Flash floods and torrential rain; thunder rumbling and the mountains trembling.
Deafening roars echoed one after another through the narrow mountain ravines, overlapping in vast, surging waves like an ocean tide. Amid the clamor, even speaking to each other required shouting at the top of one's lungs.
Yet in that split second, everything clearly fell into a fleeting, dead silence.
As if the ears had suddenly lost all ability to hear.
In that dazed, trance-like instant, the sound of breathing, the beating of the heart, the echo of blood rushing through the brain—everything became startlingly distinct.
Then, immediately following, erupted a shrill, agonizing wail that seemed to sprout from the deepest depths of the heart!
It was as if all the agony and calamity buried in memory were relived at this moment, erupting in a chain reaction. The sorrow, futility, and torment witnessed across a lifetime, every unbearable memory and past ordeal, surged once more—colliding, churning, boiling, until at last... giving rise to pure despair!
As the phantom of the skeletal evil spirit opened its jaws and shrieked, an endless deluge of spiritus poison plummeted from the heavens alongside the torrential rain and howling wind, tracing hallucinatory ripples of gleaming light through the darkness.
One-third of the spiritus cage's reserves was drained in an instant, detonating with a roar.
Resentment, hatred, ravenous hunger, killing intent, greed, malice—a frenzied tide of spiritus thick with countless negative emotions howled past, churning back and forth within the narrow mountain col. Like living things, they writhed, twisted, split apart, and burrowed into every soul and consciousness, invading, permeating, and swelling everywhere without leaving a single gap.
Like serpents striking from the shadows to devour their prey, they injected venom saturated with the taint of corruption. In the blink of an eye, blank, dazed faces twisted into grotesque, unnatural contortions.
Unable to hold back, they shrieked in agony!
The wails spread like a plague at a spine-chilling speed, enveloping everyone stationed along both mountainsides. Then, muffled thuds sounded continuously.
Brains boiled; souls ruptured!
Amid the wailing, blood seeped from every orifice of those contorted faces.
Even more vivid were the fireworks of spiritus erupting from their skulls, laced with countless muddy colors.
Dark green, crimson, murky yellow, pitch-black, ashen pale—a mottled tapestry of colors surged and ascended with the runaway spiritus.
Fleeting and gone in a flash.
It was practically an eerie, sinister fireworks display!
The ambush, once brimming with murderous intent and chilling malice, collapsed abruptly amid the agonizing cries. One after another, figures prostrated in the mud fell silent, turning into hollow husks.
Those who had not yet lost consciousness wailed and squirmed, screaming and instinctively crying for help, but there was no response. Unable even to stand up, they could only writhe in vain like paralytics. When fingers reflexively contracted, they squeezed triggers, spraying useless gunfire into the void until firing pins struck empty chambers with hollow clicks.
Explosives detonated amid convulsions and thrashing. Flames surged into the air as mud churned and massive boulders tumbled down with a roar.
The mountains, once quiet, suddenly seemed to tear apart as heaven and earth collapsed, but no one cared.
Even the fortunate few who, thanks to innate resistance or protective gear, managed to endure this violent onslaught were now overwhelmed by the encroaching pollution. Heavily wounded and seized by malicious impulses, they began instinctively slaughtering one another.
They even forgot their skills and weapons, relying on tooth and nail like beasts, devouring each other to vent the fear and madness in their hearts.
It was an earthly hell.
Such a sight was unbearable even to the Celestial Chosen awakening from stupor. Screaming in terror, they looked around in confusion, driven by instinct to flee.
And then came the roar falling from the sky.
A deafening crash!
Amid flashing lightning, the steel monster leaped into the air, crossing hundreds of meters to plunge down from above!
Steel claws trampled the earth as its limbs unfurled. Greataxe, hammer, chainsaw, and machine guns swept outward. Pan Ying unsheathed; amid surging bloody light, it began harvesting lives without the slightest mercy.
Up on the mountain peak, Ji Jue slowly withdrew his hand.
He let the gale howl around him, yet supported by limbs of quicksilver, he stood as steady as a mountain.
Rain splashed onto the red-hot ring, hissing sharply.
