Cultivation: I Can Steal Lifespan from Spirit Beasts

If one were to look down from the heavens, the sight would be breathtaking.

Countless pillars of purple light erupted from the earth below. They didn’t rise from grand halls or sacred peaks, but from the humble corners of the sect—manors, marketplaces, and villages. The four major market towns birthed the thickest columns, glowing with an intense, violet hue.

In the core region of the Eastern Sage Sect, similar beams of light pierced through the mountain mists, stabbing straight into the clouds.

As the forest of light took shape, a strange, resonant cry echoed across the sect.

Cluck!

“What in the world is that?!”

Cultivators looked up, their eyes widening in shock.

Above the sect, the spectral form of a purple spirit beast, as massive as a mountain, slowly coalesced. It possessed the body of a poultry but the aura of a god. Its eyes burned with crimson fire as it stiffly flapped its colossal wings.

Inside Ding-Nine Manor, Wang Ba stared at the sky, his jaw slack.

“It’s Fan Ming!”

The gargantuan projection of the Fan Ming bird spread its wings—each adorned with a single, unnerving vertical eye—and let out another earth-shaking cluck toward the Heavenly Gate Sect army below.

Ding-Ling!

The clear chime of a bell cut through the air.

The Spirit-Locking Bell was now in Ji Lan’s hand. He shook it gently, the sound crisp and commanding.

As if obeying a divine order, the giant Fan Ming beast became animated. It beat its wings with fluid grace.

Under the terrified gazes of the invaders, purple feathers began to detach from the beast’s body. They drifted down like violet snow—beautiful, silent, and deadly.

No one doubted the horror contained within that beauty.

On the twenty-four arms of the giant divine statue, the enemy cultivators stood up, panic written on their faces. Even the four Golden Core True Persons who had emerged from the statue’s eyes looked up with grave apprehension. Their bodies were shrouded in a thick aura of death, yet they couldn’t hide their fear of the falling feathers.

“The power of a Peak Nascent Soul…”

Ning Daohuan stared at the beast in the sky, his voice trembling with a mix of shock and reverence.

“Fan Ming Annihilates the World!”

Ji Lan’s voice dropped low, a cold judgment delivered from high above.

Instantly, the drifting purple feathers underwent a terrifying transformation. They stopped floating and accelerated, turning into streaks of violet light.

Each feather struck with the force of a 3rd Grade flying sword. Thousands of them rained down silently, targeting every single member of the Heavenly Gate Sect.

There was nowhere to hide.

Despair washed over the invaders. In that moment, they finally understood how the Eastern Sage Sect had stood tall in the State of Chen for centuries.

The answer was simple.

Hidden within their territory was a 4th Grade Grand Formation capable of unleashing the power of a Peak Nascent Soul cultivator. Even if their disciples were weak, this formation ensured that the sect could overturn the board in the face of annihilation.

Pfft! Pfft! Pfft!

The slaughter began.

Qi Refining cultivators were the first to fall. The moment a feather touched them, they didn’t bleed—they simply evaporated into wisps of green smoke.

Next were the Foundation Establishment cultivators.

Panic erupted. The Heavenly Gate Sect army scrambled like rats on a sinking ship.

On the divine statue, the Golden Core experts fought desperately. Some summoned bone soldiers as shields, others deployed defensive artifacts, and some tried to blast the feathers out of the air. But they were overwhelmed. The aura of death around them grew heavier by the second.

The purple feathers were indiscriminate. Qin Heng retreated deep within the protective barrier of the Mountain Guarding Formation, daring not to step a foot outside.

Ji Lan watched his plan unfold with a calm, focused gaze. He didn’t gloat. Instead, he locked eyes with Ning Daohuan, who was dancing across the statue, frantically deflecting the lethal rain.

“Sect Master Ning,” Ji Lan’s voice projected clearly. “I have long heard of your sect’s ‘Four Nascent Soul True Methods’. If you are willing to hand them over, along with your Dao Repository, I am willing to leave a thread of life for your sect!”

Ning Daohuan shattered a purple feather with a palm strike. His face was as still as water. He ignored the offer completely.

He glanced around. In mere moments, his army had suffered catastrophic losses.

Yet, strangely, there was no panic in his eyes.

Suddenly, he turned to look at the space beside Ji Lan, a bizarre smile curling his lips.

“Qin Heng,” Ning Daohuan called out, his voice cutting through the chaos. “You claimed earlier that all of the Heavenly Gate Sect’s schemes were under your watchful eye?”

Ji Lan frowned. Ning Daohuan’s composure was unnatural. A seed of unease sprouted in his gut.

Qin Heng, confused but defiant, sneered. “Correct! How could such lowly methods escape the Sect Leader’s vision? We merely feigned ignorance to lure you into the trap!”

Ning Daohuan’s smile widened, twisting into something mocking.

“Then… why did you only kill the Qi Refining and Foundation Establishment spies, yet pay absolutely no attention to those exploited Laborer Disciples?”

“Hmph! They are merely trash,” Qin Heng scoffed. “Even if you transformed them into human puppets and forcibly raised their cultivation to Qi Refining, what does it matter? Rather than wasting my Spiritual Power, I’d leave them for the disciples to clean up after the bat—”

Qin Heng stopped mid-sentence.

His expression crumbled, replaced by pure shock as he looked up at the sky.

Ji Lan snapped his folding fan shut, his eyes bulging in disbelief.

“It… it’s disappearing!” an Eastern Sage Sect disciple screamed, pointing upwards.

