Ren Xiao looked up to the sky with a grim look on her face. 'I screwed up,' she thought.
She had been fighting with suppressed strength against the thing that took over Alex exactly because she was afraid this would happen.
She looked up at the sky, her aura barely something that could be sensed. She figured she may have a bit of time to prepare herself.
However, how was she to prepare herself? Revealing the tiniest bit of her true aura would cause the judgement to come down sooner, and surely destroy her.
He looked at the swirling clouds of different color that seemed to gather together to get darker and darker.
'If I had known this would happen, I would've just used my real cultivation base to deal with the thing,' she thought.
She regretted that she didn't get rid of the thing and now, her descendant would have to die, alongside the—
She stopped. She saw Alex, floating in the air in front of her. He was completely shrunken in body mass as if he hadn't eaten anything in months.
The thin bones gave his body a skeletal outline, making him look ghostly. His eyes were shrunken, his body a shade of red that looked closer to purple.
She could only begin to imagine what sort of pain he must've been suffering. Not that different from what she would feel if she was fortunate enough to survive the next few minutes.
She then carefully looked at his body, his sword, his eyes. Not a single shred of blackness from before was there anymore.
'How is that possible? I didn't do anything to it,' she thought.
"Are you… yourself?" she asked softly.
"Yes, I am me," Alex said as he too had looked down from the sky. He looked at the sword in his hand. Now that the black surface was gone, it looked like a pretty decent sword.
Actually, this was very much likely a great sword, given what it had been housing.
Lady Ren gasped when she heard Alex's voice. It was no longer merged with the other voice, making it sound normal.
"Where is it?" she asked, which Alex easily understood to be referring to the black goop in his spiritual sea.
"I destroyed most of it," he said. "It still remains, but it no longer has the power to fight against me."
'Dear god of the beasts! How in the world did this child defeat it?' she wondered. She herself hadn't been able to think of any way to defeat it as she didn't know what it was.
She had found it over a thousand years ago, stuck to the earth. It had come down in a meteor shower, or so her people told her when she went to check what had caused a crater to the east of them.
When she reached the sword, she realized that she was being tempted by the sword. When she touched the sword, the black thing in it had attacked her, and was siphoning off her life to fuel itself.
Ren Xiao had panicked, but the sword had been weak at the time and her mental strength was not its match. She had gotten rid of it before it could fully take over her, and she had realized how dangerous of a sword it was.
So, she had taken it away, along with the land it was stuck on, not daring to touch the sword itself again.
She had locked it away in the empty treasury room, for almost a millenia now. When Alex went to it, she was sure the sword would tempt him, and as she had expected, it did.
She regretted not leaving her room at the time to stop him. She believed shedding off her natural aura to be a more important task for her so as to not incur the heaven's wrath by being outside.
Alex had been taken over, and got most of his life siphoned off of him by the thing, but somehow, he made it back.
'What does that mean?' she wondered. Did it mean he had an impressive mental strength to fight off the temptation? But then where was the thing?
Alex had said he was destroyed most of it. Not got rid of. Destroyed.
He had? But how? It was certainly not his cultivation base. Then perhaps… his body?
Ren Xaio narrowed her eyes. Alex's body surely held a lot of mysteries that she couldn't even begin to understand. Not only was he strong and seemed to have almost infinite potential, he could also absorb the blood essence of a White Tiger.
Just what was his body?
She looked at him with her narrowed eyes when she suddenly noticed something that she hadn't in shock of the black thing disappearing.
Something was different.
"You are whole?" she asked, almost surprised.
Alex looked at himself. He didn't understand what she meant. He was clearly still missing his left arm. Not to mention the horrible situation of his where everything was numb and painful at the same time.
How exactly could this even be considered whole?
"What do you mean?" he asked.
"Your body… it used to always be a sliver away from fusing with your soul completely, but now, it seems you have done something to completely fuse it," she said.
Alex understood what she meant. She was referring to the time when she saw through the other soul being in his body.
This wom— beast had impressive senses.
"Yes," Alex said. "That was my original soul controlling this clone body. I have now gotten my body back."
Lady Ren squinted her eyes at him and looked through him again.
"Why are you lying?" she asked.
"What do you mean?" Alex said. Was his story not believable? Well, not like he could help it. After all, that was the truth.
"You are no clone," Lady Ren said.
"No… I am one," Alex said. "My real body is in the Central continent right now. He used to send his soul into my body to control it, while I remained suppressed in my own mind."
Lady Ren frowned this time. "That's not true. I may believe that there was another soul in your body. That explains why your body and soul weren't united. However, not for a single second do I believe this body is a clone."
"Creating clones is difficult enough. Creating one that can take in the blood essence of the White Tiger and live? Impossible."
"Not even the Divinities and the Celestials can do such a thing, let alone someone from this land with its limited resources. You can refine this entire world, and not be able to create a body such as yours," Lady Ren said.
Alex's eyes went wide. Many thoughts roamed in his head at once, making it hard for him to understand what he was thinking.
"Are you saying that…" he couldn't continue his thoughts. That couldn't possibly be true.
"Yes," Lady Ren said. "Your body is not a clone. Its a real body, one you were born with."
Alex was stunned beyond belief. He lost all sense of the pain and numbness for a brief moment.
"Is it really true?" he thought. "Am I… not the clone?"