Cultivation: I Can Steal Lifespan from Spirit Beasts

Chapter 157: Lifespan Experiment

Without a doubt, to a Foundation Establishment cultivator, even the most formidable Qi Refining practitioner was nothing more than a paper tiger—utterly fragile.

And Zhu Jianyi was exceptionally ordinary even among his Qi Refining peers.

Yet, as Wang Ba casually pinned his opponent to the dirt with a mere flex of his Spiritual Power, he experienced a sudden, intoxicating rush of profound satisfaction.

So this is what it feels like to effortlessly crush an enemy, Wang Ba mused, savoring the sensation.

Normally, a Foundation Establishment senior bullying a junior would be a shameful act, entirely beneath mention. But Wang Ba’s path had been different. Since embarking on the road of cultivation, he had never once defeated an opponent using his own innate strength. He had always relied on the overwhelming power of his spirit beasts.

Furthermore, as a heterodox practitioner surviving within the Heavenly Gate Sect, he had spent his entire life treading on thin ice, overly cautious and painfully vigilant. He had never tasted the arrogant freedom that other cultivators enjoyed—the ability to turn the world upside down with a flick of their wrists, dominating those beneath them.

Now, effortlessly suffocating an eighth-layer Qi Refining cultivator with a stray thought, he finally understood why so many heterodox disciples preferred the violent, roaming life of a rogue bandit over the stifling hierarchy of the Sect.

Honestly, once a cultivator tasted the sheer dopamine hit of dominating the weak in the wild, bending the knee back at the Heavenly Gate Sect would feel like swallowing glass.

Sensing the dangerous shift in his own Dao Heart, Wang Ba immediately clamped down on his emotions, purging the distracting thoughts from his mind.

He couldn’t leave the Heavenly Gate Sect yet. He had no desire to remain a subservient pawn forever, but he kept Zhao Feng’s cryptic advice firmly in mind: The transformation of the dragon and the snake.

The time was not right. For now, he had to keep his head down, abide by his station, and wait for the heavens to align.

These complex reflections flashed through his mind in the span of a single breath.

Without moving a muscle, Wang Ba projected a massive, invisible hand woven purely of Spiritual Power, violently slamming the fleeing Zhu Jianyi face-first into the earth.

Simultaneously, twenty-eight Iris Formless Needles materialized from the ether. They shot through the air, piercing the acupoints of Zhu’s low-level disciples who had only just realized the danger. Wang Ba didn’t execute them on the spot, but the needles instantly shattered their Spiritual Power pathways, paralyzing them and severing their ability to transmit a warning.

“S-Senior!”

Zhu Jianyi’s pristine disguise was entirely ruined. His face was a mask of abject terror, completely devoid of the righteous, generous facade he had paraded through the Exquisite Ghost Market.

Craning his neck painfully against the crushing magical pressure, he shrieked, “I was blind! Utterly blind to your true eminence! Please, Senior, spare my life! I have wealth hoarded away—I’ll give it all to you!”

“My Master—my Master is currently in Golden River City! I am his most valued disciple! He will surely compensate you handsomely if you let me go, I beg of you…”

“Save your breath. His name holds no weight here,” Wang Ba interrupted, his voice dropping to a glacial chill. He looked down at the trembling man.

“I will ask, and you will answer. If you lie, I will interrogate your little followers next. If your stories don’t perfectly align… you already know the outcome.”

“Yes! Yes, I understand!” Zhu Jianyi nodded frantically, scraping his cheek against the dirt, desperate for the sliver of hope.

Wang Ba felt zero pity. He didn’t fully understand the mechanics of the Yin Food Worm yet, but hiding a parasite inside a pill was an inherently malicious act. Zhu Jianyi was no saint, and while Wang Ba didn’t consider himself a hero, he felt absolutely no psychological burden in tearing this man apart.

“What exactly does the Yin Food Worm do?” he asked, leading with his primary curiosity.

Zhu Jianyi hesitated for a fraction of a second. Instantly, the invisible pressure crushing his spine doubled in weight.

“I’ll speak! I’ll tell you!” he howled in agony, his words spilling out like a ruptured dam. “It’s my Master’s life-bound spirit insect! It’s divided into a mother and its children. There is only one mother worm, but there are ninety-nine child worms. When an unsuspecting cultivator swallows and refines the pill, the child worm doesn’t die. Instead, it rides their Spiritual Power, embedding itself directly into their Dantian as a parasite!”

“It feeds off the host’s Spiritual Power to mature. Once fully grown, it rapidly devours their remaining Spiritual Power, essence-blood, and vitality. Then, it abandons the husk, returning to the mother worm to regurgitate the stolen essence. Afterward, it reverts to a larval state. Through the mother worm, my Master… he absorbs a massive portion of that harvested power.”

