The eastern mountains loomed dark even against the morning sky filled with large trees as I made my way through the forest, cloaking deactivated, my cultivation deliberately suppressed to the middle stage of qi refining.
He said it was somewhat far from where he fell. I reached the location and looked around. My spiritual sense extended outward, searching for any signs of Zhang Wuhen's presence.
But there was no trace of him. Not a footprint. Not a broken branch. Not a single sign that a man bleeding from a golden core talisman had come this way at all.
"Lord," I called out. "Lord, where are you?"
Silence.
"Lord."
"You idiot." The voice came from directly behind me, sharp and angry. "Why are you shouting?"
I turned. There were large boulders behind me, as wide as a small house, rising like a hill from the forest floor. As I looked at it a section of it simply opened near one of the boulders, and Zhang Wuhen stepped out.
A concealment array built into these rocks. Clever. He had managed to do that even while being wounded.
He was shirtless. His upper body was covered in drying blood and wounds that were closing slowly, knitting shut at the pace of a man whose cultivation was burning everything it had just to keep him alive.
The remnants of his armour lay somewhere inside, I suspected. It had saved him from the worst of the talisman. Barely.
"Lord Overseer?" I called out, injecting nervousness into my voice.
"Get in here!" Zhang Wuhen's voice was rough with pain and impatience.
I stepped forward into the darkness where he was,
The interior was larger than I'd expected, carved out naturally over centuries by water erosion. And there, near the back,
A makeshift bed had been cleaved from a large flat rock. Against one wall lay his tattered armour, holes punched through it in a dozen places, the metal edges scorched and warped.
That was what had absorbed the golden core strike. That, and whatever was left of the man underneath it.
He turned to face me, "You!" Zhang Wuhen's voice was rough, pained, but still carried authority. "Did you bring the blood?"
I reached into my storage and took out three bottles of blood I had taken from the inventory earlier before coming here. "We were only able to gather this much, lord."
He limped toward me, reaching out eagerly. "Give them here. Quickly!"
This was it. The moment of truth.
As his hand extended toward the bottles, I struck.
My soul sword materialized instantly, shooting forward from my mind space like an invisible arrow. It pierced through the air between us and slammed directly into Zhang Wuhen's forehead, entering his consciousness without any physical resistance.
His eyes went wide with shock and immediate, overwhelming pain. The soul attack bypassed all his physical defenses, striking directly at his most vulnerable point.
"Ahhhhh!" He clutched his head with both hands, stumbling backward. "What... what is this?!"
I didn't give him time to recover. I stored the bottles into the inventory instantly and channelled spiritual energy into my fist, gathering every ounce of power I could muster.
My Qi Refining 7th Layer cultivation which comparable to foundation establishment mid-stage surged through my meridians, concentrating high amounts of spiritual energy in my knuckles.
This single strike had to count.
I closed the distance in an instant and drove my fist into his lower abdomen, right where his dantian was located with everything I had. The punch connected with brutal precision, my spiritual energy exploding inward at the point of impact.
Crack!
The sound it made was not pleasant.
Zhang Wuhen's eyes bulged, his mouth opening in a soundless scream as he felt his cultivation base rupture from within.
The force of my punch lifted him off his feet, sending him flying backward. He crashed into the stone wall with bone-breaking force, his body embedding several feet into the rock.
I immediately released threads of spiritual energy, wrapping them around his limbs before he became permanently embedded and dies.
Like invisible ropes, they pulled him free from the wall and slammed him down onto the cave floor.
He landed hard, groaning in agony. One hand still clutched his head where the soul attack had struck. The other moved instinctively to his abdomen, where his shattered dantian throbbed with indescribable pain.
I walked over calmly and crouched beside him, checking his condition with my spiritual sense. Yes, the dantian was completely destroyed. Fragments of his cultivation base were already dissipating into nothingness.
Zhang Wuhen, peak Foundation Establishment demon cultivator, was now just a mortal man with a stronger-than-normal body.
"You..." he gasped clutching his head, blood trickling from his mouth. "Who... what are you?"
I didn't answer. Instead, I took out a healing pill from my storage pouch and forced it into his mouth, making him swallow. His body absorbed the medicine reluctantly, enough to stabilize him and prevent immediate death from shock.
Then I sealed his acupoints with precise strikes of spiritual energy.
I closed his vocal acupoints too with a thread of spiritual energy and he went silent, his mouth slightly opening and closing with no sound coming out, his body began registering the agony of what had just been taken from him.
A cultivator's dantian was not just a reservoir of power. It was identity. Purpose. Years and decades of effort crystallized into something that could be shattered in a single second by someone stronger.
I had seen men lose their minds from it. I had seen men choose death over living past it.
He began to cry.
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ASCENSION FARMING SYSTEM : FARM TO BECOME IMMORTAL CULTIVATOR
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