Gao Leng watched the life drain from Hui’s eyes with a profound lack of satisfaction.

  “Now. Let us tidy up these loose ends.”

  He spoke the words calmly, his voice resonating with the absolute authority of a master addressing his subjects. He stood tall, his posture relaxed, wiping the blood from his hand with a slow, deliberate motion.

  Inside, he was screaming.

  Stopping the harvest to deal with Hui had been a necessity – her sabotage would have killed him within the hour had he let it continue – but the cost was catastrophic. Reforging a core was not a process meant to be paused. He had shattered his own foundation, grinding his Master’s flawed artifice into dust, and was in the midst of coalescing the raw, stolen energy into something new when he’d been forced to stand.

  Now, that dust was trying to scatter.

  A deep, sickening tremor ran through his dantian, a sensation like a cracked dam groaning under the weight of a flood. He clamped down on it with his will, forcing the unstable energies to hold their shape, but it was like trying to hold water in a sieve. Every second he spent standing here, not meditating, not guiding the flow, was a second closer to implosion.

  He needed them dead. Now.

  He shifted his gaze to the two intruders. The Sect disciple was already swaying, clutching a weeping wound across his chest. The other, the one that looked like a peasant hunter, looked battered but alert.

  Gao Leng didn’t even have the time to dwell on how it was slightly offensive that this was all that the mighty Sects could muster to oppose him. It wasn’t that he precisely wanted to fight off a half-dozen Elders, but it would have been nice to know that he warranted more than the two core formation cultivators trapped in his barrier out front and these two runts.

  Rather irritatingly, these two runts might actually pose a minor threat in his current condition. Right now, he didn’t have the stability to use techniques – not even something as simple as body reinforcement. Channelling Qi through his meridians to reinforce his body right now would be like pouring boiling oil through a straw; one slip, one surge too many, and his fragile new core would shatter before it even formed. His control right now was all but non-existent.

  So he used the only weapon that required no finesse.

  He narrowed his eyes and released the full weight of his Intent.

  It wasn’t a technique. It was simply the raw, unfiltered pressure of his existence, the spiritual mass of a cultivator a half-step into the third realm crashing down on those beneath him. It washed over the room in a suffocating, heavy tide, wasteful and crude, but effective.

  The disciple crumpled instantly. Already weakened by his wound and the corrupted air, the young man dropped to his knees with a choked gasp, his sword clattering against the stone as he struggled just to draw breath under the crushing weight.

  Gao Leng turned his gaze to the other one, expecting to see him flattened into the floorboards.

  The peasant hunter was still standing.

  It was clear the boy felt the strain, certainly, but he was standing. He looked less like a man crushed by the weight of a mountain and more like a man walking into a stiff wind.

  Gao Leng felt a flicker of genuine confusion cut through his pain. That wasn’t right. The boy wasn’t even in the second realm; it shouldn’t be possible for him to ignore the intent of a core formation cultivator, even a half-step core formation cultivator such as himself.

  Why aren’t you breaking?

  He didn’t have the bandwidth to solve the puzzle. The array beneath his feet pulsed, demanding attention. The barrier outside, besieged by the two Core Formation cultivators, shuddered under a fresh assault, draining his reserves to hold firm. The energy siphoned from the bandits in the room swirled around him, thick and chaotic, needing to be directed lest it poison him. Hui’s parasitic array had largely gone silent when he’d killed her, but its teeth still sat in the foundation lines, waiting. He could feel them. If he let his focus waver, the pattern would slip, and her little trap would start drawing from him again.

  It was almost too much. He was juggling knives in a hurricane – but he had not come this far to falter now. He could hold out for long enough to deal with these annoyances.

  Moving away from the array was a risk he couldn’t take – distance weakened his control over the fractured core, and the closer he was to the centre, the easier it was to manage the chaotic influx. So he didn’t move. Instead, he reached out with his mind, seizing a portion of the raw, corrupted energy streaming in from the dying bandits outside.

  He frowned. The flow was… thinner than it should be. The number of active threads connecting him to his thralls was dropping at an alarming rate. The two Core Formation cultivators outside were tearing through his army faster than anticipated. He didn’t have time to play games.

