Cultivation Nerd-Chapter 310 - A Dark Thread

Qi flickered around Tingfeng's body like flame dancing on the whims of the wind, uncontrolled, wild, and not quite his to command. He quickly grasped the situation, manipulating his Qi as if it were second nature. It wrapped around him like a skin-tight suit.

His Qi control was surprisingly compact and efficient for someone in his situation.

It was remarkable how quickly he adapted to his breakthrough. With progress like this, you'd think he was some kind of veteran who'd trained nonstop for months to gain that level of control.

Usually, otherworlders like me had an advantage in this regard, either due to having larger souls or because our subconscious minds weren't used to Qi and immediately recognized it as a foreign presence. Maybe both. I never had strong proof for either theory.

But he didn't linger. He channeled Qi into his sword, and it pulsed in a familiar rhythm. I recognized the technique instantly.

He's going to use Falling Moon Claw.

Tingfeng swung his sword. At first, nothing happened, and the beasts kept charging. He just stood there, staring ahead, almost absent-minded.

Then a ghostly beast formed around him. It was an amorphous mass of flaming Qi, struggling to hold a shape, but it resembled a giant tiger. The titanic feline opened its maw and let out a silent roar.

Dozens of invisible wind blades shot from its mouth.

I instinctively pushed Jiang Yeming behind me, just in case one of them strayed our way. Still, a part of me wasn't worried. The technique had been executed perfectly.

Otherwise, how could he hit a trace?

In the blink of an eye, a couple dozen beasts were butchered, bisected and torn apart like cheap meat. It was grotesque and looked so efficient.

Tingfeng's eyes widened, and his grin stretched wide, bright, and childlike. I couldn't help but smile too.

He swung his blade again. It wasn't a trace this time, but the slash still carved through monsters. One strike tore across a humanoid chest; another severed a spider's front legs.

But there were too many. More monsters swarmed him. He stood his ground, face stone-cold and unshaken.

It might be time to pull him out. He'd done better than I could have hoped, and he had already broken through. Now he looked like someone with more adrenaline than blood in his veins.

Just as I prepared to erect an array, Tingfeng's pupils dilated until his eyes seemed all black, his mind trying to take in everything at once.

He swung his sword.

I felt it again. That odd thump in my heart as his Qi shifted from fluid to honed, like a dull pencil turning into a sharp pen. The same energy, but with a different function.

Another trace. Back-to-back!

A giant white tiger surged behind him, its fur glowing like moonlight. It charged into the crowd of monstrous beasts like an apex predator ready for its first meal of the day.

Then, in a flash, the tiger became a crescent-shaped white slash that glistened under the winter light, slicing through beasts and earth like a hot knife through butter.

It was beautiful.

A deep ravine formed where the attack landed.

As a new Qi Gathering Cultivator, Tingfeng had slaughtered around fifty monstrous beasts by himself. Their numbers dropped below half.

He stood there, chest heaving. Even the beasts had stopped advancing. Maybe they noticed how drained he was, but none dared charge him just yet.

He was low on Qi. If he were a star or two further into Qi Gathering, he might've wiped them all out.

I prepared to intervene. Some beasts opened their mouths on their humanoid upper halves and hissed like snakes. They were testing him.

Tingfeng frowned, straightened his back, and pointed his sword at them with both hands.

He was putting on a brave face, but I knew better; he was exhausted.

Still, a part of me hesitated. I half-expected him to pull off something new again. Another trick. A hidden technique. Something extraordinary.

"Amazing... Does he now hold the current record for the highest back-to-back traces?" Jiang Yeming asked, though it sounded more like a thought spoken aloud.

Her voice drew Tingfeng's attention. He looked at us, but his gaze landed on me.

It was the gaze of someone who had given everything and who was used to giving everything, day after day.

That's what made Tingfeng special. He didn't care about politics, power, or status. To him, the sword was everything. Everything else was just background noise.

"What are you looking at me for?" I asked, hands in my pockets. "I said I wasn't going to help you. Figure it out on your own, kid."

Jiang Yeming's eyes widened, and she turned toward me like I'd just said the most outrageous thing in the world.

"Teacher! Please, think this through. A structured teaching system is the right way, as more young cultivators can live up to their potential!"

"Jiang Yeming, remember these words well." I cleared my throat. "The gap between a genius and a normal cultivator is wider than the gap between a cultivator and a mortal. But the difference between a monstrous genius and a mere genius? That's even greater. They operate on an entirely different plane, one the average mind can't even begin to comprehend."

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"No matter how monstrous a genius is, if they die before living up to that potential, they're nothing," Jiang Yeming snapped, voice hard as steel.

Oh? Was she angry? That was a surprise. I didn't think I'd ever seen her angry before.

"You'll see in the future," I said with a teasing smirk. But my words seemed to fly right over her head.

"No, you will see in the future, when one of your disciples dies and then you go preaching about safe training, controlled exams, and banning lethal tournaments!" she shouted. "Tingfeng can't be allowed to die in some ditch just so you can learn your lesson!"

"Well, aren't you jumping to conclusions." I shrugged, but before I could respond further, I felt it–

A Foundation Establishment beast emerging from the ravine.

