263 News Spreading Far and Wide (1/2)

The moment that Bai Tianyi reached the fifth floor, Xue Wei opened his eyes and the two of them exchanged glances before Xue Wei stood up. With this tacit understanding, the two of them descended the stairs and left the Soul Tower.

While being in the tower, neither Bai Tianyi nor Xue Wei discussed what they had discovered. Instead they walked shoulder to shoulder out of the tower, greeting a crowd that was looking at them with stunned expressions.

It was impossible to say exactly which one of them had been the one to step into the ninth floor. They only knew what they had seen from the lights on the tower, which did not divulge names, and thus they looked at them with the eyes of a hungry wolf, their questions in their throats ready to emerge, but neither Xue Wei nor Bai Tianyi paid them any attention.

After glancing at the crowd, both Xue Wei and Bai Tianyi were aware of their purpose, but neither of them had any intention of telling them anything. They quickly departed from the area under the stunned expressions of the crowd.

One has to remember—they were both two-eyed experts. Although one of them was clearly a monster, they did not have a high position in society, and it was only natural if they had tried to integrate themselves with the higher ranking teachers and students.

When they finally regained their senses, they found that Xue Wei and Bai Tianyi had already vanished into the distance, neither having turned around even once.

When they were out of the crowd's hearing range, Bai Tianyi started to tell what he had encountered. ”There was nothing on the ninth floor,” he complained. ”I was there, and there was not even any pressure nor a shred of soul power! I have a feeling that there might be some sort of secret there, but after spending a full day inside I found absolutely no clues.

”On the eighth floor, the pressure was so heavy that even I felt that it was heaven. I stayed there for the majority of the time, and I managed to break into the third layer of the Earth Knight rank.

”There was no one else on the floor, so it seems that it is very difficult to reach the eighth floor,” Bai Tianyi continued to explain. ”But on the seventh floor, there were three young ones.

”One of them was clearly pushing himself beyond his limits to be there, and I think I in fact injured him seriously when I went to the eighth floor because of shock, while the other two were much more tranquil.

”On the sixth floor were eleven experts, and you saw the fifth floor yourself.

”What was your progress like in the Soul Tower?” Bai Tianyi asked curiously. He had gained a such a lot of energy that he had smashed through into the Earth Knight rank and then up another two layers, but Xue Wei had also gained quite a bit, managing to just break into the first layer of the Earth Knight rank.

It was clear that Bai Tianyi had gotten more benefits from visiting the Soul Tower than Xue Wei had; even though he'd wasted a day on the ninth floor, he'd still broken through as much even though his breakthroughs were much more difficult than Xue Wei's, but he had also been on the eighth floor and swallowed so much soul power that it could be compared to a massacre of a thousand experts.

Xue Wei had also absorbed a lot of energy, but while absorbing he had observed the Soul Tower. Even when they were quite a few amount of experts in the Soul Tower, the Soul Power never diminished, nor did it run out. The supply was at a steady, constant level all the time, and even when Bai Tianyi had been swallowing it up on the eighth floor like a whale swallows water, the energy had been replenished instantly.

”I assume that the mystery we are supposed to sort out might have something to do with the Soul Tower,” Xue Wei muttered to himself in wonder. At least that was the most wondrous thing he had encountered since entering the Garden of Shadows.

Bai Tianyi had heard the words Xue Wei said, but he did not comment. In his opinion, he quite hoped that the problem came from the Soul Tower, since that meant that they would spend even more time within the tower and his breakthroughs would be even faster than before.

Having once stood at the apex of the world, Bai Tianyi had a hard time accepting that he was no longer able to wield even a fraction of this strength.

Although he was no longer weak, he was not considered strong yet, and this caused him to be endlessly frustrated. This was something he would never admit, but Xue Wei could feel it through their connection.

However, although Bai Tianyi wanted to break through into stronger and stronger boundaries, he was aware that cultivation was not something that was achieved overnight. It was something one obtained after traversing a long, arduous journey step by step.

Xue Wei had lived for years as a waste who could not cultivate, and although that had changed a few years ago, he still felt fortunate that his reality was different from what he had imagined it to be back then.

For him, it was a joy to walk down the path of cultivation, to feel his body strengthening bit by bit and his inner energies swell with time. He did not fully understand the longing that Bai Tianyi felt, but he was not dismissive towards it.

Together in silence, Xue Wei and Bai Tianyi returned to their courtyard. The behavior of the core students was as peculiar as it was before, all of them looking at them with curiosity but none of them stepping forward to actually initiate conversation.

Although the multi-eyed experts were proud of their abilities and their amount of eyes, they were all gifted with quite some intelligence. They could easily guess that these people who had appeared with two eyes and managed to become core students could not be simple.

Returning to the courtyard, they quickly awakened Lin Xiao and Hei Gou from their cultivation and gathered in Bai Tianyi's bedroom. They had not seen the shadows of Mo Yi or Mo Er since they returned, but none of them cared about it and quickly started to discuss what had happened in the last week they had been apart.