Chapter 145: The Middle Stage of Foundation Establishment

Seeing the hand disappear into his chest, the captain felt An grab hold of something inside him and pull with all his might.

Feeling everything inside him being torn apart, the captain, despite being paralyzed by the pill’s side effect, still managed to twitch convulsively.

At that moment, An felt a jolt of alarm when the Golden Core cultivator’s body suddenly move. But without even considering stopping, he made a sharp motion and tore the bloody, solid sphere free.

“A-AGH!!”

A chill suddenly enveloped the captain’s body. He felt an overwhelming sense of regret and an agonizing loss of the most precious and important thing in his entire life. Tears involuntarily filled his eyes.

An struggled to wipe the blood and bits of flesh off the sphere against his own torso, then raised it in front of his face.

The sphere was slightly more than ten centimeters in diameter. The core itself was white, with cracks covering its entire surface, and inside he could see something resembling liquid golden flames, no larger than a grain of sand.

‘So that’s why they call it a golden core?’

“P-please...” The captain no longer even had the strength to feel angry. Completely doomed, his face grim and pale, all he could do was beg while staring at his core, his entire life contained within it, now held in the hands of another person.

An’s hand suddenly turned black, and Death Qi enveloped the entire core, carefully flowing through the cracks.

He began forcing the energy inside the core to collide with his own, slowly trying to provoke conflicts so that the particles of energy inside would lose their signatures and become easier for him to manipulate.

Once he achieved the desired result, he began drawing energy out of the core and directing it through his body straight into the Cycle Symbol.

His skin began cracking under the enormous force of the energy that had once belonged to the captain.

His entire body became covered in cracks, and golden energy mixed with black began seeping through them, creating a vibrant mosaic across his body.

“AGH!! HAA-AAAH!!! A-AAAH!!!”

Crying out in pain but refusing to release the core from his hand, An continued greedily absorbing the energy, doing everything he could to minimize his losses during the process.

….

Watching this, the doomed captain was left speechless. Even the pain of the slow decay still eating away at him from the inside faded into the background.

The captain had never seen, or even heard of, a cultivator being able to absorb another person’s energy like this. Moreover, the energies of Foundation Establishment and the Golden Core were vastly different. They were on entirely different levels, existing at completely different stages of evolution.

These two energies were so different in structure that they should not have been able to interact in the way the captain was witnessing. He could not understand how one type of Qi could absorb another that was a full step higher in structure and evolution.

….

Feeling as though he were about to burst, An sent a fragment of his consciousness into his inner world.

His Cycle Symbol spun at maximum speed, then surpassed that limit and continued accelerating. He could feel his entire world being carefully drawn toward the Symbol.

The energy from the captain’s golden core gathered beneath the Cycle Symbol and formed thousands of thin tunnels through which the energy flowed into the Symbol, being filtered along the way, stripped of everything unnecessary, and expelled outside his physical body.

‘My inner world should be able to withstand energy this dense. But my physical body... my regeneration can no longer keep up with the strain. The longer I push this energy toward the Cycle Symbol, the greater the chance that my body will simply fall apart. I need to speed up!’

After taking another look around his inner world, he returned that fragment of consciousness to the outside.

Activating his Qi, An began catching the filtered impurities and unnecessary portions of energy expelled by the CycleSymbol.

Using these streams, he began spreading them over the tears in his body like glue, creating a shell that kept the mixed Death Qi and golden core energy from coming into contact with the external Qi. Such contact greatly slowed the process, forcing him to concentrate on suppressing the conflicts that kept appearing.

Clenching his teeth, An sucked the last drop of energy from the core. It immediately crumbled, slipping through his fingers like sand and falling to the ground.

‘I need to start sending the filtered energy into my dantian...’

Redirecting the energy from the CycleSymbol into his dantian, An decided to do it very slowly so as not to put even more strain on his already overstretched body and dantian. Another reason for slowing down was to avoid any future problems, should they arise.

….

“Ha... Hahaha!” The captain suddenly began laughing. Even his throat was paralyzed, making his voice sound like a saw scraping against metal.

“Who... could have thought... that I’d die at the hands of... a child... some kind of monster...”

The captain raised his gaze toward the sky, trying to see something through the thick clouds.

“How unfortunate... I waited so long for snow... The last snow season was... was more than thirty years ago... And it lasted only a few months...”

Lowering his gaze to the wound in his torso, he watched as the hole grew several times wider. Everything around it was black, and his body seemed to be melting into the black slime.

