The Silver-Winged Flying Swordfish cut through the clouds like a living arrow, its powerful fins beating a silent, steady rhythm. Li Yu stood on the platform on its back, the wind whipping past him, his gaze fixed on the distant, familiar peaks of the Green Mountain Sect. He was returning from his latest trip to Sunken Treasure City.
This trip had been particularly fruitful. He had acquired a rare deep-sea coral for his master and had a long insightful conversation with Old Man Jiu, the master alchemist, about the nature of soul-tempering herbs. While he wasn't interested in becoming an alchemist Li Yu wanted to soak in knowledge.
As he was flying over a dense ancient forest known for its rich spiritual energy and dangerous beasts, he sensed something. His spiritual sense was a constant passive net of his surroundings when it suddenly flared with a warning to what was below. He had taken this route countless times without issues before. He looked down to see what was going on.
In a large shattered clearing down below a fierce fight was raging. A group of seven cultivators, their robes a simple unmarked green, were surrounded by a force of at least twenty black-robed cultivators. The green-robed group was clearly on the losing end. They were fighting back-to-back in a desperate bloody struggle but they were being systematically overwhelmed.
"An ambush," he noted, his eyes narrowed. "The black-robed cultivators are moving with ruthless precision. They are not common bandits."
His immediate instinct was to urge the Swordfish to fly faster, to leave this unexpected trouble far behind. This was not his business and his core principle was to avoid conflict.
But at the exact moment his gaze fell upon the battle, one of the black-robed cultivators, a man with a hawk-like gaze and a powerful spiritual sense also looked up. Their eyes met across the distance. The man's face contorted in a snarl of fury. He shouted, his voice carrying a clear killing intent. "Witness! Kill him!"
There was no time to flee and no chance to alter his course. Five of the black-robed cultivators immediately broke off from the main fight and shot into the sky, their swords and spirit arts blazing with power.
Li Yu let out a quiet frustrated sigh. "So much for avoiding trouble," he said to the empty air. "It seems trouble has found me."
The five attackers, all at the Second or Third Stage of Qi Condensation sneered as they approached. They saw a single young disciple on a fast-moving beast. To them, this was a simple cleanup job.
Li Yu hardened himself mentally for what was about to come. He had wanted to remain hidden. But these people had seen him. They had targeted him. He was a loose ends that could expose their presence here.
"Crimson," he commanded through his spiritual link.
With a furious draconic roar the Koi's Sanctuary opened a pinprick portal and the massive jade-scaled form of his Rank 4 beast appeared in the air beside the Swordfish. Crimson, enraged at the sudden attack on its master, immediately spewed a torrent of corrosive black venom as he headed downward.
The leading black-robed cultivator, his face a mask of shock at the sudden appearance of such a powerful beast, threw up a hasty Qi shield. But as he did, Li Yu moved.
He did not feign weakness or hide his powers. This was going to be his first real fight and he didn't know what to truly expect from assassins. He unleashed the full terrifying might of his Ninth Stage Qi Condensation foundation.
His aura, which had been a calm pond erupted into a raging ocean. The pressure alone caused the five attackers to falter, their expressions turning from arrogance to pure terror. He completely out matched them, his cultivation well beyond theirs.
He activated the «Abyssal Dragon's Shadow». He did not stumble or sway. He vanished. One moment he was on the Swordfish the next he was a phantom, a ripple in space that appeared directly in the midst of the five attackers.
Before they could even react he had already struck. His hands formed the first seal of the «Deep-River Seal». He did not use a fraction of his power; he used its full crushing weight. He executed five palm strikes in the space of a single breath, his movements a blur of silent deadly grace.
Crushing Current.
Each strike was a sentence of death. The first four disciples didn't even have time to scream. The impossibly heavy and dense True Qi bypassed their defenses and shattered their bodies and internal organs from the inside out. They fell from the sky like broken dolls.
The final attacker, the one whose shield had been corroded by Crimson's venom, stared in soul-shattering horror as his companions were annihilated in an instant. He opened his mouth to scream but Li Yu was already before him.
Li Yu's hand closed around the man's throat. Vortex Grip. A spiraling, crushing force of Qi erupted and the man's neck snapped with a sickening crunch.
The battle from start to finish had taken no time at all. It was a silent and brutally efficient massacre.
Li Yu stood in the empty sky for a moment breathing in deeply. He had held nothing back and killing those five men filled him with a sense of strangely nothing. He thought there would be more emotions after what he had done but there was simply none.
They had tried to kill him so he fought back and killed them instead. It was as simple as that without any extra need for thought. He stripped the storage rings from the five falling corpses with a wave of his spiritual energy before their bodies even hit the forest canopy.
Down below, the remaining black-robed cultivators and the besieged green-robed group all stared up in shock at the sudden violent turn of events. They had seen their companions fall from the sky but the speed and efficiency of the slaughter was beyond their comprehension.
Li Yu looked down at the main battle. He was now fully committed. There could be no witnesses of his true strength.
"Crimson, attack," he commanded, his Ninth Stage aura still blazing.
Crimson roared and plunged towards the ground like a jade meteor, crashing into the flank of the black-robed cultivators. Li Yu followed him down and landed softly on a high branch of a shattered tree. He looked around, his expression was cold and detached.
The sudden powerful assault threw the ambushers' formation into chaos. But just as the tide of the battle was about to turn for the cultivators fighting for their lives a new terrifying pressure descended upon the clearing.
"Incompetent fools," a cold, ancient voice echoed from the depths of the forest. "You cannot even handle a simple cleanup."
