About five days had passed since Shirong had started his cultivation and Lin Wu had begun refining his spirit sense. Shirong still had a calm look on his face as he cultivated in peace, meanwhile Lin Wu was floating in the spatial storage ring in his actual form.
His eyes were glowing as if bloodshot and strange laughter was coming out of his mouth.
"Hehehe! I'll be damned if I don't get it right this time!" Lin Wu uttered in a hoarse voice.
Mid way through the refining process, Lin Wu reverted to his normal form as he found that this allowed him to have better focus than being in the spear form. He had no choice to do this since the explosion of spirit sense kept on happening the more he tried refining the spirit qi.
Lin Wu had actually reached nearly a hundred meters in range but was stuck at 99.9 meters. Somehow this seemed to be a big border for him, and he was unable to scale it. This was his fiftieth attempt at refining his spirit sense, and he had refined the spirit sense all the way to 99.9 meters every time.
If it were anyone else, perhaps they would have given up. But Lin Wu was still attempting it with a crazed vigor. He had actually started absorbing the spirit qi from the spirit stones that were kept in the ring too when he ran out of his own.
He gave no thought to what Shirong would think of it and simply focused on refining the spirit sense.
~Boom~
Another explosion happened, which knocked Lin Wu to a corner of the ring. The more the length of the spirit sense, the stronger the explosions had become. Lin Wu even had a few small cracks on his body due to the explosions, but they soon healed under the effect of his innate skills.
"DAMMIT! AGAIN!" Lin Wu said with anger.
Lin Wu didn't know why this was happening and wondered if he didn't have talent in refining spirit sense. He had even asked the system to analyze the problem but couldn't find anything. It said to him that everything was within its parameters and the only uncontrollable variable here was Lin Wu.
Lin Wu asked the system if it would be possible for it to refining and show him the process, but it simply said that since the intangible factor 'will' was involved in the refinement, the system could not do anything. Only after Lin Wu had refined it could the system replicate it, but that too wouldn't help Lin Wu as its properties would be vastly different.
Having no choice, Lin Wu could only keep on repeating till he got it right. He had overcome a few bottlenecks in the refinement process before which appeared at the 1 meter mark, 10 meter mark, 25 meter mark and now at the 100 meter mark.
Lin Wu had gained quite a bit of experience with spirit sense now and had pinpointed the instant where he lost control. For some reason, the entire spirit sense tendril would destabilize when it started to reach the hundred meter mark.
When it got close to it, it was as if some unknown force acted on it and broke it apart. Even the system was unable to analyze it further and told Lin Wu that it would need to obtain more data on other spirit sense refining techniques to obtain a new conclusion.
~Sigh~
"One more try… if it still doesn't work I'll just have to wait till the system can obtain more data on the spirit sense refinement techniques." Lin Wu spoke in a helpless tone.
He once again started with a single wisp of spirit qi and added more to it, one by one.
1 wisp
2 wisps
5 wisps
10 wisps
100 wisps
250 wisps
900 wisps
999 wisps
Lin Wu finally reached the 99.9 meter mark again. A single wisp was enough for about ten centimeters of spirit sense.
But at this point a sound was heard.
~Crack~
"Huh? Again? Where is that sound coming from?" Lin Wu wondered.
He had been hearing the cracking sound for a long time now, and he didn't know where they were coming from. At first they had been very faint, but now they were as if someone was breaking glass. Lin Wu had asked the system to scan the entire ring as he thought some of the items in it may be getting damaged due to the explosions.
Lin Wu had already moved the items to the corners of the ring so that they would be relatively safe. But systems scan told him that everything was the same as before and it couldn't find the source of the crack either.
~huu~
Lin Wu gave pushed the thought to the back of his mind and took a deep breath, trying to focus on the refinement again.
"This is the final chance, gotta get it right…" Lin Wu perked himself up before adding the final wisp of spirit qi to the tendril.
~Shua~
The spirit sense tendril started getting destabilized again and trembled non stop.
"NOO! I WON'T LET YOU!" Lin Wu shouted.
A non stop stream of spirit qi started coming out of his core as he released nearly a few thousand wisps at once. He was still able to control them better individually than together as a long tendril currently. He then pushed those singular wisps of spirit qi against the long tendril that was getting unstable.
"HAAAA!" He groaned with pressure.
The wisps of spirit qi that made contact with the spirit sense tendril started dissipating due to the repulsion but Lin Wu didn't mind it and simply replaced them with more spirit qi wisps. This way a cycle of destruction and suppression was created.
An hour passed, and this was the longest he had been able to maintain the tendril for. But he couldn't do it for any more as his spirit qi was nearly depleted and he couldn't spare effort to absorb anymore.
~Deng~
Finally, somehow the tendril stabilized and the rest of the spirit qi wisps that Lin Wu had released dissipated.
"Finally…" Lin Wu muttered with exhaustion.
But then…
~CRACK!!!!~