As his serpents began to devour nearby disciples with bone-crunching mercilessness, Jason stepped off of the back of his initial summon and dropped to the centre of the plaza without a sound. Nearby, a young disciple was refining the last of the blood within a blond-haired toddler that he had just ripped from the withered arms of an emaciated woman. She had clearly died attempting to protect her child, one of dozens of equally horrendous scenes within eyeshot where cowering citizens had attempted to flee from their homes after being met with sudden, violent intrusions.

So lost were they to the euphoric sensations that their core cultivation method gave life to that the majority of the disciples within the city were blatantly ignoring the barrier that Jason had recently summoned. Instead, hundreds of robe-clad youths continued to brutalize and torment the citizens of Calmer while in the heat of their cultivator’s high, some even attacking their comrades to either steal resources from others or to protect their own.

Inspecting the area with his spiritual sense, Jason thought that it was no wonder how the sect was losing the war in Hauss. Strategy, cohesion, sound decision making; the sect rarely employed some of the most basic aspects of warfare whenever they decided to make a major move. Jason had never been a particularly intelligent or clever person, but even he would have put together better plans than those that the disciples seemed to follow. Throughout all junctures in the Acquisition, any time a Haussian army closed in on a war party, said party would simply charge into the opposing ranks without hesitation and fight until the last man. If they were significantly outnumbered, they would first seek out a nearby war party, join forces with them and then commit to their typical all-or-nothing frontal assault. Each time they sacked a town or city they did so as several giant, unorganized tides of resource-hungry youths that flooded into said settlements with the loose objectives of killing or capturing all within sight.

Knowing that he couldn’t save everyone within the Calmer, Jason felt a strong surge of guilt. Still, as he watched his serpents continue to devour those deserving of such a violent death, he found comfort in the knowledge that he was doing far more to protect the people here than anyone else was.

I should speed this up.

Zeroing in on the nearest group of disciples, he followed their aura into a nearby house where the youths in question had just finished terrorizing a young family. While the parents were being refined by two young women, the daughter of the home was struggling with all her might to break free of the grasp of an evil-eyed young man, who was in the midst of tearing her clothes off.

Walking in on such a scene, Jason immediately froze all three of the intruders in place with an exertion of his aura, which left the trio alarmed and confused. He approached the woman with an unbroken stride, first stabbing his left hand into the shorter one’s chest and then immediately doing the same with the taller of the two. Feeling their breastplates give way with sickly crunches as his hand was made slick with warm gore, he began siphoning their blood into his pores, after which it was evaporated by his inner essence leaving only pure energies behind. This energy was then directed toward his dantian and then assimilated with his own inner essence. Unlike their victims, the two women died after a few anguished screams, both completely deprived of their energies in a matter of several moments.

Their bodies landed atop the floor with broken thumps as he cast them aside in disgust. Afterwards, he calmly approached the immobile man, whose frozen hands were still holding the frightened girl in place. Staring at her parents’ corpses through a gap in his arms, her cries became hysteric as she sensed the end of her life closing in.

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These sick fucks, he thought, seeing that the girl was around twelve years old. He refined the man without second thought, stabbing him between the shoulder blades and stealing away all of his energies with a bit of satisfaction. Next, he tapped a finger against the scared, shivering girl and injected a small bit of spiritual energy between her brows, rendering her unconscious. Frowning at the parents’ bodies, he created a pair of rudimentary coffins from the materials of some nearby furniture and carefully placed them inside before sealing them in a way that assured they wouldn’t rot for the time being, after which he left a stack of golden cards and a bag of jerky in the centre of the now sparsely furnished room. Following this, he used spiritual energy to ferry the remaining bodies out of the house in his wake so that the girl wouldn’t wake up to the faces of those that had killed her parents, after which he conjured an invisible barrier arrayment around the home that would allow the girl to leave at will while preventing anyone else from entering.

Sensing that those outside of Calmer were beginning to attack the translucent dome that he’d erected around the city, his lips tugged downward. In the time that he’d spent in that house, how many other families had been terrorized without any saviors to come and free them from their nightmarish situations as he had done for that girl?

I’m wasting too much time.

Not wanting more people to die than was necessary, he hurriedly took advantage of the fact that all of the disciples within the city were too distracted by their greed and depravation to notice that one of their own was quietly killing off members of the sect.

First, he summoned more serpents so that he had a total of twenty of them, all exactly the same size—twenty metres in length and one in width. Next, he activated the Scarlet Serrated Hand Technique and condensed its output so that only the area directly around his hands was shrouded by solid cloaks of bloody energy.

How many will I kill this time…?

Jason readied himself for what was to come, intent on fully replenishing his spent energy reserves and also sneaking in some cultivation as well. As the heat from his technique caused the air around him to shimmer, he shifted focus so that his spiritual sense became his primary mode of perception. Keeping a watchful eye on all within a radius of several kilometres, he directed his serpents with his mind, willing them to disperse into the surrounding streets to kill any disciples that were out in the open, a task that was easily distinguishable by their sinister auras.

Pouring energy into his legs, he took off across the plaza—which was now empty save for the withered remains of unfortunate civilians as well as large spatters of blood left behind by the serpents that he had initially summoned—and ran towards the nearest cluster of disciples. Most people had been hiding in their homes, shivering beneath blankets as they cowered within closets, crawl spaces and cellars. Hardly any made it out of their houses once members of the sect broke inside, which made it more difficult to rapidly deal with them.

Within the next five minutes, Jason was always on the move. Replenishing his energies as he ran with the unfortunate invaders that happened to cross his path, he refined thirty-two disciples without expending any energy and also without incurring any injuries. Their reactions were always the same, shock and then rage, then a few moments of sobering fright. He was far stronger than the strongest of their ranks, easily one of the most powerful people in all of Hauss and thus someone that they could only lose their lives to.

All throughout his hunting of the disciples, he made sure to constantly flood the barrier above with spiritual energy so that it wouldn’t break under the constant barrage of those outside.

It’s about time I wrap this up.

Once he’d fully replenished his energy reserves, he stopped running for a moment to increase his concentration and then carefully locked onto the locations of every disciple in the city. Exerting his aura, he froze them all in place just as he had done to plenty of their comrades up until this point. An abrupt quiet swept throughout the city as exactly 1,254 of the pillaging youths were frozen in place regardless of the dastardly deeds that they were in the midst of doing.