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

Sitting at the table, the occasional creak of the chair broke the silence of the room. An spent nearly two hours analyzing and modifying the technique before he finally activated his Qi and waved his hand.

A thin, horizontal wave of energy formed off the edge of his palm and shot into the wall at tremendous speed.

'Wow…' Standing up, pushing the chair back, An had braced for a loud crash from his energy hitting stone, instead, all he got was a faint, barely audible scrape and crackle.

Walking up to the wall, he examined a thin gash cutting nearly the full length of the room, curving into the other two walls and forming a hundred-fifty-degree arc, with the deepest concentration right at its center.

'Hm, the depth of the cut at the central concentration point is over sixty meters... but only about three meters deep at the edges. Impressive…'

'That kind of speed and cutting depth comes from thinning the wave itself, in other words, packing the Qi particles tighter within it, which gives the whole structure more integrity. And the real driving force behind this attack is the Sharpness aspect of my Qi.' Pulling his hand away from the gash, he smiled and looked around the room.

Once he'd confirmed there was nothing else here worth his attention, he wrapped himself in Qi, rose into the air, activated hundreds of vibration points across his body at varying frequencies, and started boring a new tunnel toward the surface.

He decided against retracing the old tunnel he'd used to get in, opting instead to carve a longer, more winding path out, a chance to see if he might stumble on something else worth his attention along the way.

Weaving through the earth, carving out ant-tunnel paths, he was almost at the surface when he suddenly stopped and looked down, deeper into the ground. 'Huh, am I seeing this right? That's definitely third-rank spirit-plant energy... and it's moving. Is that a famous Ginseng? The kind said to be almost as intelligent as a human?'

Watching it until the moment this sentient plant slipped out of the range where he could still make out its Qi flows, An felt his curiosity win out. He changed course and headed deeper into the earth, chasing after this running Ginseng.

.

.

Crack!

An tore through the ground at tremendous speed and burst into a massive tunnel. Stopping himself in time, he landed and looked toward the direction the Ginseng's Qi flows were coming from.

'This tunnel was probably dug out by some kind of overgrown worm, similar to the one whose Qi flows I saw underground back at the righteous camp. Probably the same one, actually.' Standing still, he looked around, studying the tunnel walls with interest, a repeating, ladder-like pattern of marks caught his eye, spaced roughly every twenty meters. Examining these marks, he guessed the creature had to be around fifty meters long, and that these ladder-like impressions were probably where its legs had pushed off, dragging its massive body forward.

Once he'd taken it all in, he confirmed his Qi Silence technique was still running at full strength and began slowly moving toward the Ginseng, which had stopped moving at some point.

….

"Why won't you just listen to me? I'm telling you! I saw a huge battle between two-legged creatures! Boom! Bam! Bash! You have no idea how ferociously they fought each other! Whoa! Zoom! Swoosh! Flying sticks and strange transparent claws! All of it flying around, smashing everything to bits!"

Making his way deeper down the tunnel, closer to the Ginseng's signal, An suddenly caught a child's voice, laced with the faintest bitterness.

'Hm? Who's talking? I don't sense anyone else, don't see any Qi from them...' He froze instantly. The mere fact that a plant could talk was already deeply unsettling, and if a sentient root was talking, it almost certainly wasn't talking to itself, which meant something else was nearby: either something far stronger than An, or something using a technique similar to his own Qi Silence.

Just as he was about to turn and slip away, he was beaten to it.

"Shu, two-legged one hiding around the corner. No point hiding. Shu, you can come out. The moment you stepped into the tunnel, I already found you, your scent, Shu." A woman's voice, old and worn, tinged with faint exhaustion, suddenly echoed through the entire tunnel.

'Damn it...' An's face fell instantly. Understanding that bolting now would burn even the slim chance he had of avoiding trouble, he wrapped himself in Qi Armor, turned, and started walking forward with long, deliberate strides, straight toward the tunnel's exit into a massive chamber.

The moment he stepped out of the tunnel, he was stunned by the sheer volume of flowering vines wrapped around absolutely everything. Behind that thick layer of blooming, multicolored flowers, he couldn't even make out the walls of the chamber.

Turning his head around, his eyes settled on the center of the room, where a massive tree stood, its trunk shaped like the outline of a woman crucified on a cross. Its branches and leaves resembled flowing locks of hair, merging seamlessly into the vines hanging from the ceiling.

