"Aah!"
In that instant, unimaginable agony swept through Xuan Wuchang's body. His vitality drained rapidly as countless blood threads, like parasites, swiftly sucked the life out of him. No matter how he circulated his magic power to resist, it did nothing!
"Aah! You old devil! May you die a wretched death!" With that final, shrill curse, Xuan Wuchang's voice abruptly fell silent.
Boom!
An immensely dense blood-red glow enveloped Xu Yan. In that instant, he became a streak of blood-colored lightning and fled forward at a terrifying speed!
"Those are the Bloodfiend Shadow-Escaping Steps! This boy has used essence blood to perform them several times, yet his vitality hasn't diminished at all!" Floating Cloud Adept was bewildered. He had already recognized the rogue cultivator's technique as a rather impractical secret art of the Bloodfiend Gate. Once brought to minor mastery, however, it burned a terrifying quantity of essence blood, making its cost far outweigh its benefits. Frequent use damaged a cultivator's foundation, so in the Cultivation World, it was mostly used by low-level cultivators.
"I must capture him! The secrets this boy carries have already far exceeded my imagination!" In over two hundred years of cultivation, this was the first time Floating Cloud Adept had felt such excitement.
Even his chance discovery of a deceased perfected Golden Core cultivator's cave abode sixty years ago had not excited him this much.
"Unfortunately, I exhausted my accumulated Core Aura fighting that old monster!" Floating Cloud Adept sighed softly. After cultivators survived Tribulation Lightning, heaven and earth granted those at Golden Core the ability to familiarize themselves with drawing upon the power of the surrounding world. This was the origin of Core Aura. Once Golden Core cultivators became familiar with it, they could gradually store it within their golden cores and release it