Cultivation: I Can Steal Lifespan from Spirit Beasts

Chapter 191: Always Keep a Trump Card

In Wang Ba’s cold estimation, the square-faced Incense Burner Path zealot barking insults at him didn’t feel significantly more dangerous than True Cultivator Lin.

Of course, Wang Ba wasn’t foolish enough to drop his guard. The cultivation world was overflowing with masters of stealth and psychotic pragmatists who played the pig to eat the tiger. For all he knew, this seemingly brain-dead zealot was exactly that kind of hidden predator.

He certainly wasn’t talking about Zhao Feng, and he definitely wasn’t talking about himself.

Regardless, assuming an enemy was weak was a fantastic way to end up dead. If the square-faced man had mastered a particularly vile hex or possessed a devastating Magical Artifact, a moment of arrogance would sink Wang Ba’s ship.

So, Wang Ba kept his defenses tight and probed carefully.

However, after a brief, conservative exchange of magical blows, Wang Ba realized his initial assessment was entirely accurate.

The man genuinely lacked basic tactical intelligence.

Wang Ba had already visibly activated a high-tier Talisman specifically designed to repel soul attacks, yet the square-faced zealot still aggressively dumped his Magic Power into summoning five human-faced Yin Ghosts.

The five spectral horrors swarmed Wang Ba, uselessly gnashing their rotting teeth against the shimmering Talisman barrier. The zealot simply crossed his arms and watched with an expression of supreme, unearned confidence, utterly convinced his ghosts were eating through the shield.

Seeing the sheer incompetence of his opponent, Wang Ba abandoned any urgency to quickly break the engagement.

Instead, he used his peripheral vision to rapidly assess the wider battlefield.

Zhu Ziji and Li Canghai were locked in a cataclysmic duel. The sky was saturated with the blinding glare of clashing Magical Artifacts and the concussive shockwaves of high-tier spells violently detonating against one another.

To Wang Ba’s genuine surprise, Zhu Ziji was actually pinning Li Canghai down!

The butcher’s momentum was an unstoppable, roaring avalanche. Li Canghai was being brutally suppressed at every turn, forced into a desperate, reactive defense.

Granted, Li Canghai wielded a third-grade spell and a third-grade Magical Artifact. While he was bleeding ground, his Golden Core-tier armaments made it functionally impossible for Zhu Ziji to secure a rapid execution. The battle was a grinding stalemate.

The clashes between the remaining Incense Burner Path zealots and the Heavenly Gate Sect commanders were similarly deadlocked.

Analyzing the tactical board, Wang Ba realized that for their strike force to actually win, one of two things had to happen: either Zhu Ziji somehow shattered Li Canghai’s defenses and pivoted to sweep the grunt forces, or the Heavenly Gate Sect commanders had to aggressively crush their individual opponents and swarm Li Canghai en masse.

Given Li Canghai’s arsenal, Zhu Ziji wasn’t breaking free anytime soon.

The victory condition lay entirely on the shoulders of the Heavenly Gate Sect commanders.

Wang Ba narrowed his eyes, preparing to stop humoring his idiotic opponent so he could execute him and go reinforce the line.

But as his gaze swept over one of the Heavenly Gate Sect Foundation Establishment experts, Wang Ba froze.

He looked closer.

Then, he cursed viciously under his breath. “You cowardly old bastards!”

In the initial chaos, he hadn’t noticed the nuances of the skirmishes. But with a critical eye, the truth was glaringly obvious. Out of the ten elite Foundation Establishment commanders deployed by the Sect, at least four of them were blatantly sandbagging.

These were mid Foundation Establishment veterans—men ranked in the upper echelons of the Combat Power list. Yet, they were currently engaged in ‘desperate, evenly matched’ duels with early Foundation Establishment zealots.

Wang Ba understood their psychology instantly.

Always keep a trump card.

Or, more accurately, play the absolute coward. If the macro-battle swung in their favor and Zhu Ziji looked poised to win, these commanders would instantly ‘find their second wind,’ obliterate their opponents, and claim the glory.

If the battle turned sour and Zhu Ziji fell, they hadn’t committed their core Magic Power reserves. They would immediately abandon their fights and flee at maximum velocity, leaving the true frontline fighters to die.

They refused to place a bet until the wheel stopped spinning. Survival was their only doctrine.

Honestly, in almost any other scenario, Wang Ba completely endorsed that philosophy.

The fatal flaw in their logic, however, was the math of the battlefield. When two armies were roughly equal in strength, the difference between total commitment and cowardly sandbagging was the difference between life and death. If the commanders united and struck with overwhelming force, they could break the Incense Burner Path’s lines.

