Far from the carnage, in the absolute stillness of the heights, Shen Tian remained anchored to the thick branch of the iron pine. His eyes held steady on the clearing below, his posture fused with the bark, his breath reduced to the faint rhythm of dust drifting through the air. Below, the clearing had become a slaughterhouse of shadows and hot red blood, a chaos of dimensional mud and lizard viscera that impregnated the forest with an unbearable stench.
The battle reached its breaking point ten agonizing minutes later.
The Zhao Clan elders, figures of respect in Dust Border City, were now bloodied shells. One of them had lost half his face to the splash of dark acid from a Void Being’s whip; the other gasped on one knee, using his chipped saber as a cane while his left arm hung inert, corroded to the bone by the claws of the shadow lizards. The mysterious hooded figure had exhausted his talismans, and his Qi reserve flickered weakly, struggling to hold a defensive barrier that cracked under the incessant assault of the horde.
Only Lin Xiao’s envoy maintained the offensive, but his aristocratic arrogance had disappeared. He was surrounded by a dozen dark replicas of the Thousand-Colored Lizards and cornered by three simultaneous whips from the Void Being. The envoy knew that the war of attrition would kill them all. If he wanted the Sword Elder’s inheritance, he had to bet everything on a single move.
Shen Tian recognized the change in the energy flow. The envoy’s freezing Qi receded from his sword and converged on his core. It was the unnatural calm that preceded the total release of a cultivator’s reserves.
"Get back!" the envoy roared, his voice shattering the ice crystal forming on his own lips.
SHING!
He raised his long sword, pointing it directly at the night sky. A shockwave of frost exploded from his position. The air itself froze. Hundreds of bluish ice stalactites formed from nothing, suspended in the gorge’s gravity, pointing toward the ground.
CRACKLE... CRACKLE...
With a horizontal slash that consumed almost the entirety of his Qi, the envoy brought down the storm.
FWOOSH! CRASH! SHATTER!
The impact was devastating. The rain of ice swords massacred the shadow lizards, immobilizing them in frost coffins that exploded into black dust. The Void Being’s whips were frozen solid. The dimensional anomaly roared, its liquid mass paralyzed for a fraction of a second under the overwhelming weight of the Lin Clan’s martial art. At the center of its chest, the dark crystal heart pulsed, exposed and defenseless.
RRRAAAAGH!
But the massive attack had a price. The envoy fell to one knee, his meridians empty and his muscles torn by the violent backlash of the technique. His guard dropped for a microsecond.
That was the moment. A veteran assassin strikes at the instant the enemy exhales, when his mind registers that the worst has passed.
"Careful," Xue Huang warned in his mind. "That envoy... his Qi is strange. Something ancient stirs inside him, hidden even from my sight."
"I know," Shen Tian responded. "But right now, the Void Being’s crystal is what matters."
Shen Tian disappeared from the branch.
WHOOSH!
He activated the Flickering Shadow Steps, pushing the absolute limit of Level 7 Qi Condensation. His cloned body became an imperceptible blur, sliding through the cold air, dodging the frost and debris with mathematical precision. He crossed the fifty meters separating him from the center of the clearing, ignoring the wounded cultivators. He appeared directly above the Void Being’s frozen shoulder.
The Immortal Dagger of the Blood Era remained sealed in his sleeve. Its power awaited another day. This strike called for his needles alone.
He condensed all his Qi into his fingertips. Qi Needle Burst. Two transparent, compressed projectiles of pure spiritual force shot out.
SHING! SHING!
He aimed at the microscopic cracks the envoy’s ice had already opened on the crystal’s surface. The needles sank into those cracks, expanding them, fracturing the structure from within.
CRACK! CRACK! CRACK!
The crystal exploded.
SKREEEEE!
A sharp shriek, a sound the human ear could barely register, ruptured the eardrums of everyone present. The creature collapsed upon itself. Gravity collapsed, the mud collapsed, the dimensional nightmare collapsed, leaving only a puddle of inert tar that dissolved its shadow lizards in an instant.
SPLAT!
A translucent blue screen blocked Shen Tian’s peripheral vision, projecting text onto his retina.
[Hidden Mission Completed: Execution of a Minor Anomaly (Void Being).]
[Calculating impact... Reward processed.]
[Extracting residual energy from the dimensional core...]
[Reward: +500 Suppression Points.]
[Current balance: 500 Suppression Points.]
Shen Tian celebrated by pivoting immediately into the next action. The pulse of combat was still alive.
"System. Restore Immortal Dagger (partial). Cost: 300 points." he ordered mentally.
"[Partial restoration of the Immortal Dagger of the Blood Era initiated.]"
"[Cost: 300 Suppression Points.]"
"[Restoration completed at 40%. The edge can cut weak dimensional defenses. The core remains sealed.]"
