A few days had passed since Ning had left to search for the spirits.
In the easternmost edges of the grassland, he had found Terra.
Terra was a feminine spirit that couldn't speak or even have conscious thoughts. She hid around giant rocks, that were impossible to traverse without being able to fly over the rock or in some other fashion get to her.
At first, the spirit was immediately scared the moment Ning and Saphandra arrived at her hiding place, but when they didn't do anything and just stuck around, her curiosity took the better of her and she came out.
Ning took the opportunity to bond with her. There was really just a single thing he could say to entice the spirit.
"Come with me and I'll take you to see the stars," he told the spirit.
When the spirit realized he was talking about the sparkling things she always saw in the night, she immediately accepted the bond.
After the fond was successful, Ning learned what new powers he had acquired from the bond.
Terra was an Earth spirit. Her powers had to do everything with earth, and how one could manipulate it.
Ning created pillars, hovered giant rocks in the air, and created minerals out of nothing.
He could even sense the structure of the ground around him and know if there was something in the earth that was not just rocks and minerals.
They appeared in his sense as vacuums, and mostly they were simply tree roots.
After learning how to use Terra's powers, Ning let her fly around him, and then he and Saphandra went to look for the other spirits.
The next spirit remained alone near an oasis. It remained hidden in the shrubs, so no passerby ever found it.
However, Ning knew where it was, so he peered through the shrub and located the spirit.
He used the same words to bond with the spirit that he later named Gray.
Gray had powers that easily destroyed things. Plants lost their green at a single touch. Rocks turned to sand with barely any force. Metals rusted to nothing very easily.
Human flesh rot with but a thought.
Ning realized that it was quite a strong power and even an evil one from what he could see.
However, it didn't take him long to realize that it was not something evil. It was something that was fundamental to the life and death of everything in the universe.
Time and Entropy. ᴛʜɪs ᴄʜᴀᴘᴛᴇʀ ɪs ᴜᴘᴅᴀᴛᴇ ʙʏ 𝗻𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗹·𝑓𝑖𝑟𝑒·𝗇𝗲𝘁
The spirit he named Gray had the power to speed up the entropy of anything and make it look like it was getting destroyed when all Ning was doing was forcing the thing he touched to age faster.
"I have to admit, that's a scary skill," Ning said. "Thank god someone else didn't get it."
Then, they moved onto the snowy mountains again since there was another spirit that had wandered here and was alone.
Ning quickly formed another bond with the spirit saying the same thing. Since he wasn't promising his spiritual energy at all, he could continue to get more and more.
The third spirit was named Void. That was because he gave Ning the power over space itself.
He could warp it, split it, compress it, expand it, or create small portals to teleport things.
All in all, it wasn't quite bad and Ning was happy with the powers he got from Void.
Void, Terra, and Gray played around with each other, making noises of jingling bells, while Saphandra looked at Ning to ask him a question.
"You still want more?" she asked. "I think I'm done with it all, so we can leave anytime we want."
"Uh… I wouldn't say no to another one, but if you want to leave then let's do that," Ning said. "Although, before that, there's one place I need to visit."
"Where?" Saphandra asked.
"I don't really know," Ning said. "But it should be around there."
Ning pointed towards the east, which Saphandra had no way of telling what he was pointing towards.
"Sigh, let's go then," she said and flew up. Ning followed here, and they were quickly outside of the mountain with snow and were soon around mountains that were full of tress.
Ning kept his eyes open and looked around for a while before he noticed something.
"There!" he pointed towards the center of a massive forest, not very far from the lake that surrounded the volcano.
There was a small pond at the center of the forest, and when Ning landed next to it, he saw a small stream of it flowing down the slope into the massive pond.
Ning looked at the pond and smiled. He was here and he was looking at it.
The Origin of this planet.
The water there was a little misty, but he could see the small ray of light coming from the tiny portal that led to a world where even his survival wasn't certain.
'This isn't water, is it?' he thought. He remembered the thick, liquid Qi back in Kumia and knew that this was Spiritual Energy that was so dense that it turned liquid after a long time.
He placed his hands into the liquid and immediately the spiritual energy rushed into his body, and surprisingly, his body was absorbing it all rather easily.
Slowly, Ning was growing to Rank 9 and then growing more and more to reach the legendary Rank 10.
"What's this? Drinking water?" Saphandra asked and crouched to touch the liquid too.
Ning was so into absorbing the liquid that he realized too late that Saphandra had stuck her hands into the liquid and started sucking in the Spiritual Energy.
He saw the shock and fear in her face along with a pained expression from violently absorbing so much spiritual energy at once.
"Are you okay?" Ning asked as he pulled her back from the Origin, but she wasn't responding at all.
Instead, her eyes were wide as she realized what was going to happen now.
Something awoke that was long asleep and a resounding voice spoke in her head.
"GIVE ME BACK MY BODY!!!"