This cave was creepy as hell.
It unnaturally thrust its entrance from a flat area of the plains, with black smog slowly drifting from the too-dark opening. A gray powder, like bleached bones that had been tainted, covered the soil leading to the entrance. Despite the bright sun, it felt unnaturally cold the closer the group approached.
Yeah, no. "Little Tianshi, I will need you to guard the wagon until Sister Quan and I return."
Far more awake now, the little one looked a bit stubborn. "But... I want to see the treasure!"
He pointed. "Scary haunted cave." Pointed to her. "Adorable little Disciple. Just... no. Not until you are strong enough to throw this wagon at least."
Her eyes widened... "I can do that!?"
Sister Quan shrugged. "It's made of wood, and even I can toss a few of the smaller trees around. The impressive feats happen later on, such as carving up mountains and stuff. One of the Elders back in the Sect got in big trouble doing that." She examined the small seven year old. "...You may have to grow a bit first."
She pouted. "Can't those guards watch the wagon?"
Adam absently walked to the cave. "Probably, but I want someone responsible out here to protect my mutant cows. Also, this place may try to eat you or something... if I thought she would listen, I would insist Sister Quan stayed here too."
The older woman paused... and looked at the suddenly darker cave. She wasn't strong enough to handle the crazy stuff Adam was doing ALREADY, if this was possibly more dangerous than that she could die without finding out how or why.
The idea that Adam could go through the same level of danger and possibly not even NOTICE, much less face consequences, was a bit disheartening. "No... no, Adam brings up a good point. I will stay behind too." She glared at nothing. "But most of your guards WILL follow you for support."
Adam tried not to snicker, considering the guards she was trying to glare down were actually behind and to the left of the angry woman. "I guess I will bring along three, I am not sure I can protect more than that easily." Seeing their expressions, he coughed. "Not that these big strong guards NEED protection. Even if the energy being released from this cave seems pretty deadly to most forms of life and all that."
...They still didn't look happy. Meh. "Now, you guys pick the three most powerful or most expendable members of your team and follow me!"
SOMETHING in there felt very interesting!
~~~Broken Adventure~~~
Only a few steps into the cave and the bones started to appear. Initially small, like from rats or other tiny animals, no flesh could be found on the many corpses that grew ever more dense the deeper they traveled into the darkness.
Torches could barely throw any light down here, the cold spiritual energy suppressed it heavily. And this energy was insidious. Heavy Yin energy components, laced with something... necrotic. It almost smelt of decay, with a hint of darkness and the void. Rockette was now riding on Adam's shoulder, carefully collecting samples and ensuring the sticky energy didn't begin infesting the guards.
Adam's body didn't care about it. The Blue energy was like acid to this strange fog of power, and while the gas felt tingly as it tried to rot his skin, his Cultivation Cells were strong enough to ignore the issue. It would require a higher concentration of power before his body would begin to rot away. Or even take damage.
Still was chilly though. It was clear that the bodies out here had been from Spirit Beasts drawn by the huge source of power, unsuspectingly infected by the strange energy being emitted, and rotting away into more white sand.
It wasn't until the group had traveled VERY deep that they began to see skeletal structures damaged by conflict.
SOMETHING down here was apparently worth fighting to the death over, and a large portion of surface creatures had been attracted to their death in pursuit of it.
The first human skeletons was found by the team thousands of meters below ground... and either due to age or the corrosive power in the air, it was heavily damaged. Looting it revealed a storage ring full of rare bones collected from the many Spirit Beast skeletons this person found along the way down here... though clearly they had been unable to detect how dangerous the energy in the air was. None of the other human skeletons they found had anything interesting on them... this one corpse likely looted the rest before dying on his way out of the cave.
Speaking of which, aside from the other rings and some coins and stuff, the rest of this guy's ring contents had either been tossed aside to make more room for the rare bones or this person was just poor in general. No identification could be found either... so the group moved on, keeping the ring. There must be SOME massive profit to make with all those rare Spirit Beast parts.
And yes, Adam was forcing the guards to carry the morbid thing, along with other neat stuff they found on the way. At least they would be useful instead of quietly following him everywhere.
There were no side paths... this was clearly not a natural cave. And at this depth, the rock had been corroded by the icy tainted Yin energies... many minerals and rocks had a dim glow to them. Some purple, some green, and strangely enough a few rocks were actually glowing with a black aura. To be honest, Adam hadn't realized black COULD glow.
