Cultivation: I Can Steal Lifespan from Spirit Beasts

Chapter 188: Sudden Storm!

The rugged mountains, winding rivers, and desolate terrain blurred past them in a rapid streak of colors.

Wang Ba kept his Divine Sense fully extended, scanning the perimeter for any trace of the Heavenly Gate Sect’s enemies while entirely ignoring the devastated landscape below. What were once majestic peaks and sprawling, fertile farmhouses had been reduced to cratered ruins and charred rubble. The ambient air still hummed with the chaotic residue of violent clashes.

To the seasoned cultivators flying alongside him, such collateral damage was barely worth a glance.

Yet, an inexplicable heaviness settled in Wang Ba’s chest. He was no bleeding-heart saint, but looking down at the scarred earth, he couldn’t suppress a quiet, weary sigh.

But there was no time for mourning.

His expression suddenly sharpened. “Take cover!”

At the absolute edge of his Divine Sense, three figures radiating the sickening, crimson aura of first-layer Qi Refining Incense Burner Path cultivators were hurtling directly toward their flight path.

Hearing Wang Ba’s sharp command, the twenty Qi Refining cultivators trailing him instantly broke formation, diving into the dense canopy and scattering like startled birds to avoid detection.

But Wang Ba’s eyes narrowed. “They spotted us!”

One of the crimson-robed cultivators abruptly flared his Spiritual Energy, banking hard to flee and alert the main horde.

Wang Ba’s face turned glacial. He surged forward to intercept, but before he could cast a technique, a streak of blinding light shot past him. A flying sword sheared through the air, and the fleeing enemy’s head was instantly separated from his shoulders in a geyser of blood!

Catching the movement from the corner of his eye, Wang Ba realized the executioner was You Wanli, the arrogant tenth-layer Qi Refining veteran.

Before Wang Ba could process the aggressive maneuver, the remaining two enemies panicked and scattered in opposite directions.

You Wanli didn’t pause. His body blurred into a beam of light as he aggressively chased down the second target.

Seeing the veteran handle one, Wang Ba effortlessly locked onto the third. He was a Foundation Establishment expert; crossing the distance took less than a blink of an eye. He materialized directly in front of the fleeing zealot.

Feeling the suffocating suppression of a Foundation Establishment aura slam into him, pure terror washed over the enemy’s face.

Wang Ba’s mind raced. His eyes flashed with an eerie, blood-red light as he attempted to forcefully implant a hypnotic suggestion into the man’s mind using his Yin Spirit Power.

To his absolute shock, the hypnotic tether failed to take root. Instead, the enemy’s terror vanished, replaced by an expression of staggering disbelief.

“Yin… Yin Spirit Power?!” The zealot gasped, pointing a trembling finger at Wang Ba. “How do you possess… y-you are—”

Wang Ba’s expression darkened into a mask of pure murder.

He recognizes the technique!

Without a second of hesitation, Wang Ba raised his hand, condensed his Spiritual Energy into a vice-like grip, and clamped down on the man’s throat, crushing his windpipe. With a vicious pulse of his Divine Sense, Wang Ba slammed his palm onto the crown of the man’s skull, initiating a brutal Soul Searching Technique.

Moments later, Wang Ba withdrew his hand, his face deathly pale. With a casual thought, he snapped the lifeless body’s neck and let it drop to the forest floor.

Nearly 10,000 Incense Burner Path cultivators have massed outside the garrison! Wang Ba’s mind reeled from the stolen memories. And every single one of them belongs to the Yin Spirit lineage! What in god’s name are they planning? How could the Sect Master not see this coming? Are the other five major Sects of the State of Chen just going to sit back and watch us burn?!

A tidal wave of panic crashed against his ribs, but he ruthlessly crushed it down.

Sweeping his gaze across the treeline, he saw that You Wanli had already finished butchering the second target. A few of the squad members were hastily looting and concealing the corpses to hide their tracks.

However, Wang Ba acutely noticed the subtle shift in the squad’s demeanor. The way they looked at him had changed. The nervous respect was gone, replaced by a strange, questioning glint.

