The more he looked at the strange floating lights, the more mesmerized Mo Chen felt. He even began to feel a deep longing toward that energy, a strange pull in his chest that he could not immediately classify.
He had never felt such a thing before, so he felt utterly confused by the emotion and spent more than an hour engrossed in it, staring at the multicolored particles as if they held the answer to some question he had not yet learned to ask.
After coming back to his senses, he once again focused on the particles.
"Is this what fantasy stories call mana? Or did I really go mad?" he said with a chuckle.
"So, uhhh… in what way does this benefit me?" He slightly tilted his head and started rubbing his newly grown beard.
"In novels, they usually use some sort of cultivation technique to draw in energy, use it to temper the body, and then, after the tempering is complete, start filling their veins with this energy before using it to construct a dantian, effectively reaching Foundation Establishment…"
He then frowned slightly.
"The problem is… how do I control this energy? How do I know my body is ready to absorb it into my veins? Most importantly, I'm about six to seven times as strong as a normal human because of my nanomachines and genetic modifications. Does that instantly make me powerful enough, or do I still need to make my body used to this energy?"
He did not realize it, but the more he thought about what to do, the more time passed—and the clearer his mind became.
---
"Okay, let's start this."
In the last week, Mo Chen's body had completely healed, and after hunting a couple dozen birds and eating them, he felt energized. He had also discovered what to do with the strange energy, which he decided to call spiritual energy.
"Who knew that I could control it with my mind?"
That fact alone should have been enough to frighten him.
Instead, it only made him stare at the floating lights with deeper interest.
His plan was simple. Since he could control its movement, he would try to force it to enter his body through his pores. If that did not work, he would try another method until something worked.
As for anything beyond body tempering, he did not know what to do. After all, if he wanted to make something enter his bloodstream, he would need to convince his body that it was a normal part of him; otherwise, white blood cells would attack it. He did not know the consequences of that, but he guessed it was probably something like qi deviation from murim novels.
After getting comfortable on the ground, he began to control the multicolored energy.
At first, nothing happened.
The particles drifted lazily in the air, scattered through the cave like a field of tiny stars. He narrowed his eyes and focused harder. Slowly but surely, the surrounding spiritual energy began to shift. One by one, the motes moved. Then more. Then all at once, they started to gather around his body, forming a dim, heavy fog of shimmering color.
Mo Chen's breathing slowed.
He could feel it now.
The energy hovered near his skin, brushing across his arms and neck in a way that made every hair on his body stand up. It was not cold, yet it was not warm either. It felt alive in a way that was deeply unsettling and deeply fascinating at the same time.
Feeling that it was enough, he began forcing it through his skin.
"Fuck."
Without warning, he screamed at the top of his lungs.
He had never felt this much pain in his entire life, not even when he fell into an acid container, and not even when he was tortured for information by enemy commanders back in the army.
This was different.
It was not the sharp, immediate pain of a wound or the deep ache of bruised flesh. This was a full-body violation, as if every cell in his skin had been grabbed by invisible hands and forced to tear itself apart one strand at a time.
It felt as though millions of knives were slicing into him all at once.
His body jerked violently. His back arched. The muscles in his neck strained so hard he thought for a moment they might split. The cave filled with the sound of his own voice, ragged and feral, and even then he could not tell whether he was screaming from pain or from pure shock.
The spiritual energy did not enter politely.
The first wave forced its way into the outermost layer of his skin, and wherever it passed, his skin split open. Tiny cracks appeared first, then larger tears. Blood ran in thin lines down his arms and chest. The skin around his shoulders began to peel in places, as if trying to escape the energy before it could fully enter.
But the strange thing was that the energy seemed to drive his healing factor into overdrive.
Even as his skin tore, new flesh began to grow back almost immediately. It was not graceful. It was not clean. It was not even fast enough to keep up with the destruction at first. But it worked.
His body used the broken pieces of skin like raw material, and with the spiritual energy acting as some incomprehensible catalyst, it rebuilt what had been destroyed.
The process was horrible.
It was as if his body had forgotten that it was supposed to be one solid thing and had instead decided to turn itself into a battlefield.
Every time the energy pushed deeper, his skin split again. Every time it split, his healing factor tried to close the wound. Every time it closed, the energy forced itself deeper once more. The result was a cycle of destruction and repair so vicious that Mo Chen's mind kept dipping toward blankness just to survive it.
His vision blurred.
His hearing became distant.
He could feel sweat pouring down his face, only for it to be instantly absorbed by the pain and ignored.
There were even areas where his healing factor was too slow compared to the rate of destruction.
That was when the real agony began.