Once again, Lucian arrived before the ruined Shanghai Gold Exchange. The night was quiet, and the surrounding streets were eerily still.
’So this can be done too,’ he thought, looking down at himself.
He was currently wearing his white sect robes with his ancient sword gripped in hand.
Circulating a wisp of Qi, light flickered across his pupils. In an instant, his night vision sharpened, turning the pitch-black streets as clear and bright as broad daylight.
Lucian slipped inside the entrance of the exchange, heading toward the inner showroom where the Ice Zombie resided. This time, he used the Five Elements Harmonizing Art to mask his biological scent and footsteps, moving like a ghost without alerting a single wandering corpse.
Entering the shattered room, he saw her crouched in the corner, clutching handfuls of antique gold jewelry against her chest. She had pale marble skin, a missing lower left jaw, yellowish pus around her collarbone, wild white hair, and crimson eyes that were currently dimmed.
’I really became a lot more powerful, huh?’ Lucian thought.
The first time he had stumbled into this room, he had to run for his life, terrified of a mutant zombie that possessed the raw destructive power of an upper B-Rank explorer. He was glad that she wasn’t too keen on killing him.
Now, he was certain he could end her life in seconds. But a quick kill wasn’t what he wanted; he wanted answers.
Stepping silently behind her, Lucian used Five Elements Harmonizing Art – Metal Control.
With a sharp flick of his wrist, the heavy gold bars and necklaces scattered across the floor liquefied into flowing metal bands, wrapping around her limbs and pinning her violently against the stone wall. Lucian stepped up, inspecting her.
"Shuuu... I know you can talk, I want to just–"
– THIEF!
Her shriek detonated inside his skull.
"Are you mindless?" Lucian muttered, frowning.
He had already erected a sound barrier around the room, so there was no danger of her screams drawing the ordinary zombies outside.
Her dimmed crimson eyes flared with sudden, hateful light.
– THIEF! THIEF!
The woman shrieked again as jagged shards of blue ice condensed out of thin air. Before she could launch them, Lucian grabbed her forehead and injected a concentrated pulse of pure qi straight into her brain.
– AUGHH!
She thrashed against the metal bindings, but her thoughts remained an incoherent loop of fury and greed.
’This seems pointless,’ Lucian thought, shaking his head.
Though this zombie was capable of mental speech, she possessed no actual intellect. She was merely an empty corpse driven by a lingering, twisted obsession with gold.
Without wasting any more time, Lucian drew his sword, severing her head from her shoulders with a dull thud.
Leaving the room, he walked openly out of the building toward the riverbank.
Gathering Water Qi beneath the soles of his boots, Lucian stepped off the edge and walked directly across the surface of the river, sending tiny ripples across the water.
Midway across the channel, he felt a gaze down on him.
Having cultivated for some time and even trained by Senior Xuanling, he was now exceptionally sensitive to hostile gazes. He focused his vision several miles into the distance, scanning the shattered skyline of the financial district.
There, perched high atop the skeletal frame of a sixty-story skyscraper, sat the exact same winged creature that had decapitated him during his last run, staring straight down at him.
’No wonder I was easily located last time.’
The monster had spotted him the very second he touched the water.
This time, Lucian changed his approach. Rather than fighting his way through thousands of zombies on the streets to reach the tower, when he crossed the river, he channeled his energy into the soil: Five Elements Harmonizing Art – Earth Burrowing.
His physical body sank smoothly, vanishing completely beneath the ground.
Enveloped in the soft, protective glow of Earth Qi, Lucian moved swiftly through the subterranean soil, heading directly toward the base of the massive skyscraper.
Midway through his underground path, his brow furrowed.
Lucian stopped, standing still beneath the earth as he concentrated on himself.
’What the hell is this?’
A faint, purple mist had mysteriously condensed on his body, trying to latch onto his robes and seep into his pores.
Reacting instantly, Lucian circulated the Eternal Profound Scripture, vaporizing the foreign purple energy in a split second.
Lucian’s expression turned grim.
’Does the birdman have some sort of curse ability?’
This sticky, tracking energy was remarkably similar to the curses Senior Xuanling had warned him about during his training.
It also explained the mysterious purple energy ball that had appeared in his harvest screen last time—the winged monster had cursed him the moment it spotted him.
Things were turning out to be far more complicated.
Accelerating his pace, Lucian surfaced silently behind a ruined concrete pillar at the base of the skyscraper. He scanned the immediate plaza; dozens of ordinary zombies were wandering aimlessly in the gloom, completely unaware of his presence.
Looking up at the sheer glass wall of the tower, Lucian used the Nine Heavens Cloudstep.
His silhouette blurred.
Leaping forward, Lucian began running vertically up the sheer face of the skyscraper.
He used the shattered window frames and metal beams as light footholds, tapping against the glass and vaulting upward with effortless grace. Gravity seemed to lose all hold on him as he ascended like a cloud reaching heavens.
In less than a minute, he cleared the sixtieth floor, and landed silently on an exposed observation deck.
He looked across the ruined floor.
Seated there, overlooking the city was the winged mutant. But as Lucian took in the surrounding area, something struck him as deeply strange.
Arranged neatly in the corner was a dusty flat-screen television, a refrigerator, a couch, and several scattered household items. They were the everyday belongings of an ordinary person, though they looked like they hadn’t been touched in a long time.
Keeping his footsteps silent, Lucian drew his sword, glowing with a faint, dangerous edge of spiritual light.
"Can you talk?" Lucian asked in fluent Chinese.
If he didn’t get an intelligible answer, a life-and-death battle would start instantly.
The winged figure stiffened in shock. It hadn’t detected Lucian’s presence until he spoke.
Slowly, the creature turned its head.
