The idea of injecting the laws into the body was far different from the natural process of forming a law body that Nascent Souls did. Instead of altering oneself to better align with the laws one has gained mastery over, it was a blind method of housing foreign energies. Without understanding there was no control, nor could there ever be a perfect integration. That said, it was also a future shortcut. The weaker owners of a Law Realm would want to study its developing laws and having those laws implanted into their body made it many times easier. If they could later gain mastery of those laws, then they would already have a headstart on incorporating them into their body of laws and any incongruity from this foreign energy would be solved.

The only problem was that this process of implanting the Law Realms energy into his body required months of constant nurturing. The adventure he’d just started in the Depths was suddenly put on hold in order for him to form a connection to the Realm Heart. While here he took advantage of the chance to study the Realm Heart on the Inner World while he was immersed in the long procedure on the outside.

It was only after five months of carefully controlling his bodily functions to maintain a very specific physical state that things finally came to a finish. The actual procedure was only slightly unpleasant, and Guan Zhenyan had put him through far worse in the past. The only downside was that he had no time to rest and recover. When he was being poisoned he was tortured for a few days and then had time to recover before it happened all over again the next week. For this process with the Realm Heart he had to maintain a constantly stable state without any breaks at all. If he wasn’t at least a Core Formation Cultivator that could use their Qi to satisfy all of their needs for food, water, sleep, air, and even just rest, then there was no way he could ever complete the process.

Two high level cultivators that were evenly matched could continuously battle day and night for months at a time, so simply maintaining his body’s stable condition was comparatively quite simple. The injection of the law energy caused constant changes which he had to continuously keep control of, but it was still easily accomplished. Instead, it was more of a matter of his mental state and how he had to find some sort of balance between such active focus and calm and quiet meditation. As a cultivator he long had to get accustomed to long periods of the same unchanging monotony, but most Cultivation was about getting into a sort of rhythm and then entering a truly meditative state to keep it going. For this process he had to actively monitor his own situation so it was very difficult to enter meditation.

He felt like a soldier constantly on the night watch that had to train their body and mind to keep standing at attention while entering a micro-sleep cycle. They had to be able to instantly wake up and snap to attention if anything unusual happened or their superior came to check on them, and they also had to remain standing. Being so sleep deprived caused their bodies to adjust in order to more quickly enter the deepest sleep cycles so their brains could get the rest they needed. While Sage could use his Qi to remove the need to sleep, a similar thing was going on with his consciousness. There was no physical need for his brain to rest, but without stillness or rhythm, he couldn’t ‘go on autopilot’ and it became mentally similar to conducting a battle for the same length of time.

A long battle for powerful cultivators could come down to a matter of their meridians burning out from the strain of constant overuse, or from the fatigue that he was suffering from now. The need to stay constantly aware and make rapid decisions for a long period of time. So, while his meridians were not extremely stressed in the same way, he felt as if he’d just fought for his life for months. Worse yet, Guan Zhenyan saved an important detail for last.

“The new laws of the Realm Heart are fully stabilized every million or so years, but they also go into smaller periods of inactivity for a few decades at a time. This one probably won’t do anything for another 100 or so.”

After that terrible battle, he was told that he couldn’t even get any benefits out of it for more than a hundred years. It was no wonder that the man tricked him since it might have modified Sage’s decision. He might have decided to come back later in pursuit of more immediate benefits first. Maybe he would have left someone else here to complete the process instead, but it was too late to change his plans now. After resting for a week he confirmed that the process was successful before leaving the Law Realm with his newly captured Ghost Armorana.

The Ghost Armorana truly lived up to its name and it escaped from him a dozen times before he finally captured it. While it was extremely elusive, there wasn’t much it could do when outnumbered more than fifty to one by others with strength equal to its own. The reason for its great ability was in the Law that it had mastered. Rather than a minor law relating to defense like most of its kind, the Ghost Armorana used a Major Law of Untouchability. Or at least that’s what it felt like to him. There wasn’t really a definitive catalog of names for laws, but those that could use them could sense others in use and it gave off a special feeling. For Sage this Ghost Armorana just felt untouchable. He would not be able to grab it or strike it, he even felt like he wouldn’t be able to affect its mind. Of course, the laws were not power on their own, but amplified what was already there and so with the help of the laws of the Purple Mist Sect and his own, they finally paralyzed the Ghost Armorana by overwhelming it with poison and he sent it to the Inner World for his usual indoctrination program.

Leaving the Law Realm he swam back towards Deep Shore.

A few days later, he was tossed a bulging sack by a shopkeeper. Then Sage nodded and stepped out of the shop to check his gains. Inside the bag he saw a pile of bluish pearls, each of them seeming to glow with a tiny mote of internal light.

So these are Spirit Pearls?

He’d read of them in the guide to the Depths and also as an obscure cultivation resource. They were essentially a super concentrated Spirit Stone with all the same uses. The quality of their energy was no better, but they had a thousand times as much contained within. They were the size of a pinky nail compared to the marble sized Spirit Stones, so not only were they smaller they held a thousand times more. If Storage Bags weren’t so cheap and plentiful, the much smaller size would probably be more valuable. In the Depths a Spirit Pearl was worth exactly the same as a thousand Spirit Stones since they were so common. Usually, at least. Some of the locals preferred the pearls they knew and didn’t bother with Storage Treasures. They weren’t happy to trade for Spirit Stones so they gave out worse conversion rates. On the other hand, in the outside world, Spirit Pearls were much more rare and so they could be worth twice as much. While they didn’t make a difference for cultivation, they were popularly used to power Magical Tools. It was very convenient to not have to ‘change the batteries’ for a thousand times longer.

Sage had just traded in some materials from his last hunt, which he did specifically in order to gather these Spirit Pearls. Ideally, he hoped to learn their method of creation in order to seed his Inner World with them. Was there a special sort of clam he had to collect and then a certain special living condition to support them, or was their resemblance to a pearl just coincidental?