Chapter 42: Knowledge Sea Consolidating

Before leaving, Su Chen went and found Wang Wenxin.

Wang Wenxin appeared to belong to the Lai Clan, but in reality, he had already completely submitted to Su Chen. Not too long ago, Su Chen’s second iteration of the Hemolytic Totem had reached a breakthrough, and he had specifically told Wang Wenxin to choose a few of his trusted subordinates so that he could make some for them. The Hemolytic Totem 2.0 no longer required an individual cover their body with inscriptions; the Origin Skills it could support now, however, had increased to five.

Wang Wenxin had nominated three people to Su Chen, who immediately turned them into experts. Of course, he hadn’t given them any Shadow Substance. Even so, Wang Wenxin had completely given up any thought of resisting against Su Chen.

The consequences of doing so were all too clear to him. After all, Su Chen could basically create batches of experts on his own now.

Even though there were certain limitations, even a bunch of strong individuals at the same level could achieve quite a bit.

From that day onwards, Wang Wenxin’s control over the Long Clear Gang also became iron-clad.

Su Chen introduced Cloud Leopard to Wang Wenxin and distributed some assassins to them. After arranging everything, he took Iron Cliff with him and left.

Because his departure was a secret, there was no ensuing commotion. He had asked Wang Wenxin to find him a boat along the Long Clear River and left, just like that.

The boat wasn’t large, and the only guests aboard were a young scholar, a young mother and her child, an old man, and a dark-skinned, burly man. Including Su Chen and Iron Cliff, there were a total of seven people aboard.

The boat was operated by a couple. The boss was quite tall and sturdy; his wife, on the other hand, was rather bright and bubbly.

The boat’s main cabin could house eight people in total. The couple operating the boat wanted to wait for another guest, but Wang Wenxin, honoring Su Chen’s orders, didn’t want word of Su Chen’s departure to spread. In addition, having one less person would make the cabin more spacious. As such, he urged them to quickly leave. The couple complained incessantly about having lost a customer and that they were doing business at a loss. Even their complexions seemed to grow ugly.

Su Chen ignored them. He leaned against the boat and seemed to nod off to sleep, but in reality, he was training his consciousness power.

His consciousness strands could already control the nearby microscopic substances. As long as he wanted to, he could prevent even specks of dust from getting within a three-foot radius of him.

Consciousness power would develop from microscopic to macroscopic. Not long from now, Su Chen’s consciousness power would be sufficient to actually control physical things.

However, this wasn’t Su Chen’s goal.

Even though using consciousness power to control objects sounded pretty good, Origin Energy could do the same more simply and conveniently. He would probably need to have the same amount of consciousness power as the Lord of the Dreamrealm, with enough power to create something like the Dreamrealm, in order to create large-scale changes to the physical world like he could with Origin Skills.

Using consciousness power to control physical objects was just a test of one’s consciousness power; its true use was still to increase the power of a person’s soul.

Increasing the power of a person’s soul had many benefits. It could improve the success rate of illusions, the power of consciousness techniques, decrease the backlash from failed consciousness techniques, improve the clarity and agility of one’s mind, etc......

Because Su Chen was cultivating the True Spirit Technique and was still drinking Spirit Sobering Medicines from time to time, Su Chen’s consciousness power had already reached 120. His thinking ability was far beyond that of a normal person. Perhaps this was also the reason why he had been making many breakthroughs in his cultivation recently.

Su Chen sat in the cabin of the boat. Because he couldn’t perform any experiments, he was instead testing out the consolidation of his own Knowledge Sea.

After increasing his consciousness power, Su Chen’s ability to perform calculations was much greater. He could already do a lot of relatively simple calculations in his head.

As he was mulling over something, a strange thought suddenly jumped into Su Chen’s head.

Could he possibly solidify some things in his Knowledge Sea that he already knew and save a lot of computational power?

In other words, he would be consolidating his Knowledge Sea.

Because a person’s Knowledge Sea wasn’t actually physical, everything he did consumed his computational power.

For instance, if Su Chen were to simulate an experiment by trying to incorporate a new Origin Substance into his Hemolytic Totem, he wouldn’t need to perform calculations on the Hemolytic Totem component because he was already familiar with it. The only calculations he would need to make would be on the integration of the Origin Substance.

However, at this moment, he needed to expend his computational power to calculate both the Hemolytic Totem and how to incorporate the Origin Substance with it.

If he were able to consolidate what he was already familiar with, he could save that computational power and focus all of his attention on calculating what he wasn’t familiar with.

The benefit of this would be that he would save a lot of computational power that he could then direct to more advanced, higher-level calculations.

Before, Su Chen was always in his research lab and never needed to perform simulations like this. Now that he was on the boat with nothing to do, however, this thought suddenly emerged in his head.

As soon as he thought of it, he began to try sending his own consciousness power back into his Knowledge Sea. A dense fog appeared over the surface of the waters.

This fog was the physical form that consciousness power took within his Knowledge Sea.

As the fog continued to swirl over the sea, some of it slowly gathered to form a long table.

This was a research bench.

Very quickly, the research bench was completely formed.

Perhaps because it was the first time he had made something like this, the research bench seemed crude, and its appearance left something to be desired. However, it was a new direction in which Su Chen could develop his consciousness.

Su Chen attempted to solidify this research bench and disperse all of the fog.

When the last strand of consciousness fog was separated from the table, Su Chen felt a small prick of pain in his consciousness, as if he had suffered from some kind of rebound.

He discovered that his consciousness power had decreased a bit during this process.

However, that research bench remained intact within his Knowledge Sea.

So it was possible.

Su Chen smiled slightly.

Expending one’s consciousness power just to create a research bench in one’s Knowledge Sea wasn’t something that many people would be willing to do, but Su Chen reckoned that this was very much worth exploring.

No one knew how this would develop in the future. Perhaps it would be valuable, perhaps it would be worthless, or perhaps it would come back to haunt him in the future.

But Su Chen wasn’t afraid to try.

True scholar overlords were filled with an insatiable appetite for knowledge, and they loved trying new things.

Next, Su Chen began to construct beakers, triangular pyramids, etc., expending a bit of his consciousness power again.

Next, Su Chen expended a bit of his consciousness power to create raw ingredients like the Corpse Spirit Flower.

Then, he began to concoct Spirit Sobering Medicines within his Knowledge Sea.

Having made so many Spirit Sobering Medicines, Su Chen was as familiar as he could get with the process of making them.

However, making illusory items formed out of consciousness power react with each other as they did in the real world wasn’t easy. A similar chemical reaction would need to be established as well.

This time, Su Chen failed.

Even though he could make Spirit Sobering Medicines with his eyes closed, within his Knowledge Sea, nothing complied with the laws of the physical rules. Su Chen wanted to make them follow reality as closely as possible, requiring him to assign them to their corresponding laws of nature even as he made them.

Su Chen discovered that doing this was actually a study of the rules of nature themselves.

For instance, if he had formulated some theory about a certain law of nature but it failed to hold up in his Knowledge Sea, then that would mean that his theory was faulty and needed to be modified. On the other hand, if everything went smoothly, that law was confirmed to be correct.

Su Chen had found a reason to consolidate his Knowledge Sea.

Luckily, if his experiments failed, all of the items would disappear and be returned to Su Chen as consciousness energy. The only drawback was that every time he had to make the ingredients again, his head would hurt as the consciousness energy was severed from him. Regardless, this greatly increased Su Chen’s capacity to accept failure.

Su Chen began to try things out left and right.

Time flowed as he ran different scenarios through his head back and forth. The boat very quickly left Clear River City, heading west, until it arrived at a densely-forested river bank.