With the Sigma strain spreading like wildfire, Ye Xia had no time to browse the System Store leisurely. She mentally accessed it, her consciousness flooded with a dizzying array of options.
[Sky-Swallowing Pill - 5,000 Kai - Increases cultivation by one minor stage. Risk of meridian rupture: 35%.]
[Ghost-Walking Cloak - 2,000 Kai - Renders the wearer invisible to spiritual senses for 1 hour.]
[Ancestral Memory Crystal - 8,000 Kai - Allows the user to experience the memories of a deceased cultivator. Compatibility not guaranteed.]
The prices were astronomical. She had 1,200 Kai—a vast amount by earthly standards, but a pittance here.
She filtered for items related to detection and analysis. One item immediately stood out, its price exactly matching her entire reserve.
[The Eye of the Void - 1,200 Kai - A one-time use consumable. Allows the user to perceive the true spiritual nature of a phenomenon, tracing energy to its source across any distance. Reveals fundamental truths. Warning: Perception of absolute truth may have profound psychological consequences.]
It was a huge risk. It would drain her completely. But it was the only thing that could potentially identify the source of the Sigma strain instantly.
She didn't hesitate. "System, purchase the Eye of the Void."
[1,200 Kai deducted. Item: 'Eye of the Void' added to inventory.]
A small, obsidian sphere materialized in her hand. It was cold and seemed to drink the light from the room.
" I have what I need," she announced to Mo and Liam. "I'm going to trace the source."
" How?" Mo asked, his voice laced with concern.
" By looking," Ye Xia said. She held the sphere up to her own eye.
The world vanished. She was no longer in the command center. She was adrift in a sea of swirling energies. She saw the planet below not as land and sea, but as a tapestry of life force—brilliant, teeming cities, serene natural landscapes, and… ugly, spreading stains of the sickly-sweet Sigma energy.
She willed herself to follow the largest stain, to find the taproot of the poison. Her consciousness streaked across the globe, over mountains and oceans, until it plunged deep into the earth, into a hidden cavern system beneath a remote, snow-capped mountain range she recognized as the Kunlun Mountains—a mythical place in cultivation lore.
There, she saw it. A massive, subterranean altar, pulsing with a vile, dark light. Cultivators in grey robes chanted around it, their auras feeding the structure. And at the center of the altar, fed by rivers of the stolen spiritual energy from the millions infected with Sigma, a spectral form was beginning to coalesce. It was ancient, powerful, and radiated a hunger that threatened to swallow her soul.
The truth was indeed profound. The clan—the Necro-Soul Sect—wasn't just harvesting energy. They were using the global death toll to fuel a ritual to summon their ancestral patriarch, a monstrously powerful ghost, back into the world.
She pulled her consciousness back, gasping, the Obsidian Sphere crumbling to dust in her hand. She stumbled, and Mo's image on the screen seemed to reach out instinctively.
" I found them," she rasped, her mind reeling from the vision. "The Kunlun Mountains. They're not just harvesting energy. They're summoning something. An ancestor. The pandemic is a blood sacrifice on a global scale."