"You bastard! Kill me," the man shouted. "Kill me if you dare."
"Ssh! Did no one ever teach you to keep quiet while someone is reading close by, old man?" Alex asked and ignored the old man while reading the Spirit Search book.
'Hmm, it's a little more complicated than I had assumed,' he thought. 'So I'm not really searching through one's memories, more so forcing them to recall stuff and see what they recalled, huh?'
He had some idea of how this technique worked, but reading the explanation directly from the source made it much clearer.
"Hmm, I can't upgrade this or even do anything with it, can I?" he thought. "Spiritual energy has an entirely different way in which it functions."
He continued reading for a little longer before he closed the book. "Alright then, let's give this a try," he said and walked toward the old man.
"Huh?" the old man was confused for a second. He had stopped struggling against the golden spear a while ago as he couldn't free himself from it. He had tried different attacks, but the spears were way too strong somehow.
He could only guess that it was thanks to Alex's absurd ability to fight realms over his cultivation base which was causing all this.
"What are you doing?" the old man asked as Alex got closer and closer.
"What do you mean?" Alex asked. "I told you, I'm going to use the Spirit Search on you. You're the little lab rat that I'm going to experiment with."
"What? But how can you use it?" the man struggled. "You only just got the book today."
"Yes, and I learned it," Alex said. "Is that so surprising?"
The old man felt his heart beat faster and faster. Was what he said true? Had he really learned a technique that was sent down from the heavens in less than an hour?
'Just what sort of monster did we offend?'
Alex placed his palm on the old man's head and smiled. "Try not to block it, or you might end up hurting your spirit," he said.
In the next moment, the old man felt a splitting pain in his head as if someone had grabbed his brain from two sides and was ripping it apart.
The pain was unbearable for a few moments, and then everything disappeared.
The old man felt his mind grow serene. He slowly looked around at the open sky and realized he had appeared inside his own Spiritual sea.
Not far away from him, Alex had appeared as well with a body formed entirely of spiritual energy.
"Hmm, I'm surprised how small this is," he said as he looked around.
"You! You dare use my own technique on me?" the man shouted. "Now that you are in my spiritual sea, don't even think of leaving."
The man started launching a barrage of attacks that came flying toward Alex. Alex put up a simple Swirling Water barrier that blocked all of the attacks.
He then sent out one of his own, a metal fist attack.
The fist-shaped attack flew toward the old man and hit the barrier he had put up. The two attacks collided and Alex won, but his attack lost so much energy that it didn't harm the old man at all.
Still, the old man's eyes went wide in shock. "This… Metal?" he couldn't help but speak with a shocked expression.
"You! How did you do that?" the old man asked. Even in the face of danger, his curiosity took over him.
"Hmm? Do what?" Alex asked.
"How do your attacks have an elemental affinity?" the man asked. "That should be impossible."
"Ah, right," Alex thought as he remembered. "It does have that, doesn't it?"
It had been a long time since he had fought a human inside his spiritual sea, so he had forgotten that his spiritual energy was quite unique to others.
Even when normal people used attacks in their spiritual sea, the only energy they could use there would be spiritual energy. As a result, those attacks would only be attacks with normal spiritual energy, even if visually they looked different.
However, for some reason, Alex was able to affect the elements of the attacks he was using. Neither the old man nor Alex could understand why.
Alex wasn't as surprised as the old man, so he sent out a barrage of attacks this time around. He kept an eye on the energy level of the sea below him to see when he could go for the man.
After attacking for a while, the old man was finally at the end of the road with no more spiritual energy to use.
Alex also was close to being out of spiritual energy, but he still had enough to survive or maybe even go out if needed.
Finally, he arrived in front of the old man who couldn't keep his body straight. His mind was hazy with little to no thoughts at all. He could barely tell what was happening around him, let alone do something about it.
Alex finally grabbed the man's head and used the Spirit Search technique. Immediately, he started seeing a hazy world in which he was grabbing his own head.
'It's working,' he thought. He was seeing what the old man was seeing.
"Who is your father?" Alex asked as a test question.
A vision of an old man floated into his mind. The old man was truly old and almost decrepit when he entered closed cultivation. That was the last thing the old man remembered about his father.
"Who do you admire the most?" Alex asked again.
Alex saw the image of a young man. He looked somewhat similar to Fu Tao, but quite different at the same time. He saw the young man wave goodbye and fly away somewhere.
Alex got a little curious.
"Who is this person?" he asked.
An answer came to his mind. This young man was his older brother, one that he had never seen again after that moment.
Alex was a little surprised when he realized who the man exactly was. 'That's the first Emperor of the Crimson Empire, isn't he?' he thought. 'The man that unified the Shattered kingdoms that were left behind by the other continent's war on this land and formed the empire.'
Alex hadn't expected to see that person.
"Do you have any secret treasures?" Alex quickly asked another question.
He got an answer, but it wasn't a very good answer. There were some things back in the Fu clan's treasury, but nothing of what he saw could make him want any of it at all.
Alex asked a few more questions to the man, who could only think about the question to answer.
'This does drain quite a bit of energy,' Alex thought. 'I can't do this any longer.'
Since he had no more need from the old man, he let go of his head and grabbed him by his throat. He squeezed the man as hard as he could until the old man's spirit simply died and disappeared in a bunch of glittering light.
The spiritual sea started crumbling as soon as the spirit died, and Alex quickly left the place, going back into his own body.
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