Who Let Him Cultivate？

Chapter 74: The Ultimate Move of Mimicry Fist

“This is a bit tricky,” Lu Yang muttered, clicking his tongue as he surveyed the empty streets.

The other recruits of the Yanjiang Branch had already scattered, rushing off with terrifying enthusiasm to commit various atrocities. Only the three of them remained.

If left to their own devices without any moral restrictions, the trio possessed enough raw destructive potential to flip the entirety of Feixian City upside down. Unfortunately, their fundamental nature as righteous undercover agents in a demonic syndicate strictly prohibited such behavior.

“No wonder there are no records of anyone successfully infiltrating the Immortal Cult,” Meng Jingzhou said, rubbing his chin. “I didn’t expect their HR filter to be this brutally efficient.”

“What is the most heinous act you can fathom committing?” Lu Yang asked, treating the question like a tactical puzzle.

Meng Jingzhou pondered this for an agonizingly long time before offering a hesitant reply. “Does… does going to a brothel count?”

Since childhood, his clan had strictly forbidden him from stepping foot in the pleasure districts. The elders and uncles who had braved those establishments always spoke of them in hushed, terrified whispers, warning that they were abyssal pits no child should ever approach. Having witnessed those same esteemed uncles kneeling on spiked washboards upon returning home, Meng Jingzhou had logically concluded that brothels were realms of unimaginable horror.

Now, burdened with a Pure Yang Spiritual Root, the prohibition was absolute. To Meng Jingzhou, stepping into a brothel was the zenith of mortal rebellion—an act of unparalleled, world-shaking depravity.

Man Gu, on the other hand, simply drew a blank. His mind was too pure to even conceptualize a viable sin.

“Forget it. We have a full day to kill in this trial anyway. Let’s hit the brothel and decompress,” Lu Yang suggested, a dry smirk tugging at his lips. Did the Immortal Cult really think a rigid set of rules could restrict him? He saw the world as a system, and every system had a loophole.

It was still early, and there was no immediate pressure to act. Since this was a rare opportunity, they might as well fulfill Meng Jingzhou’s darkest, most pathetic desire.

Meng Jingzhou’s eyes practically glowed. That’s right! This wasn’t his physical body. A minor spatial displacement of his consciousness meant a visit wouldn’t taint his Pure Yang foundation.

“Let’s go, let’s go!” Meng Jingzhou urged, practically shoving the other two forward. He lacked the sheer audacity to breach such a terrifying establishment alone.

Unable to withstand his relentless badgering, Lu Yang and Man Gu yielded.

The brothel was situated in a glaringly conspicuous location, making it impossible to miss. Heavily powdered courtesans lingered by the threshold, their silk handkerchiefs weaving through the air like predatory snares, hooking the souls of weak-willed mortals with a mere flick of their wrists.

Upon reaching the entrance, Man Gu’s courage evaporated. He backpedaled frantically. “I am a scholar of the righteous path. This is a den of iniquity, entirely unsuitable for a man of letters!”

He raised a trembling finger. “The sage decreed: ‘Fair ladies are but skeletons wrapped in fleeting flesh; beauties capable of toppling empires eventually turn to white bone.’ I cannot allow my Dao heart to be compromised!”

Lu Yang and Meng Jingzhou spent the better part of an incense stick’s burn time trying to coax him, exhausting their vocabularies, but the barbarian scholar remained an immovable fortress of chastity. They had no choice but to give up.

Lu Yang sighed, clapping a hand over his chest in a display of profound brotherhood. “Since you refuse to cross this threshold, Brother Man Gu, I shall bear this burden and go in your stead.”

Man Gu exhaled a massive breath of relief. Brother Lu is truly a reliable pillar of virtue.

Then, Man Gu watched in sheer, unadulterated horror as Lu Yang shifted his stance, executing a flawless sequence of the Mimicry Fist. Flesh and bone rippled, and within a breath, Lu Yang had transformed into a perfect replica of Man Gu.

Man Gu: “!!!”

Wearing Man Gu’s face, Lu Yang patted the paralyzed scholar on the shoulder. “Relax. I’m going in.”

Man Gu lunged, grabbing his doppelgänger by the collar. “You absolutely cannot go! And even if you do, you cannot use my face to commit this sin!”

“I am doing this out of the goodness of my heart,” Lu Yang replied, his tone dripping with deadpan sincerity. “It would be a tragic waste of an opportunity for you.”

Man Gu vehemently refused to let go.

“Don’t be shy,” Lu Yang coaxed.

In truth, Lu Yang was internally sweating. He had never set foot in a brothel either. If he made a catastrophic fool of himself, Meng Jingzhou would weaponize the memory and mock him until the end of time. Transforming into Man Gu was a flawless exploitation of the system—if a fool was made today, it would be Man Gu’s reputation burning in the annals of history, not his.

Naturally, this tactical cowardice could never be voiced aloud.

Just as the three of them were locked in a heated, noisy dispute, a deafening explosion shattered the facade of the brothel. The blast was immediately followed by the piercing shrieks of women and the unhinged, guttural laughter of men.

The trio snapped their heads toward the chaos. Over a dozen cultivators were tearing through the establishment, their arms wrapped around terrified civilian women they had abducted from the surrounding streets.

These men made no effort to conceal their cultivation. Surges of raw, unrefined spiritual qi thrummed through the air—every single one of them was at the Foundation Establishment stage. Two or three of them radiated an oppressive malice that rivaled the tiger demon they had faced earlier!

