Chương 72: Chapter 71 — Eat, Sleep, Crush, Repeat

His only choices were between death via powder, Wong, or heavenly tribulation. If Wong could sense the compounded strength of all the incoming strikes, she would let him get hit in order to eliminate his soul and cause a permanent death. If she couldn't, which Lin Che doubted was the case, she would kill him anyway. This meant that his only real option was to inflict his own death by the powder. But what if he just ripped the bag? Lin Che raised his hands to do so, and the pill in his chest detonated.

The moment his lungs forced a breath, the Crimson Miasma Powder flooded in and burned through the nerves in his chest, quickly shutting down the bulk of his internal organs, before finally stopping his heart. Lin Che reflexively reached for his Qi — the Hollow Bell would have easily cleared the poison from his system.

In fact, it was likely that he could tolerate it with the uncontrolled Qi within his body, assuming Elder Wong's enchantments hadn't strengthened the efficacy of it beyond what raw tolerance could handle. He died before he could find out. He found it almost ironic that the powder he'd gathered to assist him in case he had to fight without his cultivation was now the same thing being used to kill him repeatedly.

He came back with the bag still over his head. Lin Che immediately reached for his Qi whilst holding his breath. He heard the ever familiar rattle of thunder from above before he crushed one of the cores he was sitting on and inhaled deeply. Above him, an unclaimed tribulation gathered. He was dead before the strike, which was precisely what both he and Wong wanted, though for entirely different reasons.

Faster, he told himself, just faster. The Qi will come faster the more I try. Each cycle shaved some infinitesimal sliver off the delay between wanting his cultivation and having it in his body. Another attempt, another crushed core, and another bolt of lightning held frozen in the air, for the victim was gone before it could act.

On the seventh attempt, Lin Che got into the pattern of things and worked rather mechanically now. Or, at least, as mechanical as you can be when you still have to feel the full brunt of melting internally at the end of each loop. There was no numbing to it. He'd hoped that his mind would be able to handle the pain, but it felt fresh every single time.

Each death arrived as sharp as the one before it, and the only thing that had changed was how quickly his mind recovered enough in the next life to reach for the next core. On the tenth attempt, he decided to break the pattern instead. He could hold his breath for a reasonable length of time, so he attempted to circulate without forcing his own death. One, two, thr— The pill in his chest detonated. Elder Wong did not want him to regain his cultivation.

She knew exactly what he was doing, and she enabled it fully — he ran out of cores to crush with his backside, which meant he was back to using his hands. In fact, she stopped puppeteering him entirely and took great pleasure in watching him flail around panicked. It wasn't like she ever got bored of it, either. Every time Lin Che flailed, it was her first time watching him do so, which meant that, through all of his deaths, the last thing he saw was a smiling Elder Wong having genuine joy in watching him die.

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

His goal had been made clear: circulate during enough loops to decrease his Qi activation cooldown. Two seconds, he thought to himself. Give me two seconds and I will peel her face off with my bare hands and use it as toilet paper. He blinked at his own thought — that hadn't sounded like him. He crushed the next core and took a deep breath in, killing himself before divine retribution could shatter his soul.

He came back wanting to hurt something. It wasn't just a passing impulse this time, but instead something that had overwritten his fears and pretence of serenity. Sixteenth, seventeenth — he'd stopped thinking about his actions entirely and just did the same repetitions. The tribulations above had compounded enough that he could feel the weight of the skies pressing down upon the train carriage, and that was before the strikes had even come down. I'll slowly rip off each digit of hers and force her to eat them.

Then, I'll stomp on her abdomen until the shit leaks out. And after that, I'll force her to lick it back up and repeat the cycle. He caught himself fantasising about it in vivid detail, and, for one small instant, the old Lin Che surfaced through, horrified. That's not me. I don't think like that. That's not m— The miasma flooded through and killed him before he could finish that trail of thought.

Five cores remained, and hunger followed him into this life. The thought of that should have terrified him, but it felt more like relief. He was getting closer and closer to those two seconds, but, by this point, Lin Che really did not care. If immortality was indeed a curse, then he was fine with being done with it. He had played with death like a Turkish ice cream man, and he was perfectly fine with finally giving him the scoop. He crushed one.

Four. She thinks this hurts you, the voice said, using his own inner voice now. Lin Che couldn't tell where his thoughts ended and its thoughts began — they were indistinguishable from one another now. He caught himself asking: does it even matter? Let her enjoy it a little longer. It'll make it so much better when— He crushed the core and inhaled.

There was, suddenly, one core remaining. That's odd. I don't recal— This time, he was no longer sitting down on a train seat. If he had followed his pattern, there was no reason for him to have switched locations, but now he was on his feet. His vision, blurry at the start of each loop, finally regained detail. He was face-to-face with Elder Wong, looking down at the shorter lady. She met his eye through the bag as a platform of earth gathered beneath her feet, elevating her to the same height as him.

"If you don't crush that core right now, all the lightning above is going to strike down at once. Can't you feel the pressure of it all? What do you think is going to happen when the full weight of the skies drops down onto a body that is barely past its second refinement. Or a soul, which you claim has already been fractured?" He couldn't reply, as, in doing so, he'd breathe in the powder and die. He clutched the core in his left hand as he slowly brought his right hand upwards in a closed fist.

He kept each finger tightly pressed to his palm, save for the longest which pointed directly upwards.

"I'd love to thank you, Elder Wong, Leixin, whatever," he choked.

"I was wondering just how many more deaths he'd need before I could slip into the gap of consciousness. So, as a show of my gratitude, I'll make your death a quick one." He crushed the final core, a deep satisfaction spreading through his chest alongside the Crimson Miasma Powder. He cackled as he vacuumed up more and more of the powder, greedy for it now, accelerating his own death rather than merely accepting it.

"In all my many years, I've never met a Heart Demon who can talk."

He reached for his Qi, and this time, it came very quickly. He circulated the Hollow Bell Technique and found that the Crimson Miasma Powder had indeed been reinforced beyond his current resistance to toxins. The technique was, however, strong enough to keep him alive and simply weakened his guts. Elder Wong had clearly not calculated just how great his mastery in the Hollow Bell was, so he decided to refrain from showing the Hollow Bell Resonance to her too soon.

He was certain that the upgraded technique would be sufficient to completely eliminate the powder from his body. He felt his hand rise and his spine straighten as he pulled the bag off his face and spat directly at Elder Wong. An arc consisting of a mixture of saliva, mucous, blood, and even soul landed squarely in between her eyes. The suffocating red bloodlust that was pressing against the barrier darkened in colour and even started to leak out of it, but this only made his smile stretch wider. Far too wide.

Above the carriage, twenty-five unclaimed tribulations, gathered and stacked and hungry from every death that had come before this one, had finally found their target. Their victim looked up to the sky to meet the bolts and did not look even slightly afraid.