Chapter 406 - Poison of Death
Just as Song San was considering how to escape this dire situation, his gaze fell on Liu Feng.
Song San almost laughed when he saw the translucent green contraption around Liu Feng’s chest and the guy’s pale face. His whole body was also covered in a fog-like green energy, allowing him to float in the air.
The guy had probably taken countermeasures against being poisoned.
That was what likely took him so long.
Because by now it was clear that Liu Feng had far more control over the mist array than Song San had initially thought.
Also, judging by how Liu Feng’s body barely shifted and how little anything below his chest moved, it was obvious to Song San that the guy had been paralyzed after his spine was crushed.
Yet despite all that, Liu Feng looked as calm as ever.
Song San liked Liu Feng more than most people.
The guy was like a bug. Weak and incredibly difficult to kill.
“Humans...” the golden monkey growled.
Liu Feng glanced at the beast, then drifted his gaze toward the three-eyed snake floating beside it.
If Song San had been able to speak properly, he would have warned the monkey that a traitor was standing right next to him. Unfortunately, he could barely breathe.
It would take a while for his jaw to set itself back into place.
“Hello.” Liu Feng nodded. “Thank you for taking down such a troublesome person. Also, there is no need to worry. I do not see beasts in a bad light. In retrospect, I think there is much we both can learn from each other.”
The golden monkey snorted. “I do not need to listen to a human with weak cultivation order me around.”
The moment those words left its mouth, the beast moved. It accelerated so quickly that even Song San struggled to follow the motion.
Using its monstrous physique, the monkey blitzed across the battlefield and charged directly toward Liu Feng.
The creature was clearly confident that even with three Core Formation Cultivators present, Wu Yan, Song Song, and Ye An, it could do whatever it pleased.
Song San saw no flaws in that logic. Human martial arts combined with a monstrous body produced absurd results. Against almost any other Core Formation Cultivators, there would have been no issue.
Another figure moved at nearly the same moment.
Ye An appeared before Liu Feng and exhaled a cold breath. Frost gathered around her as she confronted the monkey with an expressionless face and icy eyes.
Ah.
This was bad, Song San thought.
After all, Ye An stepping forward like this was practically a declaration.
She was choosing a side. From this point onward, she would back Liu Feng and his team of misfits.
Whatever hope Song San still had that she might interfere to preserve some balance against his sister died right there.
Now he could only hope the monkey caused enough chaos for him to find an opening and escape.
The monkey didn't slow down for even a second when it saw who stood before it, despite clearly sensing her cultivation.
Instead, it drew back its fist.
Brilliant golden flames erupted around its arm.
The technique looked disturbingly similar to something a human cultivator would use.
Ye An responded by raising her jade-like palm.
Frost spread between her fingers, weaving itself into a delicate web of ice. The pattern resembled the webbed palm of a frog.
The monkey didn't hesitate. Its fist shot forward with its full power behind it.
Ye An's defense lasted barely a second before her arm shattered apart like a finely carved sculpture struck by a hammer.
Even Liu Feng's eyes widened.
Yet the real surprise came afterward.
No blood emerged from the ruined stump. No flesh or exposed bone could be seen. There was only ice. It looked as though the monkey had shattered an arm carved entirely from frozen crystal.
Some kind of clone technique? Song San wondered.
But he quickly dismissed the idea.
He could clearly sense that Ye An was real, and a clone would have collapsed long before surviving a strike like that.
However, the attacker didn't hesitate.
The monkey swung its other fist toward her head. This time it was merely a Qi-enhanced punch with no martial technique behind it, but Song San knew that alone was more than enough to shatter Ye An's skull like a watermelon.
Yet, Ye An seemed completely unruffled.
In the split second where she remained calmer than the monkey, she raised her remaining hand and gently touched the beast's golden-furred chest.
The monkey froze.
Then, in the next instant, ice exploded across its body.
Frost spread from the point of contact at an absurd speed, covering fur, flesh, and Qi alike. Within a heartbeat, the golden monkey had become a frozen statue suspended in midair.
Ye An exhaled a stream of cold mist and withdrew her hand.
The frozen monkey plummeted toward the ground.
With a thunderous boom, the massive statue crashed into the earth.
Yet it didn't shatter.
“What a strong body,” Ye An commented softly as she stared at the imprisoned beast. “This will hold him for a dozen minutes or so, but after that he will likely break free.”
Liu Feng nodded.
Then the group descended toward Song San.
Before he could even get a word out, a green translucent array formed around him.
Song San couldn't help feeling annoyed.
A certain half-dead bastard was as cautious as ever.
He tilted his head back and rolled his tongue around the ruined remains of his mouth, wincing at the sensation. Flesh bubbled and twisted around the wound before forming a new lower jaw lined with sharp canine teeth.
The beastly noises inside his mind rumbled louder as he drew upon their power.
Suppressing them had become increasingly difficult.
