Void Cultivation-Chapter 184- The Foundation Establishment Realm (12)

Several hours seemed to have drifted by... yet in truth, barely a few minutes had slipped through the world.

Grey stood still, a faint frown tugging at the edges of his calm expression. His gaze stretched far into the distance, past the scorched soil, past the ring of blazing fire that enclosed the battlefield, past even the trembling horizon itself.

If someone could follow his line of sight, they would notice that it pierced through the smoke-filled skies straight toward a distant city.

But Grey said nothing.

He simply stood there, quietly observing the storm of changes unfolding inside his body. Ever since he forcibly fused the shadow back into himself, Grey felt... complete, in a strange and unsettling way. It was as though a part of him that had been missing without his knowledge had suddenly snapped back into place.

Yet that feeling of wholeness came with a painful revelation.

He now understood the true consequences of the failed soul possession.

His memories were a mess, scrambled, fragmented, scattered like shattered glass across his mind. Entire pieces of his past overlapped, making it impossible for him to tell which memories truly belonged to him before he transmigrated and which ones had been twisted by the shadow’s influence. But even within that chaos, something else was happening.

The fog that had blurred his past... was beginning to lift.

A slow, dangerous clarity seeped into the cracks of his mind.

Inside his body, twenty-five spirit perforations pulsed with terrifying life. Power surged through his veins like molten metal, overflowing to the point of restlessness.

Yet despite this newfound strength, Grey’s thoughts were filled with more confusion than confidence. And in his chest, embedded deep within his heart, the shattered purple crystal quietly released its oppressive aura.

Though broken into multiple jagged fragments, the terrifying pressure it contained had not weakened. Its power still felt capable of suppressing all living beings, and Grey had no idea what to do with it now.

After the battle with the shadow, Grey finally realized how close he had been to the edge. His soul had been invaded, torn apart, damaged.

He had forcefully broken through to the Foundation Establishment Realm with no preparation, no resources, and no guidance. And before he could even stabilize that new realm, he was dragged into a life-and-death fight.

It was a miracle his mortal body hadn’t collapsed.

He could still sense more nodes within him waiting to be refined, tempting him to open more perforations, to push deeper into power. But he knew the truth... opening more now would shatter his foundation completely. The strain would tear his body apart, and the backlash would crush his cultivation from the inside out.

And the last thing Grey wanted right now... was a cultivation backlash.

So he released a soft sigh. "I don’t even know that the shadow could do all of that. But in the end, I managed to defeat it." He looked at the place where they had battled.

His figure blurred, vanished, then reappeared beside Roxanne.

The red-robed girl had watched everything from the sidelines. She hadn’t interfered for even a moment, not because she couldn’t, but because Grey himself had stopped her. He had felt her intention to step in, felt her battle instincts rise during the fight... and he had suppressed them with a single silent command.

He knew that if the shadow lost to external strength rather than his own, it would never accept him again. It would doubt him. Resist him. Maybe even try to break free the moment it regained enough power. A servant who did not fear its master was a servant ready to betray.

So Grey never allowed Roxanne to intervene, no matter how powerful she was.

At that time, Grey also wanted to verify something... his strength after breaking through.

The moment he stepped into the Foundation Establishment Realm, he instantly realized that most of his previous techniques were now unusable. His cultivation realm had jumped too far, too abruptly; his old methods could no longer keep up with the new flow of energy circulating through his veins.

To advance at a proper pace, he needed a new cultivation art, something built for Foundation Establishment, and techniques of a similar level to match it.

Fortunately, many of these resources could be found in Sky Mist City. As the Vice-Captain of one of the Homicide Department divisions, Grey already had access to things ordinary cultivators could only dream of.

But before he left... there was one thing he needed to confirm.

No threat could be allowed to linger behind him.

Grey gave Roxanne a faint, calm smile. Then, without hesitation, he lifted his foot and stepped upward, directly into empty air.

Yet his foot didn’t fall.

It landed as though stepping onto solid stone.

A ripple spread beneath him, bending the surrounding air like a tranquil pond disturbed by a single pebble.

Grey’s brows rose slightly, and a quiet surge of confidence filled his chest. He took another step. Then another. And another. Soon, he was walking freely through the sky, as naturally as if he were taking a stroll down the street. The wind roared around him, whipping at his purple hair and causing the violet glow in his eyes to shimmer like a pair of amethyst stars.

’Foundation Establishment... I still cannot truly fly’. Grey mused silently. ’But this is close enough.’

He took a casual step and vanished.

A heartbeat later, his figure reappeared dozens of feet away. To an observer, it would have looked like teleportation. In reality, Grey had accelerated so violently that the eye simply couldn’t keep up.

’My speed... it’s even faster in the air!’ Grey thought, genuinely stunned. ’I didn’t even try to move at full strength. If I unleash my Special Brilliance form... just how fast could I become?’

A fierce blast of hot wind suddenly swept past his face, snapping him out of his thoughts. A streak of red blurred into existence beside him. Roxanne materialized in mid-air, robes fluttering like flames licking the sky. Her scarlet hair billowed behind her, her expression filled with subtle confusion and something close to awe.

Yet she didn’t speak. Ever since she awoke and gained her human form, Grey had not heard her speak before. But he didn’t mind, he gave a soft smile at her as he simply turned his gaze toward Green City and continued walking forward, his steps calm, steady, confident.

As he crossed a hundred meters through the sky, his appearance began to shift. The violet shade drained from his hair strand by strand, returning it to its familiar grey. His eyes lost their amethyst radiance and settled back into a calm, muted tone. His robes faded from a dark-purple sheen back to their original deep palette. And the faint purple moon hanging behind him slowly dimmed until it vanished completely.

The world returned to normal.

As if nothing had happened.

But beneath the quiet sky and on the scarred earth below, the remnants of battle lingered like whispers silent witnesses to the terrifying scene that had taken place moments ago.