As the symbols began to appear within his Mental Fortress, Sage realized the true power of the Psionic Crystals. Although they had given a power boost to the Fisher Punk, their true worth was far greater. Soon the crystal was completely gone and he was faced with a mysterious assortment of special symbols. He started to study them and realized that if he had enough time, those symbols weren’t just boosting his Spirit Power, but they contained a deep knowledge. If I can understand them, there’s probably techniques hidden among these symbols. Also, it seems these symbols can also be used in arrays, but learning how they work will likely take much longer.

Amazed at the profound improvement, he smiled at Guan Zhenyan, “How many of your techniques came from Psionic Crystals?”

Not waiting for an answer, Sage moved his attention to the spheres floating in the air. Tao Ba had extracted all the energies remaining in the Fisher Punk’s body and just left them floating there. The corpse had shriveled up like a piece of jerky, a gross mass of dried bones and skin. The spheres in front of him each seemed to contain the very essence of the man’s different forms of strength. Sage smiled, as he felt a stirring from them. He left most of them alone, as he had no way to handle them, but there was one sphere that was a deep dark red. Sage opened his mouth. The red liquid swirled through the air in a tight cylinder like it was passing through an invisible straw and shooting straight into Sage’s mouth. After just a few moments the whole sphere was gone, completely consumed.

That red liquid didn’t sit inside his stomach. A membrane made of Qi formed inside his body and caught it, causing his stomach to bulge from the unusual shape within him. That membrane was quite unusual, and a remnant from the ancestor of a Mosquito that Sage took from the Saffron Swamp long ago. Blood Refining. His own blood then spilled into that membrane and mixed with it. The Qi underwent a mystical transformation, causing the two types of blood to combine, then refining them to remove the weakest parts. The resulting blood left in the membrane contained the most powerful of its original parts. Then, the blood dispersed into his bones, used as a blueprint to transform them, altering the bone marrow to produce the new and more powerful blood.

Over the course of a few hours, all of his bones finished their transformation. Already the new blood was being produced and his body was getting stronger. He didn’t know how to use the other parts so he left them there, floating in stasis. Then he turned his attention to the objects looted from the ratmen. He found more of the strange weapons along with large amounts of crystal projectiles and propellant for them. There were also more modern tools and small objects, like keychains, knives, utensils, candy, strange cigarettes, pry bars, and other small hand tools. Most importantly, he found a map. He couldn’t understand any of the scribbling on it, but he recognized the shapes of the bodies of water and saw a little symbol where the ruined town was. There was also a second map on a larger scale, this one was covered with a hexagonal grid and had many parts of them scratched out, there were also little tunnels through them and many scribbles on some. Then he made the connection between the hexagonal design sense of the planet’s inhabitants and the map, determining it was probably a record of their city exploration. Sadly, he wasn’t sure how much use it would be. The battle with the psychic had caused a massive amount of devastation, so it would be pretty difficult to use the map to pinpoint his position. Oh well, at least the larger map can point me to other areas of civilization.

Seeing how effective the weapons had been, Sage armed himself and the Blacksilver Pawns with them after he returned to the outside world. He also sensed an improvement. He didn’t have to try so hard to fight against the poisonous air. He still required the help of the poison laws to resist, but it was like climbing stairs instead of running up a hill. It was far from easy, but he felt far more comfortable than before. The blood seems to have given me a greater resistance to this atmosphere. I need more!

Next, he brought out a giant worm and sent the Blacksilver Pawns into his Inner World. He moved into the new and improved Warp Worm, then sent it burrowing into the ground. It crashed through the layers of concrete and debris, swallowing the chunks and refining them slightly as they passed through its body and came out the tip of its tail. It moved far slower than in normal soil, but the Warp Worm could burrow through the hardest stones with its strange mouth and internal dimension. Now that Sage had succeeded in breeding it with the giant cockroaches the ratmen used, it could survive in the harsh atmosphere. Sage already had a route to strengthening himself so he was not in the mood to spend a few months merging with a giant cockroach just to accomplish the same thing.

Even if he was stuck here for two years, he wasn’t going to waste months on such a weak creature and dilute his strength. Instead he used the worm to travel through the city, using his Spiritual Sense and the worm's powerful hearing to search for valuables. After a few hours of travel through the massive ruins, he stumbled upon a budding conflict. This time, the ratmen were the one’s laying the trap. They had arranged themselves around one of the city's tri-road intersections. They had small teams of three spread out among the upper, middle and lower floors of the buildings along with giant roach teams waiting on ground level. These roaches had weapons and armor strapped to them. Five of them were in a chevron shaped formation and waiting in a ruined storefront with a sort of shiny metal armor on the fronts of their bodies. Another was waiting across the street and it had a giant cannon on its back, a scaled up version of the weapons they held in their hands.

Down one of the three streets, a pair of people wearing different styles of gas masks were walking calmly and quietly. From the shape of them, one of them looked to be female, but they were both dressed far more conservatively than the Fisher Punk had been. They wore something that looked like blue canvas coveralls with rubbery hexagonal texturing. They also had on black combat boots and shoulder and waist harnesses holding grey metal tortoise shell-like backpacks on their backs. Sage was underground and the mask blocked his Spirit Sense so he couldn’t tell if they were talking, but it looked like they were going to stumble right into the ratmen’s ambush. They walked into the intersection calmly, but then there was sudden action.

A trio of rifles flew out of one of the windows of a building, then they spun around in mid-air and fired into the building they came from. The body of a ratman fell out of the open window and hit the ground with a wet thump. Then the man in the gas mask lifted his hand and snapped his fingers. The dark lenses of his gas mask started to glow with a red light and bright red flames blossomed in the open window of the building he was looking at. The flames danced from window to window, from floor to floor, bathing them in burning heat. The three man teams of ratmen in that building were instantly ignited and when they screamed or tried to flee, the man caught sight of their motion and reaction, focusing the fire to turn them into ashes.

That was when the, now failed, ambushers started their attack. A loud rumbling filled the air when the five giant roaches wearing armor thundered out onto the street.