PtM Book 16 - Chapter 38: Sabotage

3/3 this week.

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In the middle of a fiend outbreak, there was no such thing as rest, only fighting and recovery. Cultivators hopped from one battlefield to the next, purging fiend blood when they needed to, but otherwise cycling their qi to the point of exhaustion.

Even Cha Ming was starting to feel the toll after three full days of frantic flying and fighting through a tortuous path that tripled the distance between Cha Ming and Soaring City. And still he never dared stop to truly rest, only replenishing his qi or divinity when it got uncomfortably low.

Sometimes, it was just a small group of fiends that he could simply use Flame Rune Form to destroy and torch their remnants. Other times, it was an entire forest that was corrupted, and Cha Ming was forced to pull out the Azure Tempest Battlefield from the Clear Sky World to clear thousands of square kilometers of what used to be pristine wilderness.

Cha Ming had never been so grateful for his habit of stocking up on recovery supplies, since without them, he would have long since passed out from exhaustion. Yet there were limits to alchemical supplements. Taking too many of them in a short while made him increasingly resistant to their effects.

This alchemical poisoning affected not only his body but his energy pools. The only way to fully eliminate this poison would be to take days or even weeks to purge out the contaminants. Only then would the medicines he took regain their normal effectiveness.

Cha Ming was now a much faster flyer than before. Flying with Azure Tempest Wings was faster than most void ships and allowed him to cover great distances in a very short amount of time.

The artfully painted wings were a hundred meters long apiece. They were unwieldy, and Cha Ming could barely control them to fling himself through the air at shocking velocities that threatened the stability of his physical body.

Even the lowest intensity flaps were so jarring that they tore apart his blood vessels, muscles, and sometimes cracked his bones. Anyone but a strong demigod would never be able to survive such a means of transportation, let alone use it to traverse long distances.

Cha Ming was currently between fiend pockets. He’d just destroyed a rank-nine fiend assailing a tier-seven sect, and his flight path took him past a city of a hundred thousand people. The fiends had not managed to reach it, which was due in no small part to the valiant efforts of a local tier-six sect.

He was coasting currently, using his wings to glide until he’d slowed down enough to warrant flapping them again. It was therefore only by sheer coincidence that his strong sense of smell picked up blood in the wind.

The last time Cha Ming had smelled so much blood was in Verdant Crossroads. Only a gigantic massacre could create such a smell, so he did not hesitate to store his Azure Tempest Wings and seek out its source.

To Cha Ming’s knowledge, all mortal wars had been suspended due to the fiend outbreak, and the sects had informed everyone that those who violated this rule would be killed outright.

It shouldn’t be fiends, Cha Ming thought as he stretched his senses to his limits and tried to pinpoint where the smell was coming from. Whatever fiends consume is converted to black blood, and it smells like pitch and rotten flesh and every terrible thing imaginable.

Down below, the mortal city was silent. This was not unusual in these dark days, as most civilians were located in bunkers that had been constructed to protect them from the worst of everything. Normally, it was only guards that would be seen on the city streets, vigilantly patrolling and ensuring that no fiends snuck up on them unaware.

Except there were no guards. And neither were there any cultivators. Not a single soul was moving inside the city.

Cha Ming flew down into the streets and was met with incongruence and inconsistencies. There were open windows and tables filled with produce, and even spears left leaning on walls.

But there were no people. Nor were there dogs or animals or other pets. Not even rats could be seen scampering around the streets to molest the abandoned produce and rations.

What Cha Ming did find were shoes. And clothing. And armor. Hair accessories and jewelry and even half-eaten food that had dropped to the pest-free ground and had lain there ever since.

The stench of blood was so overwhelming that Cha Ming could only come to one conclusion: Everyone in the city had bled to death, yet not a single drop of that blood remained. And neither did their bones, for that matter, or any other part of their corpses.

Despite the thick aura of resentment, Cha Ming had no good way to track down the perpetrator. He had very little in the way of karmic-tracking abilities in the first place, and the karmic ties of mortals were extremely weak compared to cultivators.

He therefore decided to take a trip to the local tier-six sect. If anyone knew what happened, it was them.

He consulted a map and determined that the sect was only a hundred kilometers way. He did not use his Azure Tempest Wings. Instead, he became the wind. He flew as swiftly as he could in this intangible, mostly invisible form.

A short while later, he was creeping up to a forest just outside the Gold Drop Sect. A bloody light reflected off the clouds above the small mountain it was built on. Cha Ming could feel intense energy fluctuations even from far away.

Cha Ming’s wind form crept up the mountain, climbing up rocky cliffs toward the mountain city where the Gold Drop Sect was located.

