Too Twisted

This was a truly horrifying sight.

Wang Li's hair stood on end.

Yet after opening his eyes, this gray-robed cultivator made no further movements.

He seemed to see Wang Li as well, but there was no vitality in his gaze, nor any emotion.

The chill in Wang Li's heart gradually receded.

His brows furrowed deeply.

At that moment, all the other gray-robed cultivators suddenly vanished, turning back into tiny motes of light.

Countless profound streams of light appeared before him, rapidly contracting toward a certain point.

In the blink of an eye, the scenery around him changed completely.

He found himself within the gray Dao Hall once more.

Five tongues of fire still burned within the gray Dao Hall.

The gray-robed cultivator stood directly opposite Wang Li, and fierce killing intent suddenly flared again in his formerly lifeless eyes.

Wang Li froze.

Setting aside the difference in surroundings, this scene was exactly the same as when he had encountered this gray-robed cultivator while crossing his tribulation at the Second Level of Qi Refining.

At that moment, the gray-robed cultivator moved, and a streak of black light shot toward him.

Wang Li was somewhat distracted at the moment, and his reaction was slow enough already. Yet when that black light reached him, he shifted slightly and easily avoided it.

The gray-robed cultivator's figure flickered like glimmers flitting across water. Gray spiritual light bloomed beneath his feet into lotus after lotus. At the same time, nine gray sword pellets descended around Wang Li. With a hiss, all nine pellets transformed into nine streaks of sword light and stabbed inward at Wang Li from every direction.

The nine streaks of sword light struck Wang Li at once, but his figure twisted and turned into dozens of scattered currents of air.

A mass of swirling fine sand appeared beneath the gray-robed cultivator's feet, instantly holding him in place.

At the same time, Wang Li's true body had already appeared behind him.

With a puff, a spark flicked from Wang Li's finger landed on the gray-robed cultivator's already riddled back and penetrated his body, where it instantly exploded.

The gray-robed cultivator's body flew apart, severed limbs scattering everywhere.

Yet in the very next instant, those remains vanished in an eerie fashion.

Wang Li's expression became somewhat strange.

He had dealt with him far too easily.

In fact, if he had not deliberately waited to see whether this gray-robed cultivator would change in any way, this opponent from his Second Level of Qi Refining tribulation might have been instantly killed before he even had the chance to activate his nine sword pellets.

The reason was simple. Wang Li was now at the Sixth Level of Qi Refining, and he was an anomaly even among Sixth Level of Qi Refining cultivators. According to He Lingxiu's judgment, even if the Five Elders of Huayang attacked together, they might not be his match.

Yet this gray-robed cultivator had not changed at all. He was still at the Second Level of Qi Refining, with the same combat strength.

Neither his fighting style nor his preferred methods had changed.

To be fair, this gray-robed cultivator was quite formidable among Second Level of Qi Refining cultivators. His movement technique was exceedingly graceful, and back then Wang Li had battled him for a long time without landing a single spell on him.

But now, this gray-robed cultivator was simply too slow for Wang Li in every respect.

Could it be that, just as the Profound Heaven Dao Arts formed a white star within my body with every minor advancement, these five flames corresponded to each cultivation stage after my Second Level of Qi Refining?

Within this flame, those densely packed gray-robed cultivators floating there as though frozen in the river of time and space are all Second Level of Qi Refining cultivators. Then the cultivators in the following four flames are respectively at the Third Level of Qi Refining, Fourth Level of Qi Refining, Fifth Level of Qi Refining, and Sixth Level of Qi Refining?

Can I awaken other cultivators inside and fight them, or can I only awaken cultivators I have fought before?

Such thoughts immediately flashed through Wang Li's mind.

He did not hesitate much. A thread of True Essence immediately wound itself around the flame nearest to him.

If anyone had been observing inside this Dao Hall at that moment, they would have discovered that Wang Li seemed not to have moved at all, yet a gray-robed cultivator had appeared out of thin air before him in an instant.

Delight appeared on Wang Li's face.

In that instant just now, he had indeed found himself once more amid countless floating gray-robed cultivators. He had also spotted the gray-robed cultivator he had just fought again. But this time, he had not intended to awaken that cultivator. Instead, he focused on another gray-robed cultivator nearby. The moment he wondered whether this person could be awakened, the tightly shut eyes of that gray-robed cultivator opened. Then, just as before, all the other gray-robed cultivators around him vanished, leaving only this awakened one.

