Heaven Hunting Eye was a conceptual hunting ability Ye Jun acquired from the Hunt Trial. Once a target was marked by this eye, he could instinctively perceive weaknesses, movement patterns, killing routes, Qi flow disruptions, escape intentions, emotional hesitation, everything he needed to hunt that target.

The ability would grow stronger the longer the pursuit continued, meaning the more his prey ran from him, the more lethal he would become to them.

Ye Jun suspected that at higher mastery, it could affect fate itself and targets would become easier to corner, more likely to make mistakes, and he could find them even if they hid at the ends of the world.

The "eye" sat inside his Soul in the Spiritual Realm, always watching.

It was probably one of his greatest gains from the Ascension, even if he couldn’t use its true potential for now.

But even that didn’t surprise him as much as the loss of Blank Points did.

"What the hell?" he exclaimed. "What...how did you disappear?"

Since the day he got the system, he had been collecting the Blank Points. The majority of them came from the deaths of others, as if they were a trophy, but he never quite got to know what they were used for.

The whole system was very simple to understand, and he did, yet this one thing remained elusive and unknown. No matter what he did, he could never find the use of those Blank Points.

They always increased, never decreased.

But now, right before him, the system’s status screen displayed the number zero beside the Blank Points. He was sure it wasn’t like this before he ascended so...

’Something in the Ascension must have used them,’ Ye Jun frowned. ’But what? Something in the Trials? Or maybe the Trials themselves are powered through these Blank Points?’

It was plausible considering his low affinity to those specific Daos shouldn’t have granted him such high-level Trials. He should have gotten something simple for them, which also wouldn’t trigger a new Tribulation, so normally he wouldn’t have achieved the Purple Tribulation.

’Is it really that, though?’ he wondered. ’I do have Fate Resonance and stuff related to the Heavens. So I can attribute, pun intended, the elevation of the Trials to those passive skills. But then what happened to the Blank Points?’

He thought of the Trials themselves but couldn’t find anything in them that could have used Blank Points since he had already tried most of the things within them.

’That still leaves the last part....’

Ye Jun paused, the agonizing moment of his body falling apart and being rebuilt still clear as glass in his mind. Even if he wanted to, he could not forget that pain. And now he wondered if that pain was related to the Blank Points.

It was impossible for a Soul Tempering Realm Cultivator to regenerate from nothing like he did, so he had assumed that he actually stole from the Heavens themselves. That was how he got the energy to regenerate continuously.

’Now that I think about it, Heavenly Essence is so much more than I can handle. Is it really because my body was already being destroyed that I handled it?’

Doubts began creeping in, making him look at the Blank Points again.

"What if the only reason I was able to do that was because of Blank Points?" he muttered to himself. "Does that mean they can help me use something way above my pay grade without actually affecting me?"

That...opened a lot of doors of opportunity. The sheer number of things he could do with these Blank Points if his theory was right was simply ridiculous. Not to mention he didn’t know the exact requirements for them to work.

Still, it was something that blew his mind.

His eyes sparkled with excitement. "With this, I can even pick up Attributes from a Cultivator far more powerful than me. Fuck yeah!"

That had been his problem for a very long time. His system didn’t allow him to pick up Attributes from lower-realm Cultivators, not all Attributes at least. And he couldn’t pick up Attributes from someone way more powerful than him either because Assimilation happened instantaneously and that meant he would die from an overdose.

But if his theory was right, then he could technically use Blank Points to offset the overdose and simply assimilate the Attributes. And that meant progress unlike anything before.

Just thinking about it made him squirm with excitement.

"Hold your horses, Genius," he reminded himself, calming down. "It’s still a theory. So you’ll need to confirm it first."

After taking a deep breath, he sat up properly again and dismissed the status. There were a few more things on it that he wished to see, but they weren’t important. Instead, he was curious about something else.

He closed his eyes and reached for the realm which existed beyond infinity, the plane which transcended physical reality completely. He now understood it far better now that he was an entity that existed there.

Ye Jun felt the reality around him begin shifting. The spatial dimensions which made up the physical universe began flattening like a disc, along with other dimensions that overlapped them and made up the whole of physical reality.

Before long, they turned into an insignificant flat disc that he viewed from the Spiritual Realm as a Soul. Physical reality was now a fiction to him, something which couldn’t hurt his Soul Form no matter what it tried, but it was a fiction necessary for his survival.

’My life there is an anchor for my Soul Form. As long as that anchor remains there, my Will will remain strong and my Soul Form will continue to resist Assimilation.’

His Soul had no shape because direction also didn’t exist here. No normal concept did because those were aspects of physical reality.

But the Grand Daos existed here. He could feel their influence now more than ever. The Daos were the Laws and concepts upon which physical reality was based, the same way a Soul came from the Spiritual Realm even though a person existed in physical reality.

Similarly, no one could touch the Grand Daos from physical reality and that’s where the Soul Form came into use. It already existed within the Spiritual Realm so it could touch upon something like the Grand Daos which usually remained independent of physical reality.

This was the Spiritual Realm.

Ye Jun came back to his physical body, feeling a bit strange after being in the Spiritual Realm. He clenched his fists and thought, ’That was...peak.’

Just as he was thinking about what to do next, he heard the metal door creak open as Song Liangxue peeked inside and said, "Come."

"Sure!"

Ye Jun got up from the cracked stone, dusted himself off, and followed Song Liangxue out of the training hall. The metal gate closed behind them with the same heavy thud it had made when he entered, and the corridor outside felt cramped after the vast field he had just been standing in.

The smell of the food hit him the moment he stepped into the dining room.

He stopped at the doorway and just inhaled for a moment. Spirit Beast meat braised in something herbal and rich, the kind of smell that pulled at every part of him.

A pot of clear soup steamed gently in the middle of the table.

A platter of stir-fried mountain greens with garlic.

Rice that had been cooked properly, fluffy and white.

Even a small plate of pickled vegetables sat on the side, the ones Meihui liked.

"Holy shit."

"Sit down before it gets cold," Meihui said, already settling into her chair. She had cleaned up after the cooking and put on a fresh robe, her blonde hair pulled back loosely. She looked very pleased with herself.

Ye Jun sat down and picked up his chopsticks and stared at the spread for a moment as if it might disappear if he looked away.

"You two made all of this?"

"In two hours," Song Liangxue said, sliding into the seat across from him. "Meihui handled the meat, I handled everything else. We did not let each other near our pots, because the only thing more dangerous than one of us cooking is two of us trying to cook the same dish."

"There were some...disagreements," Meihui admitted.

"There were threats," Liangxue corrected.

Ye Jun laughed and took his first bite of the Spirit Beast meat. The flavor opened up across his tongue, layered and rich, the Qi-rich meat practically melting. He closed his eyes for a moment.

"Okay," he said. "I’m officially the luckiest bastard alive."

"You’re easy to impress."

"You haven’t even tried mine yet," Meihui said quickly. 𝒻𝑟𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝑛𝘰𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝘤𝘰𝘮

He tried hers next. Just as good. Maybe better, though he had the sense not to say so out loud.

"Equally amazing," he announced diplomatically.

"Coward."

"Smart husband," he corrected, and earned a soft kick under the table from Liangxue and a satisfied hum from Meihui.

They ate slowly. They talked about nothing important. The food was good and the company was better, and for one quiet hour none of the larger weights of the world were allowed into the room.