Wang Ba was confused for a split second, but catching the smug, undisguised arrogance radiating from You Wanli, he immediately understood.

In that brief, chaotic skirmish, You Wanli—a mere Qi Refining cultivator—had aggressively hunted down and executed two enemies single-handedly. Meanwhile, Wang Ba, the supposedly almighty Foundation Establishment commander, had only managed to kill one.

To a squad of grunts whose loyalty was already hanging by a thread, the optics were damning.

The murmurs began immediately. Some sneered internally, realizing this ‘True Cultivator Wang’ was nothing but a paper tiger, perhaps even weaker than themselves. You Wanli continuously shot provocative, mocking glances in Wang Ba’s direction.

Yet, You Wanli wasn’t completely suicidal. He kept his mouth shut. He knew that a Foundation Establishment cultivator’s Spiritual Energy reserves were an ocean compared to his puddle. Even if Wang Ba lacked combat instincts, the sheer brute force of his techniques could obliterate a tenth-layer cultivator. You Wanli was arrogant, but he wasn’t eager to test that theory.

Wang Ba ignored the posturing entirely. As far as he was concerned, You Wanli playing the hero just meant Wang Ba had one more expendable meat-shield to draw enemy fire.

More importantly, the Soul Searching had yielded the exact patrol routes and defensive perimeters of the enemy horde. Barring catastrophic bad luck, Wang Ba could thread the needle straight through their lines and reach Luolan Mountain undetected. With twenty grunts working simultaneously, establishing the Formation wouldn’t take long.

“Move out,” Wang Ba ordered flatly.

However, instead of obeying, the entire squad—save for Meng—instinctively looked toward You Wanli for confirmation.

Wang Ba’s eyes narrowed into dangerous slits.

He could read You Wanli’s delusions perfectly, and he found it genuinely hilarious. Does this idiot actually believe he can rival a Foundation Establishment expert? Wang Ba could literally crush the man’s skull with a flick of his wrist. He had no idea where the veteran drew such staggering, suicidal confidence.

Oblivious to Wang Ba’s lethal amusement, You Wanli puffed his chest out under the squad’s expectant gazes. After a moment of feigned deliberation, he nodded magnanimously.

“Listen to True Cultivator Wang.”

He used the title True Cultivator, pointedly omitting the honorific Senior.

Wang Ba couldn’t care less about titles, but the deliberate disrespect signaled a total collapse of the chain of command. The squad sensed the shift instantly; some looked terrified by the insubordination, while others smirked in approval.

Wang Ba simply tuned it out.

These idiots were tools. As long as they successfully built the Formation, they could mock him all they wanted. But if they crossed the line… well, Wang Ba was a reasonable man, but he wasn’t about to let a pack of Qi Refining dogs bite him.

Meng, however, looked deeply conflicted. He hurried over to Wang Ba’s side, keeping his voice low.

“Senior… we need their manpower for the array. Please, endure this insolence for now. Don’t—”

Wang Ba waved him off, cutting him short. He rapidly relayed the stolen patrol routes and safe zones to Meng.

“You take point, or feed the intel to You Wanli—I don’t care,” Wang Ba said bluntly. “My only objective is completing this mandate so I can buy myself a few days of rest before the Sect throws me into another meat-grinder.”

Meng blinked, stunned by the sheer, unapologetic pragmatism. Then, a look of profound, awestruck understanding washed over his face.

“This Junior grasps the Senior’s profound wisdom,” Meng whispered reverently.

Bowing deeply, Meng scurried over to You Wanli and whispered the intel into his ear.

Wang Ba watched him go, completely baffled. Profound wisdom? What the hell is he talking about? I just want to go home.

Regardless of Meng’s delusions, the plan worked flawlessly. Guided by the stolen patrol routes, You Wanli arrogantly took the vanguard, leading the rebellious squad through the invisible gaps in the Incense Burner Path’s blockade.

Wang Ba happily trailed behind, thrilled to have the administrative burden lifted off his shoulders.

He used the quiet flight time to mentally deconstruct the dozen ordinary techniques he had recently learned. While they lacked the raw devastating power of advanced arts, he theorized he could chain them together into seamless, rapid-fire combos for self-defense. He had been running simulations in his head for days, but he desperately needed a live-fire test.

