Chapter 134: Farewell to Three Years of Silence

Reaching his new home, the heavenly pit, without any trouble along the way, An's first order of business was refining a few pills perfectly suited to Baldi's cultivation.

Spending a little over twenty minutes on that, he moved on to other matters and pulled a massive root out of his spatial ring.

'Judging by the Qi, this Water Blind Root should be the perfect binding agent for a new pill… Second Step of the Body and Qi.'

Activating his Qi, he formed his Qi Cauldron in front of himself, and with his other hand, wrote out several runes in the air, creating a barrier around himself. 'This barrier should work perfectly to reduce the environmental factors interfering with the pill-refining process.'

An had arrived at this barrier through pure trial and error, testing pairings of primary and auxiliary runes. He'd managed to create what looked, at first glance, like a simple barrier that maintained constants inside it. In other words, it completely cut off air and light.

Looking at it from the outside, it was almost impossible to understand how the barrier worked, but from inside, An found himself in total darkness, weightless, in a vacuum, with nothing but Qi surrounding him.

.

.

A few hours later, the barrier suddenly burst, and through the cracks, a thick, sediment-laden fog from the pill began to form.

Woosh!

In a massive wave, the fog rolled across the entire vast expanse of the heavenly pit, settling everywhere in a thick layer.

Instantly, the small creatures and plants began gathering up the residue, absorbing as much as they could.

Over this extra year, the place had transformed considerably. Countless plants, under the effect of the residue from his pills and the vitality-rich Qi he exhaled during cultivation, had begun mutating, and quickly, too. And as their intelligence grew, entire family groups had started forming, living together just like the beasts did.

An had also noticed simple organisms starting to appear around the area, a direct result of his influence on the place.

These simple creatures, like the mutated plants, carried a distinct trace of his own Qi, all because they'd used his Qi as the foundation for their own creation and mutation.

'Three veins, and all of them Wood element... excellent!' Holding a pill that shimmered white shifting into blue, An broke into a smile. 'After three years, I've finally managed to make an auxiliary pill for my own cultivation! Second Step of the Body and Qi!'

Tossing the pill into the air, he caught it in his mouth and swallowed it, then, closing his eyes, began a cultivation cycle combined with Qi training.

.

.

Nearly thirty hours later, he opened his eyes. 'Not bad… since this pill makes my physical body softer and more elastic, I can draw in and absorb almost twice as many Qi particles as usual... And with this much Qi flooding in, combined with my body's new condition, my body's taking more strain, which in turn makes it tougher and stronger.' Standing up, An hopped in place a few times, feeling the changes in his physical body and dantian.

'But then again... the problem is, with this massive volume of incoming Qi particles, the filtering process takes longer, which puts a heavy strain on my mind...' Massaging his temples, he started pacing back and forth along the shore.

'As strange as it sounds, I've already gotten used to this constant headache... But something tells me it shouldn't be this way... Maybe I'm doing something wrong?'

Even though An pretended not to know the reason behind these constant headaches from mental overload, he'd actually understood it back during his very first cycles, back when he'd just started cultivating within the sect's walls, on his own cozy little plot by the lake.

The truth was, from the moment he'd arrived here, driven by the fear of being unprotected, cycles that should have lasted two to two and a half hours had stretched out past five, always with the nagging fear that his cultivation speed was too slow.

And now, six years into this world, having already achieved results in cultivation that more than seventy percent of all cultivators would never see in their lifetimes, An kept pushing forward anyway, unconsciously enduring the pain, just to keep increasing the speed of his own progress.

Once the pain in his head had settled, An pulled out two books, one for runes, the other for plants and fruits.

Recording and describing the Water Blind Root he'd stolen right out from under the noses of those third-rank creatures, and the piece of which he'd used to brew the Second Step of the Body and Qi pill, he put that book away and moved on to the runes.

Finding another primary rune, An began testing its connections, working through a whole range of chains.

.

.

Listening to the murmur of the water and the sounds of the small creatures all around, he suddenly froze and looked up through the walls of the heavenly pit, toward the sky. 'Hm? What's that?'