  He couldn’t shape the energy flowing to him from the bandits outside into a proper technique – his control was too tenuous to risk splitting his attention enough to structure a proper technique – but he didn’t need to. The corrupted Qi was inherently aggressive, a volatile slurry of pain and stolen life. He simply grabbed a mass of it and pushed, directing it in a crude, overwhelming wave toward the standing intruder.

  The boy tried to dodge, but the attack wasn’t a projectile; it was a flood. The red haze surged forward, too fast and too wide to evade, and washed over him.

  Gao Leng watched with grim satisfaction as the intruder staggered, his body seizing up as the foreign, poisonous energy invaded his system. It was a brutal method. The corrupted Qi would force its way into the boy’s meridians, clash with his natural energy, and tear him apart from the inside out.

  Gao Leng kept enough of his connection to the energy to guide it deeper, aiming for the most vulnerable point: the dantian. Rupture that, and the fight was over.

  He pushed his will into the stream, forcing it down the boy’s primary channels, driving it toward his core. He expected resistance, the frantic, chaotic flailing of a lower-realm cultivator’s defence.

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  Instead, he found a presence already there. It felt… ancient. Vast. A presence, cold and immense, coiled around the boy’s dantian like a sleeping dragon. It didn’t just block Gao Leng’s intrusion; it seized the energy he had sent, ripping control away from him with a casual, terrifying strength.

  A Pact-bearer.

  A cold spike of genuine fear pierced through his concentration. This wasn’t just a lucky peasant. This was a budding monster in human skin.

  Fortunately, even without his guidance, the corrupted Qi in the Pact-bearer’s meridians did as corrupted Qi always did – it lashed out. To the boy’s credit, he didn’t scream in pain, though maybe that was simply because he was unable to. His jaw was clamped shut, his body rigid, veins bulging as the corrupted energy, now severed from Gao Leng’s control but still rampant within him, tore through his system. He was in agony. The Pact might protect his core, but it couldn’t stop the pain of having liquid fire pumped through his veins.

  He was incapacitated. That was enough.

  Gao Leng forced his own fear down. Pact-bearer or not, the boy was distracted. Vulnerable. He needed to end this now, before that ancient presence decided to wake up properly.

  He began to gather his own Qi, painstakingly weaving it into a structure. It was agonizingly slow work, like building a house of cards in a gale. He couldn’t rush it. One slip and his own core would shatter. But he only needed a simple technique. A blade of wind. A spike of stone. Something physical to sever the boy’s head.

  Gao Leng gritted his teeth, feeling a new crack form in the shell of his coalescing core. He mentally slapped a patch of Qi over the fracture, holding it together even as he continued to build his attack. He focused, sweating with the effort, shaping the energy. Almost there.

  Then he felt it. A shift in the room’s pressure.

  He looked up. The boy was still standing, trembling violently, but he wasn’t dying. The red glow of the corrupted Qi surrounding him wasn’t tearing him apart anymore. It was… moving. Swirling. Being drawn in.

  Gao Leng stared, his concentration wavering. The boy was rotating the corrupted energy. He was cycling it through his meridians, forcing it to conform to his own rhythm.

  Impossible. That energy was poison. It was the distilled death of a hundred mortals combined with a spark of his own intent. You couldn’t cultivate with energy that wasn’t your own – even he couldn’t use the corrupted Qi in its raw form, and it was his Qi that laid the foundation for its existence!

  And yet, the boy’s aura flared. A sudden, sharp expansion of power that cracked the stone beneath his feet. The red haze around him was sucked into his skin, consumed, and replaced by a burst of dense, dark Qi.

  He broke through.

  Right there, in the middle of the fight, fueled by poison, the boy advanced a stage.

  Gao Leng almost let his technique falter in shock. What he was seeing didn’t make any sense. He didn’t know what the consequences would be for the boy’s long-term cultivation prospects – though planting a tree in poisoned soil would only ever yield a withered fruit.

  But right now, all Gao Leng cared about was that it was happening.

  Another impact struck the barrier outside. A sharp, jarring pulse ran through the foundation lines, sending a spike of pain straight through his spine. The two Core Formation cultivators battering at his defences had stopped probing. They had found something – some rhythm, some weakness – and were exploiting it mercilessly. What had once been a steady drain on his reserves was becoming a hemorrhage.

  And the bandits feeding him from outside were gone. No threads remained in the web. No lifelines. Just silence.