Its once vivid, dripping luster seemed to drain away, dimming rapidly as though every drop of psychic swill had been dumped out in that frenzied surge, awaiting another round of infusing and purification.
This indiscriminate bombardment of wailing was even more terrifying than that of an ordinary Heart Pivot Celestial Chosen.
After all, Heart Pivot practitioners were still human. Even if someone were vicious enough to want to take revenge on society, they wouldn't be insane enough like Ji Jue to stuff so much potent poison into their own soul.
Mutations provoked by corruption alchemy, corrupted spiritus steeped in the essence of numerous Great Sins, combined with the extraction and purification of Fluid Alchemy and the guiding support of blessings—it was practically an oversized, high-purity dirty bomb, poisoning everything indiscriminately and inducing mutation and madness. Death brought an end to it all, but for the survivors, the lingering horrors were endless.
Had Little Niuma not harvested them in time, this round of wailing might well have catalysed a few Corrupted...
Yet it didn't matter; Corrupted were fine too.
Pedants clung to sectarian prejudices and narrow-minded views, but someone of Ji Jue's broad vision didn't care about the distinction between Sovereign Virtues and Great Sins.
A Corrupted's life was still a life! How could one be more or less valuable than another?
No, in a sense, they were even more useful...
His fingers twitched twice. Amid the torrential rain, gossamer threads of silver light appeared and fell, misting into a faint vapor that spread silently. Under the lockdown of Solid Alchemy, the spiritus and pollution dissipating into the air rapidly merged into the quicksilver vapor, solidifying into grains of greyish-black sand.
Soon, crawling mercury spiders scurried past, gathering up the solidified black sand once more.
Once spiritus containing so much pollution and negative emotions underwent purification via Fluid Alchemy, it could be recycled and reused. As for the separated pollutants and impurities, they could be fed directly back into the Ring of Poison Heart for another cycle of catalysis...
Having lived through hard times, one learned to pinch every penny no matter what.
After all, "a penny saved is two pennies earned"—wastefulness was truly shameful.
What Ji Jue detested most was wasting materials; even a piece of scrap metal in his workshop had to be tossed into the furnace to be reforged and recycled.
Only, An Ning glanced sidelong at the faint curl of a smile on Ji Jue's lips, her expression growing increasingly conflicted: How does a perfectly normal person get so bizarre and sinister after dabbling in artisan craft?
Embers truly corrupts people!
"ROAR!!!"
In the lull between thunderclaps and crashing booms, a furious roar erupted from the valley. A colossal silhouette ripped through a vehicle's chassis and vaulted forward, crashing head-on into Little Niuma. The rampage-harvesting Little Niuma was knocked flying in an instant, tumbling through the air before hitting the ground!
"Big brother, sa—save me..."
In the mud, a Celestial Chosen who had miraculously escaped Pan Ying's edge cried out with tearful joy, only to see "Big Brother" slowly turn his head.
A pair of eyes, mottled sickly green and blood-crimson, stared straight at him.
Upon the bestial face covered in thick black bristles, the vague traces of a former full beard remained, but the bloodshot, grotesque green eyes had narrowed into vertical slits brimming with pure hunger and savagery.
Without hesitation, he opened his bloody maw, crushing his subordinate's head and ravenously devouring flesh and blood. His mutated frame expanded once more, fangs and claws sharpening.
And inside the vehicle he had torn open, all was already a mangled pulp of gore...
Amid soul trauma and corrupting pollution, the leader's repressed bestial nature had erupted into sheer frenzy, and he had long since consumed every trusted aide and subordinate at his side!
"...Is this White Stag corruption?" Ji Jue asked, intrigued.
Before this, he had seen advanced patients of Bloodthirst Syndrome, and that plague-like pathogen was precisely the poisonous fallout born from the corruption of the White Stag's Chosen.
One could say that without Bloodthirst Syndrome, Ji Jue might not have embarked upon the path of a Celestial Chosen so smoothly. Seeing such a sight again, he couldn't help but feel a surge of emotion.
The symptom of Embers corruption was reification; Swarm corruption manifested as madness and slaughter; Tianyuan corruption was the annihilation of humanity to become a vessel for distorted rules... and White Stag corruption's most direct symptom was sinking into bestiality and uncontrollable cannibalism!
