Brax places the tortured dead body of Farco on the table and looks at it with curious eyes because he sees something that contradicts what he has learned.
Farco's body is riddled with cuts and bruises, but there seem to be no lethal wounds in his body. Brax flips the body onto its stomach and sees multiple lacerations and bruises made from whips, but no lethal wounds.
"I thought cultivators wouldn't die if not subjected to a lethal blow," Brax muttered and started checking for anomalies.
"Or does it also depend on one's strength?" Brax asks as it would make sense.
If cultivators have weaker cultivation, their regeneration would also be weaker.
"But these wounds shouldn't be able to kill him," Brax concludes.
Though these wounds are gruesome, they are made in non-lethal areas, and none of the major arteries or veins have been cut open. Even a weak cultivator like Farco could easily survive these wounds.
"Is there something else?" Brax questions and starts looking closely at the wounds. With his enhanced eyesight, he finds something. "Interesting, skin corrosion and color change," He says.
These changes would have gone unnoticed if it wasn't for his enhanced eyesight. "Poison?" He questions and starts looking around for a blade.
Luckily, this basement is filled with tools. He finds a sharp knife close by and grabs it. Using its sharp edge, he cuts open the corpse with exceptional technique, as he has done this many times.
He opens the chest and then rips then buts the ribcage wide open to have access to the inner organs.
His eyes immediately lock onto the unmoving heart. It's purple in color. With excitement, he cuts open the heart to look at its insides.
As the blade penetrates the heart, a minuscule amount of Qi escapes from it. "Fascinating, the QI itself is poisoned," Brax mutters as he senses the corroding properties of the QI that just came out.
Brax was already ninety percent sure that Farco's death was due to poison, but he didn't expect to learn that someone's Qi itself could be poisoned.
Brax then starts cutting open every internal organ to see how extensive the damage from this weird poison is. He soon finds that every organ in Farco's body has been contaminated.
"This poor fucker died a very painful death," Brax says, as he can see that Farco's death had happened recently, maybe a few weeks. The poison was slowly corroding him from the inside as his Qi itself was contaminated.
Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.
And with it traveling to every part of the body, there was no way a weak cultivator like Farco could stay alive.
"Too bad there is no poison left behind. It could have been a great study subject," Brax sighs with disappointment. If he can study this poison, then he might be able to learn how it functions and how it contaminates Qi energy itself.
Till now Brax had only seen the benefits of Qi, but now he sees how dangerous it can be as well. If Qi inside one's body is contaminated, it's a sentence worse than death.
After digging into the body for some more understanding, he burns it, leaving nothing but ashes behind. This is the least he can do for cutting up Farco's body and using it as a study.
Done with the body, Brax brings his attention to the books that are on the shelves. "Let's see what we have here," he says and quickly browses through the cultivation manuals as they are just basic level. They are of no use to him, as they are similar to the ones back in the sect.
Well, he didn't expect much from an old, 4th stage Qi condensation realm cultivator. He is more interested in the other books that are kept here, the ones that have literature and history in them.
Both types of books will help him understand this world a little better, history will give him information about the past and literature will give him some perspective on how people view this world.
Literature may also hold hidden secrets about myths and legends, as there is no smoke without fire, and in a world such magical as this, the probability of myths and legends being true is very high.
With so many books around, Brax starts carefully reading them
______________________
Night falls and the old village chief can be seen sneaking out of his house.
He quietly exits the village and heads toward the Whiteworro forest. Once there, he stands below a thick tree and starts looking around left and right nervously.
"ARRGGGG!" he suddenly shouts in fright and takes a few steps back as an old man appears right in front of him.
If Brax is here, he would immediately recognize the face as it matches the dead Farco.
"Don't shout you fucking mongrel or I will rip your head off!" Farco growls at the village chief scaring him even further, but this makes the village chief shut his mouth.
"I am sorry my lord, please spare me," the chief immediately gets down on his knees even though they crack everything he does.
'Why won't these immortals just leave us alone?' the chief thinks while frightened to his core.
"Hmph! If I didn't have any use for you, you would be dead by now," Farco says as he looks down at the chief with cold eyes.
"Thank you for mercy, my lord!" the village chief starts thanking Farco by bowing his head multiple times.
"Now tell me, has a cultivator from the sect arrived?" Farco asks.
"Yes, my lord, a cultivator arrived just today," the chief answers. Hearing this, a smile forms on Farco's face.
"Hahaha, good. So when is he planning to deal with the bandits?" Farco asks.
"My lord-" The chief hesitates to answer as he starts contemplating. He is now stuck between two very massive rocks and he needs to choose which rock to not get crushed by.
After thinking it through, he decides to follow what Brax instructed him to do.
At the end of the day, Farco is just a single, 4th-stage cultivator while Brax is someone with higher-level strength plus he is also from the immortal sect.
The village chief doesn't want the entire sect's fury to fall on his little village.
"What is it?" Farco asks sternly, seeing the hesitation from the chief.
"My lord this cultivator..." The village chief then tells Farco everything that Brax told him to say.
Veins start popping on Farco's head from rage as he listens to the words coming out of the village chief's mouth.
"HOW DARE HE!!!" Farco shouts in anger, terrifying the village chief, causing him to almost piss in his pants.