Chương 189: Dissipate

"Well," I muttered, watching the Stage 8 Stormwing Raptor circle overhead, "time to see if this works or kills me." I took a deep breath and activated the Overclock Rune. The red sun in my inner world swelled outward like something had fed it an enormous amount of concentrated spiritual essence all at once, its surface which normally held a steady crimson glow now rippling with patterns of deeper red and brilliant orange that moved across it like the surface of something alive and agitated.

It began spinning and pulsing erratically as though caught in some internal storm, and I was almost certain I could hear something like roaring coming from it deep in the back of my awareness. My body felt like it was being reconstructed from the inside. My physical essence jumped from 33 to 50 units, which was still short of the 55 or more that a Stage 8 beast would carry, but raw numbers weren't the actual advantage here, what mattered was that the red sun's total capacity had increased significantly.

The runes drew from that capacity and right now I had more to draw from than I ever had before. I could see the blue sun's energy straining to maintain its concealment effect as the red sun's power became increasingly primal and raw making it feel almost demonic in its character, untamed. I reached outward with my qi and called vines up from the ground.

These were not the vines I normally used, the red sun's enhanced energy transformed them as they emerged and turned them into something that looked darker, their surfaces black and covered in thorns that were shaped more like fangs than thorns. The eagle tried to dodge away probably because it sensed the shift in my energy signature but the vines were already moving, they shot upward and wrapped around its wings and legs.

While its spiritual armor kept them from piercing deeply that wasn't what they needed to do, they only needed to hold it and drag it down. I burned through multiple Blink Step charges in rapid succession. To anyone watching, it probably appeared to be random teleportation around the beast but every position was chosen deliberately and every angle was calculated.

My fist wrapped in Titan's Crest and layers of strengthening techniques as it drove into the eagle's left-wing joint with enough force to send shockwaves through the air. I felt something crack under my knuckles and dark blood sprayed from the point of impact as several feathers each as long as a sword went spinning away into the darkness. The beast let out a blood-curdling scream but I was already gone, appearing behind it as my scorpion tail drove into another weak point that Azure had been tracking.

"The right shoulder junction," Azure said.

"Its defensive reinforcement is failing there." The eagle was already twisting and pulling against the vines and its beak, charged with enough spiritual energy to shear through steel, snapped at the space I had been a moment before, but I wasn't there anymore. Blink Step put me directly above it with my hand already moving through the motion of Phantom Strike.

The technique, powered by my qi and the overclocked red sun, hit with enough concentrated force to crater the ground beneath the beast from the transferred impact alone. Blood came from the eagle's mouth as several internal organs gave way under the force and its spiritual armor began failing. The eagle's counterattack became desperate, it managed to wrench one wing free of the vines and launched a barrage of air bullets toward me, dozens of them, each one capable of punching through solid stone.

I didn't even try to dodge. I activated Aegis Mark and let the hexagonal barrier absorb them while I positioned myself for the final strike. The first air bullet cracked the barrier from edge to edge. The second spread those cracks into a pattern of failing energy across the entire surface. This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

The third shattered it, the backlash rattled my teeth, but by then I was already through the eagle's guard and standing in front of its chest where the spiritual armor was weakest and most damaged. My scorpion tail struck with every drop of power I could pull from the overclocked red sun behind it, the bark-scaled tip drove through the failing defensive layers and into the beast's core. The core shattered, and as the massive body began to fall, I transferred it into my storage ring before it could hit the ground.

"That... that was..." Yan Ziheng's voice came out barely above a whisper and he was looking at me with an expression between awe and fear.

"Was that a demonic technique?" I didn't correct him, letting him keep the assumption that the red sun energy was some forbidden trump card I kept hidden was better than the alternative of explaining what it actually was. Then the Overclock Rune's time limit ran out, and everything went wrong. The transformation reversed like a door slamming shut and my physical essence dropped back to normal levels so fast it felt like my bones were trying to collapse inward.

Every muscle in my body screamed at me as the enhanced energy drained away, and I would have fallen to the ground if Yan Ziheng hadn't caught me.

