He simply looked at the energy of the cores becoming more unstable and asked himself a very relevant question. ‘Was genius too strong a word?’

Boom!

****

Have you ever exploded?

I have.

It was not pleasant, not one bit. I couldn’t help but wonder if this was the karma everyone was going on about.

Because if it wasn’t, then life was a game and, I was losing.

You don’t believe me? Well, then allow me to describe what I was going through.

So a mighty explosion, equal to the power of nine peak One-Star Core Martial Masters went off.

The blast spread like nothing I had ever seen and it didn’t seem intent on stopping anytime soon.

It was deafening in nature as it travelled along, showing no mercy whatsoever to whatever it encountered.

I stopped hearing it after a while because of the deafening nature I told you about a while ago. Yeah, I was being literal, go figure.

The blast devastated the terrain for miles all around. The peak where I sat was nowhere to be found.

In truth, the peaks for miles all around were nowhere to be found. I hope they don’t think this happened because I was a peakist or anything.

It’s at times like these that I’m happy that Steely was guarding those guys, cuz heaven knows that if it were me, they’d probably be dead.

Who’s the wise guy that thought it was a good idea to put me in charge of children?

Alright, let’s take stock of my current situation. So it’s dark, now that could either mean I’m dead or I’m blind. Now… I am 40% sure that death is fatal. My entrance into this world factors into that equation, so don’t judge me.

Wait a sec, I’m just getting the feeling in my body… aaaand I still have my body. Who said I was losing at life? Not this guy, that’s for sure.

Okay, so I am feeling a whole lot of uncomfortable all around me. Let me try to get my bearings right.

Rumble…

I hear falling rocks… I can hear! Great! Okay, now I see a light.

Let’s see if I can just—

My head burst out of the ground like a reverse ostrich before I looked around in confusion at the destruction I wrought.

“Oh yeah,” I nodded in confirmation. “Genius is definitely too strong a word.”

I slowly climbed out of the rubble and sneaked a peek at where I crawled from.

An unmarked grave in the middle of the sticks. I hope that’s not an ominous foreshadowing and I hope my saying I hope it’s not an ominous foreshadowing doesn’t come to pass as an ominous foreshadowing.

Now, I don’t wanna be that guy, but I’m pretty sure I should have been able to blast apart that rubble like it's nobody’s business. So what gives?

I looked down at my body and I could feel my brow rise till it blazed past my hairline, rushing across the nape of my neck to join the hair that I’m pretty sure my buttocks concocted.

“Oh my,”

Alright, so nobody move. My body is filled with wounds and I mean a LOT of wounds. Some of which were so deep that the bone was visible!

Looking all around, I could see that blood painted the stones and rubble I climbed on top of. They streamed down in different directions like rivers.

Crap… I need that I think.

"Sighs…"

"It's a good thing I brought myself to peak form before I started this, or I would be deader than the first time I died. I wonder how many people can say that?”

I replayed the scene of what happened just before the explosion went off.

You see, before my crystal cores went all nuclear Ghandi on me, I expelled the nine of them outside my body.

The cores were my creation, in the end, so of course I could control them. Sure, I wasn’t able to use them due to their berserk nature at the time, but moving them wasn’t so hard.

After I moved them to the outside, I tried to distance them from myself before I erected a lightning shield of sorts.

It wasn’t a technique or anything; it was just me shaping my lightning qi into a rudimentary shield.

However, this defence didn’t hold up all that well against the cores’ eventual detonation. After all, it was nine of them that went off. That was like nine of me!

I’m pretty sure the only reason I’m alive is because the speed at which I sent them from myself was insane. In that short time, the distance they travelled caused the explosion to weaken by the time it reached me.

Before long, the spirit stone I had, lost its glimmer before disintegrating. The remains of the stone fell between my fingers akin to ash-like sand.

“That wasn’t even a minute.” I descended into thought immediately.

The disciples over yonder aren’t even done with their spirit stones, but I’m all out?

Damn.

I guess this thing is a resource sucker.

“It looks like my absorption speed isn’t the problem. Heavenly Levyance tribulation lightning, or any tribulation lightning for that matter, isn’t something that exists in large quantities. It looks like I can only increase my capacity, but I can see where that got me. Where did I go wrong?”

I brought out a stone in each hand and ran my cultivation technique to replenish my reserves so that I could heal myself. I could feel the wounds closing up and boy did it feel good.

“Let’s see, last time I tried to connect all the cores at the same time. Maybe doing it one by one is the best way. Alright, let’s test it.”

Deciding this and not wanting to waste too much time, I went on a spirit stone binge and absorbed countless spirit stones to not only heal myself but also construct the nine crystal cores once more.

‘Okay, just need to be careful,’ I carefully integrated the first core to my cultivation technique. The integration process was complicated as all hell, but because I was only dealing with one, it wasn’t too much to handle.

This is what it means to work smarter, not harder kids.

‘Finally,’ I wiped the non-existent sweat from my consciousness’s forehead. Don’t think too hard about that.

The first core’s set-up wasn’t completed as yet. What I needed to do now was to connect this core to my dantian so that my cultivation technique would have perfect symbiosis between the two.

However, it would be best to do this when all the cores were integrated with the cultivation method first, so that everything would sync up like clockwork.

With this in mind, I got to work on the second core. However, in the midst of the integration process with the second core, the energy became chaotic once again.

‘Crap.’ I stared at the ticking time bomb before I ejected it outside his body like before.

Boom!