"What if her spiritual power is strong? Her physical body is weak. If we find an opening, a single blow will be fatal," Ling Xi said, his tone devoid of doubt.
"If that's the case, then I should show my hand too," Ye Ming said. His voice was a low murmur, yet it carried an unmistakable weight of authority that caused Ling Xi to stare at him intently.
The air around Ye Ming began to vibrate, his head snapped toward a specific coordinate in the distance. He slowly closed his eyes, and a single drop of crimson blood seeped from the corner of his eye, the price for a forbidden tracking technique.
"I've found that woman's location," he stated. With a sharp nod from Ling Xi, the entire group of eleven experts shot off across the landscape, trailing like streaks of malevolent light against the horizon.
...
In a secluded valley miles away, Shen Xi face was slightly weak and pale, the result of a severe depletion of her spiritual qi after the previous skirmishes. Despite the exhaustion weighing on her limbs, she showed no outward sign of panic.
She had been using a high-level rune to conceal her aura, a method that ordinary cultivators would have found impossible to penetrate.
At this time, Shen Xi felt the sudden shift in the atmosphere. Have they discovered me?
However, the tracking method employed by Ye Ming was an outlier, allowing him to pinpoint her coordinates. Sensing the approach of several powerful auras, Shen Xi reached into her robes and pulled out a shimmering talisman.
A brilliant light instantly enveloped her body, and the space around her distorted into a kaleidoscope of refracted reality. In the blink of an eye, she vanished, reappearing tens of miles away on a jagged mountain ridge. She needed more time—time for her spiritual qi to recover.
BOOM
A second after she departed, a crimson fist of condensed energy slammed into the spot where she had been standing. The impact detonated with the force of a falling star, opening a deep, jagged hole in the earth that smoked with residual heat.
Ling Xi and Ye Ming materialized at the edge of the crater, their expressions souring as they realized they had missed.
"A rune for time teleportation?!" Ling Xi spat, exchanging a glance with Ye Ming.
They could both sense the profound spatial residue left behind. Rather than discouraging them, the display of such rare treasures only caused their desire to kill Shen Xi to intensify.
They had already crossed the point of no return; to let a woman with such resources and potential live was to invite their own future destruction.
A nascent soul cultivator could bridge miles in a single stride, and with Ye Ming's blood-tracking active, it was only a matter of time. As she fled, Shen Xi's face grew increasingly weak.
Her physical body had never been her greatest strength, and the continuous spatial jumps consumed her soul power at an extreme, punishing speed.
She could feel the "flies" behind her, their persistence like a shadow. The coldness radiating from their auras was a physical chill that threatened to freeze the blood in her veins.
Shortly after her final jump, Ye Ming, Ling Xi, and their group of eleven converged on her location, fanning out to block every possible exit.
"Why don't you run anymore?" Ling Xi said indifferently. He stepped forward, his eyes locked onto Shen Xi. "Seeing that you have finally stopped, I assume you have accepted your fate."
Shen Xi turned to face them, her posture straightening despite her fatigue. Her voice, when it came, carried a chilling tone that seemed to echo from the void itself. "Are you so eager to die?"
Ling Xi's lip curled into a snarl of annoyance. "You're about to die, and yet you're still spouting such grandiloquent words."
He found her composure intolerable. He was a man of extreme arrogance and conceit, a genius of his domain, yet in Shen Xi's eyes, he saw only a vast, terrifying indifference—as if she were looking at an ant rather than a rival.
The others felt the same sting of dismissal. They were all geniuses in their own right, yet they were being looked down upon by a woman on the verge of collapse.
The stalemate didn't last. The other nine Early nascent soul experts, led by Ye Ming and Ling Xi at the mid-nascent stage, acted in perfect unison. They knew that none of them could survive a one-on-one confrontation with her, so they discarded their pride for the sake of survival.
The air shattered. Eleven distinct streams of spiritual qi—converged into a single, cataclysmic torrent that screamed through the air toward Shen Xi. The mountain plateau beneath her feet groaned and split under the pressure, ancient stone pulverizing to dust before the blow even landed.
Shen Xi raised the Green Lotus artifact, its petals unfurling in a frantic, spiraling dance of emerald radiance. Each petal transmuted into a series of interlocking jade shields, shimmering with life-giving energy.
The impact detonated across the valley. A shockwave rippled outward, shearing forests flat for twenty miles and turning nearby rivers to instantaneous steam. At the epicentre, a crater formed where the bedrock itself flowed like molten glass.
Shen Xi stood at the center, her white robes now stained with her own blood, her breath hitching in her chest. The Life-Death Seal at her brow began to pulse with a faint, ominous light. She could unleash its full power, but she knew the consequences would be dire—not just for her enemies, but for her own existence.
"Again!" Ye Ming roared. Above them, the nine early-stage cultivators completed a complex formation, their qi weaving together into a cage of interlocking runes that sought to pin her soul in place.
Shen Xi's fingers moved in a blur of hand seals. One lotus petal became a spear of condensed vitality, while another transformed into a serpent of binding roots. She hurled them toward Ye Ming, who met her strike with a dark whirlwind of qi that seemed to swallow the light around it. The collision tore a new canyon into the earth.
Through the screaming wind and rising dust, she saw Ling Xi's blade descending toward her unguarded back, his face a mask of murderous glee. He was waiting for this opening.