These mutated stones became more and more common until the entire tunnel became a tube of bright green stones with purple and black highlights. The materials themselves were much harder than one would expect after being saturated for who KNOWS how long by these energies, and Adam wouldn't risk touching most of the strange moss-like plants that survived down here if he could help it.
He did have a guard collect a few samples though. Mr. Whiskers may recognize them, as he had a strong ability related to nature.
Eventually the winding tunnel opened up into a massive cavern, walls covered in claw marks as the many beast corpses had fought down here for control of the area... though nothing down here was alive anymore. A cold black mist showed how thick the tainted Yin energy was... and in the center of the cave was a very shallow pool of liquid.
He would say it was water... but water shouldn't glow green like that. It was colored like toxic sludge, but cautious prodding with a long bone showed it flowed like water normally would.
It also dissolved the bone itself.
Hmm. Glancing at his guards, the lead one stepped forward. Adam pointed. "Any ideas?"
They nodded. "This seems to be a Yin spawning pool, a naturally occurring treasure that can help condition those with extreme Yang bodies or enhance the many feminine cultivation methods out there. It can enhance the spirit and soul, and tends to raise the intelligence of Spirit Beasts that consume it."
Ah... he didn't know the lead guard was a woman.
...Hadn't she watched him bathe!?
God damn perverts. 'We need to guard you' my foot.
Adam glanced at the bones. "Well, this particular pool doesn't seem to be working correctly. Unless the Spirit Beasts given higher intelligence were smart enough to get the hell out of here, unlike us."
Well, best be safe.
Rockette's Domain filled the cave system... and expanded back up the winding spiral tunnel they had came down through. As his control reached the surface... all the energy vanished into Rockette's internal storage, a strange feeling of loss suddenly hitting the group as the power vanished.
Adam stumbled. "Wow! That had a kick." Apparently some of the corroded bones had begun converting whatever energies their former bodies had produced into more of that strange black mist, sucking all that spirit energy away caused most of the skeletons in the room and outside to collapse into white dust. What a mess.
The pool still glowed green... but the energies felt different.
More refreshing and minty, less rotting and... no.
Even as Adam watched, the pool shifted from the soothing nature green back into an acidic nuclear color. The powers slid into darker and darker shades as the energies began to rot, to decay, to spoil...
Adam's eyes slid closed. "There... there is something WITHIN that Yin Pool. I think whatever it is that showed up in there IS the treasure, not the Yin pool itself." There was a point a bit off center in that shallow liquid that was tainting the rest of the area, infecting and spreading.
He moved close to the pool, having Rockette continuously drain that section of the cave as spiritual energy was constructed.
...There was a black stone, the size of a walnut. It almost seemed to pulse inside the liquid, with dim swirls of gray energy spilling into the Yin pool surrounding it. Without a thought, Adam walked into the pool, ignore the conceptually cold liquid soaking his pants, and picked the stone up.
A spike of necrotic energies began corroding his palm, causing 'Recursion' to expose jagged edges of blue crystal as his body was damaged layer by layer.
Fascinating.
The object itself wasn't a storage device or a generator of this strange energy... it was more a conceptual gate of sorts.
Attempting to use his spiritual senses to connect with the object still boring into his palm suddenly exposed instructions... this was a conceptual treasure forged by some master in the past!
These were mentioned in the legends back in the Sect. Some Treasures when made by powerful people or Sects would gain sentence, be able to choose their own masters, and reach a fundamentally higher level of experience.
If lost or destroyed, existence itself would cause these things to spawn back on the Plane somewhere, once it has had enough time to gather enough conceptual energy to be reborn from its own legend.
This was apparently called the Asura Stone... and it wanted him to do a basic binding ritual?
Adam took his other hand, forced Cultivation Cells forming his blood to drip out onto the stone, and imprinted his spirit signature onto the object that was even now slowly dissolving his flesh.
The change was instant!
The stone in his palm began to feel ever more cold as the black energies stopped flowing away. Adam absently repaired his many wounded palms (it burned through several conceptual levels of his 'Recursion' already), and began to review the information the treasure had passed into his mind. Well, more like 'Crammed into his brain matter'.
This stone was a connection. A portal to a realm where powerful demigods called 'Asuras' fought all day and night for dominance. Benevolent Asuras called Aditays constantly struggled to the death against the malevolent Danavas, the two powerful sides creating constant conflict.
Their death and continuous rebirth for further battle was creating powerful Death and Underworld spiritual energies, and this stone would allow people in this Plane of existence to access the spiritual energy spillage from that sealed Realm full of conflict and chaos.
