After he finished crossing the tiger yokai over, Baishi Shū took a look at the underground basement. Then, he was baffled. Through his Divine Eye, he saw two yokai fall to their knees and lay prostrate on the ground. One of them was the four-faced yokai while the other yokai was one that he had never seen before. It had eight arms behind its back with a grotesque face.
Tongue-tied, he was beyond speechless when he saw the two yokai performing such a submissive position.
Initially, he thought these yokai were too shameless. However, after considering the fact that the four-faced yokai was initially human, he felt it was reasonable for them to retain some of their human traits.
Putting everything aside, he was actually quite delighted to see both of them willing to raise the white flag before he did anything. This way, he could ask them as much as he wished and get the answers to his questions that the tiger yokai refused to answer.
Speaking of which, he found that there were no stairs or elevators that would lead him to the underground basement where the four-faced yokai and the eight-limbed yokai were located. The underground basement was like a near-complete enclosed area with only several ventilation ducts and circuits connected to the world outside.
Since yokai had the ability to go through physical objects, a door was not needed. They could just descend through the floor and reach the underground basement. If it were not for his Divine Eye, he would not have known that such a secretive place existed under the building.
After that, just when he crouched down and was prepared to punch through the floor, two heads secretly popped out from the ceiling above. They should be the yokai in this organization. After the fight between their boss and Baishi Shū ended, they came down to check the surroundings.
Looking at them, Baishi Shū smiled. “Since you guys couldn’t wait any longer to meet Buddha, let me send both of you on the way first. So, you can accompany your boss as well.”
With that, a warm holy light erupted forward, engulfing the two yokai whole and disintegrating them.
…
After several seconds that seemed like an eternity, the ceiling of the underground basement caved in. Rocks raced down in a series of cascades and soot filled the air. As the four-faced yokai and the eight-limbed yokai held their breaths, Baishi Shū appeared from the thick blanket of dust, holding his gilded staff and coughing.
“Cough… Before we proceed with anything, may I ask… Cough… are you willing to pay for your sin by providing me some intelligence?” Baishi Shū said, covering his mouth and nose with his hand.
It appeared to him that even though he had strengthened his mouth and nose, he still could not prevent air particles like dust and soot from going into his respiratory tracts and causing him to cough. This indicated that the Baishi Universal Deliverance was not perfect yet. It could shield him from some physical damages, but it was useless against special attacks like smoke and dust.
What’s more, prudence dictated him not to enhance his eardrums, bones, and eyeballs since they were very fragile to deal with. These organs were a human’s Achilles heel. If his opponent blinded him with something and then targeted those organs, he would be in serious trouble.
This was also the reason why he resorted to exorcise the tiger yokai so quickly the moment he saw it. Although his skin had become as tough as adamantium, he had not strengthened his bones yet. The size of the tiger yokai was massive, not to mention its long tail that could lay waste to furniture in a single sweep. What if the tiger yokai tried to overwhelm him with its immense strength? He was certain that his bones would not be able to handle such a strong impact. By then, he would be dead in no time.
‘I should improve the Baishi Universal Deliverance during my free time and find a way to settle the problem with the vulnerable spots. Also, I have to find a method to reinforce my bones…’
Reinforcing his bones was one of his top priorities. This was because, after his strength was enhanced to a certain degree, the force of a rebound alone was enough to shatter his bones. He did not want to die the moment he used his skill. It would be too embarrassing.
“Please ask away!”
“I promise I will speak by the card! I’m at your mercy!”
“Yes, yes! I’ll explain everything you want to know!”
The four-faced yokai and the eight-limbed yokai did not fall for Baishi Shu’s seemingly “frail” appearance. They remained to squat on the floor, acting like two kids being reprimanded by their teacher.
After all, even their boss, a tiger yokai who had cultivated for nearly a thousand years, stood no chance against the monk in front of them. Even the two evil spirits, who were as powerful as Hare-no-yurei and were considered the top combat forces in their organization, could not last more than a second in a confrontation with Baishi Shu. Therefore, what could they possibly have achieved? They were just two small yokai with merely several hundreds of years of experience. There was nothing they could do except to surrender if they wanted to keep their lives.
“Oh? Well then, the first question: can you tell me how long your boss has been cultivating for?” Baishi Shū thought for a moment and asked the question that bothered him the most.
The four-faced yokai quickly replied, “807 years! Seven years ago, Big Boss threw a birthday party. He even invited many yokai to celebrate the 800th year anniversary of him being a yokai!”
‘807 years? That’s it?’
Truth be told, Baishi Shū was a little befuddled. He suddenly realized that his spiritual power cultivation method might have been wrong the whole time. In the past, he seldom came across any monks or Shinto priests. Even if he did bump into one, he refrained himself from using his Divine Eye to pry them out of respect for their privacy. Then, during his first encounter with Asada Senna, after hearing her say that her clothes were blessed with spells that could block his Divine Eye, he had not believed her and had taken a peek. In the end, he only saw her two fair legs and then he stopped. He did ask the old abbot about his concern, but the old abbot could not explain it clearly as well. As such, he could only rely on himself to calculate spiritual power.
Chanting scriptures once could earn him one point of spiritual power. Then, he could earn 10 points in one day after chanting scriptures 10 times, and in a year, he would get a total of 3,650 points. This was the amount he would receive within a year before adding the spiritual power he gained through enlightenment. Of course, this was just a rough guess. After all, he could only allocate 5 hours a day to chant the scriptures as he needed to invest some of his time into learning. Things would be very different if he was someone who only cared about raising his spiritual power. If he went on to chant the scriptures for 17 or 18 hours straight, he was confident that the amount of spiritual power he gained would be tremendous. Although these things varied from person to person and were difficult to lump together under one head, they should not differ too vastly from one another.
If one could earn 3,650 points of spiritual power a year, then he or she should have roughly a million points of spiritual power after a hundred years. In the tiger yokai’s case, it should have more than 10 million points of yokai powers given that it was an 800-year-old yokai.
However, the reality was often disappointing. The truth was that although the tiger yokai was an 800-year-old yokai, it had only 500 points of yokai power.
If he was lucky enough to have multiple enlightenments, he could easily achieve that number within a week.
After doing some comparison, he found that there was a pattern to the growth of their yokai power. The four-faced yokai earned 49 points after cultivating for more than a hundred years whereas their boss, the 800-year-old tiger yokai had 536 points. After eliminating the time that they used to create trouble and other daily stuff such as eating, sleeping, and learning, the estimated growth of their yokai power should be one point annually.
‘One point of yokai power in a year?’
Baishi Shū sank into thought again. ‘I can gain one point of spiritual power after chanting the scripture once, and I can get 180 points of spiritual power for each enlightenment. Right now, I have 19,120 points of spiritual power. In other words, two years of my cultivation is equivalent to 20,000 years of theirs? So the ratio is not ten times or a hundred times, but ten thousand times?’
Baishi Shū was shocked by the number.
His mind was telling him that this was impossible. The yokai power and spiritual power were two different things, so it could not be calculated in the same way. To find out his true strength, he had to find a monk who was willing to become his subject.
Of course, even if the yokai power and spiritual power were not the same, he realized something that he had been ignoring thus far. It was only now that he found the reason why Asada Senna and his clients always called him a holy monk or Master Baishi. It was also only now that he saw the light why all his skills were more powerful than other people’s.
So, I am super strong?