Ascension of the elder

Our MC slowly began to return to consciousness and began to slowly look around himself with blurry eyes which he couldn't quite seem to focus as yet while thinking to his self

'Well I'm back in the land of the living'

While trying to take stock of the new situation he found himself in and why his new body was collapsed on the ground, he was suddenly assailed by unspeakable pain, every millimetre of his new body felt as though it was simultaneously freezing and burning while he also felt as though his muscles and veins would burst at any moment.

For many people this pain would drive them mad or at the very least send them into a coma, however after suffering the attacks on his soul for an unknown period of time the MC could just casually shrug off this pain as nothing more than a mosquito bite but even though he could ignore this pain it was still rather irritating.

Thinking along these lines he turned his soul energy inwards to try and locate the source of this pain. What must be understood about soul sight is that it doesn't use conventional senses, so what is seen or rather sensed is converted into a form that the person using this sight can recognize and to a certain extent understand and due to the current soul strength of the MC he could see more and understand much more than almost anyone else human or not.

Inspecting his new body with his soul sight he could see that there was a rampant energy ripping through his body damaging organs, muscles even into his bones. This was similar to someone receiving an electric shock but with the electricity passing through with absolutely no resistance. Curious about this energy he dove deeper into the mind and body of his host to find the source. As he saw through the physical aspect of the body he passed into the spiritual landscape which exists within everyone but cannot usually be seen but only felt as it doesn't exist within our dimension but is a separate dimension within everyone but intersects with the body at some points operating as a secondary nervous system.

In our world this spiritual system is largely separated from the mundane world. Certain people like true clairvoyants, mentalists and other gifted people, have a stronger connection with their spirit realm but these are again in the far minority and are largely overshadowed by the non sensitive and charlatans.

Looking into this spiritual world he began to see a large plain which was being ravaged by high wind, rains and lightning strikes. This was representative of what was happening to his new body in that it was energy from his spiritual realm which was hurting his physical body. Looking further he could see the source of the damage. In the middle of the plain he could see a small river running through which was currently overflowing and sending out the rain, wind and lightning in random directions.

Interpreting what he was seeing, it appears as though the people of this world were able to absorb energy much like cultivators or magicians from the stories he had read previously but something was blocking this energy in his host's case causing the energy to overflow damaging his body. Looking further down the river he could see a gate blocking the way further down and the strange thing was that past this gate the world seemed to end just continuing on as a misty nothingness. Returning his attention to the gate he could see it was sturdy but the strange thing was that there were glowing chains across it blocking entry. Moving closer he exerted a little force on the gate which didn't budge. But this lack of movement seemed related to the chains themselves rather than the gates themselves. So stepping back and thinking he once again connected this to cultivation in the fantasy's of his youth were people had to break through bottlenecks to proceed, however there was something strange going on as the chains were not native to the landscape but instead appeared to be made by some form of outside intervention.

Without understanding the full situation and with no time to investigate he couldn't just attack the chains but he could do something about the river. Covering it with his soul force he started to contain the damage occurring and looking for a quick fix he came up with the idea of widening the river. So slowly he exerted more of his soul this time on the banks of the river themselves and pushed outwards. This caused more pain to the body than the damage from the overflowing but gradually the banks began to move out allowing the level of the river to drop below the top of the banks.

As he was doing this he could see the banks began to collapse but he held them together with his soul force and began to compress and strengthen them until the river was about four times wider than it was before and the banks were so compressed they appeared to be made of concrete.

Knowing that this would only be a patch and wouldn't fix the underlying problem he began to search around looking for other options. After inspecting the plain more closely which had already started to repair automatically, he saw that there were many small tributaries connected to the river but they had nothing coming out of them and instead energy was being pushed back into them. Thinking about it these channels must be something similar to nerves like the nervous system. So he began to trace these channels and found they connected to lakes that where in turn connected to small ponds which themselves had smaller channels connected to the boundary of his spiritual realm.

The thing about these channels, lakes and ponds was that they all appeared to be clogged and stagnant. Realising that this may be a solution for his current situation he directed thin needle like stream of energy up the first channel and into the first connected lakes which he had decided to call nodes and the small ponds would be called sub-nodes. Once the energy needle had reached the first node he directed more energy up the spike. Using this he enlarged the end of the needle so it looked something like an umbrella which he pulled back to the river clearing the blockage in the channel. The strange thing was as the blockage entered the river it was destroyed with nothing left. But thinking that the river is actually pure energy he didn't question it anymore as he'd seen stranger things.

Continuing this for a while the channel became completely cleared and energy from the river started freely flowing back up the channel reaching the first node. When the energy had reached the first node he began to actively direct it again so it broke up the blockages and cleared the node. He noticed that as he was clearing the node and replaced the impurities with pure energy the process became easier. This probably meant that once he reached a certain level of energy relative to the impurities in the nodes they would clear themselves. So with a new goal he exerted more energy in to the other channel and started the process of clearing them all.

Eventually all the nodes were cleared which lead to another interesting thing. The nodes pulsed almost like breathing when they were cleared, which in turn created a suction effect on the sub nodes, pulling the impurities out and destroying them with no outside direction needed.

The level of the river kept getting lower which took the pressure off but he did notice that the level started to increase once everything was cleared and the sub nodes started to fill with energy from outside and not from the river.

Using the situation with the river as a reference he choose to expand the channels, nodes and sub-nodes to give himself more time to fix the issue with the gate. Once this was complete they were all about twice as large as before and much stronger.

Finally he could take stock of the situation he found himself in and began to see if he could learn about his new life. So using his soul force he began checking through the mind of the body he took over.

"So my name is Kyle Powell".