A thought had the black stone... converting into a solid black ink tattoo of a circle on his right palm, were the wound had been. In this form, he could feel it nestling within his own spiritual network... how odd. Another thought had it return to rock shape.
According to the history Adam had been exposed to while connecting with this object, it was first formed by a powerful Necromancer, during an expensive and massive sacrificial ritual designed to create a soul container or phylactery, one more powerful than any known variety of its kind! Instead, the monster undead spellcaster had formed this strange open connection to a realm with abundant Death energy, usable as a source of fuel for his dark works.
He still murdered people and stuff for his rituals ANYWAY, because according to these memories he was an asshole. Point was though that this Asura Stone increased his powers and reduced his energy costs when doing magic.
Karma still got the bastard in the end though... He detected the 'Death' spiritual energy easily enough, but missed the 'Underworld' energies completely. The two were similar... but the Underworld power was able to enhance spiritual beings. To empower them and increase their resistance to mental attack.
Spiritual beings like the massive number of vengeful ghosts that constantly haunted this Necromancer ass who killed thousands for various rituals.
Anyway, once the Necromancer got consumed by hungry spirits, the Asura Stone was found and destroyed by heroes after a few decades of accidentally melting flesh and spawning wandering skeletons. From then on it would pop up again and again in history, and according to these memories would eventually be found forcing an area to decay, get destroyed, and one day be reborn again.
Unlike many of the more famous treasures, this one did not come with special attacks or cultivation methods... it was just a connection to a realm where demigods fought for reasons they probably forgot eons ago. Maybe if the Necromancer had more time to try and improve his creation... he had after all gathered absurdly expensive materials to make what he THOUGHT would be his soul jar. Necrotic Silver, Haunted Gold, Corpse Gems... literal mounds of rare materials and desecrated treasures had been spent on forming this one small stone. But time was one thing he did not have.
This 'unfinished product' didn't even allow much control... you could decide to restrain the Death and Underworld energies... or not.
That was it.
No wonder most people would rather destroy the thing rather than let someone ELSE set off a local disaster. In fact, the only reasons skeletons and (eventually) zombies were not walking around was because Adam had been in the area. If he had shown up a week or so later, these many corpses would have begun an endless hunt for flesh... a nasty surprise for the locals.
While Adam had no real use right now for Death energy OR the spiritual power of the Underworld... well, Rockette was more than able to utilize 'Growth' to harvest that power, convert a portion as fuel, and convert the rest into other energy samples. Of course, the more powerful the new target energy type was, the more Death and Underworld energy must be sacrificed to produce it... but all this new energy was just waste or excess, the runoff caused by massively powerful beings fighting all the time. It wouldn't run out, and using it all for his own purposes was nothing but profit!
A thought had the black circle appear on his palm... hopefully 'Research' could examine this new data source instead of focusing on Mr. Whiskers to figure out how to bind objects to one's spirit and soul as ink. In the mean time...
A pulse. The stone was fully activated.
Again, black energies flowed from the tattoo in his hand. While it COULD be directed externally into others or objects to force rot and decay, Rockette was directing it into his Shard herself, using it to fuel Growth.
Now he could increase the sample sizes of all the discovered energy types stored there, then have her use 'Growth' once the source materials were built up to increase his internal storage of Blue energy, Green energy, and the two energies those Four Eye Flame Bulls needed.
Unfortunately, 'Binding energy' couldn't be grown directly this way. He had THOUGHT it could be, and believed he had done so in the past... but it turns out that ALL his binding energy was collected after interacting with his Domain or after being stripped away from other energy types. Seriously, 'Binding energy' acted so strange.
Another pulse of pain went up his right arm, even as the rotten flesh instantly healed. Annoying.
Oh, and his guards were here. "Sir... are you alright?"
Adam frowned. "Oh, the black rock with poisonous gray energy thing?" This damage was a necrotic affect from the Death energy. Underworld energy on the other hand was actually pretty beneficial, he could already feel it stabilizing his Spiritual Network and soothing some rough edges of his own soul. But this Death energy... "I think the raw power of death is not healthy for my body."
He nodded, ignoring their expressions. "Yeah, its killing parts of my arm as I pass the energy to Rockette's spiritual connection in my heart. And a bit of rotting in my shoulder and some veins... yeah, this is pretty bad."