…
High above the slaughter, Mu Chen stood upon a white cloud, his expression perfectly calm. It was impossible to guess what he was thinking as he watched the scene below.
Beside him, Nibi meowed, her amber eyes fixed on the struggling Shen Xi. Seeing that Mu Chen made no move to intervene, the cat didn't wait any longer. She jumped from the cloud, plummeting toward the earth.
Then the sky split.
ROAR
A roar erupted—a sound that carried the weight of an ancient realm and the unbridled fury of a being that had never known submission. The clouds above the valley tore apart as the small, golden form plummeted through the atmosphere, its fur burning like molten sunlight.
In midair, the creature unfolded.
Bones cracked with the sound of mountainside avalanches, and fur erupted into cascading waves of solar flame. Five tails, each capable of swatting aside celestial bodies, unfurled behind a colossal feline form that eclipsed the sun itself.
Nibi landed, the impact flattening what remained of the valley. Her amber eyes were pools of molten wrath as she positioned herself between Shen Xi and the encroaching death.
Her eyes, now the size of carriage wheels, fixed on the enemies with a cold assessment, measuring them as mere prey that had dared to threaten what belonged to her.
Nibi turned her massive head, seeing Shen Xi's blood-stained robes and the tremor in the hand that still gripped the Green Lotus. The great cat's pupils narrowed to razor-thin slits. The air around her grew heavy and pressurized, as if the world were holding its breath.
"What—" One of the formation cultivators faltered, his seal flickering in his hands. "What is that thing?"
"A spirit beast?" another's voice cracked, his knees shaking. "No spirit beast should have such a presence—this is a monster!"
Nibi did not answer with words. The space between her and the cultivators simply compressed as she lunged. One tail swept horizontally in a blur of golden light. The three cultivators on the left had no time to scream; the barriers they raised shattered like porcelain, and the sheer force of the impact reduced their upper bodies to a crimson mist. Blood painted the edge of the crater in a wide, fan-shaped arc.
The roar that followed vibrated in the teeth of every survivor, a layered and vast sound that demanded to know why they all had attacked Shen Xi.
"Nibi... why you?" Shen Xi stared up at the colossus. This was the same companion who usually lay lazily in her arms, demanding snacks with a soft meow. Today, she was a god of destruction, her wrath changing the very color of the heavens.
Nibi's gaze lingered on Shen Xi for a heartbeat, seeing the flickering exhaustion of her soul. The great cat's expression grew even colder. She turned back to the remaining enemies and simply moved.
The remaining six experts scattered, screaming their formations into existence. They wove chains of light and prisons of compressed air, creating a grand suppression array that fell upon Nibi like a collapsing star. Runes burned with the light of solar flares, seeking to bind her essence and force her back into her small, harmless form.
"Beast!" one of them shrieked, his voice trembling with a failed bravado. "How dare you interfere in the affairs of cultivators! You are nothing but a—"
Nibi's front paw came down with the weight of a continent. The suppression array shattered like glass. The backlash tore through the cultivators, and before they could recover, she was among them. A tail caught one by the waist and flicked him skyward where he hung suspended for a moment of weightless terror before falling directly onto a fang that impaled him through the chest.
Another tried to flee, but Nibi's breath—a cone of white-gold flame that existed between fire and pure annihilation—reduced him to drifting ash.
"Don't kill me!" a high, breaking voice cried out. One of the formation cultivators crawled backward through the blood-slick stone, dragging his useless legs.
"We don't want to die—it was Ling Xi! He brought us here! We didn't know—"
Nibi's paw descended. The plea ended in a sickening crunch of bone and stone.
Through the slaughter, Shen Xi moved. The Green Lotus spun above her head, its petals detaching to become blades of severed karma.
Ye Ming met her first, his dark whirlwind trying to consume her, but she stepped through the space where reality made itself thin. Her hand pressed against his chest. The Life-Death Seal flared with a blinding light.
Ye Ming's eyes widened as he felt his existence find itself wanting. He tried to scream, but the sound emerged as dust. His body followed, unravelling until only his dark eyes remained for a second before they, too, scattered.
Ling Xi turned to flee seeing other ten cultivators death within a short span of moments, but Nibi's tail blocked his path like a golden wall. He turned back to find Shen Xi standing where Ye Ming had been, her lotus spear aimed at his heart.
"You—" Ling Xi's voice failed. The arrogance had fled, replaced by the naked terror of a man who realized he was never the protagonist. "You can't—I'm a genius—I was meant to—"
The spear took him through the throat. Shen Xi twisted the blade, and the Life-Death Seal whispered his final dissolution.
Silence returned to the crater. The air steamed with the scent of blood. Rivers of crimson ran toward the new-made canyon, carrying fragments of bone and the tattered memories of eleven souls who had believed themselves hunters. Limbs lay scattered like kindling—a head with its eyes open, staring at clouds it would never see again.
"Nibi," Shen Xi said softly.
The cat did not answer, but one massive tail reached back gently and wrapped around Shen Xi's waist, supporting her frame against fur.
At that moment, the cloud descended. Mu Chen stood upon it, Shen Xi looked up at him and offered a tired smile. "You came."
"I did what you asked," Mu Chen said, his voice plain yet echoing with a hidden depth. "And now I will do what I should have done."
As he spoke, a cold, heavy feeling settled. His words were simple, yet they carried a weight that suggested something even more terrifying than Nibi's wrath was about to begin.