The agony of that blood-red light rampaging through his dantian, the burning sensation of his meridians being torn apart, and the pain in his soul—every part of him screamed, "Death."
The resentment surging in Lian Xiaotian's chest nearly burst from his throat. He refused to give in. The corner of his mouth curled into a crazed, icy smile.
"If you're going to destroy me, then I'll use your power to break through and rise from the ashes!"
Crack—
That was the sound of his dantian shattering, like colored glass smashed by a heavy hammer. The shock spread through every limb and bone in an instant. His Martial Soul Origin was reduced to dust.
Lian Xiaotian's skin turned dark purple at a visible speed. His bulging veins writhed like twisted earthworms beneath his skin, as if they were about to burst through his flesh.
He parted his lips, wanting to roar, but no sound came out. He could only cough up mouthful after mouthful of blood-flecked, metallic-tasting air. Every breath was like swallowing razor blades. His lungs and entrails felt as though they had been crushed and forcibly pieced back together, and even his heart spasmed.
He clenched his teeth so hard that he'd already bitten through his tongue. Blood mixed with saliva and slid down his throat, filling his mouth with the taste of rust.
Relying on the instincts he'd honed through seven brushes with death in his previous life, and the resentment now seeming to reach straight into the depths of the underworld, he forcibly began cultivating the core art of his previous life—the Nine Deaths Reincarnation Evil Art.
In his previous life, Lian Xiaotian had reached a realm of mastery beyond perfection. He had surpassed the imaginings of those who came before him, conjuring something from nothing and turning the unreal into reality. He fought on instinct and intent, producing peerless, miraculous moves with effortless ease. He had forged his own path and opened the road to the martial arts.
His Nine Deaths Reincarnation Evil Art was a cultivation method unique to him, created by combining the Nine Deaths Evil Art with the Nine Deaths Reincarnation Method.
The Nine Deaths Evil Art had been passed down by his master. It was said to have been created more than three hundred years before Lian Xiaotian's previous life by Canglong the Eccentric, a giant of the evil path who had gathered the strengths of its various schools. Canglong had first driven himself into cultivation deviation and suffered a death tribulation; at the brink of death, he had set things right and created the art.
Its central method was to make one's meridians flow in reverse. It granted peerless recovery, allowing the dead to return to life and their meridians to be rebuilt.
Each time one died and returned, their cultivation, physical strength, spiritual power, immunity, cellular vitality, and neural reflexes increased tenfold, while their true qi grew ten times purer.
But cultivating the Nine Deaths Evil Art was no different from mutilating oneself. Every breakthrough was a brush with death.
Cultivators needed an extremely high level of power to practice it. The higher their death-tribulation realm, the more they needed the resentment of the dead and the energy of death. They had to use nine sentient divine artifacts to injure themselves, then absorb the resentment of the dead within them to forge divine meridians—a process that could easily ensnare the mind.
As for the Nine Deaths Reincarnation Method, Lian Xiaotian had obtained it by chance. Its origins could no longer be traced.
Its levels of power were named after the ghost kings of the Ninefold Underworld. The deeper the hell, the more powerful the ghost king. Its peril was on par with the Nine Deaths Evil Art, and it too required death and rebirth. The more times one returned, the more astonishing the increase in power.
At each level, the corresponding ghost king's image would appear in the evil aura, as if a god had possessed the cultivator.
The Nine Deaths Reincarnation Evil Art, formed from the union of the two evil arts, was hailed as the greatest evil art of all. It had made Lian Xiaotian invincible among his peers in his previous life, and before he was twenty, he had already been recognized as the future leader of the evil path.
But in his final battle, he and a senior who had comprehended all nine forms of the Tathagata Palm had perished together.
Now, Lian Xiaotian had no sentient divine artifacts and no profound cultivation. He could only use the energy from his shattered Martial Soul as fuel and his body as a vessel, forcibly enduring the backlash of the art.
The flesh beneath his skin seemed to boil. The cracking of his bones sounded like thunder. It was as if his soul had been seized and dragged, kicking and screaming, into the netherworld. Countless icy resentments, darkness, evil aura, and death energy surged in from every direction, trying to swallow his consciousness whole.
"I swear I'll slaughter the heavens... How can I fall here?!"
Lian Xiaotian's consciousness bounced back and forth between life and death. At times, he saw events from his previous life; at others, he saw the Clear Sky Douluo's taunts, or the look in his birth mother's eyes as she died in this life.
Those scenes lashed at his consciousness like whips, keeping him from sinking completely into the depths of the underworld.
