Chapter 40: The Visitor
Elder Polio gazed upon his apprentice’s remains without sparing Yuan a glance.
Why should he? There was no way Yuan could have taken him in a fight at his best, let alone in his current state; and they both knew it. Still, he wondered why the man hadn’t killed him yet.
It would have been so easy.
“You’ve damaged my apprentice quite a bit,” the elder mused while stomping the ground with his staff. Disembodied hands of rotting flesh emerged from the ground to grab Gayak’s mangled parts and gather them. “A shame. I was very proud of this design.”
While Elder Polio planted his staff in the earth and began a series of mudras, Yuan subtly used Item Materialization to create new bullets and reload his revolver. The elder underestimated him, the same way any high-level cultivator looked down on everyone else. It might give him an opportunity to escape with judicious use of Black Haze and projectiles.
But Yuan could hardly focus with his bullet-core pounding harder than a maddened piston in his skull. Was it going to burst out in his head if he failed to cycle through the Third Coil properly?
“Varada, Pushpaputa, Vajrapradama.” Elder Polio completed a mudra sequence and then traced a circle around his apprentice’s remains. “Mend the Splintered Flesh.”
Virulent qi erupted from the elder and filled the circle. A tense silence fell upon the ruins for a few seconds.
Then the pile of flesh pieced itself back together.