Right beneath the tree sat two Ginseng creatures, wide-eyed with fear, looking to be about five or six years old, a boy and a girl. Both a yellowish color, with reddish and greenish limbs. Small, round-bellied, with funny little faces and big lips, they suddenly flinched.

"Ah! A t-two-legged one! Help!" Jumping to his feet, the boy Ginseng shielded his sister, who stared at An with wide eyes, curiosity outweighing her fear.

"Hm? You're different from the other two-legged ones. Shu, your scent... What are you?" Ignoring his Qi Silence entirely, the tree somehow sensed his energy anyway, and its tone immediately shifted, growing suspicious and hostile.

"I'm just an ordinary disciple who came to this place with other people... I found a chamber built by whoever was here before, a very long time ago, maybe even thousands of years... And out of curiosity, I dug my way down here." Staying perfectly still, completely ignoring the two Ginseng and keeping his focus locked on the Qi flows surrounding the tree, An noted that although it gave off energy comparable to a third-rank creature, reading its Qi told him it was actually significantly weaker than that, putting it roughly on par with An himself.

"I had no idea anyone was even down here. I hope I haven't offended you. And that we can avoid any unnecessary... I'll just turn around and-"

"Damn it!" His face suddenly went blank, his eyes turning cold and empty, every scrap of emotion he'd been using to keep the peace vanishing instantly. He activated his Qi at full strength, channeled it into his hand, and swung, unleashing the horizontal Qi wave he'd derived the concept for from the technique he'd studied.

While he'd been tunneling down here, he'd considered turning this attack into a proper technique, even giving it a name, but decided against it, since it wasn't really a technique so much as a slightly modified way of using his Qi. Still, he reconsidered once more, deciding that for the sake of order and his own mental clarity, it was worth naming this method after all: Qi Wave.

"GraAA!" The instant An released the concentrated Qi Wave, the tree had already reacted, gathering its Qi at the tips of hundreds of vines and launching them straight at him.

Wooosh!

The Qi Wave sliced through the vines like they were nothing, cutting clean through them. Without losing an ounce of speed, it kept flying straight toward the tree's trunk.

"Ah!" Caught off guard, the tree froze for a split second.

"NOOO!" Realizing there was nothing else it could do, the tree pulled every vine back around itself, forming a thick shield in an instant.

Feeling the wave punch straight through its shield with ease, tearing its defensive structure apart completely, the tree couldn't hold back any longer, it gathered a massive burst of Qi directly in front of the wave and detonated it.

"AH!" The resulting blast threw the tree backward, tearing every vine around it apart in the process.

"Agh!" Hundreds of vines drove themselves into the ground, trying to stop the momentum. Once it finally steadied itself, anchoring into the earth to form a massive new base of support, it suddenly heard something else closing in at tremendous speed.

"Disgusting two-legged mutant!" The creature hissed, watching a massive Qi Spear come flying toward it, split horizontally into two different energies, one Fire, one Death.

Overestimating its own strength, the tree wrapped every vine and branch it had around the spear, trying to stop it in its tracks.

Fwoosh!

The instant its vines made contact with the QiSpear, they immediately began to rot, the blackened mass bursting into flame and crumbling to ash right after.

"Aaa-AGH!! NO!" Watching hundreds of its own limbs rot and burn, the corruption racing toward its trunk fast, the tree couldn't bear the pain any longer and started severing its own damaged vines and branches, just to stop the pain signals flooding through them.

"Ah?" While it was fully distracted, An sent two more Qi Waves after it, one right behind the other, one made entirely of DeathQi, the other of FireQi.

"I won't allow it! AGH!" Watching the black wave close in on its trunk, and realizing there was nothing left it could do, the tree screamed and detonated all its stored energy inside its own trunk, obliterating both waves.

"Gh!" Feeling the shockwave from that massive release of energy, An's skin tightened and let out a strange, unsettling noise, but he ignored everything shaking and cracking around him completely. Eyes locked on the epicenter, he charged straight into the blast wave.

"GMKH!" Gritting his teeth, he tore straight through the edge of the epicenter, ignoring his own skin and flesh starting to split apart from the pressure. Inside the smoke and dust, visibility at zero, An kept moving forward without changing direction once.

Inside, where he couldn't see a thing, he stopped abruptly, wrapped his hand in Qi, and struck the trunk with everything he had, right where its head should be.

The blow shattered most of the trunk apart, exposing the creature's real body underneath. Without wasting an instant, he grabbed it by the throat with one hand and started squeezing with everything he had. "NO! KHM! GHA!"

