Severing Ties: The Sect Regrets My Departure

“Just another half hour. My mobility will return, and if I push myself, I should be fully healed within two hours.”

“Once this is resolved, it will be time to visit the Bibo Sect and reclaim what is rightfully mine.”

Deep in the mountain forest, Jiang Xun lay paralyzed on the ground, muttering his plans to the dirt. He was already fantasizing about his triumphant return, about the faces of those who had looked down on him.

But just as he was basking in his future glory, a piercing agony shattered his daydream.

It felt as if a living, malevolent entity had burrowed into his skin, sliding along his meridians like a razor wire. Wherever it passed, it brought a sensation akin to scraping bone and gouging out raw flesh.

“Hiss—!”

Despite Jiang Xun’s self-proclaimed will of iron, cold sweat instantly drenched his back.

He knew exactly what had entered his body.

It was Spiritual Qi.

Under normal circumstances, Spiritual Qi was a cultivator’s greatest tonic, the source of all power. But his situation was no longer normal. The Heaven-Bestowed Ruyi was actively reconstructing his body, altering his meridians and Dantian into something extraordinary. In this transitional state, the normally benevolent Qi was no different from deadly poison.

It was only a single wisp. Yet, the moment it entered his system, it thrashed like a thorny vine covered in acid, tearing through his delicate, reforming meridians.

Pain! Visceral, drilling pain!

Jiang Xun’s teeth ground together with a sickening crunch. “I am the Chosen One! The only True God of this world! A little pain like this…”

“I. Can. Take. It!”

He possessed great perseverance and grand ambitions. He would not be broken by a single wisp of energy.

And he succeeded. After wrecking several meridians, the wisp finally dissipated. Jiang Xun exhaled a long, trembling breath, his chest swelling with a renewed sense of boundless pride.

“Hmph. Mere torture. Is that the best the Heavens can do? Forget one strand—even if a thousand or ten thousand came at me, I would laugh in their faces!”

The words had barely left his lips when his expression froze.

His pupils dilated.

Pain. Fatal, soul-destroying pain.

As if answering his challenge, ten strands of Spiritual Qi drifted over on the breeze, diving eagerly into his pores.

One strand had been agony. Ten was a massacre.

Jiang Xun felt his meridians shattering inch by inch. It was a sensation indistinguishable from being skinned alive while having his tendons slowly pulled out with rusty pliers.

“Endure! Endure! Endure!”

“It’s just pain! I can take it!!!”

“Ugh… Ah… Hiss…”

Miserable wails echoed through the trees.

Fortunately, Jiang Xun’s will was indeed terrifying. After several minutes of gasping like a dying fish, he managed to survive the onslaught. He glanced at his arms—the flesh was mangled, bloodied by internal explosions. Yet, under the Heaven-Bestowed Ruyi’s light, the gore was already knitting back together.

Seeing this, his arrogance surged back, stronger than ever. He spat a mouthful of blood and sneered.

“Is that all?”

“Tempered by a thousand blows, I remain unbreakable! Let the winds blow from east, west, south, or north!”

“A little Spiritual Qi?”

“I.”

“Jiang Xun.”

“Am invincible!”

He felt heroic. His only regret was that his Senior Sisters weren’t here to witness this display of indomitable spirit. If they saw him now, bathed in blood yet unbowed, they would surely fall to their knees in worship.

But before he could finish the thought, the air shimmered again.

The unyielding glint in Jiang Xun’s eyes vanished, replaced instantly by sheer panic. He tried to grit his teeth. He tried to maintain the facade of the iron-willed god.

But… it hurt too much!!!

This time, it was twenty-one strands.

For a moment, Jiang Xun felt he was undergoing Lingchi—death by a thousand cuts. His skin, flesh, and meridians pulverized simultaneously. This was not something willpower could block. This was biological devastation.

By the time the twenty strands faded, Jiang Xun’s chest was a ruin of mangled meat. He lay limp, drained of every ounce of strength.

Yet, his delusion persisted. He wheezed, forcing the words out through bloody lips.

“Is… that… all?”

Whoosh.

Fifty strands hit him.

Jiang Xun’s face twisted into a mask of pure horror. The facade dropped instantly.

“Wait! That’s enough! Stop!”

“I was wrong! I take it back! Don’t come in!”

“AHHHHHHH!”

The screams were no longer human. They were the sounds of an animal in a slaughterhouse.

When the fifty strands finally burned themselves out, Jiang Xun didn’t speak. He couldn’t. He lay panting like a dead dog, his eyes glazed and dull. The “unyielding will” had been thrashed into numbness.

This was inhuman. He was scared. Genuinely, terrified scared.

But fear came too late.

Before he could even catch his breath, a swarm of Qi rushed toward him.

Jiang Xun’s body seized up in a violent convulsion.

One hundred strands.

It wasn’t cultivation. It was an execution.

When the hundred strands finally faded, the light in Jiang Xun’s eyes was gone. He lay there, twitching, drool mixing with blood. Then, a sudden, irrational rage bubbled up.

“Damn it… this place has thin Qi… why does it keep finding me?”