They were fellow candidates of the Immortal Cult’s trial, fully embracing the mandate to commit evil.

“Absolute bastards!” A towering, righteous fury erupted from the depths of the trio’s hearts.

Meng Jingzhou and Man Gu surged forward to intervene, but Lu Yang threw his arms out, halting their advance.

“Hold your ground. Do not be impulsive,” Lu Yang ordered, his mind rapidly calculating the power disparity. “There are only three of us. A direct confrontation is tactical suicide.”

“Then what do you suggest we do?!” Meng Jingzhou demanded, his voice tight with anxiety.

Lu Yang waved a hand dismissively. “I have a method to temporarily override my combat limitations. Give me a moment.”

Meng Jingzhou and Man Gu exchanged bewildered glances. Neither of them possessed a Ten-Bull Strength Pill. Had Lu Yang secretly mastered some forbidden, meridian-burning art to temporarily elevate his cultivation?

They watched as Lu Yang took a slow, measured breath. His posture shifted, the rigid tension melting into an eerie, flowing grace. The lively spark in his eyes died, replaced by a glacial, ineffable indifference. His entire temperament became a void of absolute, untouchable frost.

Meng Jingzhou narrowed his eyes, trying to place the familiar stance, before his eyes widened in sheer terror.

That posture… it was a perfect mirror of Senior Sister Yun Zhi!

Lu Yang was executing the Lu-Style Mimicry Fist to assume the form of their eldritch nightmare of a Senior Sister.

He had joked previously that the Lu-Style Mimicry Fist possessed nine theoretical layers, and that reaching the zenith would allow him to transform into a Tribulation Transcendence mighty expert with a single thought. The joke, however, was rooted in a terrifying empirical discovery: when he transformed into Man Gu, his physical parameters had demonstrably increased to match the barbarian’s.

The Mimicry Fist didn’t just copy appearances; it siphoned a fraction of the target’s actual power!

Naturally, the system had limits. He couldn’t infinitely scale his power. But even a fraction of a fraction of a god’s strength was still divine. Lu Yang intended to exploit this loophole, borrowing the Senior Sister’s stats to obliterate the Foundation Establishment trash before him.

Senior Sister, forgive my trespass.

A breathtakingly beautiful woman materialized in the street. Her gaze held the crushing weight of an eternal winter, and the space between her brows seemed to harbor a frost that had remained unmelted since the dawn of creation.

The moment Meng Jingzhou and Man Gu laid eyes on her, their lungs seized. They instinctively held their breath, their knees trembling violently under the sheer, phantom pressure of her existence.

Lu Yang had successfully transformed!

Instantly, Lu Yang felt a primordial, ineffable force crash down from the heavens, violently flooding his mortal meridians!

…

Dao Seeking Sect, Heavenly Gate Peak.

Yun Zhi sat cross-legged at the absolute pinnacle of the mountain. She opened her eyes, her gaze piercing the firmament as if mapping the boundless, infinite sea of stars beyond the mortal horizon.

Her aura was restrained to the point of absolute nonexistence. To the naked eye, she was nothing more than a fragile mortal. Yet, no mortal could levitate above the highest peak, nor could a mortal’s eyes contain the swirling majesty of a cosmic galaxy.

“Hmm?” Yun Zhi murmured, her gaze snapping back to the mortal plane. “Who dares borrow my power?”

She sensed a microscopic sliver of her essence being siphoned away, dragged across the void toward an infinitely distant coordinate.

“Let us see who possesses such cosmic audacity.”

In all her years, Yun Zhi had never encountered a thief so brazen as to reach into her very soul!

She shattered her mortal guise. Her aura erupted—a localized hurricane of divine wrath. It manifested as a primordial battle halberd, violently piercing the clouds and asserting the absolute, terrifying dominance of the Dao Seeking Sect’s Senior Sister!

Yun Zhi’s soul detached from her physical vessel, transforming into a blinding streak of lethal light as it tore through the dimensions, hunting down the parasitic connection.

…

“Gah—!”

Lu Yang violently coughed up a mouthful of air, his internal organs screaming in agony. His mortal vessel was fundamentally incapable of housing even a microscopic fraction of the Senior Sister’s ineffable weight. The transformation violently collapsed, reverting him to his original form.

Meng Jingzhou and Man Gu collapsed against a wall, gasping for air. The phantom oppression of the Senior Sister had nearly crushed their Dao hearts.

CRACK—

A deafening, apocalyptic fracture echoed from the sky above.

The demonic Rogue Cultivators, who had been in the midst of their vile pillaging, froze. The trio, who had been preparing to launch a desperate counterattack, froze. Everyone stared dumbfounded at the firmament.

The infinitely expansive sky of the illusionary space had cracked. It looked as though a cosmic battering ram had just slammed against the fabric of reality.

Crack. Crack. CRACK.

The fissures spider-webbed outward like a desiccated riverbed, the spatial displacement growing exponentially worse. Then, with a catastrophic shatter that sounded like the death rattle of a god, the heavens simply caved in. A massive, jagged void was torn open in the sky.

A breathtakingly beautiful figure stepped through the bleeding wound in reality, her brows furrowed in cold displeasure.

“This aura…” Yun Zhi murmured, her voice echoing with absolute authority. “Is this a demonic cult?”