"At best, he's just a ghoul. He's far from a true wolf."
An Ning looked down disdainfully. "Brother Ji Jue, turning to evil doesn't make everyone three times stronger... Leaving trash like this alone wouldn't amount to anything anyway."
The Twelve Virtues differed from one another, each possessing unique attributes. At the same time, the purer the power, the more extreme it became, and the more easily it exerted a reverse influence over the Celestial Chosen. If one could not maintain oneself and master such power, one was bound to suffer its backlash sooner or later.
Countless people were seduced by power and drawn to the Great Sins, plunging irrationally into the vortex. Yet the harshness and chaos of the Great Sins far exceeded the Sovereign Virtues... What seemed like generous gifts and bestowment was merely fattening pigs for slaughter, nurturing fodder to be devoured and digested by true talents.
A fall born of having no choice was pitiable, but harboring childish notions and naive fantasies while willfully leaping into sin—that was true suicidal folly.
The beast-mutated, man-eating, blood-drinking monster below couldn't even retain his sense of self. His consciousness had been twisted into a shattered mess the moment corruption took hold. Even left alone, he would only destroy himself in endless, ravenous hunger.
He was immeasurably far from a true wolf.
Yet having encountered him, a hunter naturally could not turn a blind eye.
An Ning sighed.
She flicked her fingers.
Amid the overwhelming curtain of rain, a pierced tunnel abruptly opened. A shimmer of faint light flashed past. In an instant, the beastly ghoul howled and collapsed, a massive hole pierced clean through his chest.
At the wound, flesh squirmed as if trying to regenerate.
Regrettably, no matter how it grew and recovered, it could not close the wound pierced by the faint light. Blood gushed ceaselessly. In the growth of the flesh, mutation rapidly ballooned, transforming in the blink of an eye into a bizarre monstrosity woven of countless squirming claws and fangs, hissing, roaring, and thrashing about.
Nothing could halt death once it had arrived.
Struck down by that ray of Flying Light, it rapidly withered and shriveled, ultimately bleeding to death. As its numerous limbs withered and decayed, all that remained in place was a mutated skeleton, half man, half beast.
Only...
The moment the ghoul withered away in death, An Ning's nonchalant expression froze.
Amid the howling wind, she whipped her head around and surveyed her surroundings, her gaze scanning inch by inch across the mudslides and floods.
Her usual faint smile and slight contempt vanished in an instant.
A cold gleam surfaced in her eyes.
A wolf!
There was the scent of a wolf...
It wasn't a physical smell or tracks; rather, it was the instinct of a hunter!
Beginning with the House of An's Higher Calling, honed through countless trials and arts, the intuition etched deep into her soul had been triggered.
The moment the ghoul died, a stir of ravenous hunger drifted from the shadows.
A covert appetite surfaced alongside the death of the prey. Even masked and suppressed under layer upon layer, such a gaze, no matter how fleeting and subtle, triggered instinctive vigilance the second it landed on a hunter.
The wolf had come!
When? From where? No, perhaps from the very beginning, it had been lurking nearby, silently shadowing their every step...
Yet was that fleeting leakage of aura truly accidental?
In the long wait and tension, An Ning gradually realized.
In the chaotic wilderness, there were never fixed roles. The identities of hunter and prey shifted constantly; even a hunter could slip up and end up in a wolf's jaws.
This fleeting display of presence might even have been deliberate.
Intentionally leaving tracks in the mud to heighten the hunter's vigilance, wearing down the opponent's stamina in day-and-night torment, until at some moment of neglect, striking ruthlessly for an instant kill!
Perhaps at this very moment, the Sin of the White Stag in the dark was sneering disdainfully, gazing from afar at the hunter acting as if facing a mortal foe, staying motionless, biding its time.
And before that...
While Ji Jue was directing his mechanical constructs to swiftly sweep the battlefield and collect materials, danger plummeted from the skies once more!
An Ning suddenly bent low and, without any warning, swept Ji Jue's legs out from under him!
Taken entirely by surprise, Ji Jue fell backward in shock.
