The Human Giant



The crystal sword in Yoze's hand trembled with rage as Immortal Welse screamed inside his head.

"You dog shit m********!" 

After letting out his anger at being defeated and his true body having been captured, Immortal Welse couldn't help but become more afraid of Yoze. He already knew that his mind had been composed of Yoze's spiritual energies making him make subpar decisions.

He first became aware that spiritual energy attacks from demons messed with the mind and could paralyze a person's movements by applying pressure through their spiritual energy. He also knew that these attacks could have additional effects such as making the person feel like their mind was getting burned by a hot flame.

The effects of these spiritual attacks varied but from his experience, they usually only had one special effect. Yet Immortal Welse felt his mind in constant pain from having his spiritual energy eaten, he felt as if his mind was being suppressed by several mountains made out of pure iron.

His thought was not only getting suppressed but he felt his mind slow down significantly as it felt as if every single one of his thoughts were going through a thick swamp. What was concerning was that there seemed to be an additional effect that affects his perception of danger.

After thinking about their recent battle, Immortal Welse recognized that there were a few incidents where he made the wrong choice by assuming Yoze was weaker than he was. The most significant was when he still came over to check if Yoze was killed by his self-explosion and got too close that he was captured.

Even though he maintained a distance away from Yoze's body in case there was retaliation. The combination of being spiritually eaten alive, the pressures from the spiritual energies and their effects, and Yoze's incredible control over his own body made it so that the distance that he thought would be safe was simply not enough.

So now that his true body was trapped in Yoze's hands he could only try his best to survive while also knowing that there was no possible way for him to trust Yoze. As enemies, he recognized that Yoze was trying to collect as much value from him as he possibly could.

And if he gets everything he wants he might go back on his words and decide to continue trying to kill him. What made Immortal Welse sigh from unhappiness was that he knew that the chances of trying to escape on his own were slim.

Without his physical body made out of flesh, he couldn't transform into any of his animal forms using his immortal tattoos. Forcing him to only rely on using spells and his other techniques that didn't rely on his body.

But he had a feeling that these spells wouldn't have much effect even if he used them to escape since Yoze would be aware of every time he used them and take precautions. 

"A combination of giving him what he wants and buying some time to think of an escape plan is the best thing I can do right now." Immortal Welse thought to himself as he calmed himself down, reduced his trembling, and decided to partially cooperate with Yoze.

After briefly coming up with a general plan, Immortal Welse took action and used his remaining crystal energy to recreate some of his blue tattoos. Compared to his previous blue tattoos which were thick, long, and seemed to be alive, the blue tattoos that Immortal Welse created were thin and short.

They seemed to lack the essence and energy to create large and complex 3D models of various creatures. Without waiting for Yoze to consider that he was attacking him, Immortal Welse reformed his blue tattoos into a book that had hundreds of pages and a cover of a Wolf with ten pairs of eyes, the wings of an eagle, and a tail of a whale.

After creating the book on the crystal sword's surface, Immortal Welse sent it out and gave it to Yoze who gladly took it. 

"Let's take a look," 

Yoze opened the book made of blue tattoos and quickly read it from start to finish and was disappointed to find that much of the beginning pages were identical to the Fire immortal cultivation manual he had gotten from Tiki. Much of it described the method of gathering crystal dust and turning it into crystal energy to get through the various stages of immortal cultivation.

From using the crystal energy to create new crystal nerves until one accumulated enough nerves to undergo the crystallization process in the Nerve Crystallization realm. From the description in the book the process of turning one's nerves into crystals without accidentally destroying them was extremely difficult, time-consuming, and energy intensive.

After one completed the crystallization process their information processing speed would skyrocket and allow them to continue to the next stage without worrying about not being able to handle the amount of information needed to complete it. 

That realm was called the Crystal Spine realm and focused on turning all the individual crystal nerves that were crystallized and combining them into a second spine that was encased in extremely strong crystals. The next realm was the Crystal Skull realm which continued on the path set by the Crystal Spine realm and focused on creating a second skull made out of the same hard crystal.

However, what Yoze cared about the most was the Crystal Brain realm and what came after it. According to this manual, the Crystal Brain Realm made its users create a second brain made out of crystal.

This process was extremely long and dangerous due to it allowing the users to improve or fix their brain structures. Many fell into this temptation and made subtle changes that ended up causing massive problems down the line.

Due to the changes they made in their crystal brains, they might develop two different personalities, have two different ways of processing information and thus couldn't sync, and could lead to the creation of a new human mind that wants to become the main host.

Numerous problems could occur in this realm and the death toll of immortal cultivators trying to get through the realm was more than a third of immortal cultivators deaths.