Ashlock felt the corrosive slime burn his root as he contemplated his options.
The pain was initially numb as the root hairs were instantly vaporized. But as the root's cell walls began to break down and the corrosive fluid poured in through the small gaps and interacted with the soft flesh inside, he felt a pain like no other—a searing pain, like dipping his toe into boiling water.
But this time, he resisted it by shifting his attention away—micromanaging it from afar. One of the many benefits of having a mountain-sized body and a mind that couldn't process everything at once.
Now it felt like a distant dull ache as if he had sat on his foot for too long, making it numb. He could still wiggle his toes and command the root, but he couldn't see exactly what was happening.
"Right, time to cast {Root Puppet} and see if this works..."
***
Diana landed below with blue flames shrouding her legs and dashed toward the exit of the mineshaft while looking over her shoulder. 'I should get ready to evacuate as the slime is impossible for me to defeat with my water Qi.'
Diana's sword sat lazily in her hand.
She tried to ignore the hundreds of beady eyes glaring at her from the safety of their stone homes.
The rodents were of little concern to her as they were mostly in the Qi realm—even the miners could deal with them with the help of artifacts, but a nest and the few stronger ones would require a cultivator to deal with them.
Being in the Soul Fire realm made Diana stronger than many things in this world, especially with her techniques, artifacts, and weapons she acquired from her family before their demise.
However, even with all her advantages, the world was vast, and something new was always trying to kill her, and Diana had experienced that today.
The slime wasn't life-threatening per se, but if she had been trapped in a stone room without an exit with it, her only chance of escaping would be to force her way through the mountain rock and hope her soul core had enough energy to keep her going all the way to the surface.
Diana watched with interest as the slime aggressively tried to absorb the root. What would Ashlock do here? The tree had displayed intelligence far beyond that of a normal one and abilities that even monarch realms couldn't achieve.
Sure, Ashlock may be unable to move or use his Qi for any techniques. Still, he appeared instinctually capable of artificially creating rifts between worlds—which wasn't surprising considering he possessed such flawless spatial Qi.
Diana frowned a little at that thought and summoned her blue flames tarnished with a hint of black, showing that her spiritual roots were inferior. She could still display the same power as another. It's just affected the finesse she could have over her techniques and soul-fire.
For example, even if Ashlock somehow taught Stella how to open rifts between worlds, Diana doubted Stella could even open the rift as that would be a very high-level and complex spatial Qi technique.
Diana focused back on the slime. "Why isn't the patriarch burning it with his flames?" She wondered aloud, her voice echoing slightly through the cavern, earning her even more stares from the rodents.
After Ashlock displayed his inner eye, Diana had no issue replacing the image of the blood lotus sect patriarch with that demon-eyed tree. Hell, even her father didn't have such a terrifying gaze as that gluttonous tree.
Looking closer, Diana saw the black root's tip open up and hair-thin fibers fanned out. The slime began to convulse and shudder as lilac Qi occasionally flashed along the hair-thin roots.
The slime's body appeared to offer little resistance as it was at war with its own body, and the water Qi did nothing to counter the spatial Qi of Ashlock.
Diana watched its blue body being overtaken by the black roots as if a plague of spindly fingers corrupted it. It was a terrifying display and reminded Diana of how Ashlock controlled corpses. Was this the same technique? Would he take over this strange creature?
Its body sagged down, but the roots held it mostly together. The process was a little slow due to the slime's enormous body. Finally, the rodents became restless as they saw the creature they had been so afraid of being eaten alive from the inside.
Sparks of lilac Qi flashed between the black roots throughout the slime's body, slowly turning the whole thing a light shade of purple.
***
The dull pain finally stopped.
Ashlock's Soul Core hummed as Qi poured into the mountain, especially down that single root. Over the last hour, he had broken through the cavern ceiling with more roots, attacking the slime's body from more contact points—otherwise, the process would have taken days.
For all the greatness of the {Root Puppet} skill, speed was not its area of expertise. Even with the slime's lack of blood vessels or muscle tissue to be carefully overtaken, the process still took forever and far too much Qi.
With the pain finally gone, Ashlock turned his view back to the cavern, and everything felt... slimy. The hair-thin roots he commanded to control the body also came with the sense of touch.
Letting the slime gloop down like a giant raindrop, he found he could keep contact with it through the root in the ceiling and use it like a massive finger. However, the most bizarre of all was the slime's soul core.
It did have one, but rather than being a marble-like stone of fixed size, it was like a sparse cloud throughout the slime's body held loosely together by strings of Qi.
Without a central soul core, it was no wonder the slime could split itself in two and still retain its Qi and cognitive abilities. Maybe the split parts were even still connected by threads of Qi.
However, more importantly, this cloud-type soul core had a significant flaw. Like a gas, Qi was leaked out of the body every second, and it struggled to retain any Qi.
