1129 Blackout
The crowd gathered around Alex’s headless body and wondered what they were supposed to do there. They had to wait for the city to make some arrangements or at least have the acquaintances of the dead person take the body away.
“Can anyone identify who this is?” someone asked.
“I don’t know any sect that wears this sort of robes,” another person said.
“Maybe his storage bag has some identification?” somebody added. A few people agreed that they should check who it was.
One of them was about to move up front when the corpse spasmed all of a sudden. A Saint Foundation cultivation base erupted from the body and people backed off.
“Get away, the body might be exploding,” a few people said.
“Should we destroy it?” another person added.
However, before anyone could attack, the cultivation base retreated back and everything calmed down. Then, from the neck where the head was gone, bones and muscles started wriggling.
Slowly, it grew out in the shape of a head and more things started growing on it. Tendons, veins, skin, eyes, and even brain, everything grew back to the way it was before he had lost his head.
“HAAAH!” Alex took a deep breath in as he stopped up from the ground. Immediately a sword appeared in his hand and he got ready to fight.
His body had gone into a fight or flight mode and he looked around, delirious, and tried to figure out what was happening.
“It’s alright, young man. We’re not going to hurt you,” one of the people said and Alex looked toward him.
He gulped a little and breathed in a few more times before he started calming down a little.
“Hey! What’s happening out there? Why did you blackout again?” Godslayer’s voice cried from inside his head.
Alex’s mind was too jumbled to make any sense of what had just happened.
“Hey, isn’t that… no, that is. That’s Alchemist Alex. I’ve seen his face before,” someone said.
“Alchemist Alex? The one that stopped making pills?” someone else asked.
“You’re right. That is him,” someone else said.
Alex was still struggling to form coherent thoughts in his head, but for now, he decided to run away.
He didn’t even care what direction it was. He simply flew off. People thought of following him, but no one acted on him.
“Wasn’t he dead?” someone asked.
“I thought so too, but his head grew out. Is that even possible?” another person asked.
“Could it be a pill? He is a master Alchemist,” someone else said.
Far away, a woman looked towards the saints that were gathered around her. “That was him,” she said. “That was the guy that entered the 44th floor while I was fighting,” she said.
“Are you sure?” the people asked.
“Yes,” the girl said. “He came in through the cracks in space and told the puppet I was fighting that he had won. The puppet acknowledged it as a fact and the next moment we were back on the first floor without me ever getting the chance to fully finish our battle.”
“I see,” one of the elders said. “Then it’s settled then. It was Alchemist Alex who completed the Sundering Sanctum’s challenges this time around.”
It wouldn’t be long before more people learn of that fact.
Alex flew silently, gathering the thoughts in his head. Godslayer still asked a lot of questions, but he waited until he had everything working again.
“I died,” he told to Godslayer. “Well, at least as dead as a headless man can be before I regenerated back.”
“What?” Godslayer couldn’t help but ask. “You were headless?”
“I think so,” he said. “Some of the people in the crowd also seemed surprised that my head grew back. Holy shit, I didn’t even know that was possible.”
“I think so,” Alex said. “How did it feel?”
“Like I was in a space devoid of anything, just like last time,” Godslayer said.
Alex couldn’t help but show a surprised expression. “Just like last time?” he asked. “When?”
“Back when that girl exploded her body. This happened back then too,” Godslayer said.
“Geez, was my head gone back then too?” he thought. Now that he thought about it, it made sense. After all, that was a Saint Soul realm cultivator’s body exploding after all, and by that point, Alex didn’t have any defenses at all.
“So I can live even without my head, huh?” Alex thought. “That makes sense. The Undying physique’s second stage does say that as long as I have Qi, I will come back to life.”
He gently felt the dantian in his body. If what he was thinking was right, then this was now the most important organ of his body.
Not his heart, not his brain. The dantian.
“I will have to be careful,” he said.
“So… you can regenerate?” Godslayer asked in a somber tone. “Even from such a massive attack?”
“Yes, my physique technique helps me,” Alex said.
Godslayer thought about something and asked, “You called it the Undying Physique, right?”
“Yes,” Alex said.
“Undying… how did you get this physique exactly?” Godslayer said.
“From the previous user of the physique,” Alex said, not adding more right now.
“Was he… the Undying God?” Godslayer asked.
Alex was surprised. “You know about him too?” he asked.
“Only by name,” Godslayer said in a serious tone.
This felt different from all the other times he had talked about a god. Most times he would sound angry and rabid, but this time, his voice was different.
‘Has he changed?’ Alex wondered. He would be very happy if Godslayer could stop being an annoyance every time something god-related was brought into the conversation.
“That was perhaps the only god from the demons that I know of,” Godslayer said.
“Do you not feel angry?” Alex asked. “I took a god’s physique, you know.”
“You have a lot of things from various gods. There’s no point in me getting angry over one more,” Godslayer said.
Alex smiled. “It’s nice to see that you have progressed,” he said. “Now can we go back to talking about how I almost died?”
“Sure,” Godslayer said.
“I’m curious, how are you still alive? My head was cut off your know? I would assume you would be gone since my Spiritual sea would have gone with my head,” Alex said.
“Of the two you have, for now, the dantian is attached to your physical body,” Godslayer said. “Your spiritual sea is attached to your spirit. As long as your spirit remains, the spiritual sea remains as well,” Godslayer answered.
“So, I will be fine as long as my dantian is fine, right? I can regenerate as long as I have Qi,” Alex said. “Is there a chance of my spirit being harmed right now? Will too much damage to my physical body deteriorate my spirit by any chance?”
“Your spirit is attached to your body for now, so there is a chance. But if your body grows, your spirit should grow as well. Once your reach the Saint Core realm, however, the spirit will separate from your body and form itself a cocoon in your dantian, a core.”
“Once it breaks through that cocoon and becomes a nascent soul, your spirit will have separated itself from your physical body. At that time, they can be separately attacked and damaged,” Godslayer said.
“So… as long as my dantian is safe for now, I’m safe,” Alex said.
“It sure seems that way,” Godslayer replied.
Alex asked a few more questions and once he got the answers, he began thinking about Zhu Shaofan.
That man had managed to stay under the many elders’ noses and ran his assassin organization. Alex wondered why he even opened an information organization, but the more he thought about it, the more it made sense.
Having your own organization to gather and parse information was very convenient for assassins as they could get any information they wanted at any time. Not only that, it was a great way to proactively hide information about themselves. If they were the biggest in the game, they could make any information disappear.
Just like how Zhu Shaofan had managed to make his own name disappear from almost everything in history. Barely any people remembered him anymore at all.
“He killed me, or at least I hope he thinks so,” Alex said. “If he thinks I’m dead, he will go to the employers to get his reward. I wonder where he will be going.”
Alex had a list in his head, and he had a few suspects in his head already. “I should be more proactive now that I know how I can find the person who can lead me to my father,” he thought.
For that, however, he needed help. And the only help he could get right now was from the elders.
Alex decided to return back to the Sunborn Sanctuary as quickly as he could.
He stopped flying and looked around. “Where the hell am I even?” he thought. He had been flying so aimlessly for a while now and only now he had realized that he was in the middle of nowhere.
He released his spiritual sense that reached over a dozen kilometers wide instantly and saw a group of people on a road. He flew towards those people and asked for directions before flying towards the closest city from where he was.
Once he was in the city, he took the teleportation formation and was now on his way back to the Sunborn Sanctuary.