Chapter 29: Finish What You Started
The air around them both grew suffocatingly heavy as the dense, malicious current of peak-stage Qi flooded relentlessly into Lu Feng’s lower abdomen.
The mercenary leader’s face was twisted into a grotesque grin of triumphant sadism, completely confident that his brutal, crude method of over-pressurizing the boy’s core would leave nothing behind in a matter of moments except for a mangled, bursting shell of flesh and bone.
To the seasoned mercenary, this was a routine executionary technique, a sadistic display of dominance over someone he still foolishly believed was a novice who had merely stumbled upon a stroke of unearned luck.
The man poured an even heavier, more vicious torrent of his internal energy through his palm, driving the toxic wave deeper into Lu Feng’s frame with reckless abandon.
"Brat, keep your dying final words to yourself," the leader snarled, his voice dripping with venomous satisfaction as he watched for the first signs of internal rupture. "Let’s see how much longer that arrogant mouth of yours stays shut once your entire core turns to liquid mush."
Lu Feng didn’t flinch. He didn’t scream, nor did he convulse in agony. Instead, a faint, cold, almost mocking smile touched the corners of his lips as he looked straight up into the man’s widened, bloodshot eyes.
"You shouldn’t have done that," Lu Feng warned quietly, his voice carrying an unnatural, steady resonance that cut right through the whistling wind of the dark forest.
The leader scoffed, misinterpreting the warning as a pathetic bluff from a cornered animal. But right on cue, the moment the heavy foreign energy crossed the threshold of Lu Feng’s Dantian, the Primordial Chaos Bead resting quietly within the cosmic vortex was suddenly triggered.
It did not strain nor did it fracture.
Instead, the ancient, unfathomable core reacted with a voracious, absolute hunger like it had first did when he awakened it hours ago.
It flared to life with a sudden, silent violence, transforming instantly from a dormant anchor into an insatiable, cosmic black hole. It didn’t just absorb the incoming Qi that the leader was pushing into him; it violently seized the initiative, reversing the flow and sucking out far more Qi from the leader’s palm than the man had ever intended, or even possessed in his wildest nightmares.
At first, the leader wasn’t worried. He merely blinked through the dark, assuming his destructive technique was simply taking a brief moment longer to fully saturate the boy’s crude, unrefined meridians. He tightened his grip on Lu Feng’s collar, expecting the explosive feedback to hit any second now.
However, after about thirty seconds of steady, unbroken channeling, the expression on the leader’s face started to change.
The arrogant, triumphant smirk vanished entirely from his scarred features, replaced by a sudden, creeping furrow of his brow. A cold, damp bead of sweat rolled down his temple, catching the pale light of the crescent moon.
That was because, despite the immense rivers of energy he was actively and desperately pumping into Lu Feng’s body, nothing seemed to be happening to the target.
Lu Feng’s face had completely relaxed, his breathing turning steady, slow, and utterly unbothered, as if he were standing under a warm, refreshing summer shower rather than facing a lethal execution.
If anything, the leader experienced a sickening, hollow jolt deep in his own chest as he realized his own core was getting rapidly, inexplicably emptied.
Panic flickered in the man’s eyes, and his frown deepened sharply into a mask of pure confusion. The steady stream of energy he was forcing outward suddenly felt like a runaway freight train flying down an open track, dragging his own life’s work along with it. He tried to halt the flow of his internal energy, attempting to yank his hand back from Lu Feng’s collar to break the physical contact.
To his absolute horror, his hand wouldn’t budge.
It was as if his thick, iron-reinforced gauntlet had been magnetically welded to Lu Feng’s dark robes, locked mercilessly in place by an invisible, gravitational suction emanating straight from the boy’s lower abdomen.
"What—what is this?!" the leader choked out, his voice cracking with sudden, unadulterated terror as his previous confidence evaporated into thin air. He tugged furiously at his arm, pulling back with all his might, planting his heavy boots hard against the thick bark of the weeping willow, but he remained utterly anchored, unable to detach himself by even a fraction of an inch. "What did you do to me? Let go of me! Let go of me right now!"
