"Your cultivation is decent," Su Min said calmly. Her gaze briefly followed the severed head as it rolled to a stop in the dirt, its eyes frozen in a permanent, wide stare of shock. "But without a proper spiritual weapon to channel it... it's meaningless."
The man had reacted with the instinctive speed of a Qi Refining cultivator, but his sword was a mere mortal blade. It was a piece of finely crafted steel utterly outclassed by true spiritual power. It hadn't mattered in the slightest. She had cleaved through both the man and his inferior weapon in one fluid, unstoppable stroke, the disparity between their weapons as vast as the gap between their strengths.
"Kill her!!"
A furious, desperate bellow erupted from the Demon Slaying Division's surviving soldiers. A group of Body Refining cultivators charged at her in a disordered mob, their faces contorted with a mix of rage and fear. Yet how could they possibly threaten her? Even a genuine, if hastily made, Qi Refining cultivator had just fallen in a single, effortless blow. These few were nothing but lambs rushing to the slaughter, their bravery born of ignorance.
Crack! Crack! Crack!
A flash of cold, precise light followed, and heads tumbled to the churned earth like overripe fruit from a shaken tree. For a long, suspended moment, the world fell into a stunned, deafening silence. Even the soldiers tasked with herding the commoners stood frozen, their minds struggling to catch up to the brutal reality before them. Just moments ago, the Division's lords had looked down upon them from a position of absolute, terrifying power. Now they lay scattered across the ground, dead as common strays, their power proven to be an illusion. Their deaths were so swift and so absolute that even the commoners who had been destined for the sacrificial fires stood stupefied. Their own terror was momentarily forgotten as they struggled to process the sudden, violent shift in their reality.
"What is the matter?" Su Min asked, a light smile touching her lips as she looked at the paralyzed crowd. Her voice cut through the silence with chilling clarity. "Are you all waiting around to be burned alive?"
Whoosh!
The next instant, the square exploded into a wave of pure, unthinking chaos. Commoners and soldiers alike broke formation and scattered in a blind panic for their lives, dipping over each other in their desperation to escape the scorched ground. No one dared to linger a second longer in the presence of such decisive power. The surviving soldiers, seeing the utter futility of any resistance, abandoned their posts and fled with the crowd. They discarded their weapons and armor, the heavy iron clattering against the stones. Their only task had been to draw Su Min out with the mountain fires. Now that she stood before them, calm and deadly, there was no point in burning anything further. In the real battle that had just begun, they would be less than cannon fodder, their lives worth less than the dirt beneath her feet.
"Still not scramming?" she asked with a dismissive glance at the small cluster of city officials. They were trembling so violently they could barely stand, and a dark puddle had already formed at the feet of one. She spared them no further thought as her focus shifted and her senses stretched out. Her gaze swept toward the horizon, where two putrid, recognizable streams of spiritual power howled toward her location like vengeful ghosts, their auras boiling with renewed fury.
In response, a brilliant, cleansing crimson light erupted around her, a protective halo of fire. The sacred Nanming Lihuo answered its mistress's call without hesitation. This Heaven and Earth treasure was the natural bane of all things wicked and corrupt, its very presence a purifying force that made the air sizzle.
"You—!"
The two cultivators who had just arrived skidded to a halt. Their faces paled from rage to shock as they took in the scene. The corpses of their comrade and his guards littered the ground, a full third of their forces annihilated in the blink of an eye before they could even intervene.
"Be careful!" one of them barked, his voice tight with sudden, sharp tension. "That woman's weapon isn't ordinary! It's a true spiritual artifact!"
He was right. Su Min's blade was a mid-grade Yellow rank flying sword, a true spiritual treasure that had been tempered and grown with her. Before it, their own conjured weapons might as well have been made of paper and twine.
Suddenly—
"Ahhh!!!"
Pained, gurgling screams tore through the air, but they didn't come from Su Min's direction. They came from within the enemy's own ranks. At the very moment they recoiled from her display of power, the two Qi Refining cultivators spun with practiced, horrifying speed. They pressed their palms directly against their own closest subordinates' backs. A sickly pale green light engulfed the hapless Body Refining soldiers, whose eyes bulged in betrayal and agony. Their souls were forcibly ripped from their bodies and drawn into the two commanders, consumed as fuel for a dark ascension.
"A secret soul harvesting technique?" Su Min asked, her eyes narrowing slightly. Her expression turned grim and cold as she watched the extraction. She had read of such despicable arts.
