Cultivation Fever 11 Monster

"If I chