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Chapter 244 – Sinking into the Black
🕑 Added 2025-04-19 02:28:25 +0000 UTCBenton grew more lightheaded by the moment. Black crept into the edges of his sight. He felt himself sink into it. His wound was something no mortal could withstand. He was dying, and there was nothing he could do about it.
Those thoughts triggered a rebellion in his mind. Not the dying part. He’d done that before, and as an old man, it was to be expected.
No. Mortal. He wasn’t a mortal.
Was he? He’d been one on Earth, but he was no longer on Earth?
Right. He was a cultivator now.
The other part of his thoughts that seemed wrong was that there was nothing he could do about dying. He wasn’t just a cultivator; he was a cultivator with a Healing technique.
With a thought, he triggered it, and wash of warmth swept over the mess of tangled flesh where his shoulder used to be, relieving some of the pain.
But he was low on qi. Very low. Not enough left to Heal him.
Spirit coins. His ring.
With another thought, he had a stack of them appear in his mouth, where they quickly dissolved. One hundred thousand qi. Good. He used all of it for Healing. Some for the next stack and the next and the next.
The healing jogged his memory. A pill. Yes. Also in his ring.
He withdrew a Major Healing Pill and consumed it. Its effects combined with his Healing technique to at least double the rate of recovery.
Vaguely, it occurred to him that he was in a hurry, though he couldn’t quite remember why. The urgency was enough for him to trigger a technique—Time Manipulation.
Seconds or minutes or hours or days passed as he continued to consume stack after stack of greater spirit coins. Blood stopped spurting and regenerated inside his body. Torn muscles weaved themselves back together. Flesh and bone re-formed. First his shoulder and then his entire arm reappeared inch by inch.
The technique mostly blocked the pain. Mostly. The sensations caused were not pleasant, but they were better than the alternative. And soon, soonish, he was completely injury free.
Benton praised his prior self for purchasing the Healing Technique. He would have died without it. The kids would have, too.
Crap. The kids. He’d been down in the bunker for what seemed like an eternity. The Nascent Souls could be attacking his sect members. Might have already attacked his sect members. They might all be dead.
No. He couldn’t let himself think like that.
Benton withdrew a new robe from his ring, threw it on, and teleported back to the surface.
The Nascent Souls were still outside the wall, attacking the towers. The Grand Defense Formation was down, but it must have put up one hell of a fight to have kept them out so long.
The shields protecting the towers were down, though, and the turrets destroyed. The two Jade Chameleons were slowly whittling away the outer rock layer.
The man was floating quite near the towers, directing his shots from up close. The woman, though, was still using ranged attacks, but she, too, had drifted closer to the wall. And in doing so, she’d inadvertently moved closer to the trap. Instead of twenty-five yards away from it, she was closer to ten.
Still, that might have well as been a hundred or a thousand, considering the lack of effectiveness of every attack he’d tried against her.
Benton shook with rage. These two assholes had come to his home, almost killed him, and were trying to kill his kids. There had to be something he could do. Something. Anything.
He just wanted to fly up to her and tackle her. Which would be pointless. But it would feel good. It would feel like he was accomplishing something even if he wasn’t.
Wait. Was it pointless? If he literally launched himself at her, wouldn’t he, in essence, become a projectile in that situation?
He’d have the element of surprise. If he used his spear, she’d think he was planning on engaging in a melee attack. She wouldn’t expect him to literally tackle her, right? What cultivator at their level would resort to grappling?
Ten yards. All he needed was to move her ten yards.
He’d take damage, of course. But this time, he wouldn’t deplete his shield. It would hold up to a few shots even from an enemy of her caliber.
Benton withdrew his spear from his ring. He chose a clone in the air about a dozen yards from her that was to her side slightly behind her.
Triggering his technique, he switched places with it. As soon as he finished the teleport, he applied his projectile enhancement technique on himself.
It worked.
He rocketed toward her, Force, Speed, Momentum, and Wind propelling him faster than he’d ever traveled.
His movement must have caught her attention because her head whipped toward him. Her eyes widened in surprise.
If the situation hadn’t been so dire, he might have laughed. He’d been hurt because he’d underestimated his opponents. They’d done the same thing.
Benton hoped their consequences were more dire than his had been.
He flew toward her so fast and with so much Momentum that he barely had time to think as the dozen yards evaporated in an instant. A feint with his spear caused her to use her bracelet to attempt to block it, but that had never been his aim.
Instead, he collided with her, his arm going around her waist.
It felt like hitting a tree. A very solid, old, heavy tree. One with a large circumference.
