Undercurrents Hide Killing Intent in the Immortal City, Qi and Blood Run Amok as Flesh and Bone Burst

At the boundary of Black Mud City's inner city, the brutal traces of the day lay exposed beneath the night.

Whole white-jade city bricks weighing thousands of pounds had been smashed to pieces by that thirty-thousand-pound black Dao stele. The ground was covered in ghastly white jade fragments, their jagged breaks pointing straight at the night sky. The cracks in the ground all around were stuffed with heaps of dull gray-white powder—the remains of spirit stones utterly drained dry to barely keep the damaged grand formation running.

"Move it! Didn't any of you eat?"

An inner-city formation master stood atop the rubble, gripping a spirit-energy whip that glimmered with a ghostly blue light as he cursed at the top of his lungs.

He covered his nose and mouth in disgust.

In the massive pit below, more than a hundred lowly mining slaves temporarily seized from the outer-city mines were hauling heavy jade fragments like ants.

Crack!

The spirit-energy whip lashed down with a shrill tearing sound, striking the back of a mining slave who had moved a little too slowly.

His flesh split open.

The slave did not even have time to scream before he toppled into the white-jade ruins. After twitching twice, he lay still.

"Drag that piece of trash away! These mud-legged bastards can't be treated nicely." His face full of disgust, the formation master turned and ordered his assistant, "Go hurry up the city defense troops. Why haven't they brought the human stake yet? The gap in the formation core is this huge—if we don't fill it with living human qi and blood, the grand formation won't close before dawn!"

Fourth Li was mixed in with the labor crew amid the uneven, muddy ruins.

He wore the set of black-iron scale armor stripped from a guard's corpse, his face and neck smeared with foul-smelling black mud.

His back was hunched, both hands gripping a heavy chunk of jade as his straw sandals trudged deep and shallow through the mud.

He kept his head bowed low.

The light in his eyes had dimmed to the utmost, like a stagnant pool of foul water long since dead.

He did not look at his companions' miserable state, nor did he look at the spirit-energy whip in the air. He merely rolled his eyes to an extremely tricky angle and fixed them on the lead formation master.

It was a butcher's instinct.

Fourth Li had slaughtered pigs on the butcher's block for more than a decade. Even with his eyes closed, he knew how to find the gaps between bones.

Again and again, he picked apart that formation master's bones in his mind.

Three inches above the cervical vertebrae at the back of his neck, there was a finger-width gap in the collar of his Dharma robe. It lacked formation-pattern protection. A sharp knife thrust in there could sever the spinal cord directly.

At the Kidney Water acupoints on either side of his lower back, the outer fabric looked ornate, but it was actually the thinnest. Slice upward three inches, and the great tendons at his waist could be cut.

He coldly measured the distance.

Thirty feet. Twenty feet. Fifteen feet.

Just then, a fully armed patrol of guards marched down the main road from the left in neat formation.

Their armor plates clattered.

Fourth Li's foot suddenly slipped.

He pitched forward with perfect naturalness, his entire body crashing heavily into a puddle thick with yellow mud.

The chunk of white jade in his hands rolled away.

The patrol guards did not even glance at the fallen laborer. They simply stepped over him and passed by.

Half of Fourth Li's face was submerged in muddy water.

At the instant he fell, his left hand had already silently slipped through the gap in the armor plates at his waist.

A small packet of powder wrapped in oiled paper was clenched tightly in his palm.

It was Qi-Severing Powder, a cheap poison he had snagged from a roadside stall on the edge of the black market. It was specially made to contaminate a person's meridians. His fingers dug beneath the edge of the oiled paper; once he found an opening, a rub of his thumb would send the powder flying.

"Out of the way! Get the hell away from me!"

A rough bellow came from the other end of the ruins.

The commander led more than a dozen subordinates, escorting the creaking wooden cart as they strode through the mud and finally reached the ruins of the formation core.

On the cart, Zhang Elder's lower body was utterly limp, sprawled across it like rotten mud.

The lead formation master hurriedly pinched his nose shut, his brows knotting into a dead lump.

"Why did you only just bring the human stake here?" The formation master pointed down at the commander from above. "Why does this old thing stink so badly? Hurry up, no more nonsense—throw the human stake straight into the deep pit of the formation core! If you delay repairs to the grand formation, how many heads do you have to answer for it?"

Publicly rebuked by an inner-city formation master, the commander's eye twitched violently twice.

He suppressed the fury in his heart and pulled his mouth into a savage grin.

"Your instruction is right, Formation Master. I'll throw this lump of rotten meat in to fill the formation."

The commander strode to the wooden cart and reached out his right hand, clad in a black-iron gauntlet. Spreading his fingers, he grabbed directly for Zhang Elder's grizzled hair.

The instant his fingertips were about to touch the old farmer's scalp—

A sudden change erupted against his chest.

An indescribably extreme heat exploded without warning from the black fragmentary stele!

Sizzle—

The shrill sound of flesh being instantly scorched erupted from within the commander's inner armor.

"Aah!"

A muffled groan of utter agony burst from the commander's throat.

His outstretched right hand froze in midair. As though every bone had been sucked out of him, his entire body pitched heavily forward.

One knee smashed into the jade-strewn ruins.

Sharp white-jade shards pierced through his knee armor on the spot, blood instantly staining the ground red.

