Chapter 37: Martial Warrior Ninth Stage

Before the alpha wolf could even raise its snout and howl a warning, the darkness between the surrounding ironwood trees suddenly shifted.

Swish!

Three humanoid figures dropped from the branches above, moving with terrifying speed.

There was no battle cry. A dark saber came down in a smooth diagonal arc, slicing cleanly through the alpha wolf’s neck before its paws could even leave the ground. At the same time, two other Shadow Soldiers crashed into the wolves on either side, their armored hands clamping over the beasts’ muzzles with three tons of crushing force and snapping their jaws like dry twigs.

Crunch.

In less than five seconds, all seven wolves were dead.

The three soldiers calmly knelt beside the corpses and pressed their flat gauntlets against the cooling flesh.

Shadow Devour.

Thick black mist seeped from their fingers and sank into the wolves’ hides, bones, and pooled blood. Under the relentless pull of their innate talent, the beasts’ muscular bodies rapidly withered away, leaving behind little more than paper-thin skins and brittle gray bones. The wolves’ raw vitality, spiritual bloodline essence, and natural shadow energy were drawn out, refined into pure liquid power, and sent directly through the metaphysical soul tether.

Thirty kilometers away, inside the Sterling training room.

Thump.

Lucian’s seated body trembled slightly.

Inside his Soul Sea, the dormant obsidian Spiritual Seed suddenly pulsed with a warm, crimson glow. A thick stream of refined essence poured out of the void, flooding his lower abdomen like warm, rich wine.

Without any conscious command from him, the Eternal Night Demon Codex and the Floating Pagoda Mysterious Skill activated together, flowing through his meridians. The incoming beast essence was immediately seized, pulled through the 1,080 refined pathways, and steadily hammered into his cellular foundation.

Lucian didn’t open his eyes. His breathing remained slow and steady as his consciousness sank deeper into a complete cultivation trance.

’More,’ his soul whispered through the tether. ’Keep going.’

Through the forest, the four hundred Shadow Soldiers moved like a plague of locusts spreading across the land.

Divided into forty autonomous squads, they swept through Black Crow Ridge, Viper’s Gorge, and the outer slopes of Iron Peak. They weren’t hunting for pleasure or glory. They moved with the cold efficiency of a harvesting machine.

In a muddy river basin, a massive armored lizard—a Stage 4 Martial Warrior beast—thrashed wildly as four coordinated saber strikes tore into its back. The soldiers combined their six tons of weight to force the struggling beast into the mud, then drove their blades into the soft joints behind its skull.

Devour.

The essence surged through the void.

On a sheer basalt cliff, two Razor-Beak Vultures perched on an overhang were attacked before they could even spread their wings. Two soldiers launched themselves from the rock face, seized the enormous birds by their hollow-boned necks, and snapped them in mid-air.

Devour.

Ten beasts. Thirty beasts. Fifty beasts.

By the time the first twenty-four hours had passed, the scale of the harvest had reached a level that was almost unheard of.

Normally, an ordinary high school senior preparing for the college entrance exam would consider hunting three low-tier beasts in an entire week an achievement, spending the time between hunts nursing bruises and relying on recovery potions. Even the young masters of prestigious clans, protected by private bodyguards, could safely hunt only ten or fifteen beasts under controlled conditions.

Lucian had four hundred elite warriors working for him around the clock.

They needed no food, no water, and no rest. They felt neither muscle fatigue nor fear. Whenever their physical bodies suffered minor wounds from beast claws, the essence they had devoured immediately repaired the damage, restoring their armor to its original condition.

And every drop of surplus vitality, every trace of energy extracted from the beast cores, flowed directly into Lucian’s physical body without the slightest waste.

By the afternoon of the second day, the transformation taking place inside Lucian’s body had reached a frightening level.

Inside the quiet Sterling training chamber, even the surrounding air had begun to distort.

Lucian was still sitting in the exact same lotus position he had taken forty-eight hours earlier. But the presence radiating from him was now completely different.

His skin, once pale from years of malnutrition in the slums, now possessed the smooth, lustrous sheen of flawless black jade. Beneath his flesh, his skeleton had undergone a profound tempering under the relentless circulation of the Floating Pagoda Mysterious Skill. His bones, once no different from an ordinary human’s, had become incredibly dense, giving off a faint metallic resonance whenever his heartbeat pulsed.

Second Stage Martial Warrior... shattered.

Third Stage... bypassed.

Fifth Stage... obliterated.

The sheer amount of essence pouring into his Soul Seed was staggering. In just forty-eight hours, his vanguard had hunted down and drained nearly two hundred Martial Warrior-tier beasts. If an ordinary cultivator had tried to absorb even a tenth of that chaotic, unrefined beast vitality, their meridians would have ruptured, while the turbulent spiritual energy would have torn through their internal organs.

But Lucian possessed the Lord of Shadows.

His Divine-Rank talent was basically like having a furnace inside his body.

Any wild beast essence that entered him didn’t simply flow straight toward his Soul Sea. The moment it entered his body, his talent would automatically strip away all the impurities and foreign energy mixed within it.

By the time it finally reached his Soul Sea, nothing unnecessary remained.

What he was left with was pure, concentrated primordial energy, clean, powerful, and perfectly suited to strengthen his body.

The obsidian Spiritual Seed inside his Soul Sea had already grown to nearly three times its original size.

It spun faster and faster, giving off a powerful gravitational force. Even the heavy training mats around him were slowly lifted several inches from the ground.

Sixth Stage...

*Seventh Stage... *

Eighth Stage!

For an ordinary prodigy, reaching even one of these stages could take years of painstaking meditation. They would have to risk their lives in dangerous wilderness, spend fortunes on medicinal pills, and endure countless breakthroughs.

But for him?

He was tearing through those same stages in just a matter of hours.

Outside the training room, the second day quietly slipped into night. Then, before anyone knew it, the darkness began to fade.

A pale, chilly dawn slowly spread across the horizon.

The third day had arrived.

The morning of the college entrance mock trials had finally arrived.

By then, the four hundred Shadow Soldiers had already pushed deep into the Thousand Mountain Forest, reaching the boundary of the middle mountain ridges.

Behind them stretched miles upon miles of silent wilderness.

Not a single beast’s roar could be heard.

For a forest that was supposed to be crawling with predators, the silence felt strangely unnatural.