Its decaying face was twisted in agony, but it said something that made Lucian shocked.
– R-Run away... Grrr!
The winged man suddenly clutched his head with both clawed hands, thrashing violently as his dim eyes fought against an encroaching crimson madness.
– Go to Beijing... Graaa! SCREEEEE!
The man let out a horrifying, grief-stricken shriek that shattered the surrounding glass.
In the next instant, the lingering human light vanished entirely. His eyes burned into a blinding, murderous scarlet, locking with feral hunger onto Lucian.
BOOM!
The concrete deck fractured under explosive pressure as Lucian and the winged mutant collided.
***
BOOM!
Lucian skidded back across the broken concrete, his boots carving two deep grooves into the floor.
’Physical strength is near a middle-level S-Rank, but his speed is far faster than that,’ Lucian analyzed calmly.
He used Qi Sense Breath, releasing hundreds of microscopic, invisible threads of qi into the air around them. The instant the mutant moved, the ambient threads distorted, feeding the trajectory of the attack directly into Lucian’s mind.
The birdman blurred, appearing inches from his throat with razor-sharp talons outstretched.
Lucian didn’t flinch. His sword flashed with piercing brilliance as he unleashed Micro-Point Piercing Light.
The mutant crossed his feathered forearms in a frantic block. The needle-point explosion of pure force slammed into the creature’s wings with concussive weight, launching the beast backward into the open night sky.
– SCREEEEE!
Lucian leaped off, cracking the floor beneath him.
He shot forward like a cannonball. Flicking his wrist, he anchored a strand of dense qi around the birdman’s left ankle, violently yanking the beast down. Using the counter-recoil, Lucian kicked off empty air with Nine Heavens Cloudstep, circling at blinding speed.
When the birdman dove at him again with bared fangs, Lucian swung his sword in a wide arc.
A searing, crimson wave of Fire erupted along the edge of the blade, detonating against the mutant’s chest and blasting him through the glass of the lower floors.
CRACK! BOOM!
’His intelligence is definitely degraded,’ Lucian thought, noting the creature’s reckless, feral patterns.
Lucian caught the window frame and pulled himself through the breach into an open-plan office.
Before he could plant his feet, the birdman flapped his wings violently. Hundreds of black, razor-sharp feathers detached from his forearms, floating in mid-air like an iron storm before hurtling toward Lucian from every angle.
"Telekinesis?!"
Lucian didn’t try to dodge. He drove the blade straight down into the floorboards with overwhelming force.
CRACK!
The concrete slab violently buckled, sending an explosive shockwave through the room that scattered the oncoming storm of feather blades.
Before the dust could clear, the birdman appeared behind him in a blur of wind. Two feathered arms clamped around Lucian’s torso, lifting him off his feet and driving him upward through the ceiling into the upper floors.
BOOM!
Lucian crashed through two floors.
Thanks to the Eternal Jade-Bone Method, his tempered skeleton easily absorbed the kinetic trauma, leaving him with little more than dull bruises. But a far more dangerous problem was developing around them.
’These upper floors will collapse.’
Lucian deduced they were currently fighting between the 45th and 50th floors. The structure under extreme stress; the top ten to fifteen floors were on the verge of shearing clean off.
Rather than trying to stabilize the structure, Lucian grinned.
Before the birdman could recover, Lucian pointed his sword at the primary weight-bearing pillars and unleashed three consecutive blasts of Micro-Point Piercing Light.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
The main concrete columns shattered into powdered dust.
A few wandering zombies on the floor were crushed instantly, reduced to paste as collateral damage.
The birdman lunged again, exchanging five rapid, brutal blows with Lucian amidst the falling debris. Both took minor scrapes, but Lucian had already laid his trap.
During the frantic exchange, he had secretly woven dozens of Qi threads around the birdman’s limbs and the fractured pillars.
Sensing the right moment, Lucian clenched his fist and pulled them all at once.
CRASH!
The birdman was violently wrenched off-balance, slamming hard into a crumbling wall.
Lucian closed the gap in a split second, driving an elemental fist infused with the Five Elements Harmonizing Art directly into the creature’s ribs.
In the very next breath—
CREAK—!
A deafening groan of twisting steel echoed through the night.
The entire top fifteen floors of the skyscraper severed completely from the main tower, tilting sideways before plunging straight toward the streets below.
The birdman snarled, pulling against the qi threads to drag Lucian down with him.
Lucian simply smiled, using Qi Sense Breath to predict the creature’s flanking path before landing a heavy left hook across his face.
WROONG!
Wind roared past them at terminal velocity as the massive block of the skyscraper fell through the dark. Concrete walls, desks, and broken glass tumbled around them like an avalanche.
The birdman moved with terrifying agility, but inside the storm of falling debris, Lucian read every single angle before the creature could even strike.
More importantly, the birdman was covered in deep gashes, while Lucian remained in peak condition—his Wood Qi was constantly circulating through his body, constantly healing him.
Just a hundred meters above the ground, Lucian spotted his exit window.
Pushing off from the edge, he leaped into the night, escaping the plummeting ruin just in time.
The birdman shrieked in fury, bursting through the dust to chase him down.
Waiting for this exact moment, Lucian spun mid-air and unleashed Micro-Point Piercing Light at maximum output.
A blinding, needle-sharp beam of pure white spiritual energy erupted from his blade. The brilliant flash temporarily blinded the creature, followed immediately by dozens of penetrating light points that punched clean holes through both of the birdman’s feathered wings.
– KRYAAAA!
The birdman’s wings shredded into tatters.
Lucian deployed Nine Heavens Cloudstep, stepping across the air like a phantom.
Behind him, the entire fifteen-story skyscraper smashed directly into the street, crushing the winged mutant along with the thousands of zombies that had gathered below.
BOOOM!