Chapter Eighty-Nine: Condensed Spirit Prayer Beads

Chapter Eighty-Nine: Condensing Spirit Beads

After entering the thread of Midnight Fragrance, Xia Zheng began to read it carefully. About an hour later, he closed his eyes and slowly savored the contents of the post.

The Spirit Bead was this man’s ingenious invention. In simple terms, it meant extracting one’s own spiritual power and infusing it into a vessel with affinity for spiritual energy—namely, a bead. Midnight Fragrance named this kind of vessel a Spirit Bead. When one needed the power stored inside, one merely held the bead in hand and absorbed it directly.

Because the power sealed within was one’s own spiritual energy from the same source, the conversion rate was quite high. According to Midnight Fragrance’s research, it could reach more than ninety percent at its best. At the same time, since the stored spiritual power did not repel its owner, the absorption rate was also very high, allowing spiritual recovery to occur at remarkable speed, even enough to replenish one’s power in an instant.

However, this storage method had a major flaw: the spiritual power sealed inside could only be preserved for up to seventy-two hours. After that, it vanished without a trace.

Midnight Fragrance also listed the materials that could serve as such Spirit Beads: high-quality jade, diamond, and porcelain were the main three, though there might be other unknown materials as well. For the time being, these three were the best vessels discovered.

Xia Zheng immediately remembered that his storage pouch contained many treasures looted by Wadsworth—jewels, jade, porcelain, and more. He took out more than twenty pieces, all of them quite small, in two sizes: the largest was about the size of a tangyuan dumpling, while the smallest was only the size of a grain of rice.

Though he did not know the quality of these gems and jade, he felt Wadsworth would not have bothered collecting inferior pieces.

With suitable vessels in hand, Xia Zheng then reread the thread’s replies one by one, and found that at first many people had denounced the poster as a fraud, or said the method was useless, that spiritual power could not be infused at all, or that only a tiny amount could be stored, disappearing within minutes and nowhere near lasting seventy-two hours.

Xia Zheng endured it and kept reading. As he went farther down the thread, fewer and fewer people were cursing him. By the time the forum had granted Midnight Fragrance the “big boss” tag, the replies had become nothing but praise and flattery.

Even the original poster replied in one of the later comments: this method was not suitable for everyone, especially newcomers who had only recently become mentalists. One’s cultivation had to reach a certain level; ideally, one should advance to the standard of an A-class esper before trying it. If one had awakened the sea of consciousness, the success rate would rise greatly.

At the same time, the quality of the vessel directly determined the upper limit of spiritual power it could hold. So those who had failed while holding a pile of junk, then came to curse him, were merely trying to catch fish in a tree—utterly unrealistic and incapable of judging their own limits.

Though such a reply drew plenty of hostility and abuse, after that Midnight Fragrance never responded in the thread again.

After reading it over and over several times, Xia Zheng put away his phone. Then he controlled his spiritual sense to make the jewels, jade, and porcelain vessels before him float in the air, repeatedly rehearsing the process of infusion in his mind.

“If it works, it will greatly ease my current worry about restoring spiritual power.”

Xia Zheng began his attempt. He lifted a rice-grain-sized round jade pebble with his spiritual sense. It was crystal-clear and very beautiful.

First, he split off a strand of spiritual sense from the sea of consciousness, sending it out from his body to become a mass of red energy hovering beside the bead. Then he broke that mass down into pure spiritual power and controlled it to tentatively make contact with the bead.

The moment it touched the surface, Xia Zheng felt the bead tremble. He immediately stopped. Instead, he divided the energy into two parts, then controlled one part to continue the contact.

This time, the bead no longer trembled. It accepted the infusion very smoothly. At first the speed was slow, but once it began, it gradually accelerated within a few seconds. Xia Zheng was thrilled, though his expression remained calm, and he kept the infusion process steady and careful.

The two split portions of spiritual power were fully poured into the bead, taking about a minute.

A flash of blue light swept across the bead’s surface, then it returned to normal. Its weight had not changed much, but in the hand it felt somehow rounder and warmer.

Xia Zheng then continued infusing the remaining spiritual power, doing so twenty times in a row, equivalent to the total amount of ten strands of spiritual sense. By the twenty-second infusion, nothing seemed unusual at first, but when half of the spiritual power remained, he suddenly felt a trace of repulsion in the process. Xia Zheng failed to notice in time and kept infusing. The bead immediately cracked, the spiritual power inside turning into pale smoke and dissipating, while the bead itself crumbled to powder.

Nearly half an hour of effort had been wasted. He did not mind the jade all that much, but it was a pity to see all that spiritual power thrown away for nothing.

“It seems a rice-grain-sized bead can hold at most a little over ten strands of spiritual sense, not quite eleven.”

After summing up the result, Xia Zheng picked up another jade piece of nearly the same size and began infusing it.