Above the sect, the mountain-sized divine beast, Fan Ming, was fading. Its purple body turned translucent, flickering like a dying flame.

Simultaneously, the pillars of purple light rising from the manors and villages below began to blink out one by one.

“What is happening?!”

Panic seized the Eastern Sage Sect.

Ji Lan lost his cool composure. He frantically spread his Divine Sense, scanning the entire sect.

What he saw made his blood run cold.

In a nearby manor, a figure dressed as a Laborer Disciple looked up at the sky and gave a grotesque, twisted smile.

The next second, the laborer’s body imploded.

It was as if a greedy beast lived inside his skin, sucking away every ounce of his Qi, blood, essence, and soul. In the blink of an eye, the living human collapsed into nothingness, leaving behind only a single object.

A blood-colored finger bone.

It hovered in the air, radiating a sinister, ancient aura.

As the bone manifested, the nearby purple light pillar shuddered, destabilized by the sudden corruption of its anchor point, and extinguished.

Ji Lan’s Divine Sense swept wider. The same nightmare was repeating all across the sect. In manors, marketplaces, and villages… Laborer Disciples were popping like blood blisters, leaving behind gruesome relics.

Ribs. Skulls. Femurs. Patellas.

These bones were floating exactly where the formation bases of the Fan Ming Grand Formation were located!

Realization hit them all like a sledgehammer.

“Destroy them!” someone shouted.

Cultivators unleashed frantic attacks on the floating blood bones. But the bones possessed an indestructible quality; they absorbed the blows without a scratch. Then, as if hearing a summons, they shot through the air, converging toward a single point.

Even after the bones flew away, the purple pillars remained dead.

Ji Lan felt a wave of dizziness.

He finally understood what he had missed. The grand strategy, the perfect trap… all undone by the most insignificant detail.

“The laborers!” Qin Heng roared, his eyes red with madness and regret. “It was those damned laborers all along!”

He had ignored them. He had viewed them as ants, unworthy of his attention. And now, those ants were the nails in his sect’s coffin.

Ji Lan stared across the battlefield at Ning Daohuan.

“Sect Leader Ning… what terrifying resolve!”

“On the surface, you used the ‘Buried Bone Secret Technique’ to help laborers defy the heavens and gain power, creating an army of puppets.”

“But in reality… you used their very bodies to smuggle in the replacement parts for our formation!”

“But how?” Ji Lan demanded, his voice trembling. “How did you know I wouldn’t kill them beforehand? If I had purged them, your plan would have failed instantly!”

Ning Daohuan laughed cold and sharp. “Did you think I am like you? I do not gamble on the heavens showing me favor. I ensure my victory.”

Ji Lan spun around.

Thousands of blood-colored bones streamed into the sect’s core area. They swirled around a black-robed cultivator whose face was obscured by shadow.

Clack. Clack. Clack.

The bones snapped together, fusing into a horrific exoskeleton around the figure.

In the blink of an eye, a monstrosity standing three meters tall, armored in blood-red bone and radiating the terrifying pressure of a Nascent Soul, was born.

“With the Blood Bone Holy Venerable…” Ning Daohuan’s maniacal laughter echoed through the sky. “Even if I cannot win, I will never lose!”

“Ji Lan! You have a few Golden Cores. What do you have to gamble against this?”

The surviving Heavenly Gate Sect cultivators, fueled by the trauma of near-death and burning rage, roared as they charged the faltering Mountain Guarding Formation.

The formation, already destabilized by the loss of its anchors, shook violently. The light curtain flickered, on the verge of collapse.

Inside the barrier, the Blood Bone Holy Venerable moved.

It didn’t speak. It simply charged straight for the sect’s command warship.

Though the cultivator controlling the bone armor seemed unfamiliar with its immense power, moving with a slight clumsiness, the raw strength was undeniable.

“Junior Brother Huang!”

“Damn it!”

In a single exchange, Elder Huang, the Head of the Myriad Beast Department, was swatted out of the air.

His 3rd Grade Spirit Beast, the Nine Heavens Crane, shrieked in grief and dive-bombed the monster, detonating its own Demon Core in a suicidal explosion.

BOOM!

Dust billowed. But when it cleared, the Blood Bone Holy Venerable stood amidst the crater, the red light on its bones pulsing rhythmically. It was completely unharmed.

Despair swallowed the Eastern Sage Sect.

On the warship, Ji Lan looked around at the crumbling defenses. He took a deep, shuddering breath.

As the Sect Leader, he had to make the hard choice. Rage, humiliation, and grief had to be swallowed.

He looked back one last time at the majestic peaks of the Eastern Sage Sect.

“Go!”

He spat the word out like a curse.

His Spiritual Power surged, pushing the warship toward a shimmering distortion in the air—a pre-prepared teleportation gateway.

“Sect Leader!”

“Elder!”

“Take me with you!”

“Don’t leave us!”

Below, thousands of abandoned disciples screamed and reached out as the ship began to fade into the void.

“Trying to leave?”

A cold, raspy voice echoed from within the Blood Bone Holy Venerable.

The monster blurred, reaching out a massive skeletal hand to snatch the warship out of the sky.

However, its control was still imperfect. The hand missed the hull of the ship by inches.

Instead, it closed around a figure who had been too slow to board.

“Elder Qin!”

“Senior Brother Qin!”

Screams of horror erupted.

The Blood Bone Holy Venerable held the struggling Qin Heng in its grasp like a toy. It brought the aged elder close to its skull-like visage.

The blood-colored jawbone creaked open, forming a mockery of a smile.

“Master… we meet again.”

CRUNCH.

The hand squeezed.