My heart dropped. The patriarch!? Gao Shan was already enough of a headache, but if the patriarch of the Gao Clan came to Three River City then all hope was lost.

  Perhaps Wang Ren and I could overturn the natural order of the world to defeat Gao Shan. Even now I hadn’t lost my will. However, the patriarch of the Gao Clan was sure to be an existence I could barely comprehend.

  Forget squashing me like an ant, he could sneeze and blow away a city if he was as strong as I suspected. Nonetheless, I would take each problem as it came. If I was fated to die here I would at least do my utmost to drag another Gao bastard with me to the hells.

  I grimaced as I returned Gao Shan’s fearsome glare. It was a struggle to stand under the weight of his cultivation.

  My legs buckled, my breath coming in short bursts. It was as though I was standing at the base of the Cloudy Falls themselves.

  The entire building shuddered as he crashed from the skies, landing in front of me. The pressure grew until I could barely breathe. Our eyes locked, unchecked fury in his and cold loathing tinged with defiance in mine.

  “Would you not take revenge if someone slaughtered your family members and clan? I won’t apologise for giving that sniveling bastard what he deserved,” I replied, holding my head high.

  If I was going to die I was going to go out with a bang. And if he decided to act in haste and make a mistake that I could take advantage of, then that was all the better.

  To my surprise, Gao Shan’s lips curled into a smile. He doubled over and began to laugh from his belly like a man possessed.

  Despite his casual attitude, the pressure on me didn’t lessen whatsoever. I knew that if I tried to strike now he could reap my life in an instant.

  After a few moments he stood back up. He gathered his breath and straightened his robe before levelling his gaze at me once more.

  “You are a funny man, Zhao Dan,” he said.

  “Well, I don’t often aim to be but we can’t choose where we find humour,” I replied, unsure where the conversation was heading.

  “Indeed. Wise words from a man soon to be dead. How often that seems to happen. Why is it that they can’t be so wise in life and avoid a bloody fate? Perhaps it is the will of the heavens that we live stupidly and die with intelligence. You misunderstand the reason for my rage, Zhao Dan.”

  I raised an eyebrow.

  “You actually think I cared about that worthless trash cousin of mine? He was sent out here so he would stop causing trouble in the clan. I’m only here now because he managed to fuck up so badly that he broke the patriarch from his secluded cultivation. I’m going to kill you not for revenge, but because you dared to kill a man with the name Gao,” he declared, his voice taking on a steel edge as he spoke the name of his clan.

  “And if I dared to kill one more?” I replied, cocking my head to one side and smirking.

  Gao Shan’s smirk vanished entirely and he took another step towards me. My legs were trembling like jelly but I steeled my resolve.

  It would take the jade emperor himself descending from heaven to knock me to the ground. He took another step, drawing closer and closer towards me.

  When he was a single step away from me, I watched the flow of his qi. It was almost impossible to sense, but I’d always had a heightened ability to see energy flows since the day I arrived in this world.

  Straining every sense in my body to the limit, I felt a throbbing in my skull. Gao Shan didn’t notice my efforts, his eyes a spectre of fury that threatened to tear my soul apart.

  The crushing weight of his cultivation surrounded me as though I was standing ten thousand metres deep in the ocean.

  This close, I could reach out and grab Gao Shan’s arm. A single touch was all I needed to inflict the most devastating of my techniques—ordering his body to grow and multiply in lethal ways.

  My own understanding of the body had increased through my cultivation. When I came here I had a doctor’s knowledge of the human body, but that was far from sufficient.

  Now I had pulled back the veil a little, peering at the secrets of this new world. Blood essence, spiritual energy that became qi—these changed the body in a myriad of ways that I was only beginning to comprehend.

  Gao Shan, being one of the most powerful cultivators I’d ever encountered, was the perfect target to test how far I could corrupt a cultivator’s body. My technique began with causing tumours in the physical body, but how devastating would it be if even my target’s qi turned against them?

  “Die,” Gao Shan uttered, his arm exploding towards me with the majestic grace of a serpent.

  Even knowing the strike was coming, I struggled to react. The speed at which he moved was ridiculous.

  His arm blurred and I couldn’t follow his strike. I didn’t need to. I knew I was likely to die or at the very least be mortally wounded.

  So instead of attempting to defend myself or avoid the strike of a cultivator who outshone me in almost every way, I played to my strengths. My own arm shot out as soon as I noticed him move.

  His gaze flicked to my arm, but he snorted and ignored it. His overconfidence would be my weapon.

  His fingers tightened around my throat a breath before I grabbed onto his arm. To him it might seem like the dying struggles of his victim, but letting me make skin contact was a mistake.

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  I opened the floodgates. All my qi poured from my dantian in a torrential wave. I had been suppressing the void in my dantian all this time, in an effort to prevent the dead councillor from noticing I was not under his control.

  It had been trying to push something into my dantian. As my qi raced out of the dantian I felt the void awaken, something emerging.

  Until this point it had only fed me medicinal qi, refined from the energies it consumed. However, it had mostly absorbed the residual impurities of my alchemy experiments and then the hypnosis gu. I was curious to see what would emerge.

  At the same time as my qi left my body, I felt icy tendrils spear into my throat from Gao Shan’s tightening fist. I instantly recognised them as poison.

  It was no surprise that a cultivator of the Gao Clan would use poison as a weapon, but that was yet another miscalculation on his part. I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry at the situation.

  Unfortunately, there was still the problem of the strength of the poison. My physique could only handle so much. It all hinged on what Gao Shan’s true cultivation was.

