Cultivation Nerd-Chapter 332 - The Breaking

The giant bone fist came down with earth-shaking force, its descent like a mountain collapsing. For a heartbeat, I felt its weight, knowing that this strike would crush me to a pulp.

I gritted my teeth and drove my Qi outward in a violent surge. At once, a greenish aura ignited around me, blazing with the weight and luster of solid jade.

Before me, the air rippled and condensed, and from that pressure, the silhouette of a giant jade arm emerged. Translucent jade plating shimmered into being, layer by layer, until the phantom limb stood as though carved from crystal.

It was the arm of the jade soldiers I used to create, except this one was massive, and I used it as a shield to block the incoming attack.

Bone met jade in an explosion of force. The impact rippled through the air, shaking the ground and sending cracks spiderwebbing across the soldier’s jade arm. The sound was sharp and thunderous like creaking glass.

But the defense held.

The bone avatar’s strike was stopped cold for now.

The cracks crawling across the jade made one thing clear: the next strike would break the arm.

And holy shit, making something this size and durable drained so much Qi.

Still, it bought me enough time to move again. I also had to be careful not to meet that snake guy’s gaze. He needed to be taken out first.

But the others had to know I’d think that after seeing his technique. Which meant it was a trap. If I wanted to deal with him, I’d need an indirect maneuver.

I jumped aside as another elder closed the distance. He was the tallest among them, and as he got closer, he threw off his cloak, revealing a muscular physique that looked carved from stone.

Now I could sense his cultivation level, a two-star Foundation Establishment. Middle-aged, fifties maybe, likely at his peak. A close-combat fighter. Probably carrying an old injury, which explained why he hadn’t advanced further.

He punched, and the air blurred. Multiple translucent fists shot out from the motion, conjured Qi striking in tandem.

Should I dodge, or take it? Letting them hit me was dangerous for obvious reasons, but dodging meant I risked the others moving to surround me.

I chose not to resist. A soft green cocoon wrapped around me as I let his momentum carry me, the impact hurling me backward and creating distance, and giving me time to think.

At the same moment, the snakes still coiled around me were shredded by the barrage, dissolving into Qi.

His element was likely simple: fist.

Before my feet even touched the ground again, the same elder who had made the barrier ripple appeared behind me, barely giving me time to react.

He was still hard to sense. I only caught the shift of air, and he’d been the one figure outside my sight for a heartbeat.

I remembered what he’d done to the library barrier. So I turned mid-air, conjured a thicker jade shell around myself, and crossed my arms to guard my vitals.

His punch landed before I could even think of dodging, and that was when it grew strange.

My arms folded limply around his fist like strands of cloth, the barrier crumpling with them. What should have been solid jade rippled like fabric, bending fluidly to swallow the blow. My defenses smothered the force like a blanket pressed down by weight, softening but never breaking.

There was no pain in my arms, no shattering bones, no tearing flesh. But his fist drove through regardless, slipping past the yielding shield to crash squarely into my face. My vision flared white. Thought scattered. The world spun as my body was flung backward, smashing through the trunk of a tree, and nearly a second before momentum spat me to the ground.

Blood trickled hot and metallic from the corner of my lips, my skull rattling as though every thought had been knocked loose.

My arms had returned to normal, meaning that whatever he touched directly wouldn't be harmed. He had used my own defenses like gloves, bypassing them to land a clean hit.

I didn’t have time to recover. The Fist Elder and Bone Elder were already closing in from opposite sides. The skeleton avatar loomed, its massive fist cocked back, while the other unleashed afterimages of conjured fists.

Ready to crush me from both sides.

I can’t beat them.

The world froze. My foundation technique halted everything but thought. It didn’t fix the situation, but at least gave me a moment to think.

Not like this.

I was injured, and my Qi drained significantly more than all of them combined. Worse, each of them had reserves larger than mine, and they were all at higher stages. Skilled. Coordinated. Dangerous.

These weren’t like my grandfather’s level-gap fights. These were inner elders, chosen because they had reached Foundation Establishment young, each with the raw talent to one day step into Core Formation. Few ever did, but the potential remained.

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And their synergy… that was the kind of battle experience you couldn’t fake. Fighting at this stage without tripping over each other was difficult, yet they moved like gears in a machine.

I shaped two square barriers, one around the Bone Elder, one around the Fist Elder. Then I released my technique and everything returned to normal.

Their eyes widened in shock as walls of shimmering violet light snapped into place, sealing them in. For a heartbeat, nothing happened. Then the change began. Their sclera darkened, flushing a violent red as if blood itself had seeped into the whites of their eyes. Veins bulged and spread in jagged patterns, crawling outward like a nest of spiderwebs spun beneath the surface, distorting their gaze into something raw and feral-looking.

The Fist Elder hammered against the array without hesitation, cracks spreading fast.

The barrier wasn’t made to withstand his level of force. I couldn’t afford to pour that much Qi into it.

Meanwhile, the Bone Elder’s eyes darted about, unfocused and nauseous. The Fist Elder had it worse, convinced he was being poisoned and desperately pummeling his way out.

