Chronic Toxin

The night wind swept up gravel from the ground and brushed across the ruined village square.

In midair, the Blood Bat Cursed Spirit, having just crossed the barrier between grades, let out a piercing shriek.

It had always bullied the weak and feared the strong. Even after stealing blood to force its way across the threshold of Special Grade, the treachery and cowardice carved into its bones had not changed.

Though Kamo Chitsubaki's undisguised provocation from below stirred its fury, the monster did not lose its head.

Its broad fleshy wings silently spread through the air.

It turned into a blurred black shadow almost impossible to follow with the naked eye and began circling at high speed along the upper edges of the square.

A battle of attrition.

As it circled, using its terrifying speed that far surpassed before, the monster deliberately created the sound of air tearing in from every direction, attempting to disrupt its prey's hearing.

It patiently searched for gaps in the Blood Armor while continuously gathering the mixed cursed energy around its body into the sharp tips of its wings and claws, building power for the fatal strike to come.

For Qian Chun, standing in the center of the field, this state of poised restraint was undoubtedly an exceptionally brutal trial.

She was already injured.

After successive domain clashes and high-intensity exchanges, her reserves of cursed energy had long since run dry.

Now, she still had to forcibly maintain [Blood Manipulation: Blood Armor], pushing both her mind and body to their limits.

With every second that passed, the scales of victory tipped a little further toward the monster in the air.

Lu Ping watched it all coldly from the shadows of a broken wall.

He made no rash move, his fingers still firmly gripping [Nue's Feather], which crackled with lightning.

The moment that high-speed black shadow caused Qian Chun to reveal even the slightest opening, he would let it taste lightning piercing straight through the core in its head.

Unexpectedly, Qian Chun, at the heart of the storm, made an exceptionally bold move.

She slowly lowered her eyelids and simply closed her eyes.

In this rapidly shifting fight for life and death, giving up vision entirely to track a Special Grade Cursed Spirit known for its speed was no different from baring her neck for execution.

But it was merely a tactical disguise.

Lu Ping keenly noticed an almost imperceptible resonance running through the dark-red Blood Armor covering Qian Chun's body.

It was an advanced application technique of the Three Great Families' cursed arts.

She was not using mere cursed energy to sense the outside world at all. Instead, she focused all her attention on the blood she had lost.

Though the blood stolen by the monster's ambush had entered its body, it still retained faint fluctuations of its caster's cursed energy.

Through that barely perceptible connection, Qian Chun constructed an extremely crude yet absolutely accurate positioning network in her mind.

She did not need to know how dazzling the monster's flight path was. She only needed to confirm one thing—when and from what angle it would launch its attack.

That was enough.

The stalemate lasted for a full three minutes.

At last, a faint, nearly imperceptible disturbance appeared in the high-speed afterimage in the night sky.

It had only just evolved. Even with the vast cursed energy of a Special Grade, it could not conceal its psychological weakness.

It began to grow restless.

The frustration of failing to take down its prey, coupled with its instinctive fear of the boy hidden in the dark who could fire a sneak attack at any moment, made it decide to delay no longer.

It did not want to give rise to further complications.

A sharp howl suddenly came from overhead.

While moving at high speed, the monster opened its gaping maw and violently spewed out a portion of the filthy blood inside it that had yet to be fully assimilated.

The droplets, mixed with corrosive cursed energy, transformed into a dense red net that descended from above, rushing straight at Qian Chun's face.

[Blood-Blinded Eyes].

It used the blood net to block its prey's senses and disrupt her final defensive judgment.

However, its true killing move was not there.

At the very instant it spat out the filthy blood, the monster's real body had already used the cover of night to appear directly behind Qian Chun, as though it had teleported.

Its claw, brimming with violent cursed energy and gleaming with ghostly blue venom, tore through the air with a shriek as it smashed straight toward the back of the sorceress's unguarded head.

If that blow landed, even if it failed to shatter her skull outright, the severe concussion would be enough to make Qian Chun instantly lose the fine control of her technique.

Once the Blood Armor collapsed, the battle would be over.

Just as the filthy blood was about to splatter across her cheek, Qian Chun's body suddenly swayed in an extremely unnatural motion.

Her upper body tipped slightly forward as if she had lost all strength, as though the taut string she had maintained for so long had finally snapped.

At the sight, wild, humanlike delight appeared on the monster's ugly face.

It held nothing back, pouring all its strength into the swinging claw, determined to smash its prey's head to pieces.

Life and death were often decided in an instant.

At the moment that sharp spike was only three inches from the back of her head—

The body that seemed exhausted and on the verge of collapse suddenly completed a vicious one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn at a speed that entirely surpassed the Blood Bat Cursed Spirit's dynamic vision.

There was not a single unnecessary evasive movement.

Qian Chun's hands swept two grim dark-red afterimages before her chest, carrying the indestructible force of Blood Armor as they slammed together in front of her.

Bang—!

A thunderous boom echoed across the empty square.

The scene seemed to freeze at that moment.

The Blood Bat Cursed Spirit's face, full of shock and unwillingness, along with its massive head that contained the source of its core cursed energy, was crushed between two palms clad in heavy Blood Armor into a pulpy mass of indistinguishable flesh.

Pure violence brought instant destruction.

The immense vitality of a Special Grade was extinguished in an instant, like a machine whose power had been cut.

Its massive headless body, having lost its center of control, fell limply onto the cold stone slabs with a dull crash.

Before its remaining consciousness faded completely into nothingness, only one icy sentence entered its auditory nerves:

"Blood from a [Blood Manipulation] user is fatal poison to cursed spirits. You've got some nerve sucking it."

Looking at the monster's remains beneath her feet as they rapidly carbonized and scattered in the wind, Qian Chun's tense shoulders finally relaxed.

She let out a long breath of stale air tinged with the scent of rust and dispelled the Blood Armor covering her body.

This gamble had ultimately been hers to win.