One of his purchases in the city was chains that disrupted the flow of the cultivator's spiritual energy.

In battle, the chains were useless, however, in order to neutralize the already defeated and helpless cultivator they were doing just fine.

He brought two guards inside and tied them up, after which he repeated the process of neutralization with the priest.

There was no need to install the formations, for they were already activated in this basement space. Obviously anti-detection, noise reduction and so on, this formation can be picked up later.

The bugs, of course, could not survive for five years in the abandoned lands, but when Sam got to the forest again, he certainly found a little, where could he go without them?

In addition to the dagger, the priest had a ring, and in it Sam found a tablet with a description of the technique used. After some thought, he decided to first interrogate the priest and the guards.

Sam divided the bugs into a more or less equal number among all three and waited patiently.

Soon heart-rending screams, threats, pleas began. When Sam decided it was time, he removed the bugs from the priest.

Sam - Speak.

Priest - I work for the Burh clan, I recently came to the city with the young master Raines, he appointed me to this job, everything was done on his orders.

Sam - What kind of energy is being drawn from mortals? And how to absorb it from daggers? And don't make me get bugs again.

Priest - Raines never told anyone how to consume it, he only gave me a way to take energy away from mortals with daggers as vessels. He probably didn't want anyone to know how to use energy, please believe me, I'm just a tool.

Sam - Hmm? Are you saying that you have never experimented or absorbed energy directly? Well, apparently you weren't enough.

Sam again threw bugs on him and began to interrogate others, but they knew even less, they did not know the technique either. In general, they just watched each other and the priest.

When the priest was already heavily gnawed, Sam gathered the bugs again.

Sam - Well, remember?

Priest - Yes, yes, I remember. I absorbed energy, it increases talent, regeneration, and even body strength, but the effect is temporary, the energy gradually dissipates.

- I can show you if you like, I don't know how to keep it for long, but I think the young master knows the way.

Sam watched as the priest approached the mortal and used a spell to kill him, this time the energy was absorbed into the priest himself, but there was so little of it that even Sam could not feel it at close range.

Only the dagger that had killed quite a few mortals, and which was full, barely gave Sam a familiar feeling, and even then he had to concentrate on it.

This is exactly the same energy that he took from the bearded men, they just had a lot of it in comparison.

If this technique was possessed by the Burkh clan, then it is quite possible that they received it from the undead, namely the bearded race.

While Sam didn't really care, it's probably even better for him.

After all, while this technique spreads, Sam will have a huge number of energy sources, both from the bearded and living cultivators.

Unfortunately, in order to get a technique with the way to store this energy at least temporarily, you will have to cut out the Burkh clan in the future, well, or bearded men. But what are the prospects?

He will be able to spread this technique, people will kill each other by the millions, and he, accordingly, will take away this dark energy from them, just like he did from the bearded ones.

Perhaps in the future it will be possible to infect entire planets with this technique and use them as personal farmland.

He killed more than a dozen bearded Core Formation men to feed himself, who knows how much of this energy he will need in the future?

Moreover, this energy began to interact with his spiritual network and created it own cores inside.

He also suddenly thought of something else, he approached the mortal girl.

Girl - Uncle, please let go.

Sam already heard it somewhere ...

He pierced the girl's heart with his hand and activated the mutation, the girl's eyes went out, tears, despair, pain, and even a drop of hope for salvation froze on her face.

There were almost no changes, but still the girl's skin was barely noticeably wrinkled. Plus, he seemed to have absorbed some sort of drop of spiritual energy besides dark.

Sam wasn't sure, he walked over to one of the Foundation Establishment guards and tried again. This time he felt it, he absorbed both spiritual energy and the dark energy after death of this practitioner.

This practitioner has clearly aged, as if part of the extra years of life that spiritual energy gave him had simply disappeared. Well it was not too obvious, only if you really keep attention to that.

It was obvious that he absorbed only a small part of the spiritual energy from his body, he could not absorb his sea of ​​Qi and it simply soon lost stability and dispersed.

And the mutation energy came out too little, although obviously more than from a mortal. In any case, there was nothing to compare with the bearded men.

In general, for this amplification method to work for the sake of increasing dark energy, you need a really huge number of victims, perhaps millions ...