Cultivator’s Path to Infamy [Progression | Cultivation | Villain Lead]

Rising up through the wide passage Mo Fan and the others had carved out, An felt a metallic taste growing sharper in the air the higher he climbed.

Reaching the point where the vertical tunnel opened into a cave, he landed on the ground and slowly walked toward the exit.

The moment he stepped outside, he heard footsteps.

"Cut him down!"

"AAAAAH!"

Two disciples charged at him with swords drawn, but An simply stepped to the side, dodging both attacks without any trouble.

Both disciples wore robes marking them as righteous path, but looking into their eyes, gone a sickly green, all he saw inside was rage and fury.

Reading the Qi coming off them, he realized their minds were wrapped in something, stripped entirely of rational thought.

"AAaaah!" Regrouping, they lunged at him again.

Standing his ground, An waited for the right moment, once both of them lined up on the correct trajectory, he made a single swing. The instant it connected, both their heads came clean off.

Their bodies, not yet registering they'd lost their heads, ran a few more meters before finally collapsing.

Turning away from them, An shook the blood off his hand, jumped, and climbed up onto the ledge of the crater, the same one that marked the start of the tunnel.

Standing at the edge, he looked up at the thick fog above, through which he could just make out the boundary of a massive formation, blocking off everything, even the crimson clouds outside.

Taking a few steps forward, he came out on the other side of the ridge, and a new pit opened up before him, this one hundreds of times larger than the last.

The entire floor of the pit was littered with corpses, the ground soaked with blood and viscera. From the clothing, he could tell the bodies belonged to both Righteous and Demonic disciples alike.

Counting the bodies, he tilted his head. 'Only part of both groups clashed here... did the rest push on further? Into the Central Ring?'

Carefully making his way down the steep slope of the crater, An reached the field at the bottom and started walking forward, stepping over the bodies scattered everywhere.

"Kgh... Wh-what are you doing here?"

He heard a weak voice. Turning, he found Shepor Dunt lying across a pile of other bodies.

An walked closer and looked over his wounds. Two gaping holes ran clean through his body, one from a sword, the other from a dagger. His left arm had been severed straight through the shoulder in a single clean strike, most likely from an axe.

"H-how are you still alive?" Dunt asked in a weak voice, his heavy gaze fixed on An.

"Who knows, maybe luck? Though there were a few moments where I nearly..." Reading the Qi coming off him, An found none of the hidden contempt or disdain that used to be there, just fear, reluctance, anger, all tangled up with something like calm.

"Heh... Kgh! Kh-!" He smiled faintly, then immediately started coughing up blood.

"Haa... l-looks like I'm dying... aren't I?" Lifting his gaze again, he looked into An's empty, cold eyes.

An just nodded, watching more and more DeathQi seep out of Dunt.

"Sigh... i-if only I'd been st-stronger..." Tilting his head back slightly, he stared up at the thick fog hiding the crimson clouds above.

"It's not really about strength, honestly. It's about the path you chose... You picked a path where, in the end, you got used up like some disposable tool... And you probably didn't even object." An dropped down and sat across from him, paying more attention to the Qi flows than to Dunt himself.

"And what did you get out of it, in the end? Lying here in your own blood, dying for someone else's ambitions, for people who genuinely don't care about you at all..." Glancing back at the cave he'd just come out of, An laid out exactly what he thought.

"Y-you wouldn't understand... You don't know wh-what honor is... I-I'm not saying this to insult you... Khm! Kgh! You h-have to understand, raised the way I was, by my clan, I had to... Heh, doesn't matter... What matters is, y-you don't understand what friendship is, what loyalty is, h-h-honor..." Lowering his head again, sorrow in his eyes, he looked at An, trying to explain something even he didn't fully understand himself. Deep down, he already knew the words of this insufferable sect brother were full of truth, he'd known it for a long time, really, but understanding something and acting on it were two very different things.

"Hm. Honor, friendship, loyalty..." Turning back and meeting his eyes, An kept going. "While I was in there-" He jerked a thumb toward the cave leading to the incubator.

"Mo Fan, your friend, killed Ray Elion, the one who lost his brothers and sisters because of Mo Fan's own greed. But you already know that, deep down. You might try to hide it, but you can't hide it from yourself. He died at your friend's hand, and again, it was over greed. The instant Mo Fan laid eyes on that ElementalSword, his eyes lit up with more greed than I've ever seen. Heh, never seen greed that blatant before." An smirked slightly and shook his head.

