Reborn as an Extra

Chapter 554: There are infinite possibilities! Part-4.

[Sword Intent: Precision Approach!]

First, Rio calmed his mind and focused his entire power on the tip of his flute. His aura became extremely calm as powerful sword intent flowed in his entire body and the flute.

[Ultimate Skill: Soul-Splitting: Broken Soul Shard!]

Rio took a step forward, used Lia technique and poked the evil spirit’s spine with his flute to focus all power on one single point.

The soul-splitting technique activated and split the trapped soul in the evil spirit’s body into hundreds of smaller fragments!

[Sword Sage’s Enlightenment: Soul Manipulation: Soul Shard Snatch!]

Finally, Rio used his ’soul manipulation’ skill to hold onto one of the smaller shards of the soul he had split and extracted it out of the evil spirit’s body as he immediately jumped back.

*BOOOOM!!!*

The moment Rio jumped back to make some distance, the evil spirit’s body burst apart and caused a massive explosion as miasma forcefully shattered the evil spirit’s body along with all the shards of its soul!

The explosion was so big that the river of miasma nearby was disturbed; its course was forcefully changed.

A crater the size of an entire city was carved in the ground, and the flow of miasma was disturbed, attracting the attention of hundreds of thousands of evil spirits and monstrosities from far away.

Without waiting for even a single second, Rio immediately rushed forward at full speed and escaped far away from the location of the explosion.

Rio didn’t want to get entangled with hordes of monsters and evil spirits, so he had to make a significant distance from them.

*Booom!* *Boom!*

Rio kicked the air and ran so fast that he could use the air as his foothold; with every step he created a powerful sonic boom and rushed away from the explosion site at a speed faster than a fighter jet flying at full speed.

After covering a long enough distance at full speed, Rio slowed down, once again activated full stealth mode, and started walking in a completely different direction by taking a complete 90-degree turn.

Once again, the cube pointed to a new location, and Rio started moving forward without a single worry on his face.

’I actually manage to succeed...’

With a light smirk on his face, Rio looked at his flute, and sure enough, the soul fragment he snatched from the evil spirit was still stored in it.

’As they say, if you can’t steal the products of the shop, steal the key of the shop instead for future benefits...’

Rio already knew from the very beginning that the moment he tried to use soul manipulation on the soul of the evil spirit to read its memories, miasma would forcefully shatter its soul.

And its entire body would also blow apart, leaving no clues for Rio at all, as the same had happened before.

But after seeing the previous explosion, Rio had learned from his mistake.

First of all, he noticed that many of the monsters in the area had several different souls stuffed inside them at the same time.

This gave Rio inspiration to use his soul-splitting technique in such a way that the soul of an individual gets split into several smaller but temporary shards.

Splitting souls is a very difficult task, and just doing one soul splitting can make the skill go on cooldown for a few minutes.

Rio knew this; that’s why he changed the rules.

He made it so that he would only split the soul temporarily for a few seconds by creating a very narrow split, but this technique will split the soul in many places separately at the same time.

Using this to his advantage, he created a new ’soul manipulation’ skill on the spot and snatched one of the temporarily split ’shards’ of the soul and stored it in his flute before escaping instantly.

The influence of miasma is very powerful in the spirit realm, so Rio had to use his own miasma control to delay the reaction speed of miasma so that he could take at least one shard of the soul and secure it.

’If it was possible, I would have preferred to grab the entire soul but that would make it difficult to extract it fast enough with my current soul manipulation mastery...’

Soul manipulation is very power hungry, and Rio has very low proficiency in this skill, so he could only extract a small bit of soul in that small time frame before miasma would react and shatter the soul.

One soul shard was his limit for now.

’I only managed to get my hands on one soul shard, but this one should be enough...’

The reason Rio chose to extract this particular soul shard out of them all was because the cube of possibilities was pointing to it and urging Rio’s sword intent to grab it.

So, Rio didn’t hesitate for even a single second and did exactly that.

’It all seems easy but if I wasn’t at rank S I might have gotten fatally injured in that previous explosion and its aftermath...’

Miasma was no fool; the moment it realizes that Rio tricked it, it would summon hordes of monsters to attack Rio and pursue him, so he had to settle things fast and as efficiently as possible.

[Elemental Sword Art: Soul Type: Miasmic Soul Memory Reading!]

Rio didn’t waste a single second and immediately read through the memories of the soul shard as he kept moving forward with absolute stealth on.

...

The memories inside the soul shard were mostly just unimportant things, but Rio managed to find quite a bit of relevant information from them.

First of all, the memories belonged to an Orc civilian of some long-gone age, and this particular Orc seemed to be very fond of torturing and eating its fellow Orcs a lot.

This orc was such a creep and horrible individual that his targets were all age groups and all types of orcs.

He would hunt down his fellow villagers and eat them as dinner; all the memories were mostly just him enjoying the process of cooking his fellow comrades.

He had so many recipes on how to cook orcs that even Rio felt confused about where he was even getting so many victims to experiment on.

The memories were very jumbled up, so Rio couldn’t find the time or particular year of this memory, but there was one memory that was relevant to Rio’s mission.

In this memory, the orc was out in the woods running away from the town desperately, and there were many other orcs chasing him with weapons and anger in their bloodshot eyes.

It was clear that this creepy orc was likely discovered eventually, as his crimes kept piling up and he was being chased by the people who wanted to beat the sh*t out of him.

But call it his fortune or misfortune that he ended up encountering a temporary weak node that caused him to fall into the spirit realm!

The memories after that were incomprehensible for the most part, but there was one part of it that Rio managed to understand.

There was a glimpse of a massive plateau, and there was a gigantic shadow dragon sleeping on top of the plateau.

It was so big in size that Rio was baffled just looking at it.

’What the f*ck!? A peak SS-ranker! A peak SS-rank shadow dragon!? That thing is definitely very strong!’

Once Rio finished watching this memory, the soul shard stored in his soul shattered and disappeared into nothingness, as it couldn’t remain stable for too long after being extracted from the main soul and body.

’Phew~ that was difficult...’

Rio wiped the non-existent sweat from his forehead as he finally slowed down his walking pace after the soul shard got completely destroyed.

If he wanted to, Rio could keep that soul shard for a longer time period, but he didn’t because keeping it would be like voluntarily taking a portable tracking device with you and letting Miasma know his exact real-time location.

Miasma has deep ties with this soul, and even if it’s just a small shard of it, it can be tracked; thus, Rio let it shatter and disappear once he finished reading the entirety of the memories stored inside of it.

’So, I need to find that massive plateau where that gigantic shadow dragon is... that thing definitely wasn’t Ellie... so who was that shadow dragon...’

Rio has seen Ellie’s dragon form, as he’s traveled on her back many times before when they were adventuring as a group with Liam and everyone else together.

Back then, Rio had already seen that Ellie was very different from other shadow dragons; she was incapable of using the dragon’s bloodline magic and was much weaker compared to other dragons from the dragon valley.

But the shadow dragon that Rio saw in this memory was definitely not weak.

Rio has already seen the power of ’Ashtel Rex,’ a literal walking demi-god of calamity!

So he knows what a real powerhouse looks like; just a single glimpse is enough.

’Err... things have become more dangerous now... how am I supposed to extract information from such a powerful being?...’