Getting to his feet, An put the book away, and just as he was about to jump into the pool, he stopped and looked toward the bushes, where Baldi was turning something over in his claws.

"Come here. We might be leaving for a while." Reaching a hand toward the spot where he'd been sitting, he pulled the beast pouch toward himself and tied it to his belt.

Baldi dropped whatever he'd been so intently studying and, hopping over to An, jumped straight into the pouch without any protest at all. Even An was mildly surprised, having expected to hear him grumble for at least a few minutes before he'd finally climb in.

Looking around the heavenly pit with a flicker of sadness in his eyes, An dove into the water and made his way out through the tunnel.

Looking up at the sky, through the billions of Qi flows around him, he focused on a specific set high above, far beyond the clouds.

'Oh, it's descending... That's clearly some kind of transport… that many different energy flows concentrated in one place couldn't possibly be a single monolithic entity.' Climbing onto the branches of a tree, An started moving to intercept whatever this massive thing was.

Watching the sky, drawing closer, he could see the Qi flows coming off this vessel more and more clearly.

He saw millions of identical energy signatures swarming and attacking the ship. He recognized the energy immediately. It belonged to the creatures that ruled the sky above the Core Region.

These small creatures, which looked a lot like piranhas with wings, had a second name besides Bone Ravens - Kullo birds, according to the books.

Stopping on a tree branch, An watched as, directly above his head, high beyond the clouds, the massive ship kept descending lower and lower. The vessel was wrapped in a thick layer of swarming Kullo birds.

Suddenly, five objects shot out of the ship, and a few seconds later, eight more identical ones followed.

Heading straight for the ground, they broke through the clouds, and An saw massive metal capsules, with panoramic windows set into the top of each one.

He noticed the Kullo birds weren't swarming these capsules. At first, he assumed the birds had simply decided not to switch targets to something smaller, but then he saw a strange artifact attached to each capsule, shaped like a tuning fork, constantly vibrating and generating sound waves laced with energy.

Watching these waves drive off the few bloodthirsty birds that did chase after the capsules, he saw them drop out of the sky like stones the moment the waves hit them, showing no further sign of life.

Studying the waves coming off the tuning forks, An frowned. 'This isn't just sound waves at a specific frequency, enriched with Qi.'

Continuing to leap from tree to tree, he analyzed the waves, trying to understand the principles behind this strange, curved piece of metal welded to the capsules. 'It's an illusion... visions sent straight into these birds' brains, pushing their hearts to their absolute limit, and when the sound wave passes through their bodies, tuned to just the right frequency, it simply bursts their already-overworked hearts...'

Reinforcing the outer membrane of his Qi Armor, he didn't forget to send energy to the barrier around his brain and dantian too, just in case. 'Hm, if I'm not mistaken, these frequencies are specifically tuned for beasts... I can see thousands of different vibration patterns inside the signal coming off that tuning fork... it probably doesn't affect humans, but still, better safe than sorry...'

'Oh, then why can't they just activate the same kind of artifact on the main ship?'

Sensing the capsules land, and the people climbing out of them immediately clashing with the people from the following eight capsules, An understood everything at once.

'Hm... now it makes sense why the beast-repelling function is disabled on the main ship.' Turning his head, he watched as the massive ship, bearing clear signs of combat damage, finally broke through the clouds and continued its slow descent, some distance from where he stood.

….

Dropping to treetop level, hiding their metallic undersides among the leaves, the Kullo birds, which had been greedily attacking the ship just a second earlier, suddenly shot straight up into the sky, carrying their small bodies back into the clouds as fast as they could.

"ROOOAAR!"

A roar chased after them, so deafening the ground beneath everyone's feet began shaking and cracking, forming massive sinkholes.

Already used to roars like this, An knew this was as far as it would go.

He turned toward the capsules and watched the fighting suddenly stop. But a few moments later, they collided with each other again, generating more and more chaotic Qi in the surrounding area.

Moving slowly across the branches, An came out over what was now a clearing, most of the trees here had already been destroyed by the capsules' landing.

Closer to the center of the clearing, a group of fewer than twenty living cultivators held a defensive circle.

