One Last System

I took a deep breath... and activated all five layers of formations at once.

At first, nothing much happened.

​ The energy contained within the monsters' remains wasn't something that could be extracted easily. And so, for the first few minutes, I actually sat down and did nothing, waiting for the chaos within the formation to grow sufficiently enough.

Soon enough, the blood of the monsters started to decompose, letting out all the mana within out.

Normally, this mana would simply escape and be absorbed into the greater flow of energy that formed the worldwide flow of mana that most cultivators used to grow.

It was also the source of the energy that my outermost formation pulled in to then kickstart the entire process.

Only about a minute after the blood decomposed, the soft tissues of the monsters started to fall apart as well. And once even this source of mana finally started to release its content, the rate of the reaction skyrocketed.

Flesh. Muscles. Tendons. Organs. Bones. Cores.

The material from the corpses decomposed in this order, with each element only accelerating the pace of the decomposition of others. And before a quarter of an hour has passed, all of the material within my formations has vanished, leaving nothing more but a puddle of disgusting, stinky matter.

A puddle of disgusting, stinky matter... and a raging inferno of mana that swirled within the formations while the inner rings started to purify it.

And I simply sat amidst it all, observing through my half-open eyes how filth started to accumulate at the edges of the formation.

'Not yet,' I thought, seeing how the filth buildup still has yet to cease.

The filth wasn't a physical matter. It consisted of impurities within the mana itself that would evaporate along the energy and mix with it during the extraction process.

And roughly ten more minutes later, the outer reach of my formations ended up marked with a uniform structure of a small, roughly two-inches high mound of greyish filth.

'Just a little bit more,' I forced myself to wait even longer.

Now that the energy used to purify the mana had no job left to do, it would simply pass through the outer ring of the arrays, transfering itself and reinforcing the energy that already worked on accelerating the mana's flow.

And measly five minutes later, something twitched in my soul.

'Now!' an inner voice screamed in my soul.

I closed my eyes and took one more, deep breath.

I could feel the energy brimming in the air I was breathing in, a sign that the entire process was nearing its ultimate point. And right before it happened....

I opened myself to the energy, pulling on it so that my body could absorb it!

"Haaa...." I released a long, tense sigh when the mana rushed into me, mixing with the mana I already controlled and reinforcing my cultivation.

I kept my eyes closed, but saying I wasn't looking couldn't be any further from the truth. Instead of wasting my time and looking for the visible effects of my cultivation, I put all my focus on the only thing that I could see clearly even with my eyes closed.

On my system.

[

Soul Ascendance: 79 164M/1 000 000M > 117 671M

Element Ascendance: 483 146M/1 000 000M > 645 781M

Control Ascendance: 77 168M/1 000 000M > 384 976M

]

The first change was quite extraordinary. And while my soul ascendance progressed only a tiny little bit, at least when compared to how far I had to push it, the same couldn't be said about the two other elements of my cultivation stage.

The element's progress was... average. Far easier to grow than my soul ascendance for sure, yet, it paled in comparison to how quickly my control ascendance grew.

Yet, as great of a growth as I achieved from just a single horde of monsters... I was still in the rank that bordered the absolute limit of how far a cultivator could go.

Or in other words, in terms of accumulation alone, there was no greater hurdle within the scope of all the cultivation ranks. After all, as long as I broke through right now, I would finally step into the realm of ascended ranks, beyond which one could only strive to become a royal, a cultivation realm that had little to do with normal cultivation.

For the next few minutes I continued to absorb more and more of the energy, all the way until the point I bled all the air within the formation dry of mana.

And the result was... quite unsatisfactory.

[

Soul Ascendance:  117 671M/1 000 000M > 221 361M

Element Ascendance: 645 781M/1 000 000M > 849 776M

Control Ascendance: 384 976M/1 000 000M > 575 919M

]

'An entire horde only amounted to this...' I thought, gritting my teeth.

I hoped to advance in one fell swoop... and here I was, with my control failing to grow three times its size!

I closed my eyes and lowered my head a little.

Whether I advanced or not, didn't really matter. It was a drag for sure, but I did it all just for one purpose.

So that I could grow stronger and more capable of holding huge amounts of anti-mana in myself.

'I guess I don't have a choice, then,' I thought, taking one last deep breath.

And then, I shoot out my mana outside of the formation, breaking through the limits imposed by the outermost layer of arrays.

I turned each of the strands of my mana into something like a scoop, sending it just an inch beyond several puddles of jelly-like anti-mana. And then, by pushing at it from the back, I made use of the repelling nature existing between the two types of energy to attract a considerable amount of anti-mana within my formation.

As soon as the anti-mana passed through my arrays and a tiny bit of the anti-energy infused itself into the system, the complex array I created ceased to work. With the vector of the anti-mana's flow being the opposite of that of normal mana, it made all the complex logic behind my formation turn on its head.

But now, it didn't matter at all.

Because once the anti-mana finally struck my flesh and ended up absorbed, I finally satisfied the conditions I was now set on making use of.

'If there isn't enough energy in all those pure-mana resources... Then why shouldn't I cultivate using pure mana alone?'