"After he took the ElementalSword, he hid it away the moment Mi Mili and Lin Xue showed up to help him... And then Mo Fan spun them a story, a heroic one. I'd almost call what he pulled off worthy of a real hero."

Listening to all of it, all this filth, Dunt's face twisted with pain and anger. "That's not true! H-how could you have seen any of that? Mo Fan would've spotted you easily! Lies! Ev-everything you're saying is lies!"

An just smiled. "In the end, the three of them kept going, deeper, further down. Off toward new adventures, toward the inheritance. And you? You got left behind here. Forgotten… So what, am I lying about that too?"

An pulled out a single cracked cup, the same one he'd been handed the day Dunt and Mili came to recruit him. He also pulled out a bottle of white wine. He filled the cup to the brim and handed it to Dunt.

Startled, Dunt barely caught the cup, sniffing it several times with obvious suspicion, glancing over and over at An's detached expression.

"Hm? What would I even gain from poisoning you?" An took a few long swigs from the bottle himself and tucked it back into his ring.

Seeing that, Dunt let go of his fear, tipped the cup back, and took one big gulp, nearly passing out from the sheer strength of the wine. He shook his head and came back to himself a little.

"Honor, friendship, loyalty... Honor never really belongs to you. Loyalty only ever gets shown to whoever's stronger. Friendship lasts only until you've outlived your usefulness..." Looking at the half-empty cup still in Dunt's hand, An's gaze turned a little sorrowful. "In this world, everyone's only ever responsible for themselves. Every connection, every interaction, every smile, every glance... all of it exists for one reason, to climb up to the next rung of the ladder, to claw your way higher. No matter the cost, no matter how many lives get wrecked and left permanently stuck on the rung below. That's just how this whole path works. Bleak, isn't it?" Getting slowly to his feet, he took one last look at Dunt, already passed out from the alcohol.

Turning his head to look out over the dense forest, he watched as the formation's wall cracked apart at a specific point, and dozens of Righteous disciples poured through the breach. The whole group was sprinting hard, straight in this direction.

Reaching out a hand, An pulled the cup from Dunt's loosened grip. "You'd probably disagree with me, actually. You'd say that climbing higher takes loyal friends, their support, their warm smiles and words that can chase away even the worst storm. That you need a reputation, some kind of renown, to open doors that would otherwise stay shut. Maybe you're right about that. But that's not my path. The moment... Hm." Shaking his head, he suddenly went quiet and stopped himself mid-thought.

Cleaning the cup with his Qi and tucking it back into his ring, he turned, lifted off into the sky, and headed toward the Central Ring.

….

He'd barely vanished into the clouds when disciples came bursting out of the dense forest below. Leading the group were a girl and a young man. The girl had golden hair and eyes, a small lion-like creature with pure white fur running alongside her, the core disciple who'd personally tried to recruit An before. The second, a young man with blue eyes and dark gray hair, held a shimmering, faintly blue-tinted sword.

"Sister Lou Emilia! See if there's anyone still alive!" The moment they broke out of the treeline, the whole group froze at the sight in front of them. Scanning the ground, littered with corpses and body parts, the one holding the blue-tinted sword was the first to shake it off.

Lou Emilia nodded. "Understood. Then our safety's on you, Brother Hill Shtern!" She rested a hand on the lion's head, stroking it gently, leaning down to whisper something to it.

Listening, the lion began sniffing the air.

Within moments, it fixed its attention on a body resting atop a small pile of other, already-cold corpses.

"Great Moon Swordsman! That's Senior Brother Shepor!" One of the disciples rushed over, saw who it was, and spun around, shouting to the others.

"Do everything you can! Save him!" Hill Shtern turned and gave the order to a few alchemists standing behind him.

Walking up to the lion and gripping its mane, Lou Emilia scanned the surroundings, frowning. "We really were too late. If it hadn't been for that ambush we ran into, we could've gotten here sooner and avoided losses this bad."

"Pull yourself together, Sister Lou. We need to focus on saving whoever's still breathing, not wallowing in guilt." Without even glancing her way, Hill Shtern stepped forward and immediately started helping the others search for survivors.

Lou Emilia clenched her fists until her knuckles went white, took a deep breath, and followed his lead.

….

Hovering in the clouds, An suddenly stopped and looked back.

Directly beneath him, a massive discharge of Qi tore through the ground. Tracing it, he realized it was a teleportation signature. 'So Mo Fan reached the door on the bottom floor and teleported into the trials... I wonder if he's alone, or if all three of them went together.' Looking toward the endpoint, stretching far off into the Central Ring, he kept flying.

After a few more hours in the air, An finally decided to stop.