Without the backing of his projectile technique, he was pretty sure he would have simply bounced back. But between how fast he was traveling and the Momentum he’d built up, he kept going, pushing her before him.
It was working!
The thing that really played into his favor was that she didn’t seem too concerned with the fact that she was being carried along with him. Instead, she attempted to do as much damage to him as she could, pounding his back with bursts of Water. And as a Nascent Soul, she could bring a lot of force to bear.
His shield flared to life. Once. Twice. Three times. Four.
Benton felt his qi pool rapidly being depleted. The quality and efficiency of his shield was in a contest against both her strength and her aura, and he was losing. Rapidly.
But that didn’t matter. He didn’t need to win. He just needed ten yards. Ten tiny miniscule lousy yards.
A powerful, concentrated blast of Fire hit his legs, finally burning through his shield. The experience was agonizing, almost as bad a when his shoulder had been obliterated. But neither the pain nor the loss of his lower legs mattered.
Because he’d reached his target.
Benton sensed the tower’s main weapons trigger, but he was already teleporting to a bunker.
###
Ye Zhengsheng rued the day he ever thought that encountering a challenging opponent would be a good thing. The little Golden Core he was fighting was turning into a pure nuisance. As if his use of illusion and clones to hide his presence wasn’t annoying enough, he also had the ability to use true teleportation.
All Nascent Souls had the ability to transform themselves into qi and use that as a form of quasi-teleportation. That method had limits such as being relatively slow and being restricted from penetrating anything that didn’t allow qi through. Chao Su’s, in contrast, allowed him to instantly transport himself anywhere within range. It was a rare and powerful and, as an opponent, aggravating skill, one requiring access to Spatial qi to use.
It made the man much tougher to kill than would normally have been the case. Yan Mingxia had destroyed half the man’s torso, and yet, not even a minute later, he returned to the battlefield, fully healed.
Even the highest quality Major Healing Pills didn’t work that fast. Chao Su must have used some trick to speed up the process.
As unexpected as his return to the battle was, his first act was even more puzzling. He literally launched himself at Yan Mingxia and tackled her like some common peasant wrestling in the mud.
Yan Mingxia, of course, kept calm and blasted his back with burst after burst of Water, triggering his shield. None got through.
Ye Zhengsheng charged his most powerful Fire attack and targeted the only part of the attacker he was certain of hitting without chancing a strike on his ally. And it worked. The Fire Blast hit Chao Su in the legs. His already weakened shield didn’t stand a chance, and the intense flames burned off both limbs below the knee.
It wasn’t enough to kill him, though, as he immediately triggered his teleportation ability.
Ye Zhengsheng sensed something else, though, something worrisome—an intense buildup of qi in each of the towers. By the time he spun around, it was too late. Both towers fired a beam of qi wider than his leg in the direction of Yan Mingxia.
He spun again, expecting his ally to move out of the range of the attacks from the towers. Instead, she appeared to be stuck.
She yelled, “Hel—”
There was no time to do anything. The beams met at a point less than a yard from her and combined, tripling in magnitude. The amalgamated ray flashed, and instantly, Yan Mingxia’s top half vanished. Literally vanished. Disintegrated.
Nascent Souls were quite difficult to kill, but vaporizing one’s head and chest was not something even a cultivator in that vaunted ream could survive.
Her lower torso and legs fell to the ground, where they hit with a wet smack.
Yan Mingxia, a cultivator with thousands of years of experience and victor of hundreds of battles, was dead.
Comments
Dark Phoenix
Welp I guess there's no more female nascent, ignore my previous comment I made a few minutes ago.
Pagemaster
You know what is going to be real funny! The golden core taking the trial is going to advance but the fight is going to be over by the time he does, and Benton can ask, "What took you so long? Not a good start for your century of guard duty!" Lol.
Michael
Now to use a Qi Draining technique and chemical warfare to reduce the other one to a pulp of flesh
Hayden D
Wait, she’s a water cultivator, so that’s why “wet” makes sense. I struggled to connect that. my criticism is not useful lol, sorry!
Hayden D
Tftc! Very exciting times One minor critique is that a “wet smack” doesn’t quite feel right after such a emphasis on disintegration. Why would her body be wet? from blood? Maybe other readers feel differently and I’m being unfair, so take my criticism with a grain of salt
KingOrgasmusTwo
He never used his myriad mind techniques to distract them or to mentally attack them and never used his real physical strength through body cultivation. I think to kill the last Nascent soul, he will finally remember that ..
tonright
aaah ya can't stop there! (tftc)
Black Rose
Awesome