There, he saw a half dozen red-robed figures wearing onyx masks. These cultivators were currently operating a formation. That formation was in the process of refining the entire sect. It used runes that Cha Ming would not dare dabble in, the type that only devilish cultivators utilized, and he would only study for the sake of breaking.

“That was the last of them just now,” one of the red-robed men said. “We can finally start refining the blood pool. More blood for the blood god!”

“More blood for the blood god!” the others echoed.

“Have we been given our next location?” another asked. The voice was that of a woman.

“There’s a medium-sized city a thousand kilometers away without any strong defenses, according to our scouts,” one of them answered. “We won’t be able to hit many more cities before the outbreak starts clearing out.”

“A pity. Perhaps another sect?” another asked.

“No,” the strongest among them said. “Hitting too many sects will draw too much attention. We’ll hit the city and then retreat.”

The six cultivators formed hand seals, and the bloody formation above the sect contracted. At its center was a fifty-meter pool of blood.

An entire city was destroyed, and now a whole tier-six sect is getting wiped off the map, and no one even knows about it, Cha Ming thought. Ultimately, he did not send a message to Sect Master Azure Tempest. It was possible to intercept messages, after all.

The cultivators weren’t strong either. The strongest among them had reached peak rune gathering, and the others were a mix between late and mid rune gathering. But they were more than enough to eliminate a tier-six sect.

“Refine!” the leader shouted. The large pool of glowing red blood inside the formation began to hiss and bubble and shrink. These red-robed cultivators were clearly trying to extract the blood essence of everyone in the sect, probably to use for their sin-based cultivation arts.

An azure tempest won’t keep these blood cultivators contained, Cha Ming thought. I can’t use my incarnations yet, but maybe I don’t have to.

He pulled the wind back toward himself and re-formed his body, then executed Clear Rune Transformation. He then spread out his clear runes as far as he was able to and established his upper limit as one kilometer in every direction.

His thoughts were as follows: he didn’t have time to trap all of them, because blood cultivators were famous for their blood escape techniques, which allowed them to burn a large quantity of blood essence to achieve speeds that could only be matched by his Azure Tempest Wings.

Sealing all of them with talismans or the Ninesky Seals would normally not be possible. But lately he’d been practicing radiating energy through his body with Runebound Defense. This gave him an idea: what if he used his own body as a medium to channel the Ninesky Seals? Would he then be able to seal the cultivation and abilities of everyone in the range of his clear runes?

Movement techniques would be too slow, so Cha Ming had to rely on longer-distance teleportation. This was especially risky during the fiend outbreak because spatial instabilities were at an all-time high.

Here goes nothing… He channeled Huxian’s spatial affinity. Moments later, he appeared at the center of the blood cultivators.

“What in the...”

Cha Ming’s body was broken and mangled when he appeared between them, shocking them to the extreme. He didn’t even wait for his body to heal as he shot over a thousand clear runes outside his body and channeled the Ninesky Seals.

“We’ve been discovered!” one of them shouted, and as expected, all six of them began burning their blood essence and bolting.

But it was too late. Nine-colored sealing light flashed through each of the thousand clear runes, cutting them off from their powers.

“Scatter! Escape if you can!” their leader shouted just before Cha Ming appeared beside him using Clear Rune Steps. The cultivator didn’t even have time to react before the Savage Deity War Staff came crashing down atop him.

He collapsed in a puddle of blood, but Cha Ming didn’t trust it, so he commandeered the nearest three dozen clear runes and filled the area with a sea of scorching flames.

The blood puddle screamed and quickly recovered to a humanoid shape. Cha Ming had expected such a development, so he summoned the Clear Sky Carving Knife and activated Destruction Edge. It hacked the humanoid creature into dozens of pieces that would be difficult to regenerate, even for a blood cultivator.

Only then did he set his sights on those few cultivators who had yet to escape his sealing area.

Cha Ming took a step and appeared beside a blood cultivator. He used his Wrappings of Runic Binding to restrain the sealed cultivator before appearing beside a third. “I guess I don’t need to take all of them prisoner,” he muttered. His expression turned cold as he channeled Flame Rune Strike into his staff and smashed the cultivator apart, immolating all but his storage treasures.

Three more blood cultivators remained, but since Cha Ming had chosen to kill them, he had many ways to do so. He opted to paint a special little hell for them, a sphere of fire that gradually shrank down and crushed them, just as the blood-refining formation was currently doing to the blood essence of the tier-six sect.

The entire process took ten seconds from start to finish. All that remained of the four he’d attacked with lethal intent was ashes and unburnt storage equipment.

