Rebirth as a Demonic Cultivator: Starting with a Zombie Planet

Chapter 25: My Foundation Establishment Path Relies on You

Shattered timber and scorched earth painted a picture of absolute devastation. The Linjiang Army squad stood frozen, their faces pale as they surveyed the clearing. A thick carpet of mangled flesh, shattered bone, and coarse gray fur covered the forest floor.

The giant wolves were apex predators. Even their well-trained squad couldn’t face the pack head-on. Yet, the sheer volume of gore splattered across the trees told a story of a brutal, one-sided slaughter. At least five or six of the massive beasts had been reduced to literal minced meat.

“Impossible,” Zhuang Qiang muttered, his eyes wide. “Who could have killed them?”

Wang Gangjian’s brow furrowed. “Fan out from this spot. Keep searching. If any wolves escaped, they would have left tracks.”

Wang Yong and the others nodded, gripping their weapons as they scoured the perimeter.

But after a long, tense search, they found absolutely nothing. No broken branches leading away, no trailing bloodstains. Just a dead end of absolute annihilation.

The implication hung heavy in the air.

Wang Yong swallowed hard, his throat dry. “The entire pack is dead. And whoever did it took the intact corpses with them.”

Though Wang Gangjian and Song Dayi looked like they wanted to deny it, they could only nod in grim agreement.

“Looks like we made this trip for nothing,” Song Dayi sighed, a hint of relief bleeding into his voice. No fighting meant no casualties. In this hellscape, that was a win. Even as a Level 1 Esper, a stray bite or scratch could lead to a lethal infection. With doctors extinct and medical supplies scarce, any injury was a coin flip with death.

Wang Gangjian, however, kept rubbing the back of his neck, his expression tight.

“Brother, what’s eating at you?” Wang Yong asked.

Wang Gangjian let out a bitter laugh. “Zhuang Qiang said the alpha of that pack was a Level 2 Supernatural Animal. On top of that, there were several Level 1 beasts in the mix. Whoever wiped them out… what kind of monster are we dealing with? A Level 3 Esper?”

Zhuang Qiang immediately shook his head. “No way. Level 3 Espers are incredibly rare. Without exception, they’re all warlords or the ultimate protectors of major survivor camps. If they want to push for Level 4, they need an army of grunts gathering Psionic Cores for them. Why would a Level 3 be wandering the ruins out here all by themselves?”

The others murmured in agreement. It made sense. No Level 3 Esper would waste time slumming it in the wilderness when they could sit on a throne and have resources brought to them.

“Maybe,” Zhuang Qiang mused, “it’s just a Level 2 Esper, but one with a terrifyingly high-tier talent. Talents have their own hierarchy, after all. The truly broken ones allow an Esper to slaughter enemies well above their own weight class.”

Wang Gangjian sighed, his gaze sweeping the bloody clearing one last time. “Whatever they are, we need to stay on high alert. The Haotai Hotel is already a death trap with those two high-level Zombies, and now we have an unknown Level 2 Esper roaming our backyard… Black Edge’s days are only going to get harder.”

With the sun dipping dangerously low, the four men piled back into their battered Wuling van and sped off into the gathering dusk.

…

Meanwhile, Chu Xuan took his time strolling back to the Haotai Hotel.

Along the way, he casually slaughtered any wandering Zombies, refining their corpses into Blood Beads with practiced ease. He also took the opportunity to scavenge through ruined supermarkets and convenience stores, hunting for anything edible.

Instant noodles were fine, but eating them every single day was beginning to offend his palate. A demonic cultivator still had standards.

Unfortunately, his haul consisted of nothing but a few stale chocolate bars. The Zombie apocalypse on Hailan Planet had been raging for over five years. Very little processed food could survive that kind of shelf life.

Looks like if I want a decent meal on this rotting rock, I’ll have to grow it myself, Chu Xuan thought, unwrapping a piece of chalky chocolate.

It wasn’t a difficult problem to solve. He just needed to lay down a Spirit Gathering Formation to siphon the ambient Spiritual Qi from the environment. Under the nourishment of Spiritual Qi, even the most irradiated, barren dirt could be transformed into a fertile Spirit Field. Crops grown in such soil would mature at a terrifying rate and yield incredibly rich flavors.