Lian Xiaotian endured like this for three days and three nights, until the energy of his Radiant Mantis Martial Soul had nearly run dry.
Just as he was about to give out, a faint floral fragrance suddenly drifted into his nostrils.
A beam of white light descended from the sky. It looked remarkably strange, shaped like a flower petal as it drifted slowly down and landed on Lian Xiaotian, merging into his body.
A sliver of awareness returned to Lian Xiaotian's muddled mind. He had no time to figure out why he'd regained consciousness and simply continued cultivating the Nine Deaths Reincarnation Evil Art.
What he didn't know was that the owner of the light was a girl.
She wore black and had a veil over her face. Blue hair fell down her back, and she had a pair of beautiful blue eyes, clear and untainted. Her long eyelashes curved gently upward, and each blink seemed to speak.
"Grandpa, hurry! There's a boy here!" The girl was so anxious she nearly burst into tears, wishing her grandfather could instantly appear at her side.
A few breaths later, a middle-aged man with wings on his back brought a white-haired, white-bearded old man in black to the girl.
The two were deeply shaken by the sight before them. Their pupils trembled as if struck by an earthquake.
The ground within a hundred meters was entirely blackish brown—the color of dried blood. The area was so vast that the amount of blood lost was beyond calculation.
At its center sat a boy, his whole body shrouded in a faint, dark-purple aura. His skin was dark purple and spattered with blood, but that wasn't the most horrifying—or revolting—thing about him.
The boy had no limbs. White bone and twisted flesh were clearly visible at the wounds, which were still gushing with blood.
Two small holes marked the top of his head, oozing a viscous mixture of red and white.
His face was twisted and mangled, his features barely distinguishable. There wasn't a single unharmed spot on his body.
Worse still, new tissue was growing at every wound, as though his body were trying to recover, only for it to quickly wither away.
That boy was Lian Xiaotian!
There were no words to capture the scene's horror and revulsion. The middle-aged man took one look and turned around to throw up.
The old man in black looked as if an enormous hand had clamped around his throat. For a moment, he couldn't utter a word.
"Grandpa, please save him!" The girl's sobs pulled the old man back to his senses.
"Why hasn't this child's Martial Soul appeared? Whether it's a Tool Martial Soul or a Beast Martial Soul, it should have emerged by now to protect its Soul Master. Could his Martial Soul... have been shattered? Who could be so cruel as to do this to a child?!"
The kindly old man flew into a rage, then abruptly froze in shock. "This child is surrounded by death energy. I can't sense a trace of life in him, yet he's still alive..."
Though stunned and uncertain, the old man didn't have time to dwell on it. Two yellow, two purple, and three black Soul Rings appeared around him, seven in all, and a pink begonia flower rested in his hand.
Its petals were white and pink, its colors vivid and its form graceful. Leaves and tendrils spilled from either side of his palm, their soft vines swaying in the breeze and their blossoms drooping delicately.
The Soul Rings glowed in three different colors, transforming together into countless petals that fell into Lian Xiaotian's body.
This flower was called the Nine-Heart Begonia. It was the greatest Healing Type Martial Soul of the age. No matter how many Soul Rings it gained, it would have only one Soul Skill: area-wide group healing.
With a Nine-Heart Begonia Soul Master around, even dying was difficult. Legend had it that upon reaching the Titled Douluo realm, one could even bring the dead back to life.
Lian Xiaotian's greatest problems were twofold: his cultivation was still too weak, and he was already gravely injured.
As a result, the power of the Nine Deaths Reincarnation Evil Art he cultivated kept ravaging his body. He could barely endure it, and he fell into a state of false death, with almost his entire body having stepped into hell.
The old man's Nine-Heart Begonia Martial Soul provided a steady stream of life force, keeping Lian Xiaotian alive and allowing him to forcibly continue cultivating the Nine Deaths Reincarnation Evil Art.
"Is this child cultivating?"
The old man noticed Lian Xiaotian's condition and cried out in shock. He had never imagined that a child so horrifically maimed could still cultivate—was still cultivating. He couldn't imagine what kind of willpower it took.
With the help of the Nine-Heart Begonia and the Nine Deaths Reincarnation Evil Art, Lian Xiaotian's body recovered at a visible speed. The old man, however, was faring poorly.
The hand holding the Nine-Heart Begonia trembled. His face had gone pale, and he was stunned. "This rate of recovery is far beyond the Nine-Heart Begonia's usual effects, and it instantly consumed thirty percent of my Soul Power."
Just as Lian Xiaotian's severed limbs regenerated and his face healed, the air within five hundred meters suddenly turned cold.
Before you continue