Unable to hold back his question any longer, he asked in a calm and resigned voice, though the intense pain could still be heard in it. “What... is that?”

“This is DeathQi. I combined two GreatDaos and their Qi into a single system and transformed the energy source inside my dantian... What is eating you right now is the Rot aspect of my Qi.”

An explained everything slowly and quietly.

The captain remained silent for several seconds. “Who are you... no, more precisely, what kind of beast are you?”

“Hmm... I’m human, just like you and everyone else.”

Bringing the energy transfer into his dantian under full control and maximizing his regeneration, An sat cross-legged right beside the barely conscious captain.

“Forget it... You’re clearly not human. I’m not even sure you can be called a living creature... You’re standing right beside me. I can feel that you’re here, I can sense your energy, and yet I can’t feel your breathing or heartbeat... And you say you’re human? Kh! Ha!”

The captain completely stopped resisting, allowing the black energy to run rampant inside his body.

“What does that have to do with whether I’m human or not... I was born human. No matter how I change, I’ll still remain human... It’s all in your head.” An pointed at his temple, then took out a bottle of wine and two cups.

“Ha! Don’t be a fool... You’ll remain human? The moment you step onto the path of cultivation, you lose your humanity... You become something else... And as for you, you’ve already become something… even less-!”

The captain watched as An began pouring wine into the cups.

Filling one to the brim, An enveloped it in Qi and guided it toward the captain’s mouth.

Seeing the captain give him a strange look, An nodded. The captain opened his mouth and took several sips.

Taking a sip himself, An replied, “What does humanity have to do with being human? Only a fool who steps onto the path of cultivation would cling to his humanity, judge everything as black and white, and hold himself to some set of principles and morals... Being human means being born human and considering yourself human. Even if you have ten tails and a hundred pairs of eyes, you’re still human.”

“Heh... Kh! Hah... Now I understand why you have so many enemies, judging by the number of bounties on your head... Your way of thinking is too dangerous for someone... for someone outside the control of the great clans...” Opening his mouth again, the captain let the cup tilt slightly so he could take several more sips.

“The reason I have so many enemies has nothing to do with my beliefs... Well, I don’t think so, anyway. They aren’t particularly special or unique... I created them myself, just to help me keep moving forward without looking back or regretting anything...”

After taking a large sip, An fell silent in thought.

“Maybe it’s simply Heaven’s luck playing a joke on me. What do you think?”

“Ha! Hahaha! Ptooey!”

As he laughed, black rot suddenly began pouring from his mouth.

The captain’s eyes suddenly filled with blood mixed with blackness. His gaze became furious, and staring intently into An’s eyes, he managed to force out his final words with his dying breath.

“I hope... You, who think you’re still human... meet an end even worse and darker than MINE!! I CURSE YOU!! And everything connected to you!! YOU DISGUSTING-!!”

SQUELCH!

The captain’s eyes burst, and his blackened, limp brain began spilling from his eye sockets.

His body immediately went limp. Still paralyzed, he released his final breath. The breath he had desperately tried with all his remaining strength to hold inside.

Watching the body, An suddenly activated his CycleSymbol to its full power and began drawing the escaping fragments of the captain’s soul out of his body.

Along with the fragments of the soul, he began absorbing all the remaining energy: DeathQi and signatureless Qi that had remained trapped inside the captain’s physical body.

As if on command, his inner world began rapidly expanding. The walls that served as its boundaries thickened and become stronger.

The range of his spiritual sense, which he had previously considered useless, increased to three hundred meters.

He immediately felt his control over his body and dantian improve, while his response time decreased significantly.

Sitting cross-legged and absorbing everything like some kind of a parasite, An tilted his head back and smiled broadly.

‘I’d almost forgotten what it felt like to grow this quickly in strength!’

An raised his remaining arm and mentally ordered his body to regrow the missing limb.

Over the next few minutes, while he enjoyed the sensation of growing stronger, his arm grew back and returned to its former state.

‘That one damaged core gave me an enormous increase in the amount of Qi inside my dantian... Just a little more, and I’ll be able to break through to the middle stage! And the two Terra Octopus cores will help me with that!’

He opened his eyes and turned his head toward the creature’s body lying not far away.

“The captain was clearly in the early stage of the Golden Core realm... I hope these two cores will be just as good.”

Standing up, he approached the captain and began searching his rotting body, looking for anything interesting.

The only thing he took was the black ring from one of the captain’s fingers, which slipped off the bone like a peel from a rotten banana. An did not bother checking it. He slipped it into the pocket of his slightly torn pants, then enveloped the captain’s body in his Qi.