"Y-you're finished two-legged bastard! GH!" Hundreds of thin white hairs, thick as fingers, tore up out of the ground and drove themselves straight into An's body, piercing his eyes, his nose, and anywhere they could find an opening to force their way inside.

'Come on! Come on!' Gripping the creature's throat with both hands now, his face completely covered by the hairs, blood streaming out through them constantly, An activated his Qi, wrapped both hands in it, and unleashed thousands of vibrating points.

"A-AH!" Sensing something was wrong, the creature let out a cry.

Squelch!

Its head burst apart like a watermelon, scattering a curtain of dust and grime in every direction.

Plop!

Tossing the body to the ground, An grabbed the hairs still embedded in his own body with both hands.

"Bwaa-AAH!" In one sharp motion, he ripped them free. Due to their structure, tiny barbs running along their entire length, they tore away pieces of his own flesh right along with them.

"Ah! Kh-ggh! Kha!" Lifting his head, with his whole face soaked in red and fresh blood still leaking from every opening, he coughed violently. Even as his regeneration was already kicking in, he could feel everything torn apart inside his throat and nose.

"Brrr! Another phobia unlocked! Damn tentacles!" Wiping his face with one hand, he looked down at the creature lying under his feet.

A middle-aged woman with green skin, a slightly plump figure in certain places. Since she was completely naked, he could see her anatomy matched an ordinary woman's in every detail.

'This is entirely your own fault. If you hadn't started preparing that attack, I wouldn't have responded the way I did...' He suddenly looked back at the patch of ground still marked with black rot.

Taking a step and standing over the clump of that black mass, he frowned. 'What is this? Why did my Death Qi react like this? Rot?' Crouching down, he touched the rot, closed his eyes, and opened them inside his own inner world.

Drifting up to the Cycle Symbol, he touched it and started cross-checking. 'Is this an aspect? Or some quirk of my mutated Death energy?'

'I can't quite place it... I sense something similar to my Sharpness aspect, but there's something else hidden inside this Rot, something I can't quite see. Hm, strange.'

'Eh, I'm so tired of all these mysteries...' Opening his eyes back in reality, he pulled a fruit from his ring and applied DeathQi to it. Instantly turning it into a black, rotten mass with no smell and no trace of moisture at all.

'Before, whenever I experimented with fruit and Death Qi, I never got a result like this. Just aging, never a direct transformation into rotten mass like this... still very strange.'

Standing up and destroying the rotten mass, An suddenly turned and looked toward the two Ginseng, huddled together in a far corner, pressed against each other in fear.

'I can see and sense them clearly now. They're both at peak first rank... Remarkable, that they're already sentient at such a low cultivation level. Maybe they're some other kind of intelligent race, not spirit plants at all?' Studying their Qi flows, he could tell clearly that both of them were several hundred years old, and that their fear right now was only a surface-level emotion.

Wiping the last of the blood off his face, he walked slowly back toward the exit.

….

The moment he left, the two Ginseng looked at each other.

"Whew! He really didn't touch us after all!" The sister, gripping her brother tightly, whispered in a thin little voice, afraid the wicked two-legged creature might hear her and come back.

Her brother just nodded.

Once he was sure the villain was really gone, the brother stood up, gently tapped his sister's hands to get her to let go of him, and ran toward the wooden woman's body.

Reaching it, he squeezed his eyes shut and shoved his hand right between her breasts, into her chest cavity. "Ugh! So gross! Ugh!" Rummaging around, he pulled out a seed.

Bringing it close to his face, he brushed it off and ran back, to the spot where the tree used to stand.

Dropping to his knees, he dug a little hole and dropped the seed inside.

"Are you sure this'll work?" Running over and sitting beside him, his sister watched as her brother buried the seed and started muttering something, moving his hands in strange patterns.

Finishing the spell, the brother looked at her and nodded with a smile. "Of course! You know she's still alive. How many times have we been through this already, silly! You always need everything explained again! Now that the seed's taken to the soil, she'll start growing again! And soon we'll be reunited with her!"

"What about the other two-legged ones?" Shaking his arm, his sister suddenly glanced back toward the tunnel.

"Don't worry, it won't happen again! That villain just got lucky! And now we can just hide, if we need to, and wait quietly until she gets her strength back!" Settling in comfortably beside the buried seed, the brother started picking dirt out from under his fingernails.

"Mm-hm! Mm-hm!" Nodding a few times, the sister started playing with her own feet, completely forgetting about the villain and the battle that had happened just minutes ago.