"Senior Brother!" he called out.

"Are you…"

"Fine," I got out through my teeth.

"Just backlash." That was understating it, if it wasn't for my access to normal qi and the blue sun's healing energy spreading through my body to compensate, I would be unconscious right now. I checked my inner world and winced because the red sun looked sick, it had shriveled down to barely half its normal size.

"Master," Azure said, "given your current condition, would this not be the perfect moment to trigger your breakthrough to Stage 7?" It was a reasonable point and I understood the logic, but when I looked out across the battlefield, the situation had already shifted, and the breakthrough was worth more saved than spent here. Liu Chang was standing over the corpse of the Alpha Wolf with his stone-like skin gradually returning to its normal appearance as he released the Immutable Titan Scripture technique.

Despite the fact that he had just fought a Stage 9 beast, he looked barely winded, though I could see that his qi fluctuations were slightly unstable which told me the fight had pushed him closer to his limits than his posture suggested.

"Been a while since I had to use the full Immutable Titan Scripture," he said quietly, looking down at the wolf's remains. Nearby Bing Lan was cleaning her sword and smiling, which was a rare enough expression on her that it was noticeable. The Stage 9 Blade Mantis lay in pieces around her with its core split so cleanly it looked like the result of a surgical procedure rather than combat, though I caught a slight tremor in her hands that told me the effort behind that clean result had been anything but effortless.

"A decent warm-up," she whispered. Shen Xuanyu had apparently decided at some point during his fight that if his normal attacks couldn't penetrate the Ironclad Bull's armor then he would continue hitting it until something changed. Judging by the thoroughly pulverized remains of the bull, something had eventually changed, and he was breathing heavily with his jade-colored lightning techniques having clearly consumed an enormous amount of qi. Zhang Wei's fight with the Bone Gnawer had been messier than the others.

The entire area around where they had fought was covered in jade crystals, many of them stained with the beast's blood, and he looked like someone who had prevailed but would prefer not to talk about it.

"I'll save the breakthrough for when it is actually needed," I told Azure. With that, I settled into a cross-legged meditation position to begin stabilizing my condition while Yan Ziheng took up a protective stance in front of me which was both touching and amusing given how the evening had gone. But I appreciated the gesture because it was good to know that saving someone's life in this world actually produced some loyalty in return. I had just closed my eyes when something caught my attention.

The remaining lower-stage beasts were panicking, which made sense given that every one of their leaders had just been killed, but this wasn't normal fear-driven behavior, they were acting like something else was happening, and my eyes opened as the first beast dissolved into pure qi in front of me. All across the battlefield, spirit beasts both living and dead were dissipating into raw energy and simply ceasing to exist.

The fighting had effectively stopped as everyone stood watching what was happening and trying to understand it.

"What is happening?" someone called out.

"Is this a technique?"

"Hold positions!" Liu Chang ordered, though there wasn't much point to the order by then. Then I heard something that wasn't coming from any spirit beast, a cry of genuine despair. Chu Feng had fallen to his knees with his body beginning to fade in the same way the beasts were fading, and he was begging someone I couldn't see, his voice cracking around the words.

"Please," he said, "I tried my best, please…"

"Chu Feng!" Liu Chang moved toward him, but Yan Li caught his arm and held him back.

"Wait," Yan Li said tightly.

"Look at his qi signature." I could see what he meant. The energy coming off Chu Feng wasn't normal human qi anymore, it carried the same distortion that had been present in the beasts.

"Give me one more chance, please!" Chu Feng's voice echoed off the mountains and then his body continued dispersing. The qi that had been him flew in the direction of the peaks, the last thing to fade was his face with an expression of terror locked into it, and then he was gone. Nobody moved for a long moment.

"The shrine," Liu Chang said finally.

"Everything leads back to that shrine." The other leaders looked at each other and whatever passed between them in that look was enough, they reached an agreement without speaking it, because whatever answers existed for what had just happened were waiting somewhere up in those mountains.