Adam began moving out of the Yin energy pool, grateful to be out of the conceptually cold liquid trying to melt his legs even as Rockette ensured all traces of the other, more dangerous energies were cleaned out of the area. "You guys should go bring the girls down now, I put all the deadly stuff into my hand so it should be safe. Just in case though, I am going to take a bit of a break over here and adapt to the stuff with my Gentle Rebirth Technique. Rotting flesh hurts."
Shouldn't take long, he just needed to have the Rebirth Technique examine his arm to find which Cultivation Cells adapted best to the additional sources of power and spread the solution out to the others. Much faster than the initial conversion method... he should probably document this as an 'Energy Adaptation Method' to include with the Gentle Rebirth Body Cultivation Technique's next version.
He paused.
None of the three guards had moved.
Adam raised an eyebrow. "Well? I'm going to be a bit busy forcing my body to ignore the energies of death, ONE of you can go make sure our friends get down here safely."
Sheesh, these people seriously needed to learn how to adapt to the odd stuff. His life seemed full of it.
~~~Broken Adventure~~~
Sister Quan SHOULD be angry about Adam apparently finding a cave of death and descending to put the worst of it inside his own hand... but it seemed something he would do. Perfectly in character, really.
So for now, she and little Tianshi were relaxing in this wonderful Yin pool. Adam had said something about having cleaned it so it wouldn't melt people, but she felt more calm ignoring comments like that.
Little Tianshi was pouting. "Mr. Whiskers says he doesn't want to join us, something about cool guys and yang pools and relaxing lava baths or whatever."
The cold energies seemed to pierce directly into her sore muscles and calm her headache. Sister Quan sighed. "Yang spiritual power tends to be both hot and match many masculine features. larger muscles, virility, raw strength. Yin energies like those found in this pool are cool, focus on feminine features, slenderness, flexibility, the arts..."
The girl looked confused. "What's virility?"
Sister Quan patted her head. "It means be quiet and enjoy the lovely energy pool while we wait for Adam to fix whatever that stuff on his right arm is."
Seriously, his entire right arm seems to have grown its OWN tattoo pattern, a strange network of thin black infection veins that were expanding over his body. He seemed fully in control and perfectly happy with the situation, but then again the woman wasn't sure that child would be unhappy even if he was on fire.
Strike that, Adam seemed to spend most of his LIFE on fire. If anything, that was a positive situation for the strange boy.
Anyway, SHE couldn't stop the situation, and the short conversation with the lead female guard (Who knew they could talk?) had cleared up a lot.
A massive bone pit full of corpses, Adam came down, cleaned it up, found some sort of black stone of death or evil... and was now trying to eat it with his hand. Or something.
~~~Broken Adventure~~~
This Asura Stone was... fascinating.
The more his body adapted to the dangerous energies being emitted... the more types of energies it was able to release. 'Rot energy', 'Decay energy', 'Shadow Corruption energy'... not to mention the forty or so poisonous energies that were randomly included.
After adapting his Cells to the first few dozen, his Cultivation Flesh adapted... and forced his strange near black tattoos to spread over his entire body. Every inch of his flesh was now covered with hair thin lines of energy, ones that continuously adapted to the ever increasing poisons, corruptions, and profound energy sources being introduced into his body.
Instead of his flesh rotting away as it tried to adapt, all the dangerous stuff was being shoved into his tattoo network. It spread out the damage, let his body adapt far more efficiently without causing any one portion of his flesh to be too damaged or generate any pain...
But now he had tattoos everywhere. Strange ones that made patterns that hurt to look at too closely, that seemed to shift and move.
Four hours later, and he had adapted enough to make the lines mostly stay still.
Two hours after that, and the width of each tattoo line was vastly reduced, most patterns now composed of lines as thin as a hair.
...He won't say how long it took to force those tattoos to match his skin color.
It was hard. VERY hard. And every new poison or corruption energy from the Asura Stone would pulse a black wave of color (if it was a new poison) or a silvery sheen (if it was a new high energy type).
Adam sighed, resting on a mound of white powder... Spirit Beast bone powder was surprisingly comfortable.
Still, he couldn't wait until his body stabilized again. He didn't want to walk around like a glowing strobe light.
The worst part? While the variety and range of energies was ever increasing, the overall energy AMOUNT was constant. This Asura Stone had a sort of built in limit... or maybe it was limited due to his Cultivation foundation.
Either way, he could only get a certain amount of energy per second, no matter how many strange types composed it.
Sigh... this was going to slow his cultivation progress again, since he needed to let Rockette build up a sample of each new energy he was adapting his body with.
Dang it.
Adam is an odd one... you would think that with enough time they would get used to it, no?