Even the quicksilver limbs supporting him made no move to defend. The moment they sensed the attack came from An Ning, they retracted like they had touched an electric shock, letting An Ning trip him and drag him as they leaped and sprinted across mud and rock.
Only then did he feel the vicious gale whistling past.
Right above them, within the pitch-black clouds above the torrential rain, a dark speck dimly appeared, aiming at enemies on the ground. A thunderous roar dozens of kilometers away was swallowed by the rain, but the "bullet" tore through the air in an instant!
"Found you!"
An excited voice rang out through the mental channel established by a blessed construct.
Within the storm clouds flashing with lightning, a winged Vortex Chosen soared through the tempest, relying on extraordinary vision and perception to lock onto Ji Jue's position.
Then, he raised both hands.
Bang!
All ten of his fingers exploded off in an instant, sharp digits detaching from his palms and whistling toward the ground.
The moment they detached and took flight, they broke the sound barrier, unleashing sonic booms.
In the scorching friction against the air, they rapidly morphed into spiraling bone spikes.
The lead spike grazed past Ji Jue, plunging into a boulder on the peak and detonating instantly. A virulent venom capable of corroding and dissolving all biological matter spread outward, hissing sharply under the washing rain.
Meanwhile, the remaining finger-bullets soaring through the air subtly adjusted their course, steered by their master to lock onto An Ning as she sprinted downhill.
Soon, they were detonated by a flick of faint light!
Amid thousands of rain streaks, a hidden glimmer of light rose against gravity. The instant it was perceived, it was already right before the eyes!
Bang!
The soaring Vortex Chosen's expression changed drastically. His giant wings snapped shut, instantly hardening like iron into a shield. Yet under the impact of that wisp of faint light, both wings exploded with a deafening boom. Immediately, however, the phantom image of a shield manifested out of thin air, deflecting the shattered remnant of light away.
Blocked!
Soon, as flesh squirmed, his giant wings grew back, along with his missing ten fingers.
Within the storm clouds, the Vortex Chosen darted and wheeled rapidly, raising his hands to fire finger-bullets once more, faster and faster, until his rate of fire rivaled a machine gun!
A flash of lightning illuminated his uniform—he was none other than a contestant from the Northern Realm.
"That's a feint, ignore it—"
Sprinting and swerving as An Ning pulled him along, Ji Jue waved his hand. Quicksilver surged, taking to the air and rapidly forming layers of iron curtains that warded off the toxic finger-bullets.
Crackling ruptures sounded without pause.
Silver light shattered again and again only to re-coalesce, holding out with difficulty.
Even before that, Ji Jue's eyes had ignited. Kindling flared, his perception expanding and transcending his physical vessel, looking down across every direction to perceive and penetrate everything in an instant!
—Mirror of Contained Forms!
Now, under the reflection and observation of the Mirror of Contained Forms, raindrops on all sides seemed to freeze entirely, shimmering with faint phantasmal gleams of spiritus... Without them noticing, the torrential rain filling the sky had already fallen under someone else's control!
The instant Ji Jue realized it, the countless raindrops suddenly altered, closing in like an overwhelming net to envelop them. A bone-chilling cold arose from nowhere, spreading and saturating everything, as if to freeze the entire world solid.
Entropy? Or Tianyuan?!
It didn't matter...
Tracing the countless currents of spiritus flowing between heaven and earth, Ji Jue locked onto the core of all this manipulation in an instant.
Found you!
Little Niuma suddenly roared.
The steel monster charged into a dead sprint, accelerating in a flash as fiery light erupted from the machinery on its back, propelling its massive bulk so fast it practically flew.
In the snap of a finger, it smashed through countless barricades of rain and frost, leaped into the air, and plummeted like a meteorite toward the roaring torrent in the ravine below!
In midair, the sword Pan Ying reversed in its steel claws, bloody radiance swelling and blazing as it descended from the sky.
It plunged straight into the surging, muddy torrent beneath!
BOOM!
The converging rain and frost collapsed abruptly; the trap and cage shattered, completely falling out of control.
From within the murky mountain torrent came a shrill, agonizing scream!
Chapter 365