He decided not to wait for the body to completely rot on its own. Speeding up the process, he headed straight for the beast’s body.

Reaching its open mouth, An climbed inside without hesitation and began tearing pieces of flesh away and throwing them outside.

“Got the first one!”

After pulling out an intact red core filled with FireQi, An continued tearing apart the octopus’s torso from the inside, trying to reach the second one.

Finding it and gripping it carefully, An enveloped the second core in his Qi, realizing that if he tried to pull it out, it might simply fall apart.

Trying not to move it unnecessarily and simply holding it in place with his hand, he began doing the same thing he had done with the captain’s golden core.

....

After spending more than ten minutes on all of this, An finally finished with the damaged Water core.

Shaking the sand that had once been the core from his hand, he sat cross-legged and closed his eyes, concentrating.

‘The amount of liquid Qi inside my dantian has completely filled its entire volume... I need to break through! While I still have time.’

Feeling that his energy center was filled to the brim, An began using the Qi in his physical body while simultaneously directing the freshly filtered energy from the CycleSymbol into it, forcing the liguid Qi inside to compress.

Using the energy to condense the mass and reduce its volume as much as possible, An spent several long hours on the process.

After finishing the compression, he realized that in order to stabilize the new, denser state of the Qi inside his dantian, he needed to strengthen the walls of the organ.

Carefully distributing the directed energy not only through the contents of his dantian but also through its walls, both from the inside and outside, An began treating them like clay, cracking them and filling those cracks with new Qi, gradually increasing the thickness of his dantian.

....

After spending another full hour on this, An left his energy center alone and “looked” at it.

‘Whew... That was harder than I thought, though it would be more accurate to say it was more time-consuming... But now I’m finally a cultivator in the middle stage of the Foundation Establishment realm... Heh.’

An saw that his liquid Qi, which had previously had the consistency of ordinary water, had thickened to the consistency of melted ice cream, slowly and heavily shifting around inside his dantian.

After making sure everything was in order, he decided not to waste any time and began absorbing the Fire core.

Completely ignoring what was happening around him, he focused entirely on devouring the energy from the core.

When he opened his eyes, he realized that everything around him had been stained black and green.

All the plants, trees, in fact, all living things within several hundred meters, had died because of his breakthrough to the middle stage.

Then, after he resumed absorbing energy from the core and involuntarily began releasing his Qi outward, he once again started coloring the dead area around him green.

Enriched with his Qi and vitality, the plants beneath the octopus’s body began breaking through the corpse itself, pushing through layers of scales that even a Golden Core cultivator would have found difficult to penetrate.

The fragile plants, driven by nothing but their greed for the leaking Qi, broke through the corpse and began growing around An, wrapping around his legs and lower body, shrouding him in vines.

Blood dripping from the corpse absorbed this enriched Qi, suddenly “comingalive” and crawling closer to An, likewise trying to get as close to him as possible.

Looking more closely, one could see that the blood had begun to mutate, its molecules transforming into tens of thousands of simple microscopic creatures.

From the tough, dense flesh, pale, worm-like strands began growing out, weaving a nest around the source of their desire.

‘This is starting to get annoying...’ An decided to ignore it, understanding that he had a more important task ahead of him, and closed his eyes again.

....

Having nearly finished absorbing the core, he noticed that his body was handling it much better than the first time.

Only thin cracks appeared across the surface of his body, which he once again sealed with the Qi and waste products he expelled after filtration, preventing any leaks.

“I need to hurry.” With his eyes closed, An turned his head toward the ship. Reading the Qi flows through the trees and vegetation, he realized that the battle was already over.

But what surprised him was that he saw numerous flows of DeathQi around the ship.

‘There were three of them against two beasts, and they still couldn’t handle them? Did someone screw up?’

Opening his eyes and activating his Qi, he turned all the vines and mutated growths around him to ash.

Standing up, he climbed out of the mangled corpse, which had been torn apart by his breakthrough and the greedy plants.

Looking around, he saw that his body still had several unhealed wounds, most notably a huge scar beneath his armpit where the hole had once been.

After brushing himself off, he enveloped the remains of the beast in his Qi, and the corpse immediately began to rot, turning into black sludge.

Taking a white shirt he had found in the VIP suite from his ring, An put it on and looked around again.

The only problem was his pants, which had several large tears in them. But without a spare pair, he didn’t want to bother with it.

After checking the surroundings and making sure that all traces of the bodies and his presence had been erased, An once again activated Qi Silence to its maximum, leaped forward, and rushed toward the ship.