The Sun-Wraith flew in the sky, its body glowing with fiery light. It flew down next, coming directly toward the prison. The two guards that were nearby immediately flew, knowing that they could not stop it.
Alex stood up straighter, getting ready to fight the thing. A chilling thought crossed his mind at that moment upon seeing the wraith.
Since Sun-Wraiths were created using Sunhearts, given how strong the Sunhearts of this region were, he now feared the strength of this beast.
Just how hot would its aura be? Just how destructive would its power be?
Would it be close to the Divine realm?
Alex had to worry there.
With the destructive power of the sun, would his Undying Physique even help him survive?
“Shit!” he thought as a sword appeared in his hand, constructed by his blood. He prayed that the bird wasn’t as strong as he imagined it to be, and prepared himself for the battle he was going to have to fight ahead.
He surely couldn’t handle it for too long, so Alex prepared to end it in a single attack.
All he had, he placed into the sword, empowering it for a strong strike. Then, he used his technique to compress it even further to be as thin as possible.
Beyond the 3-meter range, most of his power would immediately be destroyed by the Intent, dispersing more than half of it to below True realm. So he had to wait.
He needed the bird to get closer.
When the bird was just before the prison, only then did Alex move, timing just as the bird would arrive next to him.
He swung his sword, using his technique.
Endless Severing St—
The bird exploded into a fiery mass before Alex even released the technique. The force of the explosion knocked him back into the hole, covering his body in some minor burns that healed easily.
“Huh?”
Alex quickly got back up and walked out of the hole, confused as to what had just happened. He had no way of telling at all.
The bird had somehow died, and it had nothing to do with him at all.
When he was back out, he saw the glowing energy all around him, which hadn’t disappeared just yet. The aura of the Sun-Wraith lasted only a few seconds, but this seemed to last much longer.
‘The only time it lasted longer was when I destroyed its spirit without wounding its body,’ he thought. ‘Did its spirit get destroyed when it came in here?’
Now that he thought about it, this prison was meant to withhold someone inside by mentally attacking them. For normal people, it would just knock them out, maybe even spiritually injure them.
But for Sun-Wraiths, being knocked out was the same as losing their Spirit, in which case the aura that made up their body unraveled, no longer held together at all.
‘It was clearly so strong,’ Alex thought. ‘I can’t let it all go to waste.’
Immediately, he employed his Intent, grabbing onto the aura that still lay around him. Parts of the energy were spread out beyond where he could gather it, so he only took it from where it was.
To gather the energy, Alex could only do it in part using the Dao of Yang. What he was gathering wasn’t the aura of Yang, but rather the aura of Sun, so the Dao wasn’t entirely helpful.
The other half of it was simply pure Intent.
Alex stayed as far away from the edge as he could in order to gather it all. In a few minutes, he managed to collect quite a large amount of it. He could tell that this was already more energy than anything else he had consumed so far in hell, even more than the Sunhearts he had consumed.
And if he was right, it was probably not even half the energy that made up the bird. That could only make him wonder just how strong the Sunhearts of this region were.
The outside seemed to still be in chaos, so Alex quickly gathered the energy and sat down on the ground and consumed that energy. Instantly, his body began converting the sunlike energy into Qi, but not without any trouble.
The energy wreaked havoc on his system, burning him from the inside. At each second part of him was burned, which was then immediately healed by his physique.
If not for his physique, such a strong energy might have actually torn a hole through his body before escaping.
But since it hadn’t, all Alex had to do now was cultivate and fully refine it.
He accepted the pain and did his best to cultivate it. Such an absurdly large amount of energy would take him a long time, which Alex was sure he had. Just to be safe from another such explosion, however, he jumped into the hole where he would cultivate.
Alex refined all of that energy, turning it into Qi, before letting it refine his Origins. Not a drop of it was wasted away.
This was one of the more painful cultivation sessions he had remembered in recent history. By the time he was done, he had grown so much more, and was so much closer to breaking through again.
Just the fact of it surprised Alex.
It had only been a little more than a decade since he had last broken through, and yet he was already getting close to breaking through again.
‘No, it’s not fast,’ Alex thought. ‘I was already quite a bit of the way in because of the Heavenly Principle.’
When he had first learned his Axiom, he had cultivated so quickly, spanning years in minutes. That was the only reason why this was fast.
‘I have to manage my expectations. The next few ones won’t be this fast.’
As Alex sat down in the hole, finishing up his cultivation, he heard voices from outside the hole, so he finally walked out.
When he did, a few dozen of the many warriors were gathered there, along with the Chief of the Sunwardens.