“My only job is to distribute the child worms to Rogue Cultivators.”

What a vile, predatory cultivation art! Wang Ba was secretly horrified. If this cycle operated smoothly, these worms were essentially farming ninety-nine independent cultivators at a time, reaping their lifeforces like wheat to violently accelerate True Cultivator Lin’s cultivation.

No wonder the man’s power had progressed so rapidly.

“And this Yin Food Worm has no flaws?” Wang Ba pressed, genuinely skeptical.

The method was sinister, yes, but it sounded far too heaven-defying. Theoretically, as long as Lin Xiwen kept tricking a steady supply of gullible Rogue Cultivators, he could systematically gorge himself all the way to the Golden Core realm, or perhaps even Nascent Soul. If an art like this had no drawbacks, the Heavenly Gate Sect’s entire legacy of dark arts would be rendered obsolete.

Zhu Jianyi glanced nervously at his paralyzed lackeys, knowing their weak minds would break instantly under a Foundation Establishment cultivator’s interrogation. Gritting his teeth, he confessed.

“Naturally, it has fatal flaws! The Yin Food Worm provides zero combat utility. Furthermore, if the child worms return with their harvest too frequently, the mother worm’s power will swell and cause a severe backlash, suppressing my Master’s own soul. If he absorbs too much foreign essence at once, it triggers horrific physiological mutations.”

Wang Ba nodded slowly. That aligned with the natural laws of cultivation. A method this parasitic and artificially accelerated had to carry a massive risk of self-destruction.

With his curiosity sated, Wang Ba moved to the logistical problem. “If I want to access the deeper tiers of the Exquisite Ghost Market—the ones trading second-tier treasures—what are the exact entry requirements?”

From his conversations with Song Buping, Wang Ba knew that high-end underground markets in the State of Yan possessed unique, eccentric entry conditions beyond simply holding a Market Entry Token. It was a paranoid countermeasure against infiltration.

Zhu Jianyi froze, his eyes widening in sudden realization. “Senior… are you an enforcer from a major Sect? Are you here to eradicate the market?”

“That is none of your concern,” Wang Ba replied flatly. “Just tell me the method.”

“I… I know it! Of course I know it!” Zhu Jianyi’s mind raced as he desperately sought leverage. “But… I cannot say it aloud!”

“You cannot say it?” Wang Ba sneered.

He raised his hand, his fingertips glowing with the ominous light of the Soul Searching Technique. As a mere first-tier spell, it was difficult to employ during his Qi Refining days, often requiring supplementary arrays. But as a Foundation Establishment True Cultivator, ripping the memories from a Qi Refining junior was effortless. He had simply preferred to ask first to avoid sifting through decades of mundane garbage.

“Senior, please, you misunderstand!” Zhu Jianyi screamed, his eyes locking onto the glowing hand with absolute terror. “It’s not that I refuse to cooperate! When I was granted access to the inner market, I was forced to swear a binding Inner Demon oath! If I breathe a word of the entry requirements to an outsider, the backlash will instantly liquefy my brain!”

“Hah.”

Wang Ba completely dismissed the excuse. If the oath was that absolute, the market would never be able to recruit new blood. The boy was simply cornered and grasping at straws, trying to make himself indispensable.

Wang Ba saw right through him and lowered his glowing palm toward Zhu’s skull.

Sensing the cold, murderous intent radiating from Wang Ba, Zhu Jianyi realized his bluff had failed completely. In a flash of desperate inspiration, he shrieked:

“Senior! I swear I’m telling the truth! If I could just tell you, I’d risk the Inner Demon backlash! But if my brain melts, I can’t guide you! It would ruin your plans!”

“I can physically take you there! I know a loophole to get you inside! I swear upon my Inner Demon, I will not trick you!”

Wang Ba’s glowing palm halted a mere inch above Zhu Jianyi’s scalp.

The pressure was suffocating. Zhu Jianyi’s mind went entirely blank, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird.

After what felt like an eternity, a voice fell from the heavens like sweet dew.

“Alright then. Swear your oath.”

A massive wave of relief crashed over Zhu Jianyi. Drenched in cold sweat, he felt the crushing weight of death lift from his shoulders. He slumped into the dirt, gasping greedily for air. I survived. I actually survived—

Smack.

Wang Ba’s palm casually slapped the crown of his head.

Zhu Jianyi’s consciousness instantly fractured into a thousand dark pieces. In the microsecond before his mind completely shut down, a single, furious thought echoed in the void:

Motherfucker! He lied!

Wang Ba withdrew his hand, his expression turning slightly sour.

