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Chapter 140 – Good as New
🕑 Added 2024-11-20 04:10:23 +0000 UTCThe second wave passed in much the same manner as the first. About two-thirds as many beasts hurled themselves at the village wall. They were slightly more powerful than the previous attackers, but both the wall and the shield held. Increased toughness led to more arrows being required to take some of them down, and the injuries to the melee fighters were a bit more pronounced with scratches being more prevalent and some actual cuts appearing.
Overall, though, the defenders acquitted themselves well. Having proved they could do it once, even the least experienced carried themselves with more confidence.
During the consolidation of gains portion while waiting for the third wave, fourteen more sect members advanced techniques. Incredibly and unexpectedly, two sect members advanced to the next minor cultivation realm, achieving some form of enlightenment from the fight.
Interesting.
Benton couldn’t have been prouder.
The rank three spirit beasts took only a little over a half hour to reach the wall from when he first detected them. Which made sense. Some of those creatures were the equivalent of a peak Qi Gathering cultivator.
As a group, they were stronger, tougher, and faster not only than the previous waves but also than the vast majority of the defenders. The only saving grace was that there weren’t nearly as many of them.
Though Benton’s mind had been enhanced greatly by reaching the peak of Golden Core, he was still not able get an accurate count on the teeming mass of fur. If he had a way to mark each one or to keep them all still—well, he could have used Gravity to do that, but that method would probably have killed a lot of the low ranked creatures and he still felt it important to leave that task to his sect members—he could have figured out the exact number.
Instead, he was left with having to estimate. As best he could figure, there were around a thousand spirit beasts attacking the wall. Though, if anything, that number was conservatively high.
Even more so than with human spiritual cultivators, beasts faced challenges to reach the upper ranks. Absorbing enough environmental qi could turn a mortal animal into a spirit beast, but once a core was formed, it was difficult to advance without consuming cores from other beasts. Which wasn’t an easy task, especially since beasts of a lower rank provided little benefit. And those gains decreased the higher one progressed.
Rank ones proliferated due to absorbing qi. Rank twos, to some extent, could advance by consuming rank ones. Rank threes, on the other hand, got almost nothing from rank two cores, making advancing much more of a challenge.
Basically, to reach rank three, one had to kill a lot of rank threes and higher and consume their cores. Given that there weren’t all that many to begin with and they were all tough, there definitely was a lack of the creatures compared to the other ranks.
That lack was a very, very good thing for the defenders.
Arrows that would have killed a rank one or severely injured a rank two, bounced off the tough skin of a rank three or simply missed as some of the spirit beasts were able to dodge.
In the time the previous waves took to run from the edge of the forest to the wall, dozens were killed. During the same sprint for the third wave, Benton counted two deaths.
He glanced at Ye Zan. The guard captain implored silently with his eyes, but Benton shook his head.
No special arrows. They would need all those munitions later.
The sect members could and would kill the rank threes. It would be more difficult, sure, but adversity led to growth.
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Zi Delan had never faced anything like a beast tide while running his small gang in Vermillion Incomparable Rain Town. He’d never really faced any challenge much greater than finding food to supply his crew.
He tried using a bow, but his technique was barely at Small Success. He was pretty sure that the string hitting his arm harmed him more than the arrows injured any of the rank three beasts he aimed at.
Luckily, the barrier Master had created was incredible, and no one inside the wall was in any real danger. Even luckier, many of the archers were much better than Zi Delan was, and slowly, the number of attacking beasts dwindled.
When there were only about half left, Ye Zan gave the signal for the melee fighters to engage.
Since Zi Delan was only in the sixth minor realm of Qi Gathering and rank three beasts covered minor realms seven through nine, he normally wouldn’t have been able to participate in the fight with his spear. As a designated member of the martial pavilion from the beginning, however, he and his team had been included in the first round of Body Cultivators, and all of them had reached the peak of Bronze.
That last factor swayed Master and Ye Zan to allow them to contribute to the fight on the ground.
Within reason, of course.
They were instructed to stay together as a team and to watch each other’s backs, and Ye Zan had commanded them to withdraw the moment any of them became seriously injured. None of the crew had any problem following those orders as none of them had any desire to die anytime soon.
Food was plentiful. They had learned good skills. People respected them. They were all willing to put their lives on the line for the sect if necessary but were more than happy when told that their safety was the most important consideration.
