Other than refining the remnant souls into his physical body on the outside world, there was plenty to learn from Count Voctem’s techniques. Most of them reminded him of the techniques he’d recovered from Hei Bai, but used the Ghostwood rather than Yin Bones. Hei Bai’s techniques required very fine control and were extremely difficult to perform. Sage had always guessed she could only use them because of her strange eye, the same eye which he still had locked into a jade case. The problem was that he was clueless as to the details of the eye. He had no idea how it worked, or whether it could even be transferred. Even if it was correctly preserved and transferrable, he didn’t even know anyone who could do such disgusting surgery let alone doing it himself.

Thinking of Hei Bai and her strange techniques, Sage suddenly remembered something he hadn’t thought about in what seemed like ages. One of Hei Bai’s possessions that had always been mysterious: the Peachwood Ring. It was a Magic Tool that some might consider to be a storage treasure, but it was specialized in an unusual manner. Something like the Storage Gourd could only hold liquids, while a Beast Bag could hold living creatures. The Peachwood Ring was something known as a Soul Locker, a storage treasure made to contain spirit type beings. If the Peachwood Ring was just a normal Soul Locker, then it would be rare, but Sage always believed there was something unusual about the Peachwood Ring. Hei Bai had seemed quite obsessed with it, but Sage could never figure out what was so special about the ring.

After establishing the research teams on the Inner World, Sage had brought out every single one of his possessions and used the extra manpower to check everything over thoroughly to make sure they hadn’t missed any secrets or hidden functions of anything he owned. Just like Sage, the researchers hadn’t been able to see what was unusual about the Peachwood Ring. Sage sent his consciousness into the ring to see if anything was different. Just like before, he saw a pool of swirling yellow water inside, empty of anything else. The pool of yellow water was wide and shallow so that it could easily be searched through. He couldn’t send his consciousness deep into the water, which he assumed was because the consciousness was too similar to a spirit type beings existence. In order to keep accidents from happening, he couldn’t enter the water. Instead, the water was shallow enough he could see the bottom and found nothing different from the last time he’d looked.

Sage was curious if there were any souls remaining within the Peachwood Ring to use with the Ghostwood, but it was unfortunately empty. That was certainly a pain because he wasn’t sure where he’d be able to gather some new souls from. Preferably, he would like to find some spirit type beings. He had a whole world at his fingertips and there were many souls within it that he could claim, but he was not the type of person to sacrifice people purely for his own gains. He treated the lives of the Dragoons, Hoplites, and other insects a bit more callously, but that was because he was assured of their lacking intelligence. Even so, he still tried not to waste their lives. The greatest proof of this was that insects rarely had souls, so even if he did want to harvest them it would not be very fruitful.

Sage also didn’t want to kill Demonic Beasts to gather their souls. After applying Human Seals to so many of them, he knew that any beast was just a single technique away from being quite similar to a human. Since they all had this capability, he felt like Demonic Beasts were sort of like children that just needed to grow up to be proper people. That comparison may be a bit too much. Most kids will at least think twice before they snap you in half with their huge teeth or disembowel you with their claws.

He quickly amended this line of thought. They were still all beasts. The Human Seal was far more powerful than he gave it credit. He’d been thinking of it as a way to just help them grow up, because most Demonic Beasts could eventually gain intelligence as they aged and grew stronger. Some were even said to be able to transform into a human form once they reached a certain threshold. Yet, the Human Seal could help them bridge that gap, gaining the intelligence they might otherwise take tens of thousands of years to acquire.

Realizing this point, Sage no longer felt so bad about hunting Demonic Beasts. He’d been wary of killing the people of the Inner World to collect souls, but after some consideration it wasn’t as bad as he’d first thought. While he was at it, there were likely more than a few death row inmates as well that could be put to use. Murder as a commodity was always fertile ground for corruption, so Sage had to be very careful how such things were done.

Along with this, there was another problem. The actual collection of the souls. Sage could certainly affect them with certain techniques and also make use of certain Formation Arrays to restrain them. While this was how most dealt with them, Sage also had access to another option. Life Shadow Consumption. It was the Cultivation Technique of Hei Bai, and it specialized in capturing the souls of those the Cultivator killed. Sage couldn’t change the Cultivation Technique of his main body as it was linked to the creation of the Inner World. He could technically change the Cultivation technique of his Soul Clone, but in order to make use of it on the outside world, he’d put himself at risk. Instead, Sage opened the Life Shadow Consumption for training. Due to the time difference of the Inner World, it wouldn’t take too long for a few people to reach a high level in this technique. After a fight, he would just need to bring them out to land the finishing blow.

Not one to put all his eggs in one basket, Sage purchased some guidebooks for the Tianxia Capital to find stores that might sell Spirit Type beings. He stopped at levels where multiple stores might be selling what he was looking for. Along the way he also repeated his tradition of offloading resources from the Inner World to gather more Spirit Stones. After stopping at a dozen different stores without success he finally found what he was looking for. In a store that reminded him of a witch’s hut, strung up with dried animal parts and with fog spewing cauldrons used as decoration, he finally found the spirits he was looking for.

These beings could easily be mistaken for ghosts because they were similar to the simplest ghost stereotype of Earth. Intangible and indistinct bodies with an indistinct mouth and pair of eyes. They had two arm-like appendages without hands or fingers and no lower body to speak of. They were much like cartoon caricatures of ghosts, except they weren’t cartoons. They were an otherworldly sort of being and not actually a ghost. Ghosts were souls that, for one reason or another, couldn’t move on. Some were trapped. Some were forced into this state. Or like Count Voctem did, some souls were tortured till their resentment prevented them from passing on. The spirits he purchased were always in this form, they weren’t just leftovers from the living. Sage purchased the whole stock, all eighteen of them.

Just as Sage left the store he stopped in his tracks. Speak of the devil! How coincidental.