Nascent Soul Rebirth: Starting as a Wizard

White's "home" is a narrow triangular space nestled between two permeable brick walls, so low that one has to bend over deeply to squeeze in.

The room was almost empty, except for a pile of musty, unidentifiable hay and rags in the corner.

The musty smell was so strong it was nauseating, and the pungent, astringent smell of inferior herbs.

It was mixed with the sweet, fishy, ​​and putrid smell characteristic of a disease, almost solidifying into a substance.

Curled up in the pile of rags was a heartbreakingly thin figure—skin and bones, its small face flushed an unnatural red from a high fever.

His lips were a horrifying bluish-purple, and every breath he took was accompanied by a terrifying hissing sound like a bellows and violent spasms that seemed to tear his thin chest apart.

Solo's spiritual senses, like the most intricate tentacles, had already swept over the girl's entire body in an instant.

The situation is clear and serious:

The disease had penetrated deep into the bones, and many parts of the lungs and internal organs had become rotten and hollow. The vitality was as weak as a candle in the wind, and ordinary medicines were powerless to save it.

"Amy...the medicine...I got the medicine..." White knelt by the haystack, his voice broken and incoherent, his trembling hand wanting to touch his daughter's burning forehead, but he dared not touch it.

"Those powders won't save her," Solo declared calmly, his voice echoing clearly in the cramped, suffocating space.

White's body stiffened abruptly, as if pierced by an invisible icicle, and he slowly turned his head.

The faint glimmer of light that had just ignited in his eyes due to the intervention of the gold coins was instantly extinguished, leaving only a deathly silence and a bottomless void.

"But I can." Solo's next words made White's lifeless eyes suddenly narrow, bursting with an unbelievable, burning hope, like a drowning person grabbing onto a piece of driftwood.

Solo ignored his agitation and continued in a calm tone, as if discussing the weather:

"Her lungs were necrotic and suppurating at the core, and their structure was decaying; ordinary medical treatments and medications were ineffective."

White's heart sank once again into a cold abyss.

"The only viable solution," Solo's gaze fell on White's thin, bony chest, which heaved slightly from tension and weakness, "is 'displacement'."

The decaying parts of her body were completely removed and replaced with healthy, vibrant lung tissue.

White stared at him blankly, clearly unable to comprehend this unimaginable concept.

"Where does new, healthy lung tissue come from?" Solo asked himself, pointing vaguely at White with his fingertip, "Here. Only your lungs are still basically intact and usable."

White instantly understood, and his face turned deathly pale, devoid of any color.

His lips trembled uncontrollably, and a chill shot from his tailbone straight to the top of his head, making him feel as if he had fallen into an ice cave.

"I have mastered a secret technique," Solo's voice carried a strange, icy rhythm that seemed to penetrate the skin and reach the soul.

"It can perform precise cutting, stripping and grafting of life tissues. This technique goes against the normal laws of life and disturbs the fundamental laws of life. When it is performed, it requires the power of a 'fresh and complete' and 'voluntarily sacrificed' soul as fuel."

The ritual fire is lit, simultaneously serving as a bridge to maintain the transformation of life force and to pay the 'price' required to disrupt the law of stillness.

He leaned forward slightly, an invisible pressure enveloping the trembling White. His voice was low, yet each word was as clear as an ice bead.

"At the opportune moment, I have recently been studying some ancient runes involving the essence of life and the transformation of energy forms, and I am in need of a suitable, 'voluntarily offered' complete soul as the core experimental material to verify several key conjectures."

Your soul is still strong, but your will is on the verge of collapse and you appear to be "willing," which is just right to serve as the "cost" for this "treatment" and also as my "experimental material."

"With your soul, you can give her new life and at least ten years of good health."

"To trade, or to refuse?"

Soul! Experimental materials! Firewood!

These words are a thousand times more terrifying than the machete in Jason's hand!

All the terrifying legends about wizards, necromancers, and otherworldly demons extracting souls, imprisoning them for eternity, and subjecting them to endless torment instantly churned and exploded in White's mind.

He looked at his daughter's small face contorted in pain on the haystack, and each difficult breath felt like it was tearing his already shattered heart apart.

Boundless paternal love, like lava, breached the dam of reason, causing him to let out a beast-like "hoho" sound from his throat, almost roaring "I do!" without any regard for the consequences!