Luckily, this was perfect for Ashlock as his {Root Puppet} skill had the downside of using the body's soul core as fuel first and then using Ashlock's soul core as an external power source, something that instantly destroyed most vessels as their bodies weren't attuned to handling spatial Qi.
But the slime had no issues transitioning from one type of Qi to the other, and even though it was still technically alive, he could control it without a problem as its body didn't have a hub for control. Instead, it was like a collection of cells all mutually working together, meaning they were weak individually, and his skill could take total control without much resistance.
Ashlock mentally frowned. The Qi upkeep to maintain control over this slime was simply immense. If not for using many spirit ore deposits throughout the mountain, his soul core might be at risk of shattering from overuse.
"Not a permanent body then, but certainly one I can use for far longer than the other monster and human corpses I have recently tried to control."
If anything, it was a proof of concept. If his cultivation realm was higher, or he increased his Qi generation, then keeping this slime monster under control permanently was a possibility in the future.
"I can always just release my control over this slime and leave it somewhere for later—if it couldn't escape this cave before, I doubt it can now."
Ashlock looked around the cavern. He needed to make this entire investment into the slime worth the effort and Qi. The rats were like fish in a barrel and the obvious choice to test the slime's combat capabilities.
With Diana blocking one of the exits, he maneuvered the slime's body to come from the other side.
The rats—smart enough to piece together their impending doom—let out loud screeches, likely war cries and charged at Diana while baring their yellowing teeth and claws.
Instead of pouncing on the human, a dense mist appeared alongside haunting shadows, which made the rats cry out in confusion. Some tried to charge through the mist but were thrown back to the waiting pack as limbless and decapitated corpses, which made the other rats hesitate.
Some still charged ahead to meet their death at the tip of Diana's blade, but a few, possibly even more foolish rats, turned tail and charged at the lilac wall of slime.
And Ashlock welcomed them with open arms—the slime wall morphed into a titanic being with two limbs and pulverized the rats as they came into a paste on the cold stone floor.
It was only then that Ashlock made a realization. After killing over a hundred rats, he let the slime revert into a puddle-like state, only held to the ceiling by a thin column of slime and hair-thin roots.
Ashlock then manipulated the slime body to gobble up all the bits of rat, and before the pieces could be fully dissolved, he used the hair-thin roots to move the bits through the body and toward the many black roots connected to the top of the slime from the ceiling.
It was here that Ashlock could transport the smashed and semi-dissolved bits of rodents up through the mountain via the sap in his roots and {Devour} them on the surface.
Shrill screams filled the caverns as the few rats left were perched back to back on their hind legs in the cavern's center. Their eyes desperately searched for a way to escape.
On one side was the terrifying mist filled with laughing shadows, while the other exit was blocked by the slime they had used their entire lives to trap and kill the stronger predators that lurked down here with them.
Their brains raced with questions. Ever since the appearance of those mushrooms and mysterious roots in one of the mineshafts, pack members had gone missing, and now this?
Ashlock naturally cared little for the rodent's confusion. He needed to exterminate the pests to repurpose this vast mine for his own uses and his future sect. This would become a perfect hideout and base for his operations.
It was strange. Ashlock had always felt like the little guy in this world, at the mercy of others. But for once, he was the one with overwhelming power and could kill everything in this cavern. It felt nice to finally have a decent amount of agency, and so long as he was willing to pay the absurd Qi upkeep of the slime monster, he now had something he could directly control to fight with.
"And with its great ability to vacuum up corpses and divert their remains to my trunk so I can {Devour} them, this will be a great trump card for when the beast tide comes."
Without another thought, Ashlock directed the slime to crush all the remaining rodents huddled in the center.
A moment later, the mist cleared, and Diana emerged, shaking her blade once to remove the filthy blood and then burning off the rest with the blue fire of her soul. She looked around the now eerily quiet cavern covered in blood stains, and then she witnessed a stream of rat guts traveling up a long tube of lilac slime only to vanish into the open ends of the black roots in the ceiling high above.
"Patriarch, should I keep exploring?" Diana asked as she looked briefly at the entrance to the mineshaft on the far end of the cavern, likely leading deeper into the mine.
Ashlock used his Qi to flash the entire body of the slime twice. He wanted to give his roots time to grow a lot of slack so he could explore the rest of the mine with Diana. So, for now, taking control of this section was good enough.
"No?" Diana raised a brow. "Should I head back up to the pavilion then?"
Ashlock indicated yes with a single flash.
Diana shrugged and turned on her heel, "Alright. I'll take the root back up."
With nothing else to do down in the mine, Ashlock returned his sights back to the pavilion atop the mountain and saw Stella lying on the bench.
She was frowning at the scroll in her hands, and from a brief glance at its contents, Ashlock couldn't believe it.
The scroll explained how to create portals with spatial Qi, and he could understand it.
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