This gray-robed cultivator was a youthful cultivator whose childishness had yet to fade. Judging from his features, he was several years younger than Wang Li.

Yet the wounds on this young cultivator were even more horrifying. His entire abdomen had been blasted clean through. Even his internal organs and spine had completely disappeared, with only a ring of flesh and blood around the edges connecting the upper and lower halves of his body.

Yet within this Dao Hall, the young cultivator stood perfectly well. His movements seemed entirely unhindered, as though his body were intact.

The instant the young cultivator saw Wang Li clearly, he seemed to instinctively sense that Wang Li was far stronger than him and visibly recoiled a step in terror. But in the next instant, he restrained his fear and immediately attacked Wang Li.

His hands flicked rapidly, and more than ten streaks of silver lightning appeared above Wang Li's head, sweeping down at high speed.

"Sorry about this."

Wang Li did not move. He slapped a green talisman upward with his left hand. With a boom, a gust of green astral wind surged forth and swept those more than ten streaks of silver lightning into pieces. At the same time, he pointed through the air with his right hand, and a strand of Profound Heaven Sword Qi pierced the young cultivator's chest like a meteor, shattering his heart meridians outright.

Just as he had predicted, although these gray-robed cultivators were bizarre, they truly fought like real cultivators. They could be injured, and once they suffered a fatal wound, they immediately vanished.

The moment this young gray-robed cultivator's heart meridians snapped, he disappeared before Wang Li's eyes.

This was a genuine one-move kill. Wang Li had slain him with ease.

This young gray-robed cultivator was indeed also a Second Level of Qi Refining cultivator. And speaking objectively, he was even weaker than the gray-robed cultivator from before.

Wang Li had long grown accustomed to these gray-robed cultivators vanishing out of thin air.

But after the young gray-robed cultivator disappeared, he stared at the five flames before him in a daze for several breaths.

Isn't this mutation from cultivating the Profound Heaven Dao Arts a little too twisted?

After fully coming back to himself, he sent out several streams of True Essence in succession, touching the remaining four flames.

His guess seemed entirely correct.

Like magical artifacts, the other four flames could also be controlled by his True Essence. The instant each flame received his True Essence, he would find himself in what seemed like a frozen river of time and space, surrounded by densely packed gray-robed cultivators of every kind, all utterly motionless.

Within these other four flames, he also found familiar people he had encountered before.

These five flames truly corresponded to gray-robed cultivators of different cultivation levels.

If he entirely set aside whether such an excessively twisted mutation might bring about some extremely detrimental and unforeseeable consequence, then based on what he had discovered so far, the gray Dao Palace within his sea of qi was an astonishing treasure for refining True Essence. And the five flames within this gray Dao Palace were practically a massive treasure vault.

When these bizarre gray-robed cultivators had first appeared during his advancement at the Second Level of Qi Refining, Lü Shenliang had deduced that he would encounter such gray-robed cultivators every time he advanced a minor realm in the future.

Moreover, she had deduced that the difficulty of his tribulations would only increase.

Newly advanced cultivators were naturally at many disadvantages when facing cultivators who had immersed themselves in that level for a long time. As their cultivation continued to rise, those innate disadvantages would only widen further.

Compared to a First Level Golden Core cultivator who had just formed their core, a First Level Golden Core cultivator who had formed their core decades ago held an overwhelming advantage. If both possessed extensive experience in magical combat, then the newly core-formed Golden Core cultivator would truly be getting the short end of the stick all the way to grandma's house.

Fortunately, Wang Li's tribulations were simple and brutal: all he needed to do was fight and defeat the gray-robed cultivator who appeared.

Thus, after he reached the Second Level of Qi Refining, Lü Shenliang had adopted a cultivation method for him centered entirely on actual combat.

But only Lü Shenliang and Wang Li knew just how many lethal dangers they had encountered along the way.

And even with actual combat as the focus, it was not as though one could find a suitable opponent whenever one wished to fight. Even traveling to and fro consumed a great deal of time.

But things were different now. Whenever he wanted to fight, he could find a gray-robed cultivator to battle at any time.

Within the flame farthest from him, all the cultivators were at the Sixth Level of Qi Refining.