Two prisoners should be fine for interrogation, Cha Ming thought to himself. He gathered both cultivators with his Wrappings of Runic Binding and affixed more permanent seals to them.

“Do you have any idea who you’re dealing with?” the middle-rune-carving blood cultivator said. “If you don’t let us go right now, the blood—”

“Quiet, you idiot!” the lead cultivator snapped. The cultivator went silent as the leader shot Cha Ming a toothy smile. “It seems we were unfortunate enough to run into the warden of this area, Daoist Clear Sky. Our defeat is not unwarranted.”

“Warden?” the weaker of the two said. “That means…”

“Yes,” the cultivator said. “And I hear this one especially loathes the way we do things. He was probably planning on getting information from us. Unfortunately for him, that won’t be possible.” A powerful energy surged out from inside the man and began to tear apart the seal on his cultivation.

Cha Ming stepped back and watched them both coldly. “I see what’s going on. A cultivator planted an external seal. It isn’t part of your cultivation, and it contains the power of their law-stitching cultivation.”

The cultivator laughed as his flesh began to melt away. What had broken down his seal was also eliminating these two cultivators. “Getting caught was never an option, Daoist Clear Sky. You will show no mercy to cultivators like us, so we might as well see ourselves to the Yellow River.”

“I-I don’t want to die!” the middle-rune-carving cultivator said. “I’ll talk!” But it was too late. Half his body had already melted down.

“This is why you never got that promotion, little one,” the leader said. “Not that it matters at this point.”

Cha Ming could do nothing to stop the process. These weren’t normal flames. They didn’t just contain the principles of fire—they burned the body using blood as fuel

“Blood, fire, and sealing…” Cha Ming muttered. “It can only be Dao God Blood Seal.” With the death of the last two cultivators, the blood-refining cultivation lost all energy. It, too, collapsed and melted, and even the blood pool turned to ashes.

Fortunately, Cha Ming had directly killed the other four. The greedy Clear Sky Carving Knife had dutifully fetched their possessions before their remnants caught fire.

Their bags of holding were sealed, but the formations weren’t too intricate. Cha Ming only took a few minutes to pick apart their formation locks before looking through them.

What he found were several vials of blood essence, a few scrolls, and talismans, all blood-based, as well as a few sin treasures. And four identity medallions. These six people had all been disciples of the Blood God Sect.

***

There wasn’t much left of the Gold Drop Sect. All its wealth was untouched, and all its ships were still in place, but the bodies were gone, and that was in itself the best evidence of what had transpired.

Cha Ming sealed the entrance to the sect before contacting Sect Master Azure Tempest. She listened patiently to his retelling but did not look overly surprised by his report.

“What is this Blood God Sect?” Cha Ming asked.

“It’s supposed to be a tier-two sect under the jurisdiction of the tier-one Pure Blood Sect,” the sect master replied. “They’re our neighbors in the Pure Blood Region. Or I guess we should start calling it the Blood God Region.

“I take it many such attacks have occurred?” Cha Ming said.

“Too many to count,” Azure Wind replied.

“What terrible timing,” Cha Ming said.

“You’re telling me,” Azure Tempest replied. “I’m busy fighting fiends, and many larger cities and sects are on the verge of falling. I can’t investigate this matter until the fiend outbreak is over, and you can’t either.”

“I think it would be best to keep an eye out for other underhanded activities, though,” Cha Ming said. “I’m almost a hundred percent certain that a Dao God Blood Seal from the Heartforge Realm was involved in all this.”

“They warned me you would all be trouble,” Azure Tempest muttered. “At first, I thought the trouble would come from my warden. I suppose that was just naïve of me.”

Cha Ming continued his journey toward Soaring City. The encounter with the Blood God Sect had tired him out somewhat, but he was still in fighting shape, and the city was not doing so well.

With the help of the Azure Tempest Wings, Cha Ming was able to hit five more locations before arriving at his destination.

He was still ten kilometers out when his body began to pulse and pound, and his heart fell into a familiar rhythm. That of armies. That of drums. That of war.

It wasn’t just cultivators that were defending Soaring City, but mortals as well. This was the capital of the Soaring Eagle Kingdom, and if it fell, an entire mortal country would devolve into chaos.

An army of a million was stationed outside the city, only a tenth of which were normal troops. The rest had volunteered or been conscripted.

Drums were the instrument of choice on the Chasewind Plane, and when ten thousand drums were playing in unison, the sound carried. If not for these drums, the mortal army meeting the veritable ocean of fiends would have long succumbed to their baser instincts, turned tail, and run.