As for the tedious manual labor—plowing, weeding, pest control, and harvesting—he had the perfect workforce. Yin Corpses might be mindless, but with a little tuning, they were far superior to human laborers for monotonous, repetitive tasks. They didn’t complain, they didn’t need breaks, and they certainly didn’t demand a salary.

He acted immediately.

Behind the Haotai Hotel sat a neglected garden. Chu Xuan ordered his Yin Corpses to rip out the dead weeds and loosen the compacted earth. Once the ground was prepped, he began laying the array flags for the Spirit Gathering Formation.

The Spiritual Qi on Hailan Planet was pitifully thin, a mere fraction of what he was used to on the Cangxuan Continent. But thin didn’t mean nonexistent. The formation acted like a vacuum, pulling those scattered, anemic wisps of energy into a concentrated zone. If the ambient energy proved insufficient, he could always bury a few Spirit Stones in the array nodes to artificially enrich the soil.

By sunset, his new Spirit Field was ready.

Measuring forty meters wide and thirty meters long, he divided the plot into neat, distinct sections for different spiritual crops.

“Golden Pattern Rice. Tastes like normal rice, but infinitely more succulent,” he muttered, sorting through his seed pouches. “Rosy Wheat. Good for long-term consumption; makes the physical body lighter and purges impurities.”

He handed the seeds over to his Yin Corpses. At first, the undead brutes were clumsy, crushing a few seeds with their heavy, rotting fingers. But under Chu Xuan’s cold, meticulous mental commands, they quickly adapted, becoming highly Proficient farmhands.

“Not bad at all,” Chu Xuan nodded, pleased with his undead agricultural setup.

Leaving the garden to his workers, he summoned his blade and ascended via Sword Riding, landing smoothly on the hotel rooftop.

The Wolf King and its four surviving packmates lay securely bound in heavy chains. The four lesser wolves were still unconscious, but the Wolf King was wide awake. Its massive eyes burned with a feral, savage hatred, glaring at Chu Xuan as if it wanted to tear him apart ten thousand times over.

Chu Xuan completely ignored the beast’s murderous intent. It was just a living resource, after all.

With the casual indifference of a butcher prepping a carcass, he drew a small, wickedly sharp knife and approached the alpha.

First, the joints. Then the abdomen. Finally, the crown of the skull.

He carved precise, bloody holes into the living wolf’s flesh. The meat and marrow in these three areas possessed different energetic properties, making them ideal incubators for specific spiritual plants.

Into the bleeding joints and the torn abdomen, Chu Xuan carefully embedded the seeds of Soul-Nurturing Leaves and Vermilion Blood Fruits. The skull, being closest to the brain and the seat of the creature’s consciousness, was the prime real estate. There, he planted the seed of the Soul-Nourishing Flower.

The Soul-Nourishing Flower was the core ingredient required to refine the Foundation Building Blood Pill. The Soul-Nurturing Leaves and Vermilion Blood Fruits were rare, essential catalysts. As long as he successfully harvested these three, he could easily purchase the remaining mundane ingredients from any orthodox market back home using Spirit Stones.

Once he had them all, his Foundation Building Blood Pill would be complete.

“My path to Foundation Establishment relies entirely on you,” Chu Xuan said, gently patting the Wolf King’s bloody snout with a warm, chilling smile.

The Wolf King whimpered, its feral rage giving way to primal terror. It could feel its very life force being siphoned away, its vitality acting as fertilizer for the parasitic seeds taking root in its flesh. But it was completely powerless, forced to lie there and endure the agonizing, slow drain of its existence.

As for the four unconscious giant wolves, Chu Xuan repeated the clinical process. Since they were only Level 1 Supernatural Animals, their flesh wasn’t potent enough to sustain high-tier flora, so he settled for planting more common, lower-grade seeds in their bodies.

With his living garden fully planted, Chu Xuan descended to the first floor of the Haotai Hotel to secure his new base of operations.

First, he laid down a Mist Formation.

It was a standard Middle Grade Qi Condensation Formation. Its function was beautifully simple: it generated a dense, disorienting fog that blanketed a circular area roughly a hundred zhang across. In Hailan Planet’s metrics, that was a diameter of about three hundred and thirty meters.

The fog easily swallowed the Haotai Hotel and the immediate surrounding shops and streets. Anyone who wandered into the mist would find their senses warped; no matter how far they walked, the spatial distortion would seamlessly loop them back to the entrance, ensuring they could never breach the interior.

Next, he began setting up the Evil Qi Gathering Formation.