Cultivation by Trial and Error

A cliff lay ahead, but as Chen Hai took flight, he did not plummet down its face.

At this moment, he felt weightless, completely unable to control his actions, simply floating in the sky.

The Nameless Ancient Book described a Visualization Technique for ascending and observing from a high peak.

The Dharma Method spoke of imagining oneself climbing to the top of a towering mountain and looking downwards, then picturing a sudden leap from that summit.

If one tried this visualization method and cultivated it correctly, there was a strong chance that the soul would leap straight out of the body.

According to folk tales, when a person is startled, there's also a certain possibility that the soul might leave the body and drift away to who knows where!

Under a series of coincidences, Chen Hai's current situation seemed to align with both above-mentioned scenarios.

For the soul, the body is both a restraint and a form of protection.

At this time, Chen Hai could not freely control his body, and he felt that even a gentle breeze might blow him away.

In that instant, the knowledge that had flooded his mind when he had carelessly engaged in visualization and glimpsed that terrifying entity suddenly resurfaced.

He also discovered that some of the oddities he had found could directly affect him in his current Soul Body state.

The streams of information contained the secrets of that terrifying being's body.

In less than the time it takes to breathe, his fragile soul, freshly departed from the body, had already undergone a fundamental change.

Now, he no longer floated in human form.

His body had flattened, his limbs had vanished, and two suckers at his head and tail looked utterly fierce!

His current form bore a faint resemblance to the terrifying entity he had previously glimpsed.

Though the transformation seemed slow to describe, in reality, it occurred in just an instant.

After the transformation, Chen Hai clearly felt that although he still couldn't control his body, the sensation of being blown away by the wind had disappeared.

A few meters away, two points of green light caught his eye immediately.

Accompanying them was the massive body of a snake, at least six or seven meters long.

The so-called green light was merely the eyes of this huge snake.

However, the snake appeared unreal, far from a physical entity.

It seemed to be the transformed soul of a Snake Demon with some level of Tao Cultivation.

"How amusing. I thought I'd merely bewitched an ordinary person, but it turns out you are also a fellow cultivator!"

"The Divine Soul of a cultivator is a great tonic. Devouring you will spare me years of arduous Cultivation..."

The voice of the Snake Demon was grating, as harsh as a broken gong.

But since it could speak, it must possess some cultivation—not to mention, in terms of spiritual wisdom, it was not much different from an ordinary person.

The reason Chen Hai had inexplicably ended up here when he was originally planning to climb over the school's back wall to return to his dormitory was clearly due to the Snake Demon's mischief.

The moment Chen Hai's soul had left his body, the Snake Demon had been ready to swallow it whole.

However, the qualitative change in Chen Hai's soul had piqued its curiosity, causing it to stop momentarily, its slimy green eyes staring intently at Chen Hai for quite some time.

Now, Chen Hai's soul had completed its transformation, with no further changes in sight.

At this point, the Snake Demon had lost its patience. It slithered close to Chen Hai and opened its enormous mouth to bite him.

Facing the gaping maw of the Snake Demon, Chen Hai, who couldn't even control his body, couldn't dodge or escape.

As the Snake Demon was about to engulf him, at the crucial moment, the sucker on Chen Hai's head happened to touch the upper part of the Snake Demon's mouth.

"Thinking of swallowing me? Let's see who ends up swallowing whom," as if he had grasped a lifeline, his sucker firmly adhered to the roof of the Snake Demon's mouth.

After undergoing a transformation, his outward form, if compared with an entity in reality, would resemble a giant leech.

An ordinary leech, getting swallowed by a snake yet sticking to the roof of its mouth, the outcome, one might assume, would be clear to most.

Rumors claim that once a leech bites down on someone, it can't be torn off unless there's a thunderstorm.

Although this may sound exaggerated, it at least demonstrates the terrifying strength of a leech's suction.

The leech that Chen Hai had transformed into was new and poorly formed, unable to move freely yet.

But, his leech body was the result of a metamorphosis inspired by a thread of essence from that terrifying being.

A common leech can only suck the blood of humans and animals, but the leech that Chen Hai had become could directly consume the power of the soul.

Clinging to the roof of the serpent's mouth, driven by his instinct, Chen Hai vividly sensed streams of cold energy flowing into his body.

His newly formed leech body began to solidify at a rate visible to the naked eye.

On the other hand, the Snake Demon appeared to have gone mad.

It dashed here and there, rolling chaotically through the void.

And since it was in a Soul Body state, it couldn't do much damage to the physical world; otherwise, the surrounding hills, rocks, and vegetation would have been devastated beyond recognition.

But all its efforts were in vain.

No matter how much it struggled, Chen Hai simply would not let go.

Time passed, and the massive body of the Snake Demon, originally six to seven meters long, began to collapse and slowly dissipate.

When the part to which he was attached dissipated into nothingness, Chen Hai finally reappeared within the void.

"The Snake Demon is dead? That thing, it looks menacing, but it turns out to be just a paper tiger!"

"How pathetic, weak like this, and it dared to target me, thinking to swallow me whole. I really wonder where it got the courage from?"

Having absorbed the majority of the Snake Demon's power, Chen Hai was now radiant with health.

At first sight of the Snake Demon, he had genuinely felt his scalp go numb with fear.

But now, he surveyed the remains of the devastated Snake Demon and felt a trace of dissatisfaction, as if the experience had been somewhat anticlimactic.

He had been worried initially that, unable to move freely, he wouldn't know how to return to his own body.

But now, he suddenly discovered that his Soul Body, already solidified by a large extent, was able to move at will.

The Nameless Ancient Book had some descriptions of the first few Realms of Tao Cultivation.

The First Realm of Cultivation, named Soul Departure.

The Second Realm of Cultivation, named Night Tour.

"Under the night sky, I can now wander at will. Could it be that I've stepped into the Night Tour Realm?"

"But haven't I not even started the real Cultivation process yet?"

Feeling perplexed, Chen Hai quietly wondered.

Thinking it over, he could only attribute the occurrence to the miraculous effects bestowed upon him by that terrifying being.

His line of thinking wasn't incorrect.

After all, without having glimpsed that terrifying entity and gathered those insights from its body, his Soul Body would never have undergone such a transformation.

In the Soul Body state of an ordinary person, encountering that Snake Demon would almost certainly result in death—or something perilously close to it.