"[Remaining balance: 200 Suppression Points.]"
The dagger in his sleeve vibrated. The outer rust cracked and fell in scales, revealing a black metal that absorbed light. A partial restoration, and enough.
"System. Advance to Level 8. Cost: 200 points."
"[Level advance initiated.]"
"[Cost: 200 Suppression Points.]"
"[Clone’s cultivation base updated: Qi Condensation — Level 8.]"
"[Eighth meridian opened. The Tenth Meridian remains sealed.]"
"[Remaining balance: 0 Suppression Points.]"
VWOOOM!
A cascade of pure energy flooded Shen Tian’s veins. The wear on the meridians forced by the Lotus Feedback Method disappeared, replaced by the overflowing vitality of a new level. The eighth meridian opened wide, while the Tenth remained sealed, a closed door at the bottom of his dantian.
Taking advantage of the catatonic stupor of the Zhao Clan elders, who watched in disbelief as a vagabond with a straw hat had just stolen victory from their hands, Shen Tian spun on his heels. He left the elders to their fate. Their wounds robbed them of any strength to interfere.
His target was the leader.
He channeled the murderous intent accumulated over one hundred and thirty-five years of horror in the Blood Demon Valley. All his vital force, all the newly acquired power, converged in a descending slash of the Immortal Dagger, aiming directly at the base of Lin Xiao’s envoy’s nape. The man was still on his knees, his Qi apparently exhausted. A perfect, lethal, inescapable blow. The blow that would define the appropriation of the inheritance map.
CLANG!
A circular shockwave burst the earth beneath his feet, raising a crater of stone dust and black tar. The impact resonated like the clash of two mountains of solid iron. Shen Tian’s wrist creaked violently, the bones of his forearm screaming under a physical resistance that defied any logic of Qi Condensation.
Two scant centimeters from the envoy’s carotid artery, the blade of the Immortal Dagger had been stopped.
A Qi shield? A defensive talisman? The answer arrived as something worse. Two bare fingers pinched the lethal blade, trapping it between the index and the middle finger of a raised left hand. The envoy’s spiritual perception covered the entire clearing. He had tracked Shen Tian from the moment the clone left its hiding place. A thin layer of grayish, suffocating aura enveloped his fingers, neutralizing the piercing power of the Blood Era weapon.
"I am surprised you lasted so long hidden, child," the envoy said.
That voice belonged to the envoy’s throat, yet it carried an ancient, extremely raspy tone, like two millstones grinding dry bones. It vibrated with a frequency that froze the blood in the veins.
A turbid, twisted smile slowly drew itself on the man’s face, stretching the skin at an unnatural angle. The gray aura exploded outward, enveloping his body in a whirlwind of ash and death.
The illusion shattered. The rich silk tunics embroidered with the Lin Clan’s colors disintegrated like paper exposed to fire, falling in pieces to reveal a horrifying armor of bone scales and dark funerary garments, ragged and worn by the passage of centuries underground. The man’s skin lost all color, acquiring a cadaverous tone, and his pupils retracted until they became black pins surrounded by yellowish sclerae.
The hooded figure, who remained kneeling in the mud, looked up in horror. His eyes, visible beneath the hood, reflected a fear that dwarfed anything the battle against the Void Being had provoked. He retreated crawling, completely forgetting his exhaustion, as if a thousand dimensional anomalies would have been easier to face than the thing that had just revealed itself.
The spiritual pressure emanating from his figure abandoned the realm of a simple Level 9 Qi Condensation. It crushed the air of the gorge with the physical weight of a siege hammer. Shen Tian was thrown backward, forced to drive the Immortal Dagger into the stone and plant his knee on the ground to prevent the pure gravitational force of the aura from shattering the bones of his legs.
BOOM!
In the vastness of his sea of consciousness, Xue Huang’s calculating silence was replaced by genuine stupefaction and an irrational panic she had never displayed before.
"Impossible!" the Blood Empress hissed, her spiritual figure trembling within the mental space. "The Concealment Art of my era is almost absolute. Only an expert of the Void Refinement Realm or higher could have sensed you under that technique. His Qi is ancient. Now I understand. His power carries the signature of another age."
The energy signature of the creature dressed in funerary garments continued to spike, shattering the barriers of common sense.
Qi Condensation.
Foundation Establishment.
Golden Core.
VWOOOM! VWOOOM! VWOOOM!
The pressure escalated without mercy, fracturing the gorge’s rocks and suffocating the surrounding vegetation, breaking the limits of what any frontier escort should possess. Whoever this subject was, he had been playing with the Lin Clan, with the Demon Queen at the Black Market, and with Shen Tian himself from the beginning. A piece on the board had just revealed itself as the player.
Shen Tian looked up from beneath the brim of his hat, spitting a clot of blood, as he asked himself the only logical question before the end.
Who the hell is this guy?