But because half the strike force was hoarding their Magic Power to fuel a potential retreat, the entire offensive was going to collapse. The cowards would survive to run away, and the vanguard would be butchered.

But eventually, the fires of war would reach the cowards, too. When they were inevitably cornered, would they regret holding back today?

Wang Ba wrestled with the tactical dilemma for a microsecond before making a cold, pragmatic decision.

He began subtly retreating, dragging his fight toward the outer edge of the battlefield, distancing himself from the sandbagging commanders.

Predictably, the Qi Refining grunts who had followed him into the fray began to fall.

“Senior! Save me!”

A terrified, desperate scream echoed across the cratered earth.

Wang Ba snapped his gaze toward the sound. Far in the distance, Meng was caught in a brutal pincer attack by two first-layer zealots. The defensive treasure light radiating from his robes was flickering wildly, on the verge of shattering.

“You think you have the luxury to save your dog? Heh! With my Yin Ghosts draining your soul, you should be begging for your own life!” the square-faced zealot sneered, thoroughly enjoying his delusion of dominance.

Wang Ba didn’t say a word. He simply flicked his wrist.

Two Iris Formless Needles shot from his sleeve, tearing through the air toward the square-faced zealot’s throat.

“Pathetic tricks!”

The zealot scoffed. He was an orthodox soul-refiner; his Divine Sense was significantly denser than a standard cultivator’s. Tracking the invisible needles was child’s play for him. With a surge of his soul force, he violently warped the kinetic trajectory of the needles, forcing them to narrowly miss his neck and shoot harmlessly past his ears.

The zealot barked a triumphant, arrogant laugh. “Hehehe! A futile, desperate—”

The laugh died in his throat.

He whipped his head around, tracing the trajectory of the deflected needles.

Hundreds of yards behind him, the two zealots who were moments away from butchering Meng suddenly went rigid. The Iris Formless Needles had punched cleanly through the backs of their skulls, exploding out of their foreheads in a spray of bone and brain matter.

Meng collapsed to his knees, covered in his enemies’ blood, panting in bewildered, ecstatic relief.

“You… you bastard! You deserve death!”

The square-faced zealot erupted into a psychotic rage. He had just mocked Wang Ba’s attack as futile, only to realize he had been completely played. The sheer humiliation burned his face.

Gritting his teeth, he dumped a massive surge of Magic Power, summoning two massive, heavily mutated Yin Ghosts that dwarfed the original five.

“I was trying to show mercy to a pathetic weakling, but you have genuinely crossed the line!” The zealot roared, his face twisting with manic, wounded pride. “Suffer my wrath!”

Who let this absolute clown onto a battlefield? Wang Ba thought, utterly dumbfounded by the sheer, unadulterated cringe of the zealot’s dialogue.

However, to keep the idiot engaged, Wang Ba played along. He deliberately throttled the output of his defensive Talisman, making the shimmering barrier violently flicker as if the new Yin Ghosts were tearing it apart.

Seeing the ‘failing’ barrier, the zealot’s face smoothed back into a look of composed, arrogant superiority.

Just then, another scream tore through the chaos.

“Save me! Senior Wang, please, save me!”

Wang Ba shifted his Divine Sense. A white-haired cultivator was scrambling through the dirt, desperately dodging magical blasts.

It was the elderly grunt. The same old man who had tried to incite a mutiny at the staging ground and force Wang Ba to take the fall for rejecting the mandate.

Wang Ba remembered the old man’s treacherous, hidden blade perfectly.

He looked at the scrambling elder with eyes devoid of all human warmth, completely indifferent to his terror. Without a word, Wang Ba took another step backward, retreating further toward the perimeter.

Seconds later, a hulking, one-eyed zealot swung a massive magical axe. The blade cleaved cleanly through the old man’s torso, bifurcating him in an explosion of gore.

As the top half of the old man’s body hit the dirt, his dying eyes locked onto Wang Ba. They were filled with venomous, agonizing resentment, and… a profound, soul-crushing regret.

If I had only known… if I hadn’t crossed him…

SPLAT.

The one-eyed zealot brought his heavy boot down, violently crushing the old man’s skull like a rotten melon.

Thwip.

Before the one-eyed zealot could even pull his boot back, a microscopic, bloody hole appeared dead center in his forehead.

His massive body swayed for a second before crashing heavily into the dirt.

Standing passively within the swarm of seven Yin Ghosts, Wang Ba quietly recalled the Iris Formless Needle to his sleeve.

His expression was utterly placid. He had let the old man die to settle a personal grudge, yes. But the zealot had killed a member of his squad. A toll had to be paid.

The casual execution of another zealot pushed the square-faced cultivator past the brink of sanity. Roaring in fury, he bit down hard on the tip of his tongue and spat a mouthful of hyper-oxygenated heart’s blood directly onto his Yin Ghosts!