This time, twenty infusions again went smoothly. On the twenty-first, Xia Zheng was very cautious. When the last portion of spiritual power had been infused and only one third remained, that familiar repulsive force appeared once more. Xia Zheng immediately ended the infusion, drew back the spiritual power, and reintegrated it into the original energy.

Holding in his hand a fully infused Spirit Bead, its surface now entirely transformed into a shimmering, multicolored sheen, Xia Zheng’s expression brightened considerably.

“Let’s see how effective it is.”

He took the bead to the rooftop not far away, then trained his mental power over and over until the sea of consciousness was drained dry.

With the Spirit Bead in his palm, Xia Zheng began absorbing the spiritual power within. At once, a wave of replenishment surged through him. A few seconds later, the bead returned to its original appearance.

He checked himself and found that his sea of consciousness had been replenished, restoring nearly ten strands of spiritual sense, almost ninety percent of his original state. The conversion rate was indeed quite good. He now had a little over a hundred strands of spiritual sense in his sea of consciousness, which meant this tiny bead could restore about ten percent of it.

After obtaining the result, Xia Zheng went on to test vessels of different materials. Several hours later, he found that jade and porcelain were the best choices. Diamond, by contrast, was somewhat inferior: its conversion rate could at best reach about eighty percent. Porcelain reached around eighty-five percent, while jade achieved a relatively stable ninety percent.

However, diamond vessels had the advantage of being less likely to break and far sturdier, and one could infuse them directly without splitting spiritual power first, making them somewhat more convenient. Porcelain was the most fragile and had the highest failure rate, but it also had a unique advantage: the fastest infusion speed, between one and a half and two times that of the other two materials.

Xia Zheng put away the jewels and jade of the other materials, keeping only the jade vessels, and searched through them again until he made up about ten pieces.

This time, they were no longer rice-grain-sized, but about the size of tangyuan dumplings, nearly ten times larger in volume. Xia Zheng first restored his own spiritual power, then repeatedly drew off strands of spiritual sense, converted them into spiritual power, and infused them into the beads.

It took about eighty minutes to complete one infusion. Afterwards, Xia Zheng used one again, and this time his previously depleted sea of consciousness was restored almost instantly to full, reaching around ninety percent.

“Not bad. In terms of recovery effect, jade is still the best. Though it falls short of the other two materials in sturdiness and infusion speed, its capacity is the highest.”

Xia Zheng thought of it as similar to charging a phone: total battery capacity, battery health, and charging speed all involved trade-offs. It depended on what one valued more.

If he was in a hurry, porcelain would be the choice, since it had the fastest infusion speed, with storage capacity and conversion rate in the middle. If he wanted to save materials and avoid breakage, diamond was the better option. If he wanted the highest storage capacity and conversion rate, jade was still the best.

Then Xia Zheng began infusing spiritual power into the ten jade beads one by one. Each time he finished one, he put it away and restored his own power before continuing. By the time all ten beads had been filled, it was already the morning of the next day.

Xia Zheng put away all ten Spirit Beads, stood up, rolled his shoulders, then took a hot shower and ate a hearty breakfast. When he returned to the bedroom, he found Nalan Sheng still asleep and not yet awake.

Seeing that his girlfriend was wearing only a cool, semi-transparent nightgown, Xia Zheng felt a stir of impulse. After stripping off his own clothes, he slipped into the covers and held Nalan Sheng. Although she still would not agree to a real relationship with him, other intimate gestures were still possible, and they could ease the ache of longing.

At the same time, a piece of news slowly spread: Albert, whom Xia Zheng had once battled, had died mysteriously in a hotel. Though on the night of his stay he had called for several women, and the manner of death somewhat resembled sudden exhaustion in bed, it still provoked the fury of the Professional Alliance.

The death of a contestant was nothing less than an attack on the alliance’s reputation and authority. Camila, who had only recently taken office as alliance leader, stated plainly in a public interview that she would pursue the truth behind Albert’s death at any cost. If someone had acted in secret, then they would have to bear the alliance’s wrath.

In order to soothe the alliance’s anger, the Federation dispatched a team of capable detectives to investigate. Among them was Inspector Wu Nianfang of Heidel Castle. After the Midnight Mary incident, she had been promoted and was now a chief inspector. Normally, a case like this would not require her personal involvement, but this minor matter implicated many forces behind the scenes and was also connected to the currently blazing-hot genius mentalist, Xia Zheng. Thus, the Federal Presidential Office granted special approval for the case to be handled as an exception, sending Wu Nianfang to lead the investigation and thoroughly uncover the truth.

After learning about the many forces involved in the case, especially after hearing Xia Zheng’s name, Wu Nianfang could not help but sigh that Xia Zheng’s growth had been astonishingly rapid. He was no longer merely an ordinary young esper.