Aman took a sterilized injection needle that he had bought from a pharmacy and pricked the pad of his thumb with it.

Squeezing out a drop of blood, he let it fall into the glass he had in front of him.

There, several ants which he had collected from the garden were moving around at the bottom of the glass.

He waited for some time until some of the ants began investigating the drop of blood and some of them ingested a bit.

Then, he closed his eyes and asked Nama, “What now?”

[Now, have to channel your soul into your crown chakra as much as possible, just like you did with your heart during the test to enter IIE.]

Aman closed his eyes and focused upon his soul galaxy, trying his best to force the nano-photons to obey his will.

The response was extremely jerky and whenever he succeeded, he would soon lose control and the particles would slip back.

[Here, let me help.]

Suddenly, Aman felt that his five senses were cut off. All the sounds that he had been hearing, the feel of his clothes against his body, even the sensation of his weight… everything was gone.

He was just a disembodied soul floating in a jet-black void with the only thing present being the galaxy of his soul.

Manipulating the soul became a lot easier.

Soon, he managed to push most of the errant soul to the crown of his head and suddenly, the field of his soul sight expanded.

He noticed a tiny glittering cluster of pinpricks of light near his soul galaxy.

It was his drop of blood… more accurately, the nano-photons associated with the cells in that drop of blood.

[Focus on the nano-photons which have been ingested by the ants and try to use that as a medium to connect with their souls.]

Following Nama’s instructions, he focused on the pinpricks of light which were moving about.

Concentrating as hard as he could, he managed to focus on a single ant but before he could do anything more, there was a sudden turbulence in his soul and he lost control of it.

Just like a stretched rubber band, the soul sprang back to its original shape violently and produced a strong backlash.

Aman’s eyes sprang open and all his senses returned as he clutched his head and moaned as spikes of pain passed through his brain.

Feebly crawling on his bed, he snatched an energy bar from the pile of discarded wrappers he had on his bedside table.

Chewing on the bar, he recalled his experience in training his soul since the morning.

He had been meditating to try and improve his control of his soul since morning before finally trying to connect to and control the ants with his soul.

But it had been all uphill.

Not only was his soul damaged in its intensity, due to the overuse of the Gene Extractor, his control over his soul had dropped to an all-time low.

He sighed. There was no shortcut to curing his soul.

He would have to keep on cultivating until the flaws were too minor to matter.

Just like if you drew a cross with a marker on a tennis ball and a similarly sized cross on the surface of the earth, compared to the overall size of the earth the cross would be insignificant but on the tennis ball, the mark would be very eye-catching.

With the help on Nama, his cultivation progress was extremely shocking.

After all, a nascent divinity was something only late stage cultivators of the qi cultivation path were supposed to have while he had it at the beginning itself.

The effects were naturally splendid.

According to Nama’s estimate, he could reach the second stage of soul cultivation from the first in around two months at the current pace which was about three times the speed of a moderately talented human with the best soul sensor.

And the pace would have been even faster if his soul wasn’t damaged.