"Half a year, huh? I guess we don't have much time then," Bai Jingshen said. "Come with me, you two."
Bai Jingshen walked outside with Pearl and Alex following behind him. As they walked through the hallway, Alex checked Pearl's cultivation base. He was very much close to entering the Saint Foundation realm.
Pearl had his cultivation base slowed down due to having to spend a decade and a half in a place without any cultivation potential. Due to the evolution, his cultivation base had shot up, but he still had to continue from then on.
'I wonder how fast his cultivation speed will be from now on,' Alex wondered.
There were a few other tests he wanted to do with Pearl as soon as possible, with the main one being if Pearl cultivating still forced him to body cultivate or not. The obvious answer was no, but he still wanted to test it before being certain.
"Here we are," Bai Jingshen said, arriving in front of a large door with a formation carved onto it. "You recognize this door, don't you?"
Alex felt awkward at the question and gave a small smile instead.
They had arrived in front of the treasury, the very same one Alex had found Godslayer in, and had proceeded to destroy his way through the palace that very nearly led to Ren Xiao's death.
"You wanna try opening it?" Bai Jingshen asked.
Alex quickly shook his head.
The white tiger laughed and placed his palm on the formation before pouring Qi onto the seal. "You wouldn't have been able to open it even if you wanted to," he said. "This formation requires the person to have a very strong concentration of White Tiger's bloodline in their system."
"You made it through last time, but this time around, it would be impossible for you," Bai Jingshen said.
Alex nodded. His Qi was capable of running any formation and script regardless of whether or not he was pouring his Qi as it was required. While others would need to use a token of some sort, he could activate a formation or script without it.
However, when it came to formations with seals on them that asked for a specific thing, he couldn't do anything even if he could activate it.
That was why despite activating the treasury door back in his own palace, he still needed the crown's help to open it.
After Bai Jingshen, Alex and Pearl walked in.
The last time Alex had come, there were only two swords in this place, of which he had taken one. However, this time around, the treasury was completely filled up with many different items and objects.
"Woah!" Alex said, quite surprised at the stuff inside the treasury. He had been inside his own treasury, but it was nowhere near as good as this.
"There is so much stuff," he couldn't help but say.
"I brought a lot of things back with me when I was gone," Bai Jingshen said. "Most of these things are for the others. There's nothing here that I would truly count as… incredible."
"Ah, is that so," Alex couldn't help but say.
"Oh, wait," Bai Jingshen said and looked around. "There is one thing that I brought back for Pearl. I forgot I kept it here."
He reached for some corner and pulled out a box. He opened the wooden box and pulled out something metallic from inside of it.
It was a sort of bracelet, which he tossed toward Pearl.
Pearl caught it and looked at it curiously.
Alex looked at it too. At first, he couldn't see what was so good about this bracelet. Was it a defensive item maybe that Pearl was going to use?
As he thought that, his eyes caught on something blue or violet. "Hmm?" he looked closely at the small blue crystal. He felt like he knew what that was, that crystal.
"No way!" he shouted the moment he realized. "Is that… a space stone?"
"We just call it a storage artifact, but yes that stone in it is the Space stone," Bai Jingshen said.
Alex looked at the ring on his own finger. "They are of separate color, huh?" he asked. "I remember the senior saying the color was a result of corruption or something. Is the color random?"
"The color isn't random," Bai Jingshen said. "It's usually a good measure of how much of the space in the space stone you've managed to turn into usable space in the ring."
"If I'm not wrong, it starts off with colorless or white where it is full of space aura and no space. Then it goes yellow, green, blue, purple, and red. There are some people that say black is the highest grade one, but I've never seen one," Bai Jingshen said.
"So, blue stones are average huh?" Alex said. "Senior said even red ones weren't very good though."
"Honestly, Space stones are a mystery to me. I only know it has space energy which can be turned to normal space," Bai Jingshen said and helped Pearl wear the bracelet.
"You'll have to spend your days refining it okay? I took it from the treasury without asking, so I don't know who it belonged to before. You will have to take care," he told Pearl.
Pearl nodded and looked at the bracelet on his arm with fascination. What was even more fascinating was that the bracelet slowly changed color, turning transparent until it looked like the white fur on Pearl's arm.
"Alright, now where is it?" Bai Jingshen looked around again and found the sword that he had been looking for. "Come."
Alex went along with him and arrived in front of a small pedestal that was kept in the corner of the room. On it was a thin and long sword with a red handle, silver crossguard, and a fully black blade.
The blade itself, now that Alex was looking at it, was made up of not metal, but rather some form of crystalline rock. He had never really noticed that before, but now he did.
On the base of the blade itself was a small indentation made by something that was carved on it.
The Azure Imperium's Insignia.
This was the sword that had been in Pearl's mother's body when they had somehow arrived on the Western Continent. This was the sword that Alex had pulled from her body to let her die. This was the sword that let them know who exactly their enemy was.
"It's time for you to find who the owner of the sword was," Bai Jingshen said. He turned toward Pearl. "It's time for you to find who killed your mother."
Pearl was surprised but he quickly got serious and nodded. "I will definitely find them," he said.
Bai Jingshen grabbed the sword and tossed it at Alex.
Alex caught the sword reactively, not letting it fall to the ground. As soon as he grabbed it, he felt a force on him that came from the half-formed spirit in the sword, not unlike his own Midnight.
Alex poured some of his Qi into the sword to calm it down fully. It took a while, but Alex got it to stop struggling so much.
The moment the sword stopped struggling, Alex noticed something else about the sword.
"Space aura?"
