Elder Gui waved at Naath using his martial energy to force him to his feet. He spoke up saying, “Kid you did pretty good surviving my tests, as a reward I will now teach you how to cultivate in soul techniques. Not only that I will explain the ranks of soul masters. Soul cultivation is very similar to martial cultivation. Each major realm has nine levels that are further divided into three small stages. For now, you only need to know the first three realms. They are as follows. The soul discovery realm, the soul opening realm, and the soul controlling realm. The soul discovery realm is about learning of your own soul and beginning to explore its uses.

The soul opening realm is when you can truly see your own soul and peer into the nature of yourself. In this realm, you will discover the colour of your soul that signifies who you are at the deepest level. After this stage, your soul energy will have a colour to it and every time it is used it will be seen by others. As an example my soul colour is light black, this shows that I will sometimes be rather cruel yet it is always to help others. The soul controlling realm is when you can finally start to use your soul to make special constructs out of soul energy.

At this stage, only simple things like chairs and cups can be made using soul energy, and once you are done with them you must recall them back to maintain your soul energy. If your soul does not have enough energy to create something and you try to create it any way you will damage your own soul and may end up crippling your own mind. Once this happens there is no way to fix it you will be an idiot for the rest of your life. You won't even be able to feed yourself or use the bathroom alone, so make sure you are very careful about how much you expend.

Now then can I assume you already have a soul cultivation method? I saw how quickly your soul was expanding a few months back.”

Naath nodded his head “yes master Gui, I do indeed have a soul cultivation method already.”

Elder Gui nodded and said, “good then you can enter my soul realm to train and use this method, this is a place I have set up a formation in, to aid in the development of a person's soul. Unfortunately, I have grown past the level of needing this formation, however, it will still show great benefit to your current level.”

After saying this elder Gui grabbed Naath and the next thing Naath saw was akin to a giant transparent light black dome. Elder Gui threw Naath inside and said, “ah right I almost forgot until your soul reaches at least the early fifth level of soul discovery realm you won't be able to leave this formation. Good luck Naath, I look forward to seeing you in a few weeks if you are talented, a few years if you are not.” Naath paled slightly and went into a slurry of curses, however, the formation was one way only Naath could hear elder Gui but elder Gui could not hear him.

The rune in Naath’s soul sea fell into a fit of laughter saying out loud “haha I like that old man Gui’s methods.”

Naath’s face scrunched slightly in anger and he slowly made his way into the center of the formation and sat down cross-legged. Once he was here he began to circulate the empty soul method. Naath instantly felt the difference that the formation was making to his soul cultivation. As the energy left his soul and emptied, it gathered even more energy than normal from the outside, Naath felt like it was roughly a 50% increase from before.

The rune spoke up at this point saying, “hoho, who would have thought this backwater little world would have someone capable of making something like this?

Not bad, not bad at all. Ah right Naath I should probably tell you, I only gave you half of the empty soul method. The way you're using it right now you will never increase your actual soul cultivation, just the density of the energy and the sheer size of your soul. This is already something that is rare in this universe, however, it won’t increase your soul cultivation even an inch. You could practice for millennia and never advance. Here is the other part of it.” With that the rune let information drift out of it and into Naath’s soul sea.

Naath immediately took in this information and was rather aggravated with the rune. What he was doing was expanding his soul and condensing his soul energy. To actually progress down the path of soul cultivation one needed to use the energy already available and purify it slowly but surely and in doing this a person would slowly learn what their own soul was capable of doing. Once Naath learned this he wanted to strangle the rune! Naath had about 20 times the amount of soul energy normal people had which meant he had to spend 20 times as long as he would have had to in order to advance a single realm!

Naath’s facial muscles twitched slightly as he began to use the empty soul method to purify his own soul energy. In a matter of minutes, he went into the empty state that the empty soul method would cause. After this, he began to look through his soul energy drawing it into his core soul at the center of his soul sea. As he did this he slowly began to see all of his memories from his past life and his current one play out before him. However, they played out in the third person and he was looking at everything rather objectively.

As he did this Naath began to learn who he was from an outsider's perspective and slowly began to accept it entirely. Outside of the formation elder Gui was looking in at Naath and smiling as he felt subtle changes in Naath’s soul energy that signified he was slowly purifying it. However, as he was nodding his head in approval he suddenly paused and realised something. Wait… his amount of soul energy… I didn’t even think of that! This kid has as much soul energy as someone on my own level, what the hell kind of method did he learn?! I'm so used to being around others of my own level that it completely slipped my mind ah!”

Naath was completely unaware of all of this as he was in a state of complete emptiness and in the process of cleansing his soul energy. As Naath continued to develop and purify his soul energy the liquid soul energy in his soul sea became clearer. At first, it was like a murky lake bed, but now it was like a clean river. As Naath continued he became more and more lost in his cultivation. After a week had passed and Naath still hadn't moved, if elder Gui couldn't sense Naath’s soul energy he would think he was in a coma.

Naath hadn't moved a single inch since he started to work on cultivating his soul. On this day the sect master dropped in out of nowhere startling elder Gui.

The sect master simply observed for a moment before he asked, “how is his progress?”

Elder Gui said, “It’s astonishing, in this week he has done what took me a full year to accomplish back when I was starting to cultivate the soul. Also I just realised last week, his soul energy is monstrous and so is the size of his soul. It’s actually on the same level as my own yet he hasn't even reached the early first stage of the soul discovery realm yet.” The sect master jumped slightly but quickly recovered his calm exterior and simply nodded as he looked at Naath inside of the formation.

He was silent for a long time before finally saying, “elder Gui I want you to let me know immediately when he first shows signs of breaking through to the soul opening realm. I feel as though the colour of his soul is going to be something truly special, it will probably give all of us a nice surprise.” With that the sect master disappeared into thin air and once more elder Gui was left to simply observe.