Chapter 372: Profound Verse

“Die in agony, rat!” Du Sha roared.

The corrosive tempest crashed down like an emerald tidal wave, yet Shen Yu did not raise a single barrier.

Instead, he threw his head back and inhaled.

HISS——!

The toxic fog swirled violently, dragged down his nostrils and throat in vast, suffocating streams.

The lethal Corpse-Melting Powder bit into his esophagus, dissolving his inner lining and turning his saliva into acidic foam.

The Heart-Biting Mist pierced through his pores, turning his skin necrotic gray as parasitic poison-spores tried to latch onto his cardiovascular nodes to curdle his blood.

Any sane cultivator would have severed their poisoned meridians to halt the spread.

Shen Yu simply bit down on his tongue until warm blood flooded his mouth, his dilated pupils vibrating with psychotic euphoria.

‘More… burn deeper!’

He did not resist the agony, he weaponized it.

Mobilizing the tyrannical, unrefined cruelty of the Asura Blood-Forging Sutra, he forcibly clamped his boiling blood pathways around the intruding poisons.

His tempered marrow ignited like a furnace, ruthlessly grinding the virulent toxins against his bone lattice, crushing the external poisons with his own blood essence to forge a raw, volatile explosive force in his core.

BOOM!

The stone beneath his boots cratered.

Shen Yu tore straight through the dissolving acidic cloud, lunging across the platform like an unchained abyssal fiend.

Du Sha’s arrogant sneer faltered for a split heartbeat.

“What kind of freak eats three rare poisons like that?!”

HISS!

Reacting with trained instinct, Du Sha thrust his right forearm forward.

The black serpent coiled around his wrist swelled to the thickness of a timber pillar, its maws parting to reveal dripping, purple fangs coated in Deep-Abyss Primordial Venom.

The beast struck with the speed of an executioner’s bolt, aimed straight for Shen Yu’s exposed throat.

Shen Yu didn’t attempt to dodge.

With a sick, wet grin, he thrust his own left forearm directly into the serpent’s lunging path.

CRUNCH!

Two razor-sharp fangs punched clean through Shen Yu’s forearm, the deadly venom discharging in a pressurized torrent straight into his radial artery.

The virulent venom turned the veins in his arm pitch-black in a fraction of a second, the flesh rotting and blackening around the puncture wounds.

Du Sha’s eyes flared with vicious triumph.

“You reckless brute! My spiritual beast’s venom can paralyze a sect’s elders in three—”

CRACK!

Du Sha’s triumphant boast choked in his throat.

Shen Yu did not even flinch at the rotting of his own arm.

Instead, he violently contracted his forearm muscles, using the dense, iron-hard lattice of his Asura-tempered bones to clamp the serpent’s fangs inside his flesh like a vice, trapping the beast in place.

With his right hand freed, Shen Yu plunged his blackened, iron-dense fingers straight into the two-headed viper’s torso, gripping its spine through flesh and scale.

“A dead worm has too much to say,” Shen Yu rasped through teeth drenched in blackened bile.

RIP——!

With a sickening spray of purple gore and boiling organs, Shen Yu physically tore the massive serpent in half with his bare hands!

PFFT!

A catastrophic spiritual backlash tore through Du Sha’s meridians as his bonded life-beast was butchered.

The Thousand Poison Sect’s head disciple violently convulsed, vomiting a mouthful of clotted dark blood as he stumbled backward.

The pain in his dantian was excruciating, but the sudden, hollow void in his soul was far worse.

That viper was not a mere beast he had captured along the way, it had been placed in his crib when he was only three years old.

He had fed it with his own blood since childhood, watched it grow from a tiny worm coiled around his thumb into his most loyal companion.

Through every brutal trial in the Thousand Poison Sect, through every assassination and dark scheme, the serpent had slept against his chest, sharing his warmth and protecting his back.

Now, its shattered halves lay twitching in the volcanic dust, its entrails steaming on the cold stone.

“Little… Little Black…” Du Sha choked out, a raw, suffocating grief clawing up his throat alongside the bile and blood.

Tears of blood welled in the corners of his eyes, mixing with his sweat.

Yet as he looked up from the mangled corpse of his childhood companion to the blood-soaked monster standing before him, the sorrow was instantly swallowed by sheer, paralyzing horror.

The arrogant gleam in Du Sha’s eyes died completely, replaced by the cold, creeping chill of genuine dread.

The man before him was not a cultivator, he was an unhinged demon that felt no pain, disregarded self-preservation, and used his own rotting flesh as bait to slaughter his enemies.

“Monster…” Du Sha gasped, trembling as he scrambled backward toward the edge of the altar.

Desperation entirely overwhelmed his pride.

Du Sha slammed his spatial pouch, tossing aside his standard poison vials and retrieving his sect’s greatest foundation-level treasure, the Nether-Bone Heart-Piercing Needle, a mid-Earth-grade consumable killer artifact forged from the spinal bone of a tier 3.

