’s refusal to let it recover. The mirror had diminished it further.

Even now, however, it was watching for the moment his attention wandered.

He brought his hand closer.

Ning Shuang assumed he wanted to hear it properly. The soul seemed to reach the same conclusion, because its eyes fixed on his face and its mouth opened again.

That’s when Su Bai opened his own mouth.

The demon understood first.

Its composure broke, and both hands seized at the Qi around his fingers. A sharp cry escaped it before Su Bai pushed the entire spiritual form between his lips and swallowed.

Ning Shuang’s weapon lowered slightly.

She stared at his empty hand, then at his face. She had expected him to seal the soul in a container or destroy it through some technique she had never seen. There had been nothing in his expression to suggest that eating it was even a possibility.

Su Bai closed his eyes.

Ning Shuang remained still for another moment. Then she glanced toward the unconscious men and moved to a position where she could watch both them and the forest.

Her questions would have to wait until he finished whatever he had just begun.

Inside Su Bai, the foreign presence struck his spiritual defenses almost immediately.

The demon had gathered itself during the brief passage inward. As soon as it could perceive the surrounding pathways, it released a thin strand of soul power toward the connection behind it.

The attempt was careful. It needed only enough space to retreat through before Su Bai brought another restraint to bear.

Needle Qi cut across that connection.

The demon recoiled and turned toward a second route. Before it could reach it, the circulation ahead shifted beneath a new will.

Within the Nascent Origin, Su Bai’s Nascent Soul opened its eyes.

The small figure rose from the steady flow surrounding it and looked directly toward the intruder.

The demon felt that attention settle over its remaining form. Needle Qi answered from the connected pathways, closing off the route it had just chosen.

For a moment, neither moved.

Then the demon gathered its strength into a narrow point and drove toward the edge of the encirclement.

A needle struck its shoulder.

The attack pierced the force it had assembled, and the spiritual form shuddered. Before it could recover, further points of Needle Qi settled around its arms and torso. Every attempt to move brought pressure against another damaged portion of its soul.

Su Bai watched through his internal awareness.

His Nascent Soul was directing the defense personally. The response had become far more precise than the automatic attacks that had once greeted invading soul fragments.

It identified each attempt to gather power and interrupted it before the demon could make use of the surrounding connections.

The restraint gradually drew the captive deeper.

The demon resisted as long as it could. It tried to anchor itself against a passing flow of Qi, then abandoned that effort when another needle approached its fractured forehead. Its perception stretched ahead in search of something it might exploit.

That was when it sensed the reservoirs.

The quantities of Qi within them made its struggling hesitate. Its awareness reached farther and encountered the emptiness of the Infinite Dantian.

There seemed to be no boundary against which it could brace itself, no ordinary foundation through which it might force an escape.

The demon turned back toward Su Bai’s Nascent Soul.

"A ghost?!"

The translucent figure continued guiding it downward.

Golden light appeared ahead.

The Dao-Devouring Blank Stele had awakened within Su Bai’s foundation. Its radiance reached the captive, and the pressure holding the soul changed.

The demon felt something begin separating the power that sustained its consciousness from the knowledge buried within it.

Its resistance became desperate.

The soul twisted hard enough to widen the cracks across its face. Su Bai’s Nascent Soul maintained the restraint until the Stele’s pull had taken hold completely.

Only then did it withdraw toward the Nascent Origin.

The demon tried to cry out.

Golden light swallowed the sound along with its remaining form.

New characters began appearing across the Stele.

Before Su Bai could examine them, unfamiliar information surged into his mind.

He paused as faces, places, and experiences began settling within his awareness.

Only after following them for a moment did he realize that the Stele had recovered memories from the demon’s soul.

His expression gradually darkened.

The man’s cruelty extended far beyond what Ning Shuang had described.

Captives and disciples had suffered under him for years, and many of the things he had done served little purpose beyond satisfying his own desires.

Su Bai regretted examining some of those recollections. The man’s pleasure had survived alongside them, making the experience especially revolting.

He suppressed the urge to withdraw. Somewhere within these memories, there might be information about the people behind the formations.

As he continued, he recalled receiving the remnant souls’ memories after the Stele absorbed them. The same thing seemed to have happened here.

The Soul-Bloom soul fragments had only yielded scattered impressions and cultivation traces, while Ji Ruyue’s tiny soul sliver had provided the imprint of her method.

Perhaps how much survived of a person’s soul determined what the Stele could recover. He would consider that possibility more carefully later.

For now, Su Bai directed his attention toward the demon’s recent experiences.

He followed them until a stretch of memory abruptly ended.

At first, he assumed another fragment would fill the gap. He continued searching, but the missing portion never appeared.

Su Bai went back and examined it again.

The recollections before and after remained accessible. Something had happened between them, yet he could recover nothing of it.

His attention sharpened when he noticed that the demon’s later actions involved preparations whose origins were absent.

He searched farther and encountered more gaps.

The formations on the demon’s original body appeared in his memories, but Su Bai could find neither the person responsible nor the explanation of their purpose.

The escape preparations presented the same difficulty. The man had trusted them enough to stake his survival on them, yet whatever had earned that trust was missing.

Su Bai’s face grew grim.

He could still recover ordinary experiences from the same period. The omissions repeatedly surrounded the arrangements he wanted to investigate.

After checking several times, he could no longer comfortably attribute them to the soul’s injuries.

He searched the memories once more. There was no resistance he could test or seal he could study. The relevant portions were simply absent.

He did not know whether they had disappeared before the demon died or during the absorption.

Either possibility left him with the same troubling result. The people behind the scheme had left no identifiable trace in what the Stele recovered.

Su Bai opened his eyes.

Ning Shuang turned toward him, and her curiosity faded when she saw his expression.

"Brother Su?"

He looked toward the corpse beneath the tree. The prisoner had chosen death rather than reveal the people he feared. Even after consuming his soul, Su Bai had reached another dead end.

The possibility that someone had prepared for this outcome made him feel considerably less pleased about surviving the encounter.