Well, second most important consideration. If saving a fellow sect member required them to risk themselves, it was understood that there was a price for all that they had been given.
Considered where they were in life versus where they’d been such a short time previous, it was a trade all of them were willing to make, even if they hoped such a thing would never come to pass.
Zi Delan looked to his left and to his right, meeting the eyes of each member of his team. “Three. Two. One. Jump.”
With the delay from getting ready and from the count, they were far from the first ones down from the wall. At least ten of the main sect guards and a dozen assorted other sect members who’d already reached the peak of Bronze Body Cultivation had immediately entered the fray. As had two Qi Gathering cultivators from the Poison Claw Sect.
Zi Delan frowned. The allied sect members didn’t have any Body Cultivation and weren’t all that high ranked otherwise. He was almost positive they weren’t supposed to be fighting.
None of that was his concern, however. Master and Ye Zan would figure all that out. Zi Delan needed to concentrate on his mission—not dying and killing as many beasts as he could, in that order.
If sparring with Senior Brother had taught Zi Delan anything, it was how to concentrate on the fight. As soon as his feet hit the ground, all thoughts of anything else fled his mind. His spear flashed out, catching a squirrel darting toward Liao Guanyu.
The hit was good, the tip penetrating the beast’s back.
Zi Delan allowed himself a small smile. The blow wasn’t enough to kill, but the creature was definitely injured. Slowed. It wouldn’t be attacking his friends’ backs again anytime soon.
The following fifteen minutes were the craziest, most hectic, frantic, chaotic, exhilarating, and dangerous of Zi Delan’s entire existence. There were so many beasts around him that he had to use the entire spear to keep them off him and his friends.
A thrust to stab a rabbit transitioned to a parry with the haft to swat away a rat, thoroughly devastating the inside of the rabbit’s body at the same time. He danced around his teammates, throwing off whatever creature was climbing their back as they performed the same service for him.
At no point sparring or hunting in the Wood had he ever felt so at one with his weapon. It became almost like a part of him. He was positive that, when he consolidated his gains, he'd reach Large Success.
Not every move had a positive outcome, however. A bird dive bombed him, and neither he nor his team noticed it until it drew blood from the top of his head. The grass hid a small green snake, and it slithered up his leg, biting him before he knew it was there. He could only hope it wasn’t poisonous.
Numerous other scrapes and cuts and bites added up, but nothing was so bad that it endangered him or prevented him from fighting.
Facing such a relentless onslaught, one of the six of them was destined to eventually take a serious wound.
Like the beasts that had most injured Zi Delan, Zhong Kun never saw the one that got him. From what they could piece together later, a jackal had been fighting Hou Yazhu and losing. It withdrew and, instead of directly attacking a nearby sect member, seemed to retreat. With so many other targets, the guards quickly forgot about the creature.
It circled around and came out of the brush, ambushing Zhong Kun and catching him in the throat.
Zi Delan and Ding Hua quickly put down the already wounded animal, but the damage was done. Zhong Kun fell to the ground in a heap, blood gushing from the bite.
It was bad, surely a mortal wound.
Zi Delan had seen a man bleed out after having his throat slit in a fight. The guy had gone from strong and healthy to dead in minutes, and there had been nothing that any of the bystanders could do to help him.
For an instant, he panicked, remembering the helplessness he’d felt at that moment in the past. He couldn’t bear the thought of watching a friend die like that stranger had.
Zi Delan took a deep breath. He was no longer a kid. He was a cultivator.
There had to be something he could do. Find someone with a healing pill. Carry Zhong Kun to Master.
Yes. That was—
Before Zi Delan could move to pick up his friend, Master appeared right beside them. All beasts within a five-foot radius of them collapsed to the dirt, unable to move.
“Master…” Zi Delan tried to speak, tried to explain the problem, but the words just wouldn’t come.
“He’ll be fine,” Master said. “Don’t worry.”
Even as the words were leaving his mouth, Master calmly grabbed Zhong Kun’s hand. There was no supernatural glow or any sign that Master was doing anything at all. Well, other than the fact that the bleeding stopped, the throat that had been torn to pieces by the jackal bite knit itself back together.
“See,” Master said. “Good as new.”
Comments
Gopard
Thanks for the chapter!
ShadeByTheSea
Yeah, he bought it like 2 weeks before the wave.
Frardowin
I think it is his healing concept
BelligerentGnu
I see that healing technique hit the top of the buy list.
