Molting the Mortal Coil

Chapter 831: Tracking

Chapter 831: Tracking

Sage was powerful enough that he didnt have to switch back and forth between Hindsight and Foresight, especially since that would waste a lot of time on his part. Every time he switched he would lose his place and then have to rewind time again back to that same position. It was much like rewinding a video to a specific point in time, he could pause it or roll it forward and backward, but the rewind function didnt have a timeline that he could use to jump to a specific time. Instead he had to rewind it backwards, and it even had a limit to its speed multiplier. If he deactivated Hindsight, it was like closing the video and having to do the long rewind process all over again. Remarkably, the multiplier on the rewind speed was the same as his rank, with time being able to go back six times faster than normal. So, it would take five minutes for his Hindsight to go back to seeing the events of half an hour in the past.

The Ghost Armorana had a few hours headstart on him at this point, so he did not want to spend a half hour reestablishing his Hindsight over and over again. Even worse, every time he did, hed end up even more time lagged on the Ghost Armoranas trail and then would have to waste even more time to catch the trail again. Instead he chose to risk getting injured and proceed as any other cultivator would. He didnt dare to spread his Spirit Sense out too far because this Hidden Domain was not a place full of pushovers. He had no desire to attract the attention of a swarm of tier 6 fish by spreading out his Spirit Sense to its full extent. There were many Demonic Beasts that were known to treat the touch of a Spirit Sense like it was an invasion of their territory and then respond violently.

After avoiding the snapping jaws of a fish with razor sharp teeth and then dispatching said fish, Sage swam into a large undersea cavern. In front of him he saw the Ghost Armorana and its bright silvery scales. Compared to the others of its kind whose scales looked like silvery metal, the Ghost Armoranas scales were far more translucent which made them look somewhat like silvery flakes suspended in resin or frosted glass. Yet, the Ghost Armorana was not the most important thing in this room, the object it was nestled up against was far more interesting. At first sight, it resembled some sort of giant octopus or squid. There was a huge roughly spherical object at the center with eight tentacles expanding outwards. Only, a closer look would show that these werent any sort of tentacle hed seen before. Four of them were double the diameter of the other four, and instead of tapering off to a smaller size as they extended further, they split apart into multiple smaller tentacles like the branches of a tree. There were also no suction cups, or spines that he could see upon them. They extended out to the edges of the huge chamber and then attached to the wall in more than thirty places.

The Armorana was pressed up against the side of the huge fleshy mass and it was only after watching it for a few seconds did Sage realize what it was. The huge object suddenly expanded and then contracted and he heard a loud thumping noise reverberating through the water. He watched in fascination for a few seconds before it then thumped once again. Is that a gigantic heart? Are these rocks some sort of entity?

Combining the sound and the motion of the giant heart beating made it apparent that those were not tentacles, but giant branching blood vessels. The only problem was that despite looking like flesh, it was placed in the center of an undersea cavern. Neither the rocky walls, nor the seawater they were immersed in seemed congruent with the huge organic heart that was beating at the center of this chamber. Yet, that basic observation was sent into chaos when he started to use his other senses. Sage used his Qi to resonate with the laws and while he could call upon the laws to empower his actions, they felt impeded. The power of laws surrounding the giant heart were so dense that his control over laws felt strangled. If before he was working in open air, it was now like he was truly underwater when it came to operating the power of law.

The Ghost Armorana had not yet noticed him, it had its eyes closed and from what he saw it looked to be meditating or cultivating. It completely ignored him as he moved closer and felt the greater and greater fluctuations of law energy from the giant heart. Sage quickly switched to Foresight and created the mental intention to attack the heart. He saw the future result and altered his intended attack over and over again. Then he switched to another technique and started to attack. Then he started to use a poison, and many other methods, running through all sorts of tests that he could think of. It was much like having a perfect predictive model, but the only problem was that all results were only visual.

On the plus side, the Soul Clone developed a technique to allow it to use the many visual modes of the Sea Locust while looking through Sages eyes. Initially, Sage and his clone shared the same vision with each other. It was much like how a person had two eyes and could choose to close one or the other to focus on what was going on. If you were seeing drastically different things in each of those eyes it would become very confusing, but he had two separate minds to process that information. His two selves ran somewhat independently, except they could share memories with each other and choose to change their perspective to the other whenever they wanted.

That all changed when Sage sent the Soul Clone into the Inner World. Usually when he visited in a spiritual form, his consciousness would speed up to match the timeframe of the Inner World. He could spend days there, but when he left again only a few moments would pass in the real world. The difference lay in the fact that when he was focusing on the Inner World his consciousness would leave the outside world. With the Soul Clone, he was no longer moving between the two worlds and became a permanent resident of both. The disconnected time frame created a lot of difficulties but also opened a window to so many more things. Sage had compensated for this by developing a sort of mental technique that helped him disconnect the two minds and move his main consciousness and point of view over to the Inner World. In this way, he was essentially a resident of the Inner World, with a clone body moving around in the much slower outside world.

To help with this mental divide of what was once two completely interconnected minds, Sage and the teams of researchers created a series of magical tools that intercepted the connection between him and his clone. The things that Sage sensed were projected onto a series of huge screens, which helped with the illusion that it was a sort of game. It was a very surreal experience. He still missed his family, but they were now part of the other world and he could focus upon uncovering the mysteries of the world.

One of which was now staring him right in the face.

The other purpose of all the projections of his senses was to make them more measurable and accessible to the teams of researchers. Having teams of people helping invent and create new techniques was certainly useful, but what would be even more useful would be to have teams of people helping him analyze everything going on around him and helping him choose the best decisions. Of course, he wouldnt share so many intimate details with just anyone, so only his closest confidants were present in that control room. Technically they were all family, but the Lang Clan had grown so large after so many thousands of years that these kids were so distantly related that just reciting the names on the family line to reach them would take many minutes.

What was important was that with their help he developed a way for him to see what he was already seeing and use the eyes of the Sea Locust to view the visions that Foresight gave him with more detail.