If he had been given more time to perfect the Soul Poison, he would have erased those souls entirely by now. They had been a constant annoyance ever since he was forced to use beast parts to regenerate his arms after Song Song ripped them off during their previous encounter.
Sadly, poison was not magic. It couldn't distinguish between Song San's soul and those of the beasts, at least not in its current version.
“Any last words?” Liu Feng asked.
His voice came out raspy, but otherwise calm.
The bastard looked as unbothered as ever, as though everything had gone exactly the way he wanted.
Perhaps it had.
Though Song San doubted even Liu Feng had planned all of this.
“You were just lucky,” Song San replied, awkwardly testing the movements of his new jaw.
He didn't even have the strength to stand anymore.
And with the monkey defeated so easily by Ye An, there was no longer any realistic chance of escape.
Song San's gaze drifted toward Ye An's destroyed arm.
Steam rose from the stump as fresh ice grew outward, slowly shaping itself into a replacement limb.
He roughly understood what had happened.
The crazy bitch had likely been tearing off parts of herself whenever his sickness spread into her body, replacing the damaged sections with ice through whatever bizarre mechanism her Extreme Physique allowed.
“Yes, I was lucky. From now on, that will probably be my thing for a while,” Liu Feng said. “It seems fate is playing a cruel joke on both of us.”
“Just kill him,” Song Song intervened.
What a lovely sister she was.
“I don’t really have anything to say,” Song San snorted, trying to clear the blood from his newly formed nostrils.
As for telling Liu Feng his life story, about how his mother had sacrificed herself so he could grow up, or how he had somehow become a little too much like his father despite hating the man...
Nobody would ever know.
And after his death, nobody would remember he had even existed.
He had left nothing behind.
Oh.
Wait.
He had a daughter.
But...
“Actually, I have a daughter in Greengrass Town. Do whatever you want with that information,” Song San said, staring up at the blue sky.
Ice filled the green array. Cold spread across his body as the freezing energy locked him in place, slowing his thoughts and dulling his senses.
Afterward came warmth.
The array Liu Feng had erected around him ignited in dark flames, slowly consuming his body. The fire didn't burn quickly. It worked its way through him piece by piece.
Song San knew then that there was no way out.
This was the end.
What a life it had been.
As his thoughts drifted through old memories, for some reason they kept circling back toward the daughter he had abandoned.
Did the orphanage treat her well?
The weather became quite cold during autumn and winter.
Did they give her a thick enough coat?
Would anyone notice if she got sick?
Song San didn't understand why he was thinking about such things.
He also didn't understand why he had told Liu Feng where to find her.
As Ye An's ice sealed his thoughts and Liu Feng's array slowly consumed his body, none of those things occupied his mind anymore.
Instead, he wondered what she looked like.
Would she grow up resembling him?
Would she inherit his eyes?
His temperament?
Would she become a better person than he had ever managed to be?
The flames continued to spread.
The sky above remained clear and blue.
And Song San's final thoughts belonged to the daughter he had always imagined he never cared about.
*******
I stared at Song San's slowly destroyed corpse. This method would ensure that his poison couldn't spread around and that any contingencies designed to take us down with him wouldn't work.
Yet despite all that, I still found myself waiting for Song San, one of the smartest people I knew, to somehow pull something out at the last moment.
Perhaps he would still escape.
Perhaps this was another layer of some absurd scheme.
After all, he was one of the few people around my generation, despite being only about a decade older than me, who had consistently managed to outsmart me.
Mostly because we had spent years butting heads.
His frozen head was the last thing consumed by the dark flames.
There was a strange melancholic glint in his eyes.
What was that about? What kind of plan did the crazy bastard have? Had he somehow moved his real body elsewhere and left behind a clone?
Did he somehow predict my actions?
Sure, I was confident he had expected we might try to kill him here, and he undoubtedly had countermeasures prepared. But I doubted he had planned for everything.
Even Song San couldn't have predicted that I would gain the support of a Nascent Soul beast.
No matter how clever his schemes were, there were limits. The difference between Core Formation and Nascent Soul was simply too vast. Some gaps couldn't be bridged through planning alone.
I had the unpleasant feeling this would become another Hu Jin situation. One of those mysteries I would never fully understand. A person disappearing from the world and taking all their answers with them.
Unfortunately, I didn't get much time to dwell on it as a loud cracking noise echoed through the battlefield.
My gaze snapped toward the frozen golden monkey. Cracks spread rapidly through the ice covering its body. Steam hissed into the air as overwhelming heat radiated outward.
“He is breaking out much faster than normal,” Ye An observed.
I levitated what remained of Song San's body as it crumbled into ash. Even after nothing remained, I didn't dispel the array.
Just in case. Instead, I adjusted the array and sent it floating eastward as far as it could travel.
“Don't worry,” I reassured everyone. “We have our own powerhouse now.”
I glanced at the three-eyed white snake out of the corner of my eye.
Bai immediately understood and slithered away.
Honestly, sending Bai into the Beast Sect as both a literal and metaphorical snake had originally been a whim. The results had exceeded all expectations.