No matter how sincere Zhu Jianyi had sounded, Wang Ba was far too paranoid to entrust his safety to a captive’s verbal promise. Soul Searching was always the endgame.

However, sorting through the boy’s fragmented memories, Wang Ba realized with mild surprise that Zhu had actually been telling the truth. When Wang Ba probed the specific memory regarding the Exquisite Ghost Market’s inner tier, Zhu’s physical body began to violently convulse, his face contorting as the Inner Demon oath triggered.

To prevent his subject from experiencing sudden brain death, Wang Ba immediately severed the connection. He tried probing memories of other high-tier markets, but met the same lethal resistance.

Finding nothing of strategic value, Wang Ba terminated the Soul Searching Technique and left Zhu Jianyi unconscious in the dirt.

He briefly subjected the paralyzed lackeys to the same process, finding their minds filled with nothing but petty robbery and cruelty.

Disappointed, Wang Ba surveyed the desolate, uninhabited wilderness. A thought suddenly occurred to him—an experiment he had theorized for years but never possessed the appropriate human subjects to test.

He walked over to one of the comatose lackeys. He was going to inject him with Lifespan.

Historically, when Wang Ba forcibly extracted Lifespan from a human subject, it triggered the Prion of Longevity phenomenon, causing catastrophic cellular breakdown. But what would happen if he forced excess Lifespan into a cultivator’s system?

Placing his hand over the lackey’s chest, he initiated the transfer.

He immediately noted the conversion rate: it was roughly one to four. Sacrificing one year of his own Lifespan forcibly injected four years of vitality into the subject.

As the dense Lifespan flooded the man’s meridians, his body reacted violently. It acted like a vacuum, spontaneously and greedily absorbing the sparse Spiritual Qi from the surrounding environment.

Wang Ba’s eyes narrowed as he analyzed the physiological shift. To his utter shock, the lackey’s aura began to mutate, radiating a signature Wang Ba was intimately familiar with.

“He’s attempting Foundation Establishment?!” Wang Ba muttered in disbelief.

The subject was only at the third layer of Qi Refining. His Dantian capacity hadn’t expanded, yet his physical vessel was emitting the distinct, volatile energy signature of a cultivator actively breaking through to the second major realm.

It was a grotesque paradox. The man was incredibly weak, yet radiating the pressure of the strong.

As the forced Lifespan settled, the Foundation Establishment aura grew exponentially more violent.

“No… it’s not a true breakthrough,” Wang Ba corrected himself, his researcher’s intuition kicking in. “It’s a forced biological mutation. His physical life-level is trying to evolve, just like a spirit beast ascending a tier.”

Fueled by the massive influx of vitality, the lackey slowly groaned, waking from his comatose state.

He blinked, confusion giving way to wide-eyed awe as he stared at his trembling hands. He could feel an apocalyptic surge of power flooding his veins. A manic, god-like confidence swelled within his chest.

“Who does Zhu Jianyi think he is?” the lackey laughed, his voice distorting with a strange echo. “And True Cultivator Lin?! With this power, I can rule—!”

CRACK.

His eyes bulged from their sockets. Jagged, glowing fissures spider-webbed across his face and neck as his mortal shell failed to contain the catastrophic energy density.

“No—!”

BOOM!

His body violently detonated, vaporizing into a cloud of crimson mist and concussive force.

Having anticipated the catastrophic failure, Wang Ba had already retreated to a safe distance, dragging the unconscious Zhu Jianyi and the remaining lackey with him.

When the dust settled, Wang Ba walked back to the crater, his expression solemn. Fragments of charred bone and tissue were scattered across the scorched earth.

“Why did the injection trigger an uncontrolled evolution?” Wang Ba muttered, his mind racing with variables.

He had hypothesized that injecting Lifespan into a fellow human might trigger a reverse Prion of Longevity effect, perhaps ironically shortening their lifespan due to biological rejection. He never imagined the subject’s body would attempt a forced, instant evolution to a Tier-2 lifeform.

It was a literal shortcut to the heavens. But the host’s Spiritual Power and physical vessel were entirely desynchronized, leading to an immediate, explosive critical failure.

The implications were staggering.

Suppressing his revulsion, Wang Ba knelt in the dirt and methodically collected the scattered biological samples into a storage bag. The fleshy debris would require thorough alchemical analysis in a controlled environment.

Suddenly, his Divine Sense rippled. He detected the faint, rapid approach of foreign cultivators drawn by the explosion.

Abandoning his musings, Wang Ba hoisted Zhu Jianyi and the surviving lackey. He summoned his flying Magical Artifact, stepping onto it as it transformed into a streak of brilliant light, vanishing into the northern horizon long before anyone arrived.