Cultivation System: Elder Edition

Chapter 454

Songs of Survival (I)

It all happened in a blur.

One moment she was dancing between the falling apes, finally purging some of the stuffy feeling that had piled up in her chest ever since joining those two madmen, and the next she saw that old man appear and grab her by the waist. Though her instinct was to immediately retaliate and stab him, she held back; the look in his eyes seemed to spark something in her, so she only protested by the expression.

She felt herself shuttled through the shadows, Qi swarming her and moving her in a way she never experienced before. There were as many movement techniques under heaven as there were stars in the night sky and only one lifetime to experience them. Though she knew a lot and studied even more, this particular way... eluded her.

She was never good with darkness or shadows, preferring the light and embers of a roaring flame. As such, the way she moved between two points was rather straightforward, requiring very little intricate Qi manipulation.

The man's way, however? It confounded her. Though she could understand the basics of a movement art from just seeing it once--no matter how complex it was--this time she was stumped.

There was little time to reel on the realization, however; Lu Qi settled her down next to the boy and whipped something out from his spatial ring. It was reminiscent of a tortoise shell, though Liao Xinya couldn't detect anything particularly extraordinary in the object.

Regardless, he pushed it out with his hand, and not a blink later, Liao Xinya felt... death.

She felt it once or twice before--when she first angered her Master by insulting somebody he cherished deeply. The man had gripped her by the throat and held tight until she felt death.

Now, too, she felt it.

No... it was far, far, far worse today. In the blink of an eye, her entire world became a surge of energy potent enough to destroy everything--her breath fading, she knew that if something like this hit the Mountain itself, it would tear through all the protective formations and cultivators as though they were sheets of paper.

Even if she knew this place would become her tomb, she was unwilling. She wanted to cling to life as desperately as possible but knew it was for naught; something like this could not be defied. It was an act of Dao itself, and she would die.

... and yet, she did not.

That little thing Lu Qi put forth seemed to grasp the entirety of the leviathan bearing down on them--and then it flung it back.

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She thought so, at least.

Because there was no way any human--regardless of their realm--would have been able to follow this with their eyes. All she knew was that, at one moment, that flash of light was bearing down on them, and the next... it was gone. Alongside everything spanning for miles and miles onward in front of them.

There was no cave wall, no trees, no plateaus, or hills, or mountains, or anything--it was just an endless stretch of flat and drifting dust that ended in a haze.

She had just barely started wrapping her head around it when she heard Lu Qi mumble a pair of words that caused her heart to drop: "Oh shit."

As soon as she heard them, her mind went into overdrive, and she braced herself for impact, using every ounce of Qi to light herself on fire and steady the world around her.

Even with that, when it hit her, it felt as though the weight of an entire mountain pushed into her soul, and there was no way for her to endure. She felt her feet leave the ground and her body fling backward like a bolt of lightning. She tore through the thin walls of the cave and found herself flying out into the open, the span of the realm beneath her.

The sheer energy was impossible to counteract, but, bit by bit, she began to deaccelerate; within just ten or so seconds, she stopped, hovering utterly exhausted about a hundred yards or so above the desert.

She was flung that far back in the span of ten seconds. A journey that took them days to complete... just ten seconds. Could have even been fewer than that, as she wasn't quite sure it was even ten.

Feeling exhaustion swarm through her, she rapidly descended, gasping for breath by the time she did. It took just shy of three quarters of her Qi reserves to stabilize herself, and an inward inspection told her that was only the beginning.

Most of her ribs were broken, her collarbone was cracked, her left arm was utterly useless as the crack extended over to her shoulder, and her right foot was utterly annihilated, all five of her toes either broken or torn off, with the foot itself being angled completely backwards.

It would hurt, she realized, as soon as her mind caught up to the reality, but she didn't care. She should have died--of so many things--that merely being alive was a stroke of fortune.

She rapidly fished out multiple healing pills, popping them into her mouth before also finding some healing salves and applying them to the external wounds. The nature of the injury was kind of off--though most of her wounds were physical, minute traces of the overwhelming Qi that seemed to have undone part of the realm remained in her. Using Qi to rapidly close up the wounds or mend the bones was out of question--she had very little experience doing it, to begin with, and even those who did have experience would advise her to take it slow with the unnatural Qi in her.

As she settled down, she collapsed onto the sand, caring little that it was infernal. Her mind gasped back to the moment she thought she would die and to that man of so many means that she was beginning to wonder whether he was even real.

No one--no one--she knew would have been able to even survive that blast, let alone reflect it. Not just by their own means, but by any means. No artifact, no weapon, no armor, no art—there was nothing under the heavens that she was aware of that had the capacity to reflect that. There were means to dull it--formations, arrays, a few arts perhaps--but not stop it or reflect it.

Not in their little corner, at least.

She worried for a moment over his fate but quickly shook her head; if he had the means to reflect that, he had the means to do anything. It was just the matter of choice, she supposed.

Looking around at the unending sand, she didn't even know just how far out she was from the desert's edges. Though she had a tent, she disliked being in the open--and now alone, too.

Regardless, today... she would rest.

She would not move, she would not speak, and she would not cultivate.

Merely sit in silence and ponder upon who that man was.

And whether her sect knew just what kind of hell they invited under their roof.

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