“When I recover… I’ll burn this mountain to ash!”

As he vented his impotent fury, a breeze brushed against his face. It was wet. Heavy.

Jiang Xun slowly turned his head to look into the distance.

One look.

Just one.

His pupils expanded until they nearly swallowed his irises.

Shock. Disbelief. And then… primal terror.

All around him, the ambient Spiritual Qi of the Heaven-Leveling Mountains was behaving strangely. It was thickening, condensing, drawn by some terrifyingly powerful suction force. It swirled from all directions, converging on a single point.

Him.

The Qi was so dense it had liquefied into a mist. A torrential rain of pure, concentrated energy was forming—a white wall of torture closing in from every side.

Jiang Xun began to tremble.

A wet patch spread across the front of his pants. He had pissed himself.

But no one could blame him.

The torture he had just survived—the skinning, the bone-scraping—had come from barely a hundred strands.

But this? This sky-covering fog? This wall of white death?

There were millions of strands. Tens of millions. Hundreds of millions.

“Don’t come over…”

“Don’t come over…”

His voice cracked, rising into a shriek of pure despair.

“DON’T YOU COME OVER HERE!!!”

BOOM!

The Spirit Gathering Array fully activated. The concentrated rain of Spiritual Qi collapsed onto him, burying him in a tsunami of energy.

Only a single, long, desolate scream echoed from the center of the storm.

But fate, it seemed, had a twisted sense of humor.

As the screams passed through the dense fog of Qi, and then filtered through the protective golden barrier of the Heaven-Bestowed Ruyi, the acoustics warped.

The shrill wails of agony deepened into impassioned roars. The desperate shrieks of terror sounded like ecstatic battle cries.

Even his pleas for mercy were twisted.

“Save… me… Save… me…” (Jiu ming… Jiu ming…)

Outside the formation, Yuchi Chunlei stood with her hands on her hips, listening intently. She frowned, trying to parse the distorted sounds.

“Save… me…”

“Slave… no…”

“Fate… me…”

Her eyes suddenly lit up. “I know what Junior Brother is shouting!”

“My fate is mine to command, not Heaven’s!!!” (Wo ming you wo bu you tian!)

Tears of admiration welled up in Yuchi Chunlei’s eyes. She clasped her hands together, looking at the swirling fog with reverence.

“Truly worthy of being my Junior Brother. Even in the face of a massive Fated Chance, his first thought is to shout a grand vow to the heavens! Such boundless pride! Who in this world can compare to him?”

“Junior Brother, no need to thank me!”

“This is what a Senior Sister should do!”

While Jiang Xun was experiencing the most horrific, inhuman torture of his life, miles away in the underground mine ruins, the atmosphere was solemn.

Gu Xiu stood up.

He slowly walked to the edge of the cliff.

He had sat there for a full day, motionless as a statue, silently observing. During that time, hundreds of cultivators had arrived.

And more than half of them now lay broken at the bottom of the ten-thousand-zhang abyss.

The God Platform Stone Bamboo Shoot Array was a grand formation of immense complexity. It could not be broken by force; it had to be solved. One had to find the correct path and step across the void, stone by stone.

But the formation followed a brutal logic. The further one went, the harder it became. A single misstep meant the collapse of the platform and instant death.

The disciples of the Bibo Sect had thrown themselves at it relentlessly, but their progress was bought with blood. Now, the fervor had died down. The array that everyone had fought to enter was now shunned like a plague pit.

When the crowd saw Gu Xiu step forward, shaking heads rippled through the onlookers.

“Does this guy think staring at it for a day will reveal the solution? Ridiculous.”

“Indeed. This formation aligns with the Dao: One gives birth to two, two gives birth to three, three gives birth to all things. The further out you go, the exponentially more pillars appear. But only one is ever safe. You can’t just ‘figure it out’ by looking.”

“The maze isn’t even the worst part,” another cultivator shuddered, his face pale. “It’s the burning. The moment you step on those pillars, it’s like being thrown into a furnace. The pain scales with distance. By the halfway point, it’s worse than Lingchi.”

“It’s terrifying. Just remembering that pain makes my soul tremble. I can’t imagine trying to solve a puzzle while being roasted alive.”

Despair hung heavy in the eyes of the Bibo Sect disciples. Only those who had stepped onto the stones understood the true horror. This wasn’t a test; it was an execution ground. It was impassable.

Gu Xiu ignored the chatter. He stood at the edge, waiting.

Rumble.

The God Platform Stone Bamboo Shoots rose from the darkness once again, locking into place.

Gu Xiu didn’t hesitate. He stepped out, landing lightly on the first stone pillar.

He didn’t rush to the next one. Instead, he stood there, closing his eyes, sensing the energy flowing beneath his feet.

The crowd was right. The pillar carried a potent, searing energy, like a fire creeping up his legs. At this initial stage, it was faint—barely noticeable if one wasn’t paying attention.

But Gu Xiu smiled.

This was indeed the God Platform Stone Bamboo Shoot Array.

But to him, it was something else entirely.

It was a Artifact Refiner’s Furnace.