Time to focus.

This one wasn't an insect; it was a bird. The thing was the size of a bus and dwarfed the spider centaurs. Its feathers were mostly white, except for a red mullet on its head and jet-black wings.

A giant woodpecker?

What the hell was a woodpecker doing in a ravine? Monstrous beasts usually only masked their Qi in environments they were adapted to.

I liked to think I was well-read when it came to monstrous beasts… but maybe not that well-read. Do woodpeckers even live in ravines?

Probably not. Maybe it had a technique to hide its presence. Most monstrous beasts only had crude foundation techniques, even with intelligence rivaling humans, they lacked the life experience to develop more refined ones.

The woodpecker stared at us, then locked eyes with me. It didn't hesitate, diving down like a meteor.

And on the way, it casually snapped up one of the spider monsters and tore it apart mid-air.

Is it… herding them for food?

That arrogance… the way it grabbed a snack on the way down. It really had developed a human level of pride.

"Well, now I feel underestimated," I muttered.

A jade dagger formed in my hand. I swung it, sending a wind blade flying toward the beast.

But it sensed the danger and tilted mid-air, dodging with ease.

Manipulating Qi after it's been expelled is difficult, especially for techniques like Falling Moon Claw. But I activated my Foundation Technique, giving myself all the time in the world.

With painstaking control, I spent nearly a dozen minutes reshaping that one wind blade, splitting it in two and curving them around.

By the time I deactivated my technique, both blades had arced and sliced through the bird's wings.

It crashed into the earth with a thunderous boom, dirt and stone spraying out like a tidal wave.

Its momentum carried it close, within ten feet of me.

It screeched, but I stomped down on its beak, silencing it.

Then, without flair or fuss, my dagger morphed into a longsword, and I skewered its brain clean through the skull.

I kicked the body over and opened its belly with a precise slash.

Could've kept it alive for research, I thought idly. But no reason to be cruel.

A mortal-grade technique formed a hazy flame over my right eye, letting me zoom in on its massive organs. Its liver alone was bigger than me.

Strangely, the other beasts didn't attack. Not me, not even Tingfeng. They retreated.

Interesting. This beast was normal, unlike the other ones.

I dispelled the technique and turned my sword back into a dagger.

"Tingfeng, Jiang Yeming, stay behind me. And just to be safe, stay close to the ground."

They obeyed without fuss. Jiang Yeming still looked ready to argue but knew better than to pick a fight now. She laid down next to Tingfeng, who didn't even seem winded anymore.

I took a deep breath, feeling the shimmer of space shift around me as I activated my second Sky Grade Technique.

I felt the hands reach for me. Those cold, invisible fingers from that other dimension. But instead of letting them pull me in, I used my Qi to hold them at bay, twisting them into a tunnel.

They wrapped around my blade, and a dark flickering aura formed, bending the space around it.

That was dangerous and unstable. Perfect.

I swung the dagger like I would with Falling Moon Claw, releasing the aura forward.

It didn't roar, didn't slice, didn't explode.

Instead, it formed a thin line across the landscape, so fine it looked like a stray strand of hair, shimmering darkly in the air.

Reality trembled around it.

“Well, here’s to hoping this doesn’t kill us all,” I told my disciples, mostly to mess with them.

They were probably safe. I was the one in real danger if this didn’t work the way I thought it would.

This wasn’t the same technique I used against Song Song. This one was a bit more… lethal. The kind of thing I hoped could be used even against someone a stage above me.

Reality tilted.

The upper part of the world shifted like someone had sliced it with a blade, right along that thin, dark thread I’d sent out.

For a moment, I didn’t feel anything. No pain. No pull.

Or maybe this is what it feels like to be bisected by space itself.

Then reality stitched itself back together. The tilt vanished. Everything looked the same.

Except it wasn’t.

The half-human, half-arachnid monstrous beasts that had been retreating?

They fell apart. Bisected cleanly, like wax models cut by a scalpel. No screams. Just neat, silent death.

The range didn’t matter.

There was no warning, no visible sign of energy buildup, and no indication of danger. Unless someone had a spatial technique, this thing was undetectable.

Dodging or blocking it? Impossible, even for someone two realms higher. Unless they had a specific countermeasure, they were screwed.

Now then…

I looked down at my own stomach. Still intact.

Then, at some of the distant rocks, also sliced in half, as if by a laser.

Wait. I could cut what was in front of me… but not what was behind? That didn’t make any sense. If I was slicing space, shouldn’t it go through everything in that line?

Maybe space really was a fourth-dimensional axis, and what I cut was more like a fold… or a slice through layers. Explaining it with normal logic felt futile.

Honestly, I had prepared myself to be bisected.

If it came down to it, I planned to use Time De-Accel to slow things down, then thread my body back together with Dancing Jade Armor using thin, microscopic jade threads that laced muscle, nerves, veins, and bones. A wild idea. A mad one.

It would’ve been excruciating and improbably precise.

Still… I was confident I could’ve survived. Probably. Fifty percent chance, give or take.

There was still so much to learn.

I stared at the beast corpses littering the ground like chopped firewood.

But for now?

I should probably start with some basic biology.