He got his wish shortly after the silhouette of Luolan Mountain breached the horizon.

Despite the intel, You Wanli led them directly into a roaming three-man patrol.

Reacting with explosive speed, You Wanli launched his flying sword, instantly engaging two of the zealots in a flurry of sparks and steel.

The third zealot locked eyes with Wang Ba. Feeling the crushing weight of Wang Ba’s Foundation Establishment aura, the man nearly wet himself in terror.

But a second later, the terror morphed into total confusion.

Wang Ba unleashed a barrage of techniques. The spiritual energy roared through the air, looking utterly terrifying and visually spectacular… but when the techniques actually hit the zealot, they felt like aggressive slaps.

Despite Wang Ba casting at a speed the zealot couldn’t even track, the actual kinetic impact was pathetic. The zealot stumbled back, completely unharmed, his mind short-circuiting.

Did I suddenly achieve a breakthrough? Am I invincible?!

Just as the zealot gathered his Spiritual Energy to launch a triumphant counterattack, Wang Ba abruptly stopped casting. He frowned, muttered something under his breath, and casually waved his hand.

The zealot sneered. Hah! The paper tiger is out of tricks!

A millisecond later, the sneer was violently erased by absolute, paralyzing terror.

BANG!

The zealot’s chest cavity exploded outward in a shower of gore. As his lifeless body plummeted to the earth, his dead eyes remained frozen in a state of profound, lingering confusion.

Landing near the corpse, Wang Ba ignored the increasingly hostile, mocking glares of his squad.

He was annoyed. He had deliberately throttled his Spiritual Energy down to a Qi Refining level to test his technique combos, but the execution was sloppy. The transitions between the techniques were clunky, and they lacked any crowd-control elements to pin the target in place. Because of the lag, the techniques failed to stack their damage multipliers. Unless the target stood perfectly still like a training dummy, the combo was useless.

If I can chain seven or eight low-tier techniques together seamlessly, the stacked kinetic force would rival a high-tier nuke, Wang Ba theorized. But I need more practice. And better control techniques.

The Qi Refining squad, naturally, understood absolutely none of this.

To them, Wang Ba had just spent thirty seconds aggressively tickling a low-level grunt before finally managing to kill him. The doubts solidified into certainty. He’s a fraud. A complete fake. He probably bought his cultivation base with pills!

You Wanli didn’t even try to hide his sneer anymore.

With Wang Ba completely detached from command, the squad implicitly accepted You Wanli as their undisputed leader. After quickly looting the corpses, they pushed hard for the summit of Luolan Mountain.

As the rocky incline leveled out near the peak, You Wanli raised a fist, signaling a halt. He cleared his throat, assuming the posture of a seasoned general.

“Listen up! We are in the red zone. From this point forward, absolute silence!” You Wanli barked in a hushed, authoritative whisper. “Jiang, you map out the primary array nodes. Xi, take the high ground and establish a perimeter. Mu, I want you to…”

He fired off rapid, precise orders. Having personally slaughtered four enemies in the past hour, the squad hung on his every word, nodding in fervent agreement.

Satisfied with his absolute control over the unit, You Wanli turned his head and shot Wang Ba a look of pure, unadulterated arrogance.

To usurp command from a Foundation Establishment True Cultivator as a mere Qi Refining grunt was an intoxicating rush of power. In You Wanli’s mind, dominating Wang Ba made him the de facto Foundation Establishment expert of the squad.

Disgusted, Wang Ba turned his head away to stare at a tree.

If he had to look at You Wanli’s smug, punchable face for one more second, he was going to snap the man’s neck.

You Wanli interpreted the averted gaze as absolute submission. His ego exploded. Swelling with manic confidence, he drew his sword and pointed it toward the summit.

“Move out!” he commanded grandly.

He launched himself into the air, leading the charge.

At that exact millisecond, the world tore open.

A streak of dark golden light materialized out of thin air, moving with sickening velocity.

You Wanli didn’t even have time to blink. The golden light sheared horizontally through his neck.

