Bei Septus and Tai Tupanz both shivered with horror when the Beast girl nearly ripped her own jaw off. If she was truly willing to go so far…
For a moment, just a moment, they questioned if the widespread viewpoint that the Sects asserted about Beast hybrids being less than humans, lacking true feelings and intellect, was true.
The next moment, they realized that she was about to force a pill a hundred times the size of the biggest cultivation pill they’d ever received into her broken mouth. That said pill was visibly formed from Crystal Qi. They themselves were struggling to form significant quantities of Liquid Qi. Crystal Qi indicated the pill was at least at the True Core realm.
None of the thoughts mattered though, because as pills do the moment they are inside your aura and in contact with saliva, it suddenly dissolved and rushed down her throat.
The two Cultivators barely glanced at each other before they leaped together out through the hole in the ceiling of the cave.
The Qi of the world for miles shuddered as a new Will, previously dulled due to lacking a living body, asserted itself fully upon reality.
“RUN!” The various battling disciples of the Sect paused in the midst of the wanton destruction they’d dealt to the surrounding area. Trees were shattered, toppled, burning, rotting, charred remains, or in one case being brandished casually as if it were a mere stick. Rocks were strewn about, having been lifted and shifted out of the soil as great works of Earth Qi used them as weapons and barriers.
Overall the bunch of fools had expended nearly all of their strength vying for a chance to try and ambush whichever of the two most powerful of their number emerged with the Beast girl, hopefully even more exhausted and battered than they themselves would be.
Instead their two Senior brothers emerged unscathed and shouting, terror on their faces. Terror none of the others had seen from them before.
“RUN MUTHAF-“
The ground exploded as a wave of Earth Qi rippled through the area. The aura that was unleashed moments before crushed any hope of escape. While it didn’t exert a literal physical pressure on their bodies, it did upon their cultivation, and a cultivator formed the Qi-Body connection known as Meridians during the Qi Condensing realm and reinforced the Dantian-Body connection in their current realm, Foundation Establishment. So, drug down by their literal cultivations, they were pressed onto hand and knees, or even prone. Several dropped violently from the sky, movement Techniques interrupted. Their Qi froze in their Meridians and their Dantians shuddered.
Experience told them the sense of this aura was of a Nascent Soul cultivator. Just two realms higher than theirs. Yet the sheer Will behind it was on par with the Grandmaster of the Sect, and he was as the Fused Soul realm.
As the chaos of the raw Earth Qi, hardly a Technique, resided, a figure walked calmly past the groaning and terrified Cultivators. The jaw popped as it healed back in place. Sickening crunches and rippling indicated ribs setting themselves. One arm twisted almost completely around and popped in two places.
Then there was a burst of air followed by rupture of sound from the rapid movement without a proper Technique to smooth out the travel, and both the figure and the aura were gone.
Stolen story; please report.
Sobbing and retching filled the otherwise silent space of the newly created clearing. Bei Septus pointedly pretended the wet patch on his robes wasn’t new, or perhaps wasn’t’ from himself. Tei Tupanz swallowed hard and picked himself up from the ground where he definitely hadn’t hid behind Bei, definitely not.
“Was… was there a…”
“…on her shoulder?”
“…yeah.”
“Should we…?”
“Let’s leave it out of the report.”
“We’re of like minds, Brother.”
The silence stretched out for a long moment before one of the others squeaked out, “Why was there a squashed dead squirrel on her shoulder?”
Bei surreptitiously scraped his boot against an exposed root. Nobody needed to know that he’d risked the ire of some Immortal senior stuck in the body of a minor Beast.
“Why are you scraping your boot, Senior Brother Bei?” squeaked the same unwanted voice.
“I’m not.”
“But I can clearly see-“
“I’M NOT.” The death glare Bei leveled at his junior silenced the inquiries and received knowing wide eyes glances from those less dull than their squeaky brother. The group exchanged glances and came to a silent agreement, before looking at the squeaky wheel in their group.
“W-why are you all-“ he started to squeak. But as they say, the squeaky wheel, gets greased.
--
[Stop! Stopstopstopstopstop!]
Why?
Initially, I’d broken the sound barrier and smashed through a dozen trees before I learned to actively guide myself with the new type of Qi. Hitting the trees had hurt, even though my skin was humming with so much Qi it reduced a fatal splattering to a mere bruise. A bruise which healed in seconds.
My Core was still running on close to empty. Yet, out here, there was just so much Qi. Back in my chamber, I’d assumed there was a lot. How wrong I’d been! Instead I’d been starved of Qi! No, no that wasn’t it. It was less that the Qi was actually richer and more that I could reach so much father for it. My Spiritual Sense was no stronger, which meant little since it was a very new sense for me. It was my Will. Somehow, having a living body seemed to amplify my Will tremendously. Qi was flooding into me in torrential waves, being violently purified by my cultivation, and then filling my Crystal Core with pure Mundane Qi.
Qi which in turn was maintaining this body. Which was good. Not just because I hit all those poor, innocent trees, but also.
My cultivation was killing me.
[It hurts. It hurts so bad.]
A hundred miles deeper into the forest later, after I settled in the high branches of some ancient conifer, I took a deep breath. Initially the angry squirrels and even a martin that I’d displaced had concerned me, but they weren’t even minor Beasts. Just mundane animals.
So girl. Looks like this is going to work.
[Please… please just kill me already…]
See that’s the thing. It’s not you, it’s me. Rather, I’m just way too much for you. So, here’s my proposal. I don’t want to die, you don’t want to die. I’m going to hang out in your body until I can make my own, but we’re going to have to work on this broken mess of a cultivation or I’m going to be unable to cultivate at all without killing you.
All I got back were whimpers. It made sense. Her Meridians were breaking down. She was already crumbling right back to Qi Gathering. Another minute and even a small circulation of my Qi would destroy more than it would repair.
Damnit. After I got a body too. A busted, ugly girl body with weird legs and some nasty claws, sure, but a body nonetheless. Maybe if I’d had better control at the start, I might have reinforced her body and pulled it up to my realm. Instead I’d pulled in as much Qi as I possibly good and nearly cooked it alive, shattering more of her cultivation in the first few moments. I’d tried to repair her damaged Meridians, but they were so messed up even before I’d broken them that the broken remains were almost better than they were before.
Then there was her core. The Dantian she’d formed was so small and fragile that it was only through incredible luck that I’d managed to avoid pulling any Qi at all through it, instead connecting her Meridians to my Core in a haphazard patch job.
Here you go girl. I’ll talk to you when you wake up.