  He could still draw corrupted Qi from the air – his earlier rituals had saturated the entire chamber with it – but it was diffuse, thinned out, barely enough to maintain equilibrium, let alone fuel offence or stabilise his half-formed core. Minutes. That was all he had. Perhaps less.

  He tightened his grip on the technique he’d been shaping. It wavered, its form flickering like a candle in a storm, but it held. He threw it.

  The air in front of him warped as a blade of pressure, razor-thin and trembling with instability, screamed toward the Pact-bearer.

  It should have torn him in half. It should have cut cleanly through bone and flesh, ending this ridiculous distraction so Gao Leng could return to the only task that mattered.

  But the technique unravelled mid-flight.

  Just came apart. As though invisible hands had reached into its structure and pulled out the keystone.

  Gao Leng stared as the fragments of his own Qi scattered like dust motes, spiralling into the Pact-bearer instead of dispersing. The boy’s aura buckled under the influx, his whole body arching as corrupted Qi flooded into him, but he didn’t fall. Didn’t even stagger. He was straining – fiercely – but he was holding.

  No. Not just holding.

  Trying to refine it.

  Trying to use it.

  Gao Leng’s breath caught. “You dare—?”

  The Pact-bearer didn’t hear him. His eyes were half-lidded, teeth clenched, sweat dripping down his jaw as the corrupted Qi roared through his meridians like a wildfire. The floor cracked beneath him. His aura surged again, then buckled inward, condensing so sharply that the air around him rippled.

  He was forcing a breakthrough to the second realm.

  Here. Now. In the middle of a poison storm, half-blind from pain, with a shattered technique still dissolving inside him, not even a minute after breaking through once already.

  Madness. Arrogance. And yet, for a split second, Gao Leng hesitated. If the boy succeeded, he would temper his body with the corrupted Qi. He would become a living vessel of the very energy Gao Leng needed. He would be the perfect resource – a humanoid spirit herb, ripe for harvesting.

  Unfortunately, leaving him alive was an even greater risk. A Pact-bearer with talent this perverse was not something the world needed wandering around unsupervised.

  He made a decision. He couldn’t maintain the balance any longer. He needed to finish his core, stabilise it, and free up his power.

  He reached out with his mind, seizing every scrap of ambient corrupted Qi in the room. The air swirled, red mist rushing toward him like a tide. He didn’t try to refine it. He simply packed it around his core, forming a crude, brute-force shell to hold the fractures together.

  It worked. The trembling in his dantian ceased. Stability returned.

  He took a breath, ready to crush the boy—and then he froze.

  Something was wrong.

  The energy he had pulled in… it wasn’t pure corruption anymore. Woven through the red haze were threads of darkness. Cold, ancient shadows that had leeched from the boy during his breakthrough.

  Gao Leng had pulled them into his own body. Into his core.

  The presence slammed into his mind like a hammer. That ancient, vast awareness he had felt guarding the boy’s dantian was now inside him. It was cold. It was indifferent. It felt like the gaze of something that had watched stars die.

  It found one of the cracks in his core.

  He tried to clamp down. To divert. To shove the foreign element aside with the sheer volume of power he held. His will, honed by decades of struggle and ambition, crumbled before it like sand before a tide. The shadow snagged at the edge of the fracture, and for a single frozen moment, Gao Leng hoped—

  —then it tore the gap wider.

  There was a sound as the ancient presence flooded in – a single, heavy wingbeat that echoed in the silence of his soul.

  His nascent core shattered.

  As if to add insult to injury, he felt Hui’s buried teeth bite down. He had been using the immense pressure of his forming core to keep her parasitic lines dormant, suppressing them with brute force. Now, that force was gone.

  The trap sprang. The parasitic lines she had hidden in his array seized everything they could reach. The flood of tainted Qi he’d been holding surged into those channels, tearing free of his control and racing along the path she’d carved, turning his own power against him.

  He looked down at his chest, seeing the light beginning to leak through his skin. He looked up at the Pact-bearer, who was still locked in his own desperate struggle for ascension, oblivious.

  Rage, hot and pure, flooded him. He had clawed his way up from nothing. He had survived the Sect, the wilds, the hunger.

  If he couldn’t have the power, no one would. If he were to die, it would not be alone. He stopped trying to hold his core together. He pushed.

  The world turned white.