The soul came out as a spiritual form condensing from the energy inside the statue into something that had shape.
The Genesis Seed's roots wrapped around it once, briefly, and I felt the moment of contact as a faint warm pressure through my cultivation, and then the roots released it, and it floated free.
The statue screamed again, that same silent spiritual sound, and the second soul came out. Then the third, then the fourth. Each one the same, the roots finding them and drawing them through the surface and releasing them. When the fifth soul pulled free, the light in the statue's eyes went out.
The Masked One's projection had been expelled or withdrawn or destroyed, and what was left was Ke Jun's soul in its housing, staring at me from the middle of my inner world with an expression that was doing several things simultaneously.
Seeing their creator open his eyes, the Leech-kin had gone quiet for a few moments, then all of them spoke at once.
"That's him." An older woman's voice. "That's the face from the statue. That's the creator."
"He's alive." A male voice whispered. "He's actually alive."
"Are those his real eyes?" a child asked.
"He doesn't look like what the stories said." An older child said. "The stories said he was…"
I didn’t hear the rest of the conversation, I was looking at Ke Jun, and he was looking at me.
His blood-red eyes moved slowly from my face to the roots still wrapping his body, which had not fully released him yet, then back to my face. There was a long history in that look. We had a complicated relationship that included him trying to steal my body, me using the Genesis Seed to bind him for months, him providing information I needed in exchange for saving the Main Soul from the Masked One, and me ultimately deciding to drag his soul into my inner world against his explicit advice because destroying it seemed wasteful and I was, apparently, incapable of doing the sensible thing when a worse option was available.
"Get these off me," he said. His voice came out different from how I expected, less commanding, more tired.
I raised my hand toward the Genesis Seed.
The roots hesitated. The Genesis Seed had opinions about Ke Jun that it had held since the first time he had tried to use my inner world as a snack. The roots tightened slightly before they loosened, the spiritual equivalent of a very pointed look from something that could not actually produce expressions.
"I know," I said, quietly, to the Genesis Seed. "But you need to let him go."
The roots withdrew. Ke Jun's statue drifted free, and he floated there for a moment, conducting what was clearly a full inventory of his own condition before he committed to any further statements.
"That," he said finally, "is why I gave up trying to possess you or consume your inner world after our first encounter."
"Smart decision," I said.
"I did not say it was a smart decision. I said it was a decision I made." A pause. "They are occasionally the same thing."
I smiled despite myself. Even as a statue in someone else's inner world, reduced to a mortal, Ke Jun managed to sound like a person who found the concept of being wrong primarily relevant as a theoretical exercise.
"You're welcome," I said. "For not destroying your soul when you asked me to."
He was quiet for a moment.
"Yes," he said, and it cost him something to say it, I could tell. "I suppose that is the appropriate response."
That was the closest thing to gratitude I expected to get from him, so I took it and moved on.
The five souls were still floating where the Genesis Seed's roots had deposited them, and they had been watching this exchange with varying degrees of wariness. I turned to look at them properly for the first time.
Three men and two women.
One of the men was old, white-haired, and still in his posture even as a soul. The second was middle-aged, heavyset, his expression cycling between suspicion and calculation. The third appeared as a boy of around ten, either he was a heavenly prodigy, or he was one of them cultivators who preferred a youthful look even as a soul. That was a preference that I never really understood, but I wasn’t one to judge.
One of the women was elderly and tired looking, she was looking around my inner world as though she had been moved from one prison to another.
The second woman was younger, her form clear and sharp, her hands were at her sides but not relaxed. A jade beauty in her twenties by appearance, she stared at me with a defiant look in her eyes. This one was clearly a fighter. Whatever the Masked One had done to them, it clearly hadn’t been enough to kill her rebellious spirit.
But it wasn’t their appearance or their personalities that drew my attention.
It was the aura rolling off of them – Stellar Realm.
Somehow, I had ended up with five Stellar Realm souls in my inner world.
The jade beauty was the one who spoke.
"You saved us."
She wasn’t asking me a question or showing gratitude either.
This was the statement of someone establishing a fact before deciding what to do with it.
"The tree did most of it," I admitted.
Her eyes moved to the Genesis Seed behind me, then back to me. "It acts on your instruction."
"More or less," I said, which was accurate.
The Genesis Seed acted on its own priorities that happened to intersect with mine often enough to be useful, and when they didn't intersect, I mostly tried to not stand in its way.
I looked at the five of them, this accidental collection of Stellar Realm souls that I had not planned for and had no immediate solution to, and I ran the problem honestly.
They were not physically present. They were souls without bodies, which meant the standard options available to a living cultivator were not available to them. They could not cultivate in any traditional sense. They could not eat or sleep or move through the physical world.
What they could do was exist, and what they could tell me, if I approached this correctly, was information, because people who had been collected by the Masked One had survived things that most cultivators never encountered, and survival produced knowledge.
As much as I hated the Masked One’s character and actions, he had high standards when it came to adding souls into his collection. And for one reason or another, he had carefully selected these five.
The boy-shaped soul was looking at the bees.
The elderly woman had found the Blood Moon and was studying it as if she recognised what it was, which suggested she knew blood cultivation, which meant she had either practised it or encountered it, and either was interesting.
The old man was watching the Genesis Seed like he was worried it would turn on him any second. There was something about the look in his eyes that told me that he recognised the Genesis Seed for what it was.
As for the middle-aged man, he had not moved his eyes from me since I'd turned around.
It was clear that he understood that their fates were in my hand.
This was not a situation I ever thought I would be in.
It had to be related to karma.
Sect Master Yuan operated by a Dao of Karma, he had told me that the karma surrounding me after saving an entire realm had been exceptional, and that karma had real effects in a cultivation world.
Karma attracted fortune. It created connections. It occasionally arranged situations that could not have been arranged through deliberate effort like a ridiculous situation where five Stellar Realm souls were extracted from a collector of souls, and currently in my inner world with nowhere else to go.
It wasn’t even like I had planned any of this.
In fact, I didn’t even prepare for a tribulation.
The Stellar Realm tribulation had arrived because Master Yuan’s pendant was unable to hide my cultivation from the Heavens any longer. When the tribulation descended, I thought I would be forced to destroy an entire world, a civilisation of innocent souls. Instead, I had found a loophole and not only saved all of them but also stolen a Blood Moon.
And that wasn’t the end of it.
Because it was at the exact moment that the Genesis Seed was freed, that the Masked One had entered my inner world entirely through his own agency and had lost five of his collection in seconds to an angry eldritch tree.
So yeah, the only explanation I had for any of this was karma.
Karma really was overpowered in a cultivation world.
But I could learn more about karma from the Sect Master later.
Right now, there was a lot to do.
I had dozens of Leech-Kin, a Leviathan, an inner world spirit, five Stellar Realm souls, and the main soul of Ke Jun waiting for my next move. And after I dealt with them, I needed to figure out what to do with the Blood Moon.
“Welcome to your new home, everyone,” I smiled. “My name is Ke Yin.”