However, the extreme fear of utterly losing one's soul, becoming a subject of unknown horror experiments, and enduring eternal despair was like the deepest ice, freezing his blood and vocal cords.

He collapsed to the ground, his body trembling violently as if he were having a seizure, his teeth chattering.

His eyes were being torn apart and scattered by extreme love and extreme fear, as if his soul had already begun to be ripped apart by two enormous forces.

Solo, like a detached observer, patiently waited and scrutinized the tragic struggle of this humble soul on the ultimate scales.

The shack was deathly silent, save for Amy's faint, ominous breathing.

Time seemed to be stretched out and frozen.

Finally, the last glimmer of "self" in White's eyes went out completely, replaced by a deathly, resigned, almost empty resolve.

He seemed to have exhausted the last of his strength, heading towards Solo, and also towards his daughter.

He slammed his forehead heavily against the cold, hard mud, again and again, making a dull "thump-thump" sound. Blood seeped from the wound, mixing with the mud.

His voice was so hoarse and broken that it was almost unrecognizable, yet it carried a chilling calmness:

"Take...take away...my soul...to experiment on...anything...please...quickly...save Amy...please..."

After saying that, he collapsed completely, as if his soul had been ripped out beforehand, leaving only an empty shell awaiting final disposal.

"The contract is established." Solo's voice remained completely calm, devoid of joy or pity. "I accept your soul as payment for this spell and subsequent experiments."

However, just as White was in despair and awaiting the eternal darkness that would ensue, Solo did not act immediately.

Instead, he took a half step back, his gaze seemingly sweeping past White and landing on the empty space.

"Now that payment has been made, the treatment can begin," Solo said calmly, as if the terrifying conversation about the soul deal had never happened.

He did not touch White's chest, nor did he use any extraordinary magic.

He simply reached into the lining of the seemingly ordinary old cloth garment in his bosom and took out a small bag carefully wrapped in dry, soft tree bark from a specially made hidden pocket close to his heart.

Untie the rope, and inside lies a strangely shaped plant, about three inches long.

It is grayish-brown overall, with roots like fine dragon whiskers, a gnarled stem, and three leaves the size of a fingernail at the top, with a very faint, almost invisible amber luster flowing through the veins of the leaves.

It was a mild medicinal herb that Solo had found in a sacred cave.

Solo deliberately chose to walk through the rusty area near the cheap pharmacies because he understood a principle well:

In places where life and death are intertwined, and where medicine and life are directly linked, one can often glimpse the deepest despair and the most genuine entanglements of human nature.

And it's also the easiest time to find a target that meets his requirements.

This herb, which he carried with him in case of emergency, was the "bait" and "proof" he had prepared for this purpose.

In his previous life, he was a Nascent Soul cultivator, but his alchemy skills only reached the level of a third-grade alchemist because his ambitions lay elsewhere, and he was unable to reach the deeper mysteries of alchemy.

However, centuries of accumulation and countless practices have already ingrained the principles, medicinal properties, and control of heat for elixirs of grade three and below into their very essence.

For him, handling such trivial matters, which only require extracting vitality and harmonizing yin and yang to cleanse mortals of their chronic ailments, was a piece of cake.

Solo held the herb in his left hand, while his right index and middle fingers were joined together.

The other three fingers were slightly curved in a strange arc, and there was no great light shining from the fingertips. Instead, a core of extremely pure spiritual energy quietly gathered.

His gaze narrowed slightly, and in a flash, the core of his spiritual energy suddenly ignited—

It wasn't a real flame, but a thin, almost invisible, pale white halo that emitted a gentle and lingering heat, softly enveloping the spiritual herb.

This is one of the subtle manipulation techniques that only highly skilled alchemists can master – "Spirit Extraction".

Without the need for a pill furnace or external fire, relying solely on one's own exquisite control over spiritual energy and profound understanding of the nature of medicinal properties.

Using spiritual awareness as eyes and spiritual power as hands, impurities are removed, and the most effective essence of the medicinal materials is guided and activated.

Under White's blank gaze, the inconspicuous grayish-brown grass began to undergo strange changes under the pale white halo.

The grayish-brown color of the epidermis quickly faded, and the soil impurities in the roots turned into fine dust and fell off. The three small leaves gradually became transparent.

The amber luster in the veins of the leaf is slowly extracted and gathered, eventually condensing into a viscous droplet the size of a grain of rice at the top of the grass stem, resembling liquid amber and exuding a warm and fragrant aroma.