His severed head rocketed into the sky, spinning wildly. As it tumbled through the air, You Wanli’s face was still frozen in an expression of absolute, arrogant command, slowly giving way to baffled horror.

The squad froze, their brains failing to process the visual data. One second, their invincible leader was barking orders; the next, his headless corpse was violently geysering blood onto the dirt.

Before anyone could scream, the dark golden light banked sharply in the air, looping back around to decapitate the rest of the squad!

Pure, unadulterated terror seized their souls.

“Courting death!”

A voice colder than the grave shattered the panic.

Wang Ba’s figure blurred, bypassing the paralyzed squad. His Foundation Establishment Spiritual Energy violently erupted, condensing into a massive, shimmering hand that slapped the dark golden streak out of the air!

The golden light shattered like glass, revealing a wicked, dark golden blade that clattered uselessly to the stones.

“Huh?!” a voice gasped from the shadows.

The squad whipped their heads around, staring at the man standing between them and death.

It was Wang Ba.

“H-How did he…” someone stammered, their mind completely broken by the sudden display of overwhelming power.

Ignoring the gaping idiots behind him, Wang Ba’s Divine Sense flooded the perimeter. His eyes locked onto a dense patch of timber, flashing with glacial killing intent.

“Found you.”

With a flick of his wrist, Wang Ba drew a gruesome drum crafted from human skin from his Storage Bag. Channeling his Yin Spirit Power, he struck the drumhead with a violently concentrated pulse of soul energy.

BOOM!

An invisible shockwave of sonic and spiritual force slammed into the treeline.

A figure was violently blasted out of the brush, hurtling backward at a terrifying speed.

The squad gasped in horror as the ambusher’s aura washed over them.

“That aura… that’s… that’s mid Foundation Establishment!” a veteran screamed, his legs giving out.

“WHAT?!”

But the horror was instantly eclipsed by something infinitely more terrifying.

Wang Ba had already vanished.

Transforming into a blistering streak of light, Wang Ba moved with a velocity that defied physics, catching up to the mid Foundation Establishment ambusher before the man even hit the ground!

Then, under the horrified, bulging eyes of his squad, Wang Ba simply raised his hand.

And the heavens opened up.

A relentless, suffocating avalanche of techniques—fire, ice, lightning, kinetic force—roared from Wang Ba’s palm, chaining together in a flawless, overlapping torrent of absolute destruction! He dumped Spiritual Energy like a man trying to empty an ocean.

The ambusher didn’t even have time to raise a ward before he was completely engulfed in the apocalyptic bombardment!

Yet, to the squad’s absolute despair, as the smoke momentarily cleared, the mysterious ambusher was still standing. His robes were shredded, but his aura remained terrifyingly stable.

A sneer of pure mockery twisted the ambusher’s face. Is this it? Is this pathetic light show supposed to hurt me? He pulled his arm back, gathering a massive surge of dark energy to obliterate Wang Ba.

A fraction of a second later, the sneer vanished.

“No!” the ambusher screamed, his eyes blowing wide in absolute terror.

The techniques hadn’t stopped. They were accelerating.

Like a ceaseless, roaring hurricane, technique after technique slammed into his defenses, overlapping, compounding, and multiplying their kinetic force. The relentless barrage offered zero windows for a counterattack, brutally hammering his wards until they shattered like glass, the techniques aggressively tearing into his physical flesh!

And the finale arrived.

Massive, terrifying droplets of Jade Dew plummeted from the sky like meteors. Concealed within the liquid were invisible, lethal spirit needles. The instant the Jade Dew slammed into the ambusher’s battered body and violently detonated, the needles shot outward at point-blank range, shredding his internal organs to paste.

In the span of three breaths, under the paralyzed, traumatized gazes of the Qi Refining squad…

Wang Ba had relentlessly, brutally obliterated a mid Foundation Establishment expert until there was nothing left but a lifeless heap of meat.

The mountain peak plunged into a terrifying, absolute silence.

Standing over the pulverized corpse, Wang Ba lowered his hand, his brow furrowing in deep suspicion.

Something is completely wrong here. This man’s aura… he wasn’t from the Incense Burner Path!