The air in the Whispering Gulch stank of pine, damp earth, and fresh blood – a perfume Xue Jian had long grown accustomed to.
His black robes, embroidered with barely visible, dark crimson threads that seemed to writhe in the dim light, were splattered with new, vibrant stains. He stood unmoving, a specter of death amidst a tableau of slaughter.
Around him, the last vestiges of the Righteous Sect's patrol lay broken and bleeding. Their pristine white and sky-blue robes were now canvases of crimson horror. Some were cleaved in two, others impaled on jagged rocks or their own shattered weapons.
One particularly unfortunate soul, perhaps their leader, was still twitching, his eyes wide with terror and disbelief as a monstrous, shadowy serpent with scales like obsidian shards slowly uncoiled from around his crushed torso.
This was Gou Hun, Xue Jian's inherited Spirit Beast – Soul Harvester. Its form was wreathed in an oppressive aura of Yin energy so potent it seemed to drink the very light from its surroundings. Its crimson eyes, identical in their chilling emptiness to Xue Jian's own, fixed on the dying cultivator.
"You... demon..." the man gurgled, blood frothing at his lips. "The Heavens will... smite you..."
Xue Jian's lips, thin and pale, curved into a smirk that held no humor, only a chilling satisfaction. He took a deliberate step forward, his boots crunching on the blood-soaked gravel. "The Heavens?" His voice was a low, gravelly rasp, like stones grinding together.
"The Heavens do they really care about the likes of you".
He gestured almost lazily with a bloodstained hand. Gou Hun understood. The serpent's massive head dipped, its fangs, long as daggers, sinking into the dying cultivator's chest. It wasn't a quick kill. There was a siphoning, a draining of not just life, but of the refined spiritual energy the man had spent decades cultivating.
The cultivator's body shriveled, his skin tightening over his bones like old parchment, his dying scream choked into a wheezing gasp.
This was part of Xue Jian's unique, brutal path. While others sought delicate balances in dual cultivation, finding willing partners to exchange Yin and Yang, Xue Jian had found a more direct, if universally condemned, method. Gou Hun, an ancient Yin-aspected beast, could forcibly extract the refined Yang essence from male cultivators and the Yin essence from female cultivators he overpowered. This essence was then partially absorbed by the beast, strengthening it, while the rest, a torrent of raw, potent energy, was channeled directly into Xue Jian. It was a parasitic, predatory form of cultivation, and it was terrifyingly effective.
He had long abandoned the pretense of seeking a willing partner. Trust was a fool's currency, and Xue Jian was no fool. Power, absolute and unyielding, was the only truth in his pursuit of immortality. If the world deemed him a demon, so be it. Their labels were irrelevant. Their power, however, was a resource.
As Gou Hun finished, its shadowy form seemed to deepen, its scales gleaming with a malevolent inner light. A sliver of that stolen power, raw and potent, flowed into Xue Jian – a current of warmth that spread through his meridians, pushing him infinitesimally closer to the next breakthrough within the Fourth Stage of Cultivation: the Void Soul realm. He was leagues beyond these righteous Sect grunts, who were likely still struggling in the Second Stage, the Spirit Tempering Realm, or perhaps the weakest echelons of the Third, Golden Core. It was like an eagle snatching sparrows.
"Pathetic," Xue Jian muttered, wiping a smear of blood from his cheek with the back of his hand. "Barely a mouthful for Gou Hun." He glanced at the carnage. "Still, they served a purpose."
One of the corpses clutched a tattered map. Xue Jian nudged it with his foot, then bent to retrieve it, his movements economical and devoid of any wasted effort. He unrolled it, his cold eyes scanning the crude markings. It depicted a series of narrow, interconnected valleys leading deeper into the Blackwood Mountain Range – a territory nominally controlled by several smaller Righteous sects, all flies buzzing around the lion that was the Heavenly Blade Sect, the dominant Righteous power in this province.
His true target lay beyond: the rumoured resting place of the Sun Serpent, an ancient Yang-aspected Spirit Beast said to have perished there centuries ago. If its core remained, or even a fraction of its residual energy, it would be an invaluable treasure, something that could propel his cultivation forward significantly, perhaps even helping him breach the Fifth Stage, the Soul Transformation Realm. Immortality was a distant peak, and each stage was a monumental cliff face to be scaled.
"The Sun Serpent's essence," Xue Jian mused aloud, his voice barely a whisper. "It will accelerate my fusion with Gou Hun's Yin, perhaps even evolve its abilities."
He was an outcast, not by choice, but by necessity. His methods, even by the loose standards of the Demonic sects, were considered excessively brutal and heretical. He'd slaughtered his way out of a minor demonic clan that had tried to exploit his unique bond with Gou Hun when he was younger, and since then, he'd walked his own blood-soaked path. He trusted no one but himself, and Gou Hun, which was less a partner and more an extension of his own rapacious will.
The Righteous sects hunted him relentlessly, painting him as the ultimate evil. The Demonic sects, while sometimes grudgingly admiring his efficiency, kept their distance, wary of his unbridled ambition and the sheer malevolence that clung to him like a shroud. He was a rogue element, a predator beholden to no master, driven by a singular, all-consuming desire: to escape the shackles of mortality, to transcend, to live forever, even if he had to carve a path to eternity over a mountain of corpses.
He felt a familiar pang, not of hunger, but of need. The energy from the patrol was a mere appetizer. The true feast lay ahead. The path to immortality was paved not with good intentions, but with power. Xue Jian was more than willing to pay anything to achieve it.
He committed the salient features of the map to memory, then allowed a flicker of dark energy to ignite it in his palm, the parchment turning to ash in seconds. No traces. No sentiment.
Gou Hun silently slithered closer, its massive head resting near his shoulder, its presence a cold comfort. There was no affection in the gesture, only a shared purpose, a symbiosis of predator and even greater predator.
"They will send more," Xue Jian stated, looking towards the deeper passes of the Blackwood Mountains. "The Heavenly Blade Sect considers this their domain. Let them come." A flicker of something akin to anticipation glinted in his crimson eyes. More powerful cultivators meant richer harvests.
With a final, disdainful glance at the slaughtered patrol, Xue Jian turned and began to walk towards the mountains, his silhouette and that of his monstrous serpent melting into the encroaching shadows of the gulch. The forest fell silent again, save for the drip of blood and the whispering wind, which seemed to carry a new, chilling promise of the violence yet to come. His journey to the Sun Serpent's lair had begun, and the Righteous path would undoubtedly try to bar his way.
They would fail. They would all fail. For Xue Jian, failure was not an option; only immortality awaited at the end of his brutal, solitary road.