A massive mountain stood right in front of him, one that had only become visible over the last several dozen kilometers, hidden until now by the thickening crimson clouds, which had only recently started growing denser.

Coming to a stop, he looked around. 'This is the point of highest demonic energy concentration. No point flying any further, past this, the concentration will start dropping again.'

'Oh?' Focusing on a clearing tucked inside a thick patch of brush, he spotted some kind of structure built underground. 'Only short, faint Qi flows coming off this little dugout... Might not be anything valuable in there, but there's a good chance nobody's been here yet.'

Descending carefully to the ground, he decided to land a little away from the underground structure, so he could carve a tunnel without risking damage to whatever was inside.

Stepping into the tall bushes, he was just about to activate Qi in his hands to start tunneling, and stopped himself. 'Why not try something different this time?'

Wrapping himself entirely in Qi, he created thousands of tightly packed focal points, each one crammed with hundreds of tiny spots vibrating at different frequencies.

Whoosh!

Like quicksand, only hundreds of times faster, he sank straight down into the earth. 'Damn it! This is hard to control!' Constantly adjusting the frequencies, he tried to manage exactly how fast whatever touched his body broke down into fine dust.

Trying to steer himself carefully toward the underground structure, he moved through the earth like a fish thrown into water for the very first time, fumbling to figure out how to swim.

Finally reaching the structure, he circled around beneath it and decided to break in through the floor instead.

Crack!

Shattering the stone slab serving as the floor, he shot upward and landed inside the room.

A small room, five meters by five, junk piled up in every corner. Looking around, he spotted a shelf neatly stacked with scrolls made of yellow paper.

'Oh? Hopefully these actually survived somehow.' Remembering how the books had crumbled apart in his hands from age, he approached the shelf carefully, wrapped a scroll in Qi, and drew it toward himself.

Taking the scroll in hand, he studied its surface. 'This definitely isn't ordinary material. Maybe it's talisman paper?'

He removed the seal holding it shut, and the scroll sprang open at once. An had to stretch his arms out fully, mildly surprised by just how long it turned out to be.

Once it had fully unrolled, he looked over the scroll stretched out in front of him, more than five meters long. 'Feels like unrolling a whole roll of toilet paper.'

Shaking his head, he started reading from the very first line.

.

.

After reading through more than a hundred scrolls, he picked up the last one. He opened it, skimmed through, and tossed it onto the pile with the rest. 'I'm getting sick of this Great Bo already... Every single scroll is just about his exploits and achievements... Nothing but junk about the guy.'

Every last scroll described the exploits of Devil Bo, especially his encounters with the opposite sex, and how he'd stolen the hearts of thousands of the most beautiful female cultivators of his time.

Turning, he headed for the door leading to the final room, slightly larger than the first.

Opening the door, a wooden stand holding black swords immediately caught his eye. Ignoring them completely, he walked up to a small table, more like a tea table, and carefully picked up two thin books.

'Crouching Tiger and Lightning Thrust. One's a hand technique that projects the image of a tiger's paw, its claws, specifically... The strength of those claws is several times greater than the cultivator's own physical strength, with a durability on par with Rainbow Yang Metal... No idea what that metal actually is, but the technique itself... total nonsense.' After reading through it and reconstructing the technique, he analyzed it.

'Way too many issues with this technique... The activation pattern's needlessly convoluted, and honestly, it's not worth the time or the Qi it costs. Activating Qi Armor and Qi Blades at the same time eats up way less of both.' Deactivating the technique, he set the book back down on the table. 'Besides, even if I spent the time refining and stabilizing this technique, it'd basically be useless in the end.'

Opening the second book, he read through it carefully. 'Concentrating Qi into a single point, compressing it hard, then releasing it at exactly the right moment. Constant attention to timing. Oh? This technique has issues with its activation pattern too. In an actual fight, it'd be easy to mess up, given how complicated and tangled the Qi pathway is for triggering it... Hm, but it's got one huge advantage, the sheer speed of the pattern. In other words, even with all my experience and Qi training, I couldn't pull off that concentrate-compress-release sequence this fast myself. Right now, it'd take me a lot longer to manage the same thing. Interesting.'

He set that book down on the table too, on top of Crouching Tiger, and started breaking down the Lightning Thrust technique. 'I need to pull out the core concept and make a few light modifications after that... This would pair perfectly with my Sharpness aspect. The only real problem is that the whole technique's built around the sword itself as its foundation. Sigh.' Frowning, An waved a hand, pulled a chair over from the table, sat down, and focused.

'I can fix the sword problem later. Right now, I just need the concept.'