Around them, he counted thirty-seven cultivators. Surrounding them from every side, they rained down attacks, refusing to give the defending group any chance to coordinate, creating more and more panic and confusion in their ranks.

At the center of the defenders stood a young man in snow-white robes, his hair held back by a red crown.

Focusing on this young man, An immediately sensed something was off, specifically, the information carried in the Qi flowing off him, or rather, her. 'If not for her energy, it'd be hard to tell this wasn't a man, though... even through several layers of makeup, the shape of the jaw and eyes clearly belong to a woman.'

He jumped to another tree several hundred meters away, now a little closer to the clearing where the battle raged. Glancing toward the ship, that already sunk deep into the ground under its own weight, he turned back and kept watching the fight in front of him.

….

"Miss- Young Master Su! You need to retreat! Your life matters far more than ours!" Holding a gaping hole in his arm, an old man spoke urgently. He was in gray robes patterned with lilies, the same pattern worn by every one of the defenders, marking them all as part of the same faction.

"No!! Old Servant Mo, we just need to hold out until reinforcements arrive from the ship!" Hurling talismans into the air one after another, Young Master Su, who was in fact a girl, scanned all her people, who were shielding her with their own bodies from the enemy.

Seeing the bodies of people she'd known since birth, people who'd served her parents and were like family to her, now lying in the mud, their glassy eyes full of fear and reluctance, she clenched her fists until they bled and kept throwing talismans, barely holding back the tears already welling up.

"M-Mister Mo! W-we need help!" One of her people, his robes already soaked in blood, turned back and looked at the old man with a resigned expression.

"Hold the line!! Don't let them push you back a single step!!" Old Mo shouted, his voice fierce, seeing morale starting to crack.

Settling into a more stable stance, he stomped the ground with such force that his feet sank into the earth, and immediately began murmuring something, pressing his palms together and moving his fingers as if drawing something in the air, each finger working independently.

Qi began gathering inside his palms, and with his face growing paler, he barely managed to hold back the growing energy between them.

….

This concentrated energy was so dense that even from a distance, An could feel it affecting him. 'His energy's very close to what you'd see from third-rank creatures in battle... But something's clearly missing, like he's one step short of the Golden Core realm... maybe Pseudo-Golden Core?' Analyzing the fight in front of him, An reinforced his own defenses, just to be safe.

….

On the clearing, behind the attackers, a woman with a massive scar covering the entire right side of her face suddenly struck an amulet on her chest, and instantly her voice carried to every attacking cultivator. <"Switch to covert defense! Protocol 3-18A!">

Instantly, every one of them eased off the intensity of their attacks and settled into their positions.

The defending cultivators, along with Young Master Su, noticing nothing suspicious, kept up their defense. Old Mo continued preparing his attack, fully focused on the ever-growing energy between his palms.

….

Only from the branches, watching from a distance, did An notice the attacking cultivators channeling more Qi into their amulets and defensive techniques. 'That amulet on her neck? It works as some kind of energy-based voice transmission?'

He noticed that, a few milliseconds before the shift in tactics, Qi flows had burst out from that woman, specifically, from the amulet on her neck, each one heading toward one of the attackers and slipping into a small brand-shaped earring on each of their ears.

He remembered, back when he was still in the sect, overhearing a conversation between disciples by chance, that only a cultivator who'd reached the Golden Core realm could use an energy-based voice to transmit their thoughts to another person. In rare cases, a cultivator at the Foundation Establishment realm could use this ability too, but only if their soul was exceptionally strong and they possessed a special technique, developed by high-level cultivators specifically for exceptional talents, usually reserved for the Seeds of the Alliance.

This technique, which helped a cultivator master this energy-based voice, was built on the foundation of spirit sense, which a cultivator could start developing the moment they broke through to Foundation Establishment. But in practice, mastering this voice was extremely difficult, which was why cultivators below Golden Core often substituted the ability with artifacts or talismans, more often artifacts, built with a system like the one the attackers were using now. There was a main artifact, and auxiliary ones, functioning as child components, able to work together as a single network.