Before she could close the distance to intervene, the two enemies' auras surged explosively. A violent, unstable wave of power distorted the air around them, smelling of sulfur and rot. In the blink of an eye, their cultivation broke through its previous limits and was forcibly elevated to the mid-stage of Qi Refining. Their bodies grotesquely swelled; muscles bulged and skin stretched taut and shiny until they stood as monstrous, hulking figures, each nearly twice their original size. Immediately, they unleashed thick, rolling clouds of virulent green mist directly at her. The poison was so potent it killed the grass wherever it touched, turning the green blades to black slime.
"What the hell is that?" she muttered, recoiling on instinct.
She dared not confront the poisonous cloud head-on. Her Nanming Lihuo was potent, but its flame was still young and its rank was still too low to guarantee her complete protection against such a concentrated, vile toxin. Her physical body, for all its refinement, wouldn't withstand a direct contamination. She retreated swiftly, creating distance in a blur of motion. But the two now monstrous cultivators closed the gap with shocking, brutal speed. They flanked her from the left and right, cutting off her angles of escape. In their enlarged hands, dark green spiritual energy condensed into wicked, serrated, glowing scythes. They swung the blades toward her head in a deadly, perfectly coordinated pincer attack.
Their coordination was flawless, the result of a shared, twisted mind. No matter how she moved, she couldn't block both strikes at once. If she parried one, the other would surely find its mark. A single touch from those venomous weapons would flood her meridians with a corrosive, spirit-devouring poison. It might not be instantly fatal, but it would certainly cripple her.
Yet, facing this certain doom, she only allowed a faint, cold smile to touch her lips. She had been waiting for this moment, for them to commit fully to their attack and leave their defenses thin.
"Roar!!!"
With a deafening, spiritual roar that shook the very air and rattled the teeth of those still fleeing in the distance, a visible shockwave of pure mental power burst forth from her. The Tiger Bone Ring on her finger flared with a pale light, unleashing its full, soul-scorching mental assault directly into their minds.
"Ahhh!!!"
Caught completely unprepared, their focus entirely on their physical attack, the two enemies staggered as if struck by a physical maul. Their souls trembled violently within their stolen, bloated bodies. Their perfectly executed scythe strikes faltered mid-swing, the weapons themselves flickering and dissolving into insubstantial mist. Their swollen bodies wobbled unsteadily, their concentration and the delicate control over their unstable power shattered completely.
Seizing the microscopic opening, Su Min struck like a viper, her movements a study in ruthless efficiency.
With cold precision, she drove her flying sword straight through the defenses and into the heart of the closer foe. At the exact same time, her free hand shot out, palm open. She summoned a concentrated, baseball-sized blast of Nanming Lihuo that slammed into the chest of the second enemy, sending him flying backward with a concussive force. Though he wasn't dead yet, the second man howled in pure misery as the sacred flame seared his corrupted flesh. The holy fire caused his unstable energy to sizzle and pop. She ignored him for now, her focus absolute.
Her first priority was securing the kill. With a fierce, guttural roar, she slammed her body into the pinned enemy, using her momentum to drive him down. His bloated form, now nearly five meters tall, crashed to the earth with a ground-shaking thud that sent cracks through the soil. She leaned all her weight onto the sword, pinning the monstrous body to the dirt, and poured her spiritual power into the blade. This generated a torrent of Nanming Lihuo that flooded directly into his heart and core through the wound.
"Wuuu—"
The monster struggled desperately. He threw wild, powerful punches that could shatter stone, but the translucent, snarling figure of the White Tiger spirit guarding her materialized just long enough to deflect two of the blows. Its spectral form flickered with the strain. It was all the time she needed. By then, a fierce crimson glow was already pouring from the monster's eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. The internal conflagration had reached its peak.
Boom!
With a muffled internal detonation, the corrupted body exploded from within. It was consumed utterly by the sacred flame and reduced to a smoldering pile of blackened ash and splintered bone.
Su Min exhaled a light breath, a smile of genuine satisfaction playing on her lips as she felt the surge of power from her Path of Slaughter. Yet as she turned on her heel to face her final foe, that smile froze. Only a retreating back remained, growing smaller by the instant.
The surviving enemy had used the precious distraction of his comrade's violent death to flee without a second thought for honor or vengeance. In the span of a few heartbeats, he had already covered thousands of meters, a tiny, shrinking speck against the vast horizon. In the blink of an eye, he vanished beyond the distant, hazy city walls, his escape route pre-planned.
"So fast..." she could only sigh, a mix of frustration and grudging admiration coloring her tone. There's no catching up to that speed, not without preparation. The hunt was over for now.