Chapter 2240 - Fingertip
"Ordered manna, four apertures," Tianming said.
"Four apertures? Let's go!" Lin Lele got hyped up after hearing the number and charged ahead of Tianming.
"It's this way, Sis!" he said helplessly. She was blindly charging in a random direction!
"Oops, haha... I was in too much of a rush." She turned and let Tianming take the lead. For someone like her to be this excited, the manna was definitely something good.
Manna was incredibly unique in that specters and lifebound beasts alike required them. Even nova wildbeasts could evolve after ingesting manna, though the chances of that working was incredibly small. If it worked, their bloodlines would be enhanced, but if it didn't, they would die from it.
The most mysterious part of all was how manna was manifested naturally by the laws of the cosmos completely independent from nova source. Most things, whether they be divine ores, herbs, artifacts, or pills came about as a result of fundamental cosmic forces, but manna was its own thing. They usually manifested spontaneously, with no clue to their origins and a huge range of quality. Some were just imperial manna, while others were universal manna that could allow lifebound beasts to become divine beasts.
Universal manna was split into two categories. The first was normal universal manna, within which a chart of the cosmos and the stars was depicted. Good quality universal manna were known as myriadstar manna, which was the best universal manna one could ever get. Above that was ordered manna, which were necessary for lifebound beasts to break the ten thousand star barrier.
The reason they were called that was that they looked far too similar to orders. The order within the caelum of a cultivator looked like a spherical honeycomb briquette, and so did ordered manna. The only difference was that ordered manna had an actual physical form, as well as the fact that it had fewer hexagonal apertures than its ethereal counterpart. Ordered manna had ten apertures at most, and the more apertures one had, the more beneficial it would be for lifebound beasts. Ten-aperture ordered manna could allow lifebound beasts to attain a hundred thousand stars, allowing them to establish a firm foundation for the Cosmic Cartography stage.
"Four-aperture manna can allow lifebound beasts' star counts to reach forty thousand or more. It’d be a huge change in terms of bloodline and state of being." Lin Lele's lifebound beasts all had twenty thousand stars, her having used two-aperture ordered manna to evolve them. As such, a four-aperture ordered manna was still incredibly beneficial to her.
As for Tianming, his beasts were still a bit shy of being able to use them. Ordered manna could only be properly assimilated by beasts that were already astral gods. Stellaminors could only let their beasts use myriadstar manna at most. That was a hard limit set by their states of being. Ying Huo and the rest had already reached ten thousand stars and were strong enough, so Tianming didn't intend to let them risk it and end up with lifelong regret. Naturally, that wouldn't stop him from fighting for the ordered manna, either. After all, he could simply keep it until he required it. It all depended on who else would be fighting for the manna. At the very least, it was the only four-aperture ordered manna that Yin Chen had managed to detect.
"Are we there yet?"
"Almost!"
Colorful lights were shining from up ahead. Tianming charged through a pool of magma and found a large cavity in its depths. The glow of the manna illuminated the entire area and he saw a shiny, spherical object near a hundred-meter-tall pillar. It glowed a dark purple and was covered in smog that made it look incredibly eerie. It seemed to be rotating in mid-air, with the four apertures looking particularly conspicuous.
The toxic fog around it emanated from the four apertures, and it could form snakes, scorpions, and other menacing critters. The sphere glowed rather brightly, like a star, and looked way more impressive than myriadstar manna. The hexagonal apertures on it seemed to be the source of the fundamental cosmic force that poured out of it.
"Impressive!" Lin Lele spotted it immediately. She began trusting Tianming's reconnaissance capabilities.
"There's so many people!" Though Tianming had moved fast, others had already approached. Once the fighting started, even more people would be drawn over. There were already more than a dozen people there, a few of whom were already engaged in fighting. It was a cacophony of beasts and abilities.
"Brother Feng, let's go!" Lin Lele roared as she charged into the battlefield.
"Since she wants to fight for it, I'll cover for her. She's helped me a lot lately, after all." As he fought with her, he gave the manna another glance and was shocked at what he saw.
"That's!" It wasn't the manna itself that surprised him, but the tall pillar near it. It was black, but crooked and covered in patterns. They were actually fingerprints! That huge, pillar-like object looked just like a little finger! The others hadn't noticed it at all, as it looked to be made of normal rock and divine ore. There was nothing noteworthy about it apart from its odd shape.
It looked normal no matter how many times he saw it, but he still had his third eye. When he had been exploring the caeli inside the skeleton, he’d seen a shocking sight of a thousand bee-head people carrying the gigantic pinky finger of a woman, and that looked almost identical to the pillar he saw. Using his third eye, he saw that the fingerprint was identical to the one he had seen in the caelum. While the signs of wear made it look a little unlike a fingerprint, Tianming had had the benefit of seeing it in his vision.
"Could it be the same finger?"
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