Space beside me rippled, and a tall, lanky man stepped out wearing a loose blue robe.
The most striking thing about him wasn't his height. It was his face.
Pockmarked scars covered his skin as though he had survived a severe bout of smallpox, and one eye pointed east while the other seemed determined to stare west. His unnaturally long tongue dangled from his mouth.
This googly-eyed fellow was Ni Shi. My strongest trump card.
A Nascent Soul beast in human form.
“Hihihihi,” he laughed like a villain from a children's story. “This is it! I’m finally free, my beautiful fellas!”
His presence was surprisingly faint. For a creature whose original body was the size of a mountain, his Qi control was remarkable.
The ice around the golden monkey rapidly melted beneath the intense heat pouring from its body.
Only a few stubborn patches remained. One clung to its forearm, another to the lower abdomen, and the last spread across its upper back near the shoulders.
No matter how much heat it released, those sections refused to melt.
“Humans,” the monkey growled as it smashed its fists together, creating sparks that ignited into golden flames.
“A beast using human techniques?” Ni Shi tilted his head. “It seems that after all this time, even such ridiculous things have become normal.”
The monkey didn't appear amused. Its lips curled downward, and a deep frown furrowed its brow.
Normally, judging from its previous behavior, it would have attacked immediately.
This time the monkey didn't move. It instinctively realized it had encountered something dangerous.
“Who are you?” the monkey asked.
“Nobody of importance in this day and age. Even back then, I was just a toad at the bottom of a well,” Ni Shi replied.
He smiled as though it were some private joke, but the amusement never reached his eyes.
“Then just die,” the monkey said.
His speed was so fast that he blurred beyond both my vision and spiritual senses.
It seemed the monkey's instincts were good. Just not good enough. Either that, or he simply chose to ignore them.
Song Song stood beside me just in case, while the rest of my team gathered nearby. Jiang Yeming and Tingfeng, who had not yet reached Core Formation, stayed particularly close.
But the monkey paid no attention to us.
In less than a heartbeat, it appeared directly in front of Ni Shi. Its golden-furred fist was wrapped in a condensed sphere of flames that looked like a miniature sun.
“Do you know why humans developed martial techniques?” Ni Shi asked.
“It doesn't matter!” the monkey roared. “I will make these techniques my own and reveal a power humans could never imitate!”
The monkey's fist shot forward.
Then space rippled.
The arm vanished.
From the elbow down, the monkey's fist disappeared into a distortion in the air as though it had plunged into an invisible lake.
Damn.
Did he just cut off the monkey's arm? And what happened to all the energy condensed inside that punch? I couldn't sense it dissipating at all.
But then the monkey's eyes widened.
It immediately pulled back.
Its arm was completely unharmed.
The beast leapt backward, creating distance between itself and Ni Shi.
Oh.
So the arm hadn't been severed. It had only looked that way.
The technique reminded me of plunging a hand into water, except the water itself had somehow been folded into space.
A strange technique, and a very interesting one.
“Humans created martial techniques because they lacked the innate abilities beasts possessed,” Ni Shi said calmly. “They created martial techniques to better comprehend the elements they awakened during Foundation Establishment. We beasts understand our elements instinctively.”
He spread his arms slightly.
“That is our advantage.”
His eyes drifted toward the monkey.
“And what you're doing is like a fish trying to climb a tree instead of learning how to swim faster.”
The monkey clenched his teeth.
Its gaze darted around the battlefield as it searched for an escape route.
“Let me show you something,” Ni Shi continued. “My element is water. I focused only on water and nothing else. I did not waste my attention on other elements or imitate human techniques.”
He shook his head.
“After all, if you continue down your current path, you will never become a Nascent Soul beast despite your talent and bloodline.”
After saying that, Ni Shi raised both hands.
The space around us rippled.
“As you can see, it looks like I am manipulating space,” he explained. “But I am not. I merely studied depth within water.”
The ripples expanded outward.
Layers folded over one another.
Distances twisted.
“What others perceive as spatial manipulation is simply my understanding of water reaching this stage. Instead of studying space itself or learning human techniques, I achieved something similar by deepening the comprehension of my own element.”
The monkey stared at the distortions surrounding him.
Every possible escape route had become a maze of shifting ripples.
“My path is not wrong,” he growled. “I can–”
“Well, it seems you can't teach an old monkey new tricks,” Ni Shi shrugged.
Then he moved.
One moment, he stood several dozen meters away. The next, he was standing directly before the monkey.
He gently flicked a finger against the beast's forehead.
That was all.
The monkey froze.
Its eyes immediately lost focus.
The golden flames around its body vanished.
Then the massive creature slumped forward and crashed into the ground.
“I know no Mental Techniques either,” Ni Shi smirked. “I simply sank and drowned his mind.”
Then he turned toward me.
“What do you think, Liu Feng?”
“Very interesting stuff,” I nodded.
Ni Shi smiled.
Yes.
This was going to be a very... interesting partnership.