Lu Feng remained entirely silent. He didn’t offer a single word of explanation, choosing instead to watch with cold, detached eyes as the life and power were systematically unraveled from the seasoned warrior who had thought himself untouchable.
The leader kept screaming, his struggles turning wild, frantic, and uncoordinated as he felt the vast, hard-earned reserves of his Qi draining away into a bottomless abyss inside the boy. He was running out of Qi essence entirely, his internal sea of energy growing hollow, dry, and brittle like sun-baked clay.
Soon, what the leader feared most happened. His internal sea of energy went completely dry, leaving him entirely powerless, stripped of every single drop of cultivation he had spent decades accumulating.
Yet, the panic etched across his face only grew exponentially worse, because even with his Qi completely exhausted and gone, he still couldn’t take his hand off Lu Feng. The suction didn’t stop with the energy; it simply shifted gears to something far more fundamental.
Then he felt it. Something far more terrifying than lost cultivation or drained energy.
He was slowly feeling light, as though his physical body was losing its density, its weight, and its very substance. He first noticed the skin across the back of his hands tightening rapidly, turning pale and papery, and the bones in his fingers becoming more prominent and skeletal under the moonlight as the flesh seemed to recede from them.
That was when he realized with sheer, paralyzing horror what was actually being sucked out of him now.
It wasn’t just his Qi anymore. It was his Life Force. His vitality, his years, his very essence as a living creature.
Now, it was time to truly panic.
"No! No, no, no! Stop this! Please, stop this!" the leader shrieked, his voice turning into a high-pitched, desperate wail that echoed wildly through the silent forest. His cheeks began to hollow out rapidly, his robust, muscular face sinking inward as his skin took on an ashen, mummified gray tint.
His actions became utterly frantic. He clawed desperately at the air with his free hand, scratching uselessly at the bark, kicking his legs, and thrashing wildly against the inescapable pull, but nothing worked. The laws of nature had been rewritten in this small patch of darkness, and he was nothing more than fuel for a fire he had foolishly tried to light.
Lu Feng just remained motionless, standing like an immovable statue against the tree trunk, watching the man’s life force get sucked out of him until he looked like a dried, withered corpse. The vibrant, imposing mercenary leader was rapidly withering away into skin and bones right before his very eyes, his armor suddenly feeling far too large for the shrunken frame it encased.
Realizing he was staring straight into the inescapable jaws of death, the hardened criminal completely broke down, abandoning all remaining shreds of his tough exterior as he began pleading frantically for his life.
"Forgive me... please, spare me!" the withered husk of a man sobbed, hot tears cutting muddy tracks through the thick dust and gray grime on his sunken, skeletal cheeks. "I’ll give you everything! I have gold, I have secrets, I’ll tell you who hired us! Just free me! Please!"
Lu Feng finally broke his silence, his voice a low, emotionless whisper that cut through the night air like a razor-sharp blade.
"You came here tonight planning to butcher me, my companions, and everyone else on that convoy in cold blood," Lu Feng said flatly, his mismatched eyes narrowing coldly at the dying killer. "You didn’t care who had a family, who had a life, or who was innocent. So it is only fair that I finished what you started."
The leader’s mouth moved to speak again, his jaw snapping open and closed in a silent, desperate prayer, but no words came out. His lungs refused to expand, his throat turned to dust, and slowly, the man’s ragged breathing stalled completely. The desperate, terrified glint in his sunken eyes dimmed into a hollow, glassy stare.
Finally, the last faint spark of light in his eyes died out entirely, and his withered, skeletal frame slumped heavily to the side, completely devoid of life.
The leader was dead.
Lu Feng looked down at the lifeless, mummified husk hanging limply against his shoulder for a brief second. A victorious, deeply satisfied smile crept across his face, and with a casual, indifferent flick of his shoulder, he pushed the corpse away, letting it drop unceremoniously into the damp, decaying dirt at his feet where it landed with a dry, hollow thud.
Bang!
He had won.
Right at that exact second, deep within the corner of his vision, the invisible mental timer ticked down to zero, flashing its final confirmation before fading away completely into the dark.