A figure emerged from the trees. It was an old man, his face a mask of withered and wrinkled flesh. His eyes were glowing with a faint malevolent red light. His aura was a vast, deep, a terrifying sea of power that dwarfed everyone present. He was a mid-stage Foundation Establishment expert.
He simply waved his hand. A massive invisible hand of pure spiritual pressure slammed into the clearing. The surviving green-robed cultivators collapsed to the ground, their Qi sealed, their bodies paralyzed from the pressure. Crimson let out a defiant roar but the pressure crushed it to the ground as well. Its powerful Rank 4 body cracking under the strain.
Li Yu felt the pressure wash over him. It was an absolutely irresistible force. Everything happened way too fast for him to process but his body naturally activated his «Tidal Aegis Art» and «Abyssal Leviathan Physique» to their absolute limits. The spiraling currents of Qi beneath his skin meeting the crushing force. His bones groaned under the strain. His organs, fortified by the Kraken's Heart, trembled violently.
The gap between realms was immense. He was barely holding on but he could feel his defenses beginning to buckle. The pressure threatened to crush him into a paste. He didn't know what to do, he had never been in a position before where he was completely suppressed.
The old man's red eyes fixed on him, a flicker of surprise in them. "A peak Qi Condensation brat with a truly monstrous physique. You are still standing? Impressive. But it makes no difference. I will enjoy refining your body."
He raised his hand again, intensifying the pressure. Li Yu couldn't process what was going on, the pain and pressure were too much for him. He could barely move, his mind trying to think of what to do next but nothing was coming to him. He was panicking. A wave of blackness washed over his vision. His consciousness, battered by the overwhelming force, began to fade.
'Is this how I am going to die?' he thought to himself suddenly.
But in the deepest part of his soul something reacted. In the crimson-gold sanctuary of his martial spirit, something ancient and proud felt the imminent death of its host. It would simply not allow it.
As Li Yu's consciousness teetered on the edge of oblivion and his body giving out on him, the Koi's Sanctuary trembled. A presence of coldness awakened that the very air in the clearing began to freeze. The crushing spiritual pressure that was about to kill Li Yu simply vanished. It was negated by a higher authority and power.
A swirling vortex-like portal of crimson-gold light opened in the air in front of the collapsing Li Yu. From it, a wave of absolute darkness poured out, solidifying in an instant.
It was Khaos. It was no longer a fist-sized crab. It was a mountainous behemoth and its obsidian carapace blotting out the sun. Its colossal pincers were casting a shadow of death over the entire clearing. It had emerged in its true form that Li Yu first saw.
The old man paused, his technique half-formed. His face was contorting from confusion to soul-shattering terror. "What… what in the heavens is that?"
He never got an answer.
Khaos didn't bother talking to the man. He simply raised one of its colossal and crystalline pincers. The space around the pincer began to warp and distort. A terrifying silent energy, a power that didn't seem like it was of this world, gathered at its tip. It was the silent all-consuming energy of the void.
A beam of pure absolute blackness, a line of perfect, silent annihilation, shot from the pincer.
The old man's eyes widened in terror. He threw up every defensive barrier he possessed, his Foundation Establishment aura flaring like a dying sun.
But it was all useless. The black beam touched his shields and they did not shatter. They simply ceased to exist. The beam touched his body and he did not explode. He did not scream. He was simply… gone. Erased from the world with only his storage ring left, it seemed like Khaos knew what needed to be kept.
Khaos did not pause. Its massive form flickered, moving with a speed that defied its colossal size. It appeared in the midst of the frozen black-robed cultivators. Its pincers now moving in a blur of black light. They were not cutting or stabbing but simply crushing. Anything touched by its claw just disappeared.
In the space of two seconds every single one of the remaining ambushers was dead.
The clearing fell into silence.
Khaos stood in the center of the devastation for a moment. Its cold eyes swept over the unconscious survivors. Then, with a flicker, its massive form dissolved back into a stream of void energy and flowed back into the tiny portal which snapped shut.
Li Yu gasped, his consciousness returning as the pressure vanished, just in time for him to see Khaos crushing the remaining group. He stood there, his body trembling, his mind reeling from what had just happened. He had been defenseless against the old man. The pain and pressure together made him not be able to react, to even think properly.
He didn't know what to do against the old man to save himself. Could he even have saved himself if he knew what to do? That difference in power, could it really be closed through techniques and know how? He wasn't sure, he didn't know. For him, only one thing was sure, he would have died today without Khaos's help.
He hadn't been in many fights in his life, especially one where he needed to face someone with a higher cultivation than himself. This ambush could be considered his first real life and death fight and in essence he died. He couldn't react or do anything but thankfully Khaos saved him.
It took him a while to calm back down and stop the mini tremblers in his hands from the terror that was almost certain death. How did others go on adventures and have countless life and death moments? He had heard countless stories of sect disciples, retelling their adventures as if life and death encounters happened constantly and endlessly. Some even mentioned getting extremely close to death but feeling it himself was something completely different.
After finally settling his nerves, he looked at the empty clearing. At the broken and unconscious forms of the green-robed cultivators. He took a deep shuddering breath. He had survived and that was most important. Now, he had to clean this up.
He recalled Crimson, who was looking at the spot where Khaos had been with a deep instinctual fear. He sent it back to the sanctuary. He then gathered the storage rings from the dust where the black-robed cultivators had been.
He then gathered the five unconscious survivors of the green-robed group. He asked Khaos to create a small cave for him. He picked out an area a bit away from where the fighting happened, to hide inside for the time being with the survivors.
A moment later a section of a large stone cliff face silently imploded. It left behind a deep dark and perfectly hidden cave. Li Yu moved the five unconscious cultivators inside carefully laying them down.