Uncle Grey began to draw out a second arrayment diagram as he muttered about youth these days and disrespect. He activated it as soon as it was finished, and the arrayment that Nolan and Nyla had drawn out suddenly disappeared as if it had been a vivid mirage.

“Now, let’s see what you’ve got planned for us.” Uncle Grey drove Nolan’s arms to lift the lid of the chest, which immediately shone with dazzling violet light.

“In all these thousands of years, let alone make it up here, nobody else has even reached the seventh floor.”

The shining light didn’t fade in the least, and the speaker remained unseen.

“Hmm, his constitution is quite remarkable. Ha! After all these millennia, I was able to save up an immense amount of energy without being disturbed even once, and it seems that there’s even a force outside that worships me?”

Uncle Grey didn’t make any moves, simply stood there and let the forgotten man have his monologue.

“The heavens are truly helping me! And now that I’ve reached a critical point in consolidating my soul, the ideal vessel suddenly appears in my presence?”

Do we have to listen to this guy’s life story? Just kill him and take his shit.

His…shit?

“…After a life of hardship, finally receiving a stroke of luck…”

What, you suddenly don’t understand the context?

It bothers me that you think I’m strange.

“…Repent for stealing this vessel, so building a few hundred orphanages should do…”

The bright light that filled the room suddenly grew in intensity as the surrounding energies began to coalesce around the centre of the chest. A few moments later and the room had been completely drained of energy.

“…Directly take control of the forces outside and…”

Uncle Grey sighed and activated the hidden arrayment, which seemed to go completely unnoticed by the lingering spirit.

“What is this? This can’t—aah!”

The room returned to its original ambience after the spirit’s screams abruptly died down. All that remained was a volleyball-sized globe of pulsating purple energy that hovered a metre or so above the open chest.

Uncle Grey quickly instigated a chain of arrayments that caused the extremely dense remains of the spirit to undergo a series of interesting transformations. From a pulsating sphere of light to a sparkling glob of plasm, to glittering dust and then finally a few heaping handfuls of coarse gem-like beads.

Just as Nolan was about to ask what the beads were, Uncle Grey ate one of them. It quickly dissolved in Nolan’s stomach as if it were sugared candy, and an indeterminable amount of energy was immediately siphoned into the Millennial Ring.

Sensing no reaction from his body, Nolan became skeptical as Uncle Grey went on to eat nearly all of the tiny beads without showing the slightest signs of discomfort. Once he was finished, he stowed the remaining twenty pellets into Nolan’s spatial bag and abruptly relinquished control of his body.

The first thing that Nolan did was inspect the beads in his spatial bag, which were a light shade of purple and emanated a heavy, dense aura.

What’s the deal with these? Will they help me train faster, or recover quicker or something?

Don’t eat those until you reach…hmm, it’s hard to say for you. To be safe, wait until you reach the later levels of Integration. For ordinary people, one would have to be at least in the middle levels of Genesis to avoid damaging their inner essence channels and dantian.

So only May can use them?

For now, yes. Though they will be very beneficial for you in the future. Ahem, now I must go and consolidate this energy, so I suggest you stay in the tower until I make contact again.

Wait, what the fuck? We’re leaving today!

There was no answer.

What’re we supposed to do if more people show up on the upper floors? If that guy from before could do it, then it’s probably possible! Just absorb the energy later.

The ensuing silence angered Nolan so much that he punched the ground with enough strength to sprain his wrist. After healing himself with Divine Spirit Fountain water, he wondered why his teacher was so forgetful, and so flippant.

All that time stuck on Nia definitely didn’t do him any good.

Late to the task that he requested of them, and early to end communications. Uncle Grey hadn’t mentioned anything beforehand about having to put their plans of escape on hold, else Nolan probably wouldn’t have insisted to the others that it was something that must be done.

“Fucking guy.”

Nolan turned his head to call Nyla up the stairs, but remembered that each level of the tower, stairs included, was completely sealed off from the rest. He found her lingering at the bottom of the staircase, which had also been cleared of energy back when the top floor was being drained.

“Nolan?”

He nodded, and then motioned for her to follow him upstairs. He filled her in on what had happened on the way up, complaining towards the end of his explanation. “I’m telling you, he’s being sketchy again. Me and Ian can’t be here when our tribulations hit, and that can happen any time. I don’t want my cultivation to get damaged or something because the process was interrupted.”

Nolan produced a simple iron sword and began prying the large, energized stones from the floor.

“You really think you’ll face a trial?” Nyla’s eyes gave the room a sharp scan before she began to trace out an arrayment diagram.

“I can feel it. It’s kind of like how you can feel a sneeze coming on, you just don’t know for sure when it’ll happen if you keep putting it off.”

He’d initially suspected that he might experience the Heavenly Tribulation once he broke through to the Integration stage solely on the basis that, if this phenomenon truly occurred because an individual managed to reach a certain threshold in harvesting the energies of the world, then he would likely meet such requirements once he made his monumental breakthrough. He could already compare to someone an entire stage above him, which meant that at the very least he would soon be comparable to a Genesis-staged cultivator.

“I think we should go through with the plan without Uncle Grey.” Nyla finished drawing her diagram and gave him a conflicted look. “I hate to admit it, but we can’t rely on him this time. Even if you don’t undergo the tribulation, Ian will still have to. If that happens while we’re here, it could kill him.”

“I know. As soon as we finish taking all these stones then we’ll go downstairs and slip on out of here.”

“Would you stop that already?” She flicked her hand at him in a shooing action and activated her arrayment. With a brief flash of golden light, all of the peculiar gems began to shake before they were suddenly ripped free from their grooved slots and drawn over to Nyla’s spatial bag. “We’ll divide these up later.”

“Just hold on to them for now.”

With no more need for them, they dispelled the protective arrayments that had been shielding them from the tower’s aura and then walked over to face the big chest.The only things that remained in the now lightless room were the huge chest and a bleached white skeleton that sat within it. Nolan and Nyla silently considered the two objects with different degrees of thoughtfulness.

“Uh,” said Nolan after a minute or so of considerations. “I’m good on this stuff.” He sort of wanted the chest, since it was covered in all sorts of priceless gems, but to do that he’d literally have to move a corpse from its coffin. Despite all that he’d been through on Venara, such an act still seemed in poor taste.

Nyla, on the other hand, shamelessly directed both the chest and the skeleton into her spatial bag. She responded to Nolan’s look of disapproval with a nonchalant shrug. “It’s not like the man was a saint. Didn’t he try to possess your body anyway?”

“But why his bones?”

“Look at this tower. To make a place like this, he couldn’t have been a mere Genesis-staged expert. His remains will definitely have value.”

“Probably but…I don’t know.” When Nolan turned to leave, he was stopped by a gentle grasp.

“Hold on. I know we’re short for time, but do you want to stay up here for a few more minutes?”

Her dark eyes took on a hungry tint, an expression that increased Nolan’s heartrate. Memories of the last time she’d fixed him with the same stare began to play through his mind, and his heart began to race.

“I mean, we don’t have to fly down there.”