  If he was a Foundation Building master, it didn’t matter that my physique was able to refine poisons—one of that level would simply overwhelm me and ravage my body from within. However, like a ray of piercing sunlight breaking through a blanket of storm clouds, I clung to a single hope of survival; if Gao was still in the Qi Gathering Realm, I might be able to resist his poison.

  The final strand of my qi left my body, a raging swirl of corrupting energy now blossoming along Gao Shan’s arm. I staggered backwards as he released my neck, the poison burning into my chest.

  Gao Shan stared down at his arm with derision painted across his face. “Is this your final hope? A last ditch technique to try and kill me?” he snorted.

  I didn’t give him any face by responding. Either the technique would work and he would die, or it would fail and he would live as I struggled to fight against the poison.

  I coughed, my breathing short and sharp. The poison was burning through my windpipe and spreading towards my lungs.

  My body had already begun to refine the poison, but it was slow progress. It was a powerful toxin and I barely made a dent. Each breath managed to refine a drop of the poison, but there were rivers of it.

  Gao Shan’s face remained twisted into a sneer, but I saw the doubt creeping in from the corners of his eyes. My qi was spreading through his arm, far slower than I expected but still making constant progress.

  I saw tiny lumps forming on his skin as he tore back the sleeve of his robe and glared at his arm. However, I was unable to keep focusing as the poison reached my heart and lungs.

  I felt as though a fire had been lit inside me, scorching its way through my organs. Even with the excessive stages of body tempering I’d been through and the refining of my organs due to my physique, the poison continued to spread and wreak havoc.

  Gao Shan didn’t put my technique in his eyes, but I would have to hope it could at least leave a mark. Wang Ren was on his way and if I could weaken our enemy then perhaps he would take revenge for me.

  The tang of iron mixed with the acrid taste of poison in my throat as I spat blood, falling to my knees. I looked upwards, but all I saw was a mountain of blades and a sea of fire.

  My vision failed me as the poison spread from my neck to my head. My dantian swelled like a fat-bellied drunkard as the void spat something out.

  At the same time, the first drops of Gao Shan’s poison reached my stomach. That had two effects. First, the pain was incomparable to what I’d been feeling until then. It was as though a tiger was trapped inside my gut and clawing its way out in a furious rage.

  The second and more useful effect was that my stomach began to refine the poison alongside my lungs. That increased the rate at which I was fighting against the poison, but it was still far from enough.

  My entire body shuddered in weakness. I was locked in a life-or-death struggle with the rampaging poison. Expending all my qi to try and kill Gao Shan had been a risky gamble.

  It left me weakened, unable to use my full cultivation against the poison. However, if it was able to injure or kill the bastard, that was a trade I would happily take.

  There was a positive side to this torture. My heart was being refined faster than ever before, with every wheezed breath and churn of my gut refining the poison into fuel for the Fivefold Medicine Forge Physique.

  It was hard to focus on anything other than the pain, but an uncomfortable sensation had been scratching at my dantian for the last few seconds. Whatever the void had spat out seemed to be acting on its own, beyond my control.

  Unlike previous instances, it had clearly not produced a form of energy or qi that I could bend to my own uses. My senses pierced my dantian and when I saw what was inside I cursed.

  A small purple worm with green spots all over its body was crawling along the walls of my dantian. The underside of its body was covered in tiny hairs—the cause of my discomfort.

  For a brief moment I thought that the Gao Clan’s hypnosis gu was too powerful to be devoured by the void in my dantian. I soon dismissed that notion, realising that I felt no threat to my soul from the small worm.

  A fresh wave of burning agony cut through my moment of focus. I coughed black blood and yelled in pain. It was a moment of weakness, but also a cathartic expulsion of rage.

  After a few seconds I was able to focus once more. The agonising pain still burned through my flesh and bones as I struggled to refine and cleanse it, but it was manageable once again.

  The worm had crawled a few inches along my dantian’s interior surface while I was distracted. It seemed to have a purpose—though I couldn’t begin to guess at it.

  Since this creature had been produced by my body I suspected I might be able to form a connection with it. At least I hoped the void was part of my body—having a mysterious phenomenon inside the most vulnerable part of me was a terrifying prospect if it was controlled by an unknown force.

  Unfortunately I had no experience in beast taming. Forming a connection with a puppy or a kitten was one thing, but how the hell was I supposed to go about taming a mysterious worm produced by an endless void in my dantian.

  This didn’t seem to be a common occurrence. Nothing in my memories would be able to help. My first instinct was to try and reach out with my consciousness, but the moment I tried that the poison went wild.

  I was in a tentative balance with the destructive toxin. It was steadily corroding my flesh and bones, but by focusing I could keep it at bay as my organs refined it.

  The healing energy they produced restored the damaged flesh, though not fast enough to actually keep me alive—not forever, anyway. A small portion was split to refine my heart, which was gradually taking on a metallic sheen as it approached the point of being half refined.

  If I couldn’t utilise all my focus to try and make a connection with the worm, I would need another solution. My second choice would be to use a strand of my qi, but I had consumed it all in my attempt to kill Gao Shan.

  A few drops splashed around in my hollow dantian, but it was far from enough to be useful. I allowed myself to settle into a trance as I fought against the poison. The flesh on my neck was black and rotten now, my head wobbling as I lost the strength to hold it up.

  The worm suddenly stopped moving. I watched with curiosity as it lifted its head off the ground. A hint of disgust and wonder was added to the mix as it peeled back the front of its mouth to reveal rows of teeth like microscopic needles.

  Then, it lunged down and bit into the shell of my dantian. I gasped. The pain was indescribable, making the poison seem like the tickling of phoenix feathers. That caused me to lose focus and I collapsed to the ground as the poison gained a second wind.

  What the hell, little fella!?