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[Absolute Pickpocket (Sleight of Hand) has been successfully activated! (x4)]

{Host Steals}

...

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[Reward(s): 3,100,650 Thief Points]

[Thievery Rank(s): Middle-Level Thievery(s): 41/10,000]

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[Thievery Rank/Count Section]

-Low-level Thievery(s): 101/25,000

-Middle-level Thievery(s): 41/15,000

-High-level Thievery(s): 43/5,000

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[Thief Point(s): 16,894,578,600]

(AN: Thief Points also added from Zaria thieveries in Black Hermit City!)

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Ace paid no attention to the system’s notification after he successfully pickpocketed those Corpse Cultivators storage rings. 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝙚𝔀𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝓵.𝙘𝒐𝒎

Moreover, he needed to act fast while those four Corpse Cultivators still hadn’t realized the true depth of troubles they were in.

At that exact moment, the Abyssal Demon with bat wings also noticed his storage ring was missing, and the imposing thief symbol was happening to be surfacing.

Furthermore, his expression was immediately noticed by the other three Corpse Cultivators, who found it strange as they followed where their companion’s wide-open eyes were focused.

"W-wha...!!!"

He was about to exclaim when suddenly, a pitch-black streak filled with terrifying power and sharpness brushed past his neck like a soft feather yet far more lethal than anything he had ever experienced or witnessed in his long life.

But that black streak wasn’t just stopped there as it maneuvered in the air like a beautiful arc, as if having a mind of its own, and swiftly flickered towards the next Corpse Cultivator standing closest to the Abyssal Demon with bat wings.

The remaining three Abyssal Guardians didn’t even get the chance to react before the black streak flashed past their necks like a needle going through silk, and they were still in the midst of finding out what had happened with their companion’s storage ring.

The very next moment, the murky light in their cadaver eyes extinguished without any traces, and their corpse vessels regained their previous statues of being nothing but dead bodies, for their very souls had been instantly killed without them even realizing it.

’Heaven Sundering Sword: Sword of Mortal Heart!’ Ace’s lightning-fast hand came to a halt as if nothing had happened.

But there was a vaguely fainting, blurry, long, dark blue sword with a black hilt in hand; it was exactly Avos, who had become his Life Sword after his Sword Heart evolved!

This time, Ace directly killed, or more accurately, assassinated the four Corpse Cultivators by using the Heaven Sundering Sword powered by his Primordial Qi.

Furthermore, just like his Darkness Force, the Primordial Qi also seemed to have a profound suppression effect on the Undead Soul, and those four Abyssal Guardians weren’t even able to resist for a second.

Moreover, Ace’s control over his laws has reached new heights, and that’s why he was directly able to attack the Corpse Cultivators’ Undead Souls, their only weakness with sword law.

As for why he risked killing four Corpse Cultivators of the Corpse Clan, it was because the Corpse Clan had no way of finding out that their Clan members met an uncanny death.

They didn’t have life plates, life talismans, or life lamps that large, powerful sects normally used to instantly reveal the deaths of their cultivators.

But it doesn’t mean the Corpse Clan didn’t care about their clan members. It was the opposite, actually, as the Corpse Clan has even more advanced methods. They use their Undead Souls to send distress signals or simply abandon their corpse vessels, allowing their Undead Souls to escape into deep space.

However, Ace had already taken it into account before he attacked them, and the quickest way to safely kill a Corpse Cultivator was to be lightning fast. But it was impossible normally, as sneaking on a Corpse Cultivator was very difficult because of their special instincts.

If it were even a Quasi-Abyssal Grand Lord instead of Ace, these four Abyssal Guardians would’ve still sensed the terrifying danger and fled without hesitation.

At that moment, Ace quickly stowed the five corpse vessels before activating the new mirror persona and transforming into the tall, lean Corpse Cultivator with translucent skin.

However, the moment Ace activated the new mirror persona, his body morphed, but not in the way he expected.

Instead of his body reshaping into the tall, lean Corpse Cultivator’s corpse vessel, Ace felt his physical presence loosen, as if flesh itself were suddenly irrelevant. A strange lightness overtook him, followed by an eerie sense of detachment.

His vision inverted, and the world dulled before his body was gone!

Ace’s consciousness plunged inward, and when it stabilized, he realized with a jolt that he was no longer standing on the stone floor, but he was floating and not as flesh and bone but as a peculiar soul, like a ghost!

"...What?" Ace muttered, but the sound did not travel through the air. It echoed directly through his own existence before he looked down, and there was really no body.

In its place hovered a distorted, translucent humanoid silhouette, vaguely matching the Corpse Cultivator’s outline. It was composed of dim gray-black soul-light, threaded through with corpse-veins that pulsed faintly like dead arteries.

The edges of his form wavered constantly, as if existence itself struggled to decide whether he was real. Most importantly, Ace felt terrifyingly cold, and that was the only sensation he felt.

However, this cold was not physical, but a conceptual chill, one that seeped into thought and instinct alike. It was the absence of warmth, of vitality, of all things living.

If Ace still wasn’t feeling his Primordial Foundation and Universal Physique as well as full control over this persona that he could disarm any moment, he would’ve thought he was really turned into an Undead Soul!

Although this helped him stabilize his mind, it still felt distant, muffled behind layers of death-aligned laws, a completely profound and eerie feeling unlike anything he had ever experienced.

Ace frowned a little because his emotions felt dulled or more like restrained, and a faint aggression lingered close to the surface. So, there was a faint hunger, not for Qi, but for life essence, for movement, warmth, and beating hearts. It wasn’t overwhelming, but it was undeniably there.

Ace had only ’learned’ about this sort of feeling from the Corpse Cultivator memoirs, but feeling it personally was something else, and it was all thanks to the Mirror Persona, which was too real for comfort.

"So, this is an Undead Soul..." Ace murmured internally.

At that moment, he also realized what truly happened just now and why he had turned into an Undead Soul instead of turning into a Corpse Vessel.

The Grand Mirror Phantom Scripture had worked perfectly. It had captured the soul, then mirrored it, and had recreated Ace as the mirrored existence of that soul.

The problem was never the scripture but was his assumption because corpse Cultivators were not defined by their bodies; instead, their true existence lay in their Undead Souls.

The corpse vessel was nothing more than equipment!