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He looked around trying to find something he could use instead of the boxes… There wasn't anything. He couldn't use the bags and it was difficult to expect an owl to create a makeshift bag with cloth…He had no hands!

He sighed.

To think this would be the biggest crisis of the night. He revolved his spiritual energy and tried to sense his surroundings in hope to find something, anything, that could help solve his problem. And he found it. A nest. One without eggs and no birds in sight. He went to pick it up and brought it next to the boxes then he shifted the pills to the nest.

He felt a little bad as he might have stolen someone's entire house. An innocent's house. He picked up the bags and clothes and placed them where the nest had been. Those things would probably be cozier than the nest. The other bird wouldn't hold a grudge… It was purely hypocrisy since he just killed someone but it helped to make his shallow self feel a little bit better.

Done with his job, he picked the nest filled with pills and took flight. He would have to fly slowly in order not to spill a single pill but that was something he could do. As he left, he looked back one last time at the dead girl.

He didn't feel remorse or regrets.

As a human, he had killed many beings, be they fellow humans or beasts. During those times, he comforted himself by believing he had to do so. That it was required if he wanted to go further. That they were evil. But did killing them make him a good person? Or an evil one? He considered that as long as he didn't kill innocents and enjoyed it, he remained outside the evil range. He wouldn't have described himself as good but neither evil. And he was fine living that way.

Now, however, as a spiritual beast, his beliefs had changed. He had ended many lives himself just so he could eat. It was a brand-new way of seeing things. His understanding of life and death evolved. He had completely given up on good and evil. Those notions…He found them hypocritical. Killing was killing. That was it. You could kill because of many reasons but in the end, it was a way to survive. Even if it was for sport, since there was the chance that you would be the one killed.

He no longer cared about good and evil, only about survival. Killing…It only became a way to survive like any other.

As he left the big rock, he had doubts. He wondered if he made the right choice but it wasn't about the murder. He simply wondered if he could have earned more if he did things differently…

Becoming a spiritual beast had changed his views on many things.

…

Soon, he was back in his own nest, a hole in a tree. He gently dropped the stolen nest filled with pills and went to the side. He earned quite the bounty this time.

After all was said and done, he did manage to get his hands on thirty spiritual pills. Sure, they were the lowest grade kind but he was at the lowest stage of spiritual accumulation. It would be a great boon to him. They would likely help him cut weeks of trainings.

He picked one and ate it, feeling the warmth spread throughout his entire bestial body before being absorbed by his core and sent elsewhere. That elsewhere was obviously his soul sea where the true core settled.

He entered it through his will.

The familiar dark space welcomed him. On one side, there was the solid-like pyramid and on the other, there was now a glowing sphere. Compared to his core, it was slightly smaller. This was the representation of the pill. After a few seconds, a little dot escaped the sphere. It was spiritual energy of course. The pill would now melt little by little into dots until nothing was left of it. And his job was to absorb it all before they dissipated. Which meant he had to work quickly.

During the body refinement stage, one only focused on speed. The core size didn't matter. As long as it overflowed, it would bring the same benefits whether one made a pyramid or something else. As such, it was better to make the smallest core, the pyramid.

The realm of spiritual accumulation was different. It was no longer simply about speed. A cultivator also needed to think about the quantity of energy and the resistance of the core.

The quantity was obvious since it was starting from this realm that one could use spiritual energy. It became obvious that the pyramid was no longer viable.

As for the resistance? It was because there were ways to attack the soul sea. Most of those ways required one to be at least at the 30th stage of spiritual accumulation but there had to be exceptions. Though he hadn't seen any in his first life. Regardless, it was to prepare for it.

While speed was no longer the most important factor, it was still something to consider. There were changes in quality after breakthroughs and of course, a cultivator dreamt of reaching the highest stages, the End Point, in order to ascend as an Immortal God.

And so, cultivators had to figure out the best geometrical form to shape their core for this realm. They had to build over the core they already crafted to develop it.

One might consider building a second core but that was a bad idea. It doesn't have much benefits as it will take up space in the soul sea. That might seem like an infinite area but it is not. After reaching a certain stage, you need so much space that having two cores would make it impossible to grow further. Since you would need to grow them both. Which is why cultivators only had one and focused on growing it.

After eons of trials and errors, it became the norm to turn the core into a sphere. There were a few reasons for it but the most important of all was its toughness. To break through, one had to fill the core and solidify it. In doing so, it applied power onto the core and there were risks of it being damaged in the process. A sphere is the most balanced of all forms as it would be the same regardless of the angle you looked at it. It had perfect balance. Due to this, the power would be spread all over itself during breakthrough, facilitating them. It was something that no other forms could boast about.

As for the quantity, one could build it however big they wanted to be honest. It had become a consensus to use a line of spiritual energy to measure the distance from the already solid-like core to the new one. This was the length of the area that would need to be filled: all the space between that line and the solid-like core.

One only had to create a sphere over the pyramid, covering it.

One might wonder how to make a sphere with triangles. After all, even after reaching spiritual accumulation, only triangles could be used. But one shouldn't forget we were working in 3D there. Pick a random ball and draw triangles over its surface, wouldn't you be able to say it was made from triangles then? That was exactly it. Bend the triangles.

You couldn't change the length of a spiritual energy line but you could bend it however you wished.

After entering the spiritual accumulation stage, one would only need to build spheres after spheres over the previous one while using one line of spiritual energy to determinate the distance between them.

Once you knew about it, it was easy to understand.

Of course, he was very familiar with the process. And now that he had a stable supply of spiritual energy, he could focus on building a new core over his existing pyramid core.

Three days went by while he stayed awake and in his soul sea, focusing on his cultivation. After having worked so tirelessly for so long, he had only managed to create the shape of the sphere. He would need to fill it and overflow it next.

That would have to wait though as he was incredibly hungry and exhausted. He forced himself to go outside to hunt before going back and falling deeply asleep.

Once he woke up, he decided to first go hunt and fill his stomach. He decided to get himself an additional prey for after he finished the next round of cultivation. Now that he knew how exhausted he would be after a round, he would rather have food next to him once he finished it.

He never had such a problem as a human since finding food was rather easy back then… It was one more difference between being human and beast.