It was Cha Ming’s first time seeing such a large army since his arrival on the Chasewind Plane. His interactions had mostly been with larger sects, and as such, he’d disregarded the possibility of a mortal resistance. And who could blame him? On the Inkwell Plane, cities didn’t bother with mortals in the army either; every city had ample cultivators with which to do war on others or defend.

The strength of the mortal army was impressive considering that they were less than ants when compared to cultivators. Yet in hindsight, Cha Ming should have expected this—on the Chasewind Plane, mortals were left to fend for themselves. It wasn’t cultivators they relied on to defend against bandits or smaller beast attacks, or to defend themselves against larger groups of brigands or invasions from other kingdoms.

Most of the million soldiers were poorly equipped. Some had simply been handed a weapon and didn’t have a uniform, much less armor. But the drums kept them brave, and the drums kept their blood boiling, and those same drums defined the rhythm of the entire battle.

Even transcendent cultivators felt it, though the few who realized it would never admit to it. But Cha Ming was there, and Cha Ming saw it: a prime example of what he’d been working toward. Mortals were the basis of every single sect on the Chasewind Plane. When the mortals faltered, the sects faltered. When the mortals stood stall, transcendent cultivators couldn’t help but be bolstered by them.

Originally, the city only held ten million people, but now, it contained an additional thirty million refuges. All qi manipulators were out on the battlefield, and even the herbologists hadn’t been spared, as anyone who could channel the elements was ten times as useful as a normal bow-wielding or spear-wielding soldier.

Cha Ming pressed on ahead. Though he wanted to help the mortals, he knew he could make better contributions elsewhere on the battlefield. They were bleeding, yes, but some threats were so great that they could level the entire capital with an afterthought.

He flew up beside the ships of the Raging Tide Sect and a detachment from the Xuan Dao Sect. They were busy blasting away at the strongest of fiends and providing air support to the tens of thousands of sect members doing battle.

“Elder Choking Tide!” Cha Ming called out as he stepped onto the lead ship in the detachment.

“Clear Sky, you’ve arrived!” Choking Tide said. His expression was grave, and Cha Ming noticed that he’d suffered a grievous injury to his arm.

“Tell me what’s going on and how I can best assist,” Cha Ming said.

“Well, as you can see, we’re holding back a tide of fiends that’s been building up for quite some time,” Choking Tide said. “Most of these fiends are below rank ten and are manageable as long as we throw enough numbers at them. But there are twelve rank-eleven existences that pose a problem. The sect master and most of our strongest ships are busy just holding them back.”

It was easy to tell which fiends were the strongest, as they were usually the largest. Twelve humanoid titans were especially prominent at the center of the fiendish army.

No less than three initial-rune-carving cultivators were tying them down, including Sect Master Raging Tide. Five powerful ships were constantly laying down punishment. But none of this was enough to put them down.

Cha Ming’s eyes flickered over to the elder’s arm. “What happened?”

“Treachery,” Elder Choking Tide said. He cradled his arm, which hung limply by its side. It looked shriveled and devoid of blood. “We originally didn’t have any trouble containing these fiends, but then a group of mysterious masked strangers appeared. They attacked our sect and drained the blood of many of our disciples before pulling back.

“We gave chase, and in that time, we saw that many lower-tier sects had been completely annihilated—their disciples were turned to blood essence and their souls consumed by horrendous flags… Seeing that we could not intercept them, we returned, but in that time, the fiends somehow grew in number. We don’t know how it happened, but our lines broke, and the fiends began gaining ground on Soaring City. We’ve been standing guard ever since.”

“That’s not treachery, Elder Choking Tide,” Cha Ming said. “That’s sabotage.”

“Indeed,” the elder said bitterly. “But it’s treachery in the deepest sense—they have betrayed the people of our world and sinned against the human race!”

“I also encountered such cultivators,” Cha Ming confessed. “They wiped out a city of a hundred thousand and an entire tier-six sect. Their identity medallions indicate that they might be members of something called the Blood God Sect.”

“Regardless of who they are, we can only focus on the problem at hand,” Elder Choking Tide said.

Cha Ming inspected the battlefield and was at a loss on how to join in. There were problems on all sides, and he’d just arrived. “How would you like me to help?”

“Well, we aren’t exactly familiar with your capabilities, Clear Sky,” the elder confessed. “Just do what you can, and we’ll work around it, I suppose. As for me… this useless man will direct the fleet and try to minimize casualties. You wouldn’t happen to have any spare ships lying about, would you?” The elder chuckled at what he thought was a funny joke, but when Cha Ming took out a few dozen he’d stolen from pirates, he took in a sharp breath.

“Do what you can with them, and we’ll talk after the battle,” Cha Ming said before hopping off the ship and flying out to meet the enemy.