The next day, Draven woke as the first rays of sunlight touched his face. He sat up from the rock with a lazy groan, stretching his stiff muscles. Beside him, the little dragon stirred, rubbing her eyes with her tiny claws.
"Little Su, let's absorb the rest of the turtle's life force before we go back to meet that monkey," Draven said. His gaze drifted toward the distance, where the half-ruined outlines of several buildings were visible. A complicated look flashed across his face as he thought of the people who had lived there four years ago. Now, it was nothing but an abandoned city, a territory for wild beasts.
Shaking his head to clear the memories, he gently picked up the palm-sized Little Su by the scruff of her neck and placed her on his shoulder. He then turned and entered a human-sized crack in the mountain wall just below the peak.
The cave the crack led to was deep, but despite the absence of sunlight, its interior was illuminated by a soft blue glow from special mushrooms growing on the walls.
After walking for some time along a narrow path, he reached a large opening. There lay the carcass of a colossal creature resembling a giant turtle. Time had hollowed out most of its body, leaving behind a massive shell and a leathery hide.
Its size was staggering, standing at least fifty feet tall. Even in death, with only its outer form intact, the aura emanating from the carcass was so potent that Little Su began to shiver uncontrollably on Draven's shoulder.
"Do not worry. Papa is here," Draven soothed, patting her head before climbing inside the turtle's body through its empty eye socket.
A pungent, ancient smell filled the air as he moved forward. The internal flesh had petrified over time, allowing him to walk inside without hindrance until he reached a red, fleshy wall that pulsed with a dim light. This was the turtle's heart, the only organ that had remained intact through the years.
"Return to the egg when I begin," Draven instructed Little Su as he sat down cross-legged before the heart.
He had discovered this place four years ago, while they were both injured and fleeing for their lives from the godly beasts. At that time, saving Little Su, whose body had been nearly destroyed, had seemed impossible.
By a stroke of luck, he had found this turtle. Its life force and heart were still intact, despite the creature having been dead for many years. His later investigations revealed it was an ancient beast with a rare and powerful shadow bloodline, the most powerful he had ever encountered in this pocket world.
This was exactly what he needed at that time. Using the life force of an ordinary beast to reconstruct Little Su's body would have severely limited her potential.
Before her injury, Little Su had possessed five magic cores: shadow, space, lightning, wind, and water. But in the battle, all of them were shattered completely. In a desperate move, Draven had established a symbiotic bond with her. He used his own magic cores as a vessel to contain the life force from the turtle's heart, using that energy to anchor Little Su's soul and drag her back from the brink of death.
Such a task was normally impossible, as merging a foreign life force with a spirit would cause a violent repulsion, destroying the spirit or killing the host. Yet, through a combination of sheer luck and his vast medical knowledge, Draven had succeeded.
After a moment of silence to clear his mind, Draven opened a small pouch on his belt. With a thought, three hundred and sixty hair-thin needles flew out, hovering in the air before him. Seeing this, Little Su immediately transformed into a beam of light and vanished into Draven's inner world.
"Split," Draven commanded softly.
The needles divided into two groups. One group shot toward him, piercing various acupoints across his body. The other embedded itself into the pulsing red wall of the turtle's heart.
As Draven channeled his essence energy, thin purple threads began to form from the needles in his body, stretching out to connect with their counterparts in the turtle's heart. Once all the connections were established, Draven closed his eyes and entered his inner world to monitor the process.
Inside his inner world, a formidable god statue with three heads and six arms sat cross-legged at the center. Its leonine heads bore fierce expressions, with manes of red hair. Its muscular body, shining like burnished bronze, was covered in golden tribal tattoos that radiated a godly presence. Beneath the statue, a red sun pulsed with a ruby glow.
This statue was the result of his cultivation of the Battle Maniac's technique, the Chaos God Transformation Scripture.
Normally, it should have mirrored his own form. However, after reaching the fifth stage of this technique, he could progress no further due to the immense strain it had on his inner world.
Using knowledge from ancient texts, he spent years modifying it to negate this issue. With newly modified chaos god transformation scripture, he finally succeeded in reaching the legendary tenth stage, but his god form had permanently taken on this strange, triple-headed visage.
Draven shifted his attention. On the other side of his inner world, five purple suns hung in a wide circular formation. At the very center floated an obsidian egg, its shell etched with the intricate patterns of dragon scales. The one hundred and eighty threads of purple essence energy were connected to the egg, feeding it from the external source.
Originally, Draven had talent for the same five elements as Little Su. But to save her, he had shattered his own magic cores and replaced them with new ones forged from the turtle's potent shadow life force.
He had initially planned to only replace his shadow core, but the turtle's energy was so vast that he had to replace all five to barely contain it. Absorbing less was not an option, as it would have resulted in incomplete cores incapable of reconstructing Little Su's soul.
In simple words, his five cores were now a single, unified shadow core, with Little Su's spirit acting as the link that bound them together.
This formation had been inherently unstable and nearly tore his inner world apart. At the critical moment, the three-headed god statue had flared with a terrifying aura, suppressing the five rebellious cores and forcing the turtle's life force into submission. It was this intervention that allowed the process to succeed and Little Su's soul to be reborn.
This was how Draven had brought her back. For now, only her spirit was whole. To fully reconstruct her physical body, he would need to merge the blood essence of many powerful beasts into the dragon egg, providing the necessary materials for her new form to take shape.