But the commander had no attention to spare for the agonizing pain in his knee.

Both hands clutched his chest tightly. His features twisted together, completely distorted by excruciating pain.

Inside the qi sea of his dantian, the Foundation Establishment true essence that had once circulated freely was now like an ancient ferocious beast, mad with hunger, crashing into a flock of sheep.

The ultimate power fed back from the fragmentary stele obeyed none of the rules of immortal cultivation's circulation.

Pure savagery. Pure brutality.

With crushing force, the ultimate qi and blood directly shattered the barriers of the commander's dantian.

His true essence was ripped apart alive, turning into a tangled mess as it surged madly backward through his meridians.

"My qi sea... what's happening...?"

The commander expelled scorching breaths in great gasps, his entire body feeling as though he had been thrown into a red-hot pill furnace.

Then—

The muscles in his right arm began to convulse violently beyond his control.

Beneath the skin, it was as if countless little snakes were frantically writhing about.

Muscle fibers swelled and proliferated at a breakneck pace that defied all reason.

Crack... crack!

Shrill sounds of snapping metal rang out in succession.

The incomparably tough black-iron armor on the commander's right arm was forcibly bulged apart by the swelling flesh beneath it, splitting into more than a dozen horrifying cracks.

The fissures widened and widened.

Thick, blackened blood, mixed with crushed capillaries, gushed wildly from the cracks in the black iron. It pattered onto the jade fragments, giving off a nauseatingly frenzied stench of blood.

"What are you doing?"

The formation master standing above furrowed his brow even more tightly.

He demanded sharply.

His grip on the spirit-energy whip tightened instinctively, yet his feet halted of their own accord.

Hearing the voice, the commander turned his neck with extreme stiffness.

Then he abruptly raised his head.

The whites of his once-clear, calculating eyes had completely vanished.

Within his eye sockets churned a brutal red glow strikingly similar to when Lu Chen unleashed his qi and blood to the fullest.

That was not a human gaze at all. It was the gaze of a bloodthirsty ferocious beast, starved for more than ten days and newly released from its cage.

The commander's Adam's apple bobbed violently.

He opened his mouth, wanting to explain something.

But his vocal cords, stretched by the ultimate heat, could only produce dry, rasping howls like a broken bellows leaking air.

The smoothness and reason he usually displayed while currying favor before the City Lord had been ground completely into dust by the torrent of qi and blood.

The formation master looked into the commander's blood-red eyes, and his scalp suddenly exploded with prickling dread.

The thick, inescapable stench of blood and savage aura radiating from the commander struck the formation master's chest like a heavy hammer.

His face went pale, and he involuntarily retreated half a step.

Damn it, what rotten luck! the formation master cursed inwardly. What kind of trashy cultivation arts do these crude martial men clawing their way up from the bottom cultivate? To suffer qi deviation at a time like this!

He hurriedly condensed a spirit-energy shield before himself, afraid the commander would go mad and implicate him.

At the same time—

The enormous pit at the center of the ruins, the formation core, had gone too long without a supply of spirit energy. The incomplete formation runes began flashing wildly.

The formation core instinctively tugged at all the vitality around it.

Yet the fragmentary stele on the commander's chest possessed suction ten times more terrifying than the formation core.

The two forces formed an invisible vortex above the ruins.

The few heavily armored guards who had escorted the human stake alongside the commander suddenly shuddered in perfect unison.

The black-iron spears in their hands fell to the ground with a clang.

"My true essence..."

One guard's legs gave out, and he collapsed into the mud, both hands clawing desperately at his dantian.

To their horror, they discovered that the true essence within their bodies had, at some point, been silently drained completely dry.

And that was not all.

Without true essence protecting them, their meridians were immediately struck by the backlash of the violent ambient spirit energy.

The guards writhed madly on the ground in agony, cold sweat breaking out all over them. Their faces were pale as paper, and even the strength to stand had been thoroughly drained away.

On the wooden cart—

Zhang Elder, lying in the mud with his lower body completely numb, slowly turned over.

A huge grin suddenly stretched across the mud-streaked old farmer's face.

He watched those immortal sect lackeys who usually strutted about in arrogance now lying limp like mud, staring at one another in terror.

A strange, wheezing laugh escaped Zhang Elder's throat.

"Pah!"

Tilting his head back, he spat a mouthful of bloody phlegm mixed with fragments of viscera straight onto the face of the guard rolling beside him.

Unprecedented savage delight burst from the old farmer's clouded eyes.

"Aaargh!"

At the center of the ruins, the commander let out a roar that sounded nothing like a human voice.

Enduring the agony of his right arm's flesh nearly bursting and tearing apart, he braced himself against the ground with his intact left hand and staggered to his feet.

He stared fixedly at his right hand. Only one mad obsession remained in his mind: as long as he endured this trial, he would break through!

But he did not notice—

The ancient desolate patterns on the surface of the black fragmentary stele pressed inside his chest armor had completely lit up.

That glaring dark-red streak had followed the blood vessels in his chest, sinking its roots deep into his heart.

A relic left behind by the ancient ultimate path had no need for an immortal cultivator as its master.

The fragmentary stele's will was extremely simple and brutal.

It merely regarded the reasonably strong body before it as a flesh-and-blood vessel for carrying violent qi and blood—one it could discard at any time.