The other elders rushed forward, but the punch earlier had sent me flying far enough that it would take them a second to close the gap. At this level, a second was an eternity. Their hesitation gave me breathing room. Their battle experience worked against them as they were overestimating my strength.

The truth was more straightforward: the array just thinned the air. Any of them could have resisted by sealing their mouths, noses, and pores with Qi. It was a half-finished technique I’d been developing to drain oxygen. Crude, but functional.

The Bone Elder dissolved his avatar and slipped into his own shadow, reappearing beside his allies. In his place inside the square barrier was a skeleton husk wearing a cloak.

A substitution technique.

I should have caught it. Even with cloaks masking their Qi, technique use always caused a flare. But now I saw it: the cloak the Fist Elder had thrown aside earlier had gone to the decoy.

So when the Ripple Elder punched me, the skeleton must have been created. A split second of blindness, and they’d turned it against me. That level of coordination was terrifying.

Every scrap of the battlefield was a weapon in their hands.

Still, I needed to thin their numbers. Pressure like this couldn’t last.

I charged toward the weakening barrier where the Fist Elder sagged, barely clinging to consciousness. But the others weren’t going to let me finish him. The Bone Elder and the Snake Elder surged forward, closing in fast.

These two were the frontline fighters and the risk-takers. It wasn’t that the others bullied them into it; more likely, their techniques were built around escape, like the Bone Elder’s substitution tricks.

With the paralysis technique in play, the Snake Elder became my first priority. He was the kind of threat that could turn a victory into a rout if left unchecked.

I would probably reach the Fist Elder first, given my head start. But killing him there would mean being surrounded the next instant. Not a good trade.

I thought once, and the square barrier around the Fist Elder crumbled. I flicked a needle toward him. Normally it wouldn’t have hit, but he was spent and barely drawing breath. The needle found its mark.

He collapsed to his knees, breathing like a starving beast. The Bone and Snake Elders lunged to pull him away, perhaps not noticing the wound in the chaos.

“Careful!” the Fist Elder managed, a strangled, half-formed sound. “Something is–”

His words broke off as his flesh began to bubble. He swelled, puffed like a skin-thin balloon, and then burst. 𝘧𝑟𝑒𝑒𝘸𝘦𝘣𝑛𝑜𝘷𝑒𝓁.𝘤𝘰𝓂

The needle carried a strand of venom Song San and I had studied, one of the odd poisons we’d sketched in that book we published. It required the victim to crush their own cultivation to halt the poison’s spread: an awful, desperate countermeasure. Despite that, it was mediocre as an anti-cultivator toxin, but brutal at close range.

The Fist Elder groaned once, then exploded in a spray of gore. The two who had pulled him back stood frozen, eyes wide with disbelief. At such close range there had been no escape.

They would die if they touched the blood. Despite Song San calling it a failure and despite its shortcomings by my standards, the thing was terrifying in confined spaces. We’d given it a placeholder name: Contagious Explosion Poison.

Song San had conceived it after watching how his sister’s blood-infection ability worked. It was an infectious, self-propagating poison, and if enough cultivators stood close when it detonated, it could wipe them all out.

Sometimes it frightened me how fast Song San learned, how quickly he spun ideas into new horrors.

That was why he was crazy dangerous, and I was just copying his genius by remaking these toxins on my own.

However, when expectations met reality, the latter often fell short; before the blood could rain down on the elders, and the trees around us shed their leaves. The leaves spun up into a torrent, forming a protective tornado around the two vulnerable elders.

I glanced toward the source of the fluctuating Qi.

He’d stayed in the background until now, never striking. Long dark hair, a stern face, but with a soft expression ready to flip on at any moment. He looked like the friendly uncle, like this wasn’t his usual rodeo.

The Leaf Elder met my gaze and frowned. Two green, angelic wings of leaves unfurled from his back.

So he’d been watching and had prepared counters, a pair of leaf-made appendages to swat away poison or whatever else I threw.

Cautious. Good. I could use that.

“One down, six more to go,” I said calmly.

They didn’t rise to the bait. No cries of revenge and no immediate charge. Their restraint felt creepily practiced, as if they’d rehearsed every reaction.

“We are not your enemies,” the Leaf Elder said. “Nor do we want any Sky Grade Techniques or anything too precious. We only want the Earth Grade ones, some good ones, so we can start our own clans. We want to make our fortunes outside the sect. What is so wrong about that?”

“Even the Blazing Sun Immortal that the sect is named after clearly doesn’t care about this place. So why should we?” A red-haired, blue-eyed elder said. He was one of them who hadn’t used his element yet, so I had no read on his moves.

“You attack me, and want to kill me, and then say that you are not my enemies?” I asked. “Also, it is my job to protect this place.”

The truth was plain: they knew they couldn’t finish me fast enough, and now they were desperate, willing to claim they didn’t want a fight and even hoping to sway me.

I pointed at them. “From now on, I have decided that you guys are my enemy. Even if some of you escape today, I know your faces, and as long as I’m alive, I will hunt you down.”

The air tightened. They realized one of us had to die before this ended.

If they excaped, of course I wouldn’t waste time on them. I had better things to do with my life.

They hadn’t understood yet that, in their gamble, they’d already lost. Even if they killed me, they were not getting out of this alive.