“Die! Turn to ash!” Du Sha shrieked, burning thirty percent of his own blood essence to ignite the needle.

ZZZZT——!

A pale-white, needle-thin beam of sonic death erupted from the bone talisman, ripping through space and piercing straight through Shen Yu’s right chest, punching a fist-sized, cauterized hole clean through his pectoral and shattering three ribs.

The kinetic force slammed Shen Yu backward three paces, his boots gouging bloody trenches into the Primordial Stone.

Du Sha fell to one knee, panting hysterically, a manic, trembling laugh escaping his lips.

“Hahaha… pierced… your heart is pierced! No Foundation Establishment body cultivator can survive an Earth-grade bone nee—”

His voice died.

In the settling smoke, Shen Yu slowly looked down at the gaping, smoking crater in his chest.

Black blood sizzled against the burnt flesh, exposing cracked, blood-red bones pulsing beneath the wound.

Shen Yu slowly raised his gaze. His crimson eyes widened into terrifying, bottomless crescents of unadulterated madness.

He didn’t collapse.

He reached into the gaping hole in his own chest with two fingers, casually flicking away a piece of his own shattered bone before baring his bloody teeth in a wide, psychotic grin.

“Is that all the noble Thousand Poison Sect has to offer?” Shen Yu whispered, his voice vibrating with chilling delight.

Step.

Shen Yu took a heavy, blood-drenched stride forward.

Step.

Du Sha’s entire body went cold.

The hair on his neck stood on end as his bladder tightened in sheer, unadulterated terror.

He began to crawl backward across the stones, frantically clawing at his spatial ring, but his trembling fingers could no longer grip a single talisman.

“Stay back… stay away from me!” Du Sha whimpered, his arrogant facade utterly shattered into pathetic hysterics.

“I am the head disciple of the Great Venomous Empire! My master is a Nascent Soul Ancestor! If you touch me—”

Before the threat could finish, Shen Yu’s blood-soaked silhouette blurred.

BANG!

CRACK!

Shen Yu’s boot hammered down onto Du Sha’s right knee, pulverizing the joint into a bloody, splintered pulp against the Primordial Stone.

Du Sha’s shrill, agonizing shriek was instantly cut short as Shen Yu’s iron-dense claw clamped around his throat like a vice.

With sheer physical power, Shen Yu hoisted the trembling, sobbing sect scion into the air with a single arm, dangling him helplessly over the yawning chasm of the ancient altar.

Shen Yu bared his bloodied teeth, his fingers tightening to crush the scion’s windpipe and cervical spine into dust.

HISS——!

Right as the killing blow was about to land, an ominous, pitch-black poisonous vapor erupted violently from every orifice of Du Sha’s body, his eyes, nostrils, ears, and agape mouth.

It was an ancestral life-saving curse.

Even through the dense, psychotic bloodlust fogging his fractured mind, an instinctual alarm bell violently detonated in Shen Yu’s soul.

The ancient demon inside him recognized the aura immediately, it was a lethal curse placed by a mid stage Nascent Soul elder, carrying enough concentrated death essence to dissolve a Foundation Establishment cultivator’s soul into slag within a single breath!

Driven by pure, feral preservation instinct, Shen Yu violently released his grip and recoiled backward.

Du Sha, already unconscious from the eruption of the curse, fell limp.

Yet before his body could strike the stone, an intricate golden talisman sewn beneath his inner robe flared with blinding spatial light.

BZZZZT—!

The spatial talisman detonated into a golden vortex, instantly swallowing Du Sha’s limp body and tearing through the tomb’s spatial fabric, teleporting the elite scion thousands of li away into safety.

Left behind was the dense cloud of black poisonous miasma.

Deprived of its host, the sentient curse locked directly onto the nearest source of living vitality, Shen Yu!

WHOOSH!

The black fog lunged forward with terrifying speed, giving him no space or time to evade.

The vile miasma bypassed his torn skin and shattered ribs, pouring through his mouth, nose, and open wounds in an invasive, suffocating torrent.

The moment it entered his flesh, Shen Yu’s entire body went rigid.

Sizzle… hiss…

The curse was merciless.

It did not merely attack the flesh, it devoured the spiritual foundation itself.

His primary meridians withered and turned brittle like burnt straw in a matter of heartbeats.

The refined Qi in his dantian curdled into black sludge, his vitality draining away in massive, uncontrollable torrents.

His vision blackened, cold, necrotic rot raced along his veins, freezing the very beat of his heart.

Death was knocking at the threshold.

In that absolute, suffocating void of encroaching demise, the violent agony shattered the chaotic madness in his skull.

For a single fraction of a heartbeat, a fleeting spark of pristine, crystalline clarity pierced through the soul trauma.

A profound verse from the Primordial Yin Yang Scripture surfaced unbidden in his mind.

‘Heaven is cold, but the flesh is warm.

Yin craves the fullness of Yang.

Yang hungers to consume Yin.

In the friction of opposites, the Golden Elixir is forged.’