The battlefield temperature plummeted. A shrieking, glacial wind whipped around Wang Ba as the seven human-faced ghosts violently mutated, their features twisting into demonic, blue-skinned visages sporting jagged fangs!

Wang Ba felt the protective glow of his Talisman violently buckle and begin to aggressively dissolve.

A sharp, lethal coldness flashed in his eyes.

Playtime is over. The mutated ghosts were a genuine threat. He began to cycle his Magic Power, preparing to turn the zealot into ash.

But before he could unleash his barrage, an apocalyptic shockwave of soul force detonated across the battlefield!

Zhu Ziji’s voice ripped through the air, completely devoid of its former arrogance, saturated with pure, unadulterated terror.

“You hid your true strength?!”

“HAHAHAHA! You ignorant, backwater dogs! How could you possibly comprehend the absolute profundity of the Yin Spirit lineage?!” Li Canghai roared, his manic laughter echoing like thunder.

Wang Ba whipped his head toward the epicenter.

Hovering above Li Canghai was a terrifying, translucent phantom of a towering, faceless deity!

As the phantom solidified, the vague contours of the entity became horrifyingly clear to Wang Ba.

It’s the idol! The exact same faceless idol housed within the Yin Spirit Abode of my Spiritual Terrace!

The massive phantom stood absolutely motionless.

Yet, the instant Zhu Ziji—who had been aggressively dominating the fight seconds prior—laid eyes on the faceless deity, his entire body seized. His mind violently flatlined, plunging him into a state of catatonic paralysis!

Though the butcher’s iron will shattered the paralysis a fraction of a second later, in a duel between masters, a fraction of a second was an eternity.

Li Canghai, a veteran of countless slaughters, didn’t hesitate. Channeling his absolute maximum soul force, he brought his third-grade Magical Artifact, the Vibrant Purple Crimson Mace, crashing down from the heavens!

Zhu Ziji snapped back to reality just as the apocalypse descended. In a desperate, impossible maneuver, he violently twisted his body. He couldn’t dodge the blast entirely, but he narrowly avoided a lethal strike to his core.

With a sickening crunch and a miserable, agonizing howl, Zhu Ziji’s left arm was instantly pulverized into a fine, bloody mist!

But the sacrifice bought his life.

Without a single word, Zhu Ziji violently burned his essence blood. His mangled body transformed into a streak of blinding crimson light, and he fled into the horizon at a terrifying velocity!

The sequence of events was so aggressively fast—like a rabbit bolting or a falcon striking—that the entire battlefield froze in absolute, stunned silence. Neither the Incense Burner Path nor the Heavenly Gate Sect could process what had just happened.

Even the cowardly, sandbagging commanders were completely paralyzed.

No one could comprehend how Zhu Ziji, the butcher who had been dominating the fight, had been catastrophically maimed and routed in the span of a single breath.

But these commanders hadn’t survived this long by being slow. The instant their brains registered the catastrophic shift in power dynamics, their self-preservation instincts violently overrode their shock. They instantly burned the Magic Power they had been hoarding, deploying their ultimate escape arts to violently shake off their opponents, and scattered into the deep mountains like terrified rats!

With Zhu Ziji routed, Li Canghai was the undisputed apex predator of the battlefield. The faceless deity phantom dissolved into mist, and a deep, heavy exhaustion settled over his rugged features. Summoning the idol had clearly exacted a massive toll on his soul.

But seeing the Heavenly Gate Sect commanders scattering like roaches, a cruel, mocking sneer twisted his lips.

“You think you can run?”

He waved his massive hand.

A horde of newly freed zealots instantly swarmed a fleeing commander clad in yellow robes. Realizing he was cornered, the yellow-robed commander finally stopped sandbagging, violently detonating his stored Magic Power to easily blast the grunts away.

Seeing the resistance, Li Canghai’s eyes narrowed. He pulsed his soul force. A completely invisible, formless Yin Ghost shot from his body, crossing the battlefield in an instant and violently slamming into the fleeing commander!

The commander’s Magic Power instantly stagnated. A look of horrific, suffocating struggle seized his face. In the blink of an eye, the flesh on his skull violently withered, shrinking tightly against the bone.

A flicker of profound regret flashed in his sunken eyes, instantly replaced by a look of absolute, psychotic determination.

“If I die, I’m taking you with me!” he shrieked.

Ripping a massive stack of explosive Talismans from his Storage Bag, he violently hurled them… directly into the flight path of a red-and-black robed Heavenly Gate Sect commander who was attempting to sprint past him.

For a second, even Li Canghai was stunned by the sheer, unadulterated malice of the betrayal.

BOOM!

The detonating Talismans violently disrupted the red-and-black robed commander’s flight trajectory, throwing his Magic Power into chaos. The pursuing zealots seized the opening instantly, dumping a dozen lethal spells into his unprotected back.

As he was blasted out of the sky, the red-and-black robed commander’s eyes were wide with pure, unadulterated confusion.

You said you were taking them with you! Why the fuck did you bomb me?!

Seeing his ‘ally’ obliterated into ash and bone fragments, a sickening flash of vindictive satisfaction gleamed in the yellow-robed commander’s withered eyes.

A second later, his own remaining flesh was completely devoured by the invisible Yin Ghost, leaving only a husk.

In the span of two breaths, two elite Heavenly Gate Sect Foundation Establishment commanders were utterly eradicated!

Back on the perimeter, the square-faced zealot witnessed the total collapse of the enemy lines. He turned back to Wang Ba, his eyes swimming with manic, mocking pity.

“Tsk, tsk. Your almighty commanders are dead or running. How do you plan to fight me now, little rat? Surrender your soul to the Yin Spirit lineage, and perhaps I’ll—WHAT THE FUCK?!”

The mockery in the zealot’s eyes was violently overwritten by a look of absolute, mind-shattering terror!

WHOOSH!

Over a dozen highly condensed spells materialized around Wang Ba at an utterly impossible speed. In the next microsecond, the spells roared forward like a ruptured dam, cascading onto the zealot in an endless, suffocating torrent of destruction!

The zealot’s defensive Magical Artifact—which was actually quite robust—held for exactly one breath before it violently shattered into dust!

In the next heartbeat, roaring flames, glacial waves, jagged earth spikes, spinning blades, piercing wooden lances, detonating Jade Dew, and invisible Iris Needles entirely engulfed him!

In the span of a single second, before his brain could even process the necessity to dodge, the square-faced zealot was completely and utterly obliterated into fine, gray ash.

Wang Ba flicked his wrist, casually catching the Storage Ring as it fell from the disintegrating corpse.

Fast.

It was too fast.

It was horrifyingly fast!

The execution was even faster than Zhu Ziji’s escape. By the time the surrounding Incense Burner Path elites realized what had just happened, Wang Ba was already standing on his second-grade High Grade flying Magical Artifact, ready to burn sky.

“Hmph!”

A thunderous, icy snort shattered the air!

In that exact moment, Li Canghai demonstrated exactly why he was an apex predator. Before anyone else could react to Wang Ba’s display of power, Li Canghai violently kicked off the earth, his massive frame hurtling toward Wang Ba with the momentum of a falling meteor!

Simultaneously, a shrieking, invisible Yin Ghost tore through the air, screaming straight for Wang Ba’s soul!

“Senior!”

Seeing the behemoth charge, Meng’s heart seized in terror. But his survival instinct was absolute. Seeing that every single Foundation Establishment zealot was now entirely focused on Wang Ba and the fleeing commanders, Meng didn’t hesitate. He abandoned his post and sprinted for the treeline like a madman.

The remaining, fleeing Heavenly Gate Sect commanders sensed Li Canghai’s aggression pivot toward Wang Ba, and a wave of ecstatic relief washed over them.

Yes! The idiot drew aggro! We’re going to live!

As Li Canghai’s suffocating, heaven-piercing killing intent crashed down on him, Wang Ba felt genuine, ice-cold dread.

The pressure radiating from the man was equal to—if not vastly superior to—the aura of True Cultivator Lin!

An ocean of soul force blotted out the sun, descending upon Wang Ba like a pantheon of wrathful, bloodthirsty gods.

“DIE!” Li Canghai roared.

Looking at the seemingly generic, early Foundation Establishment cultivator frozen in his path, Li Canghai saw the uncontrollable panic and terror rising on the man’s face. A psychotic, fanatical grin split Li Canghai’s rugged features.

He loved the thrill of a duel, but he absolutely adored the sickening crunch of effortlessly crushing a pathetic, terrified insect beneath his heel.

However, in that exact, fatal microsecond…

Li Canghai’s psychotic grin froze.

Hum!

A singular, unassuming streak of sword light quietly slipped from the terrified cultivator’s sleeve.

It didn’t radiate a blinding, majestic aura. It didn’t scream with earth-shattering power. It simply shot straight for the dead center of Li Canghai’s forehead.

Yet, in that fraction of a second, every hair on Li Canghai’s body stood on end!

Every drop of soul force within his Spiritual Terrace violently screamed in mortal terror!

A single, horrified thought flashed through his mind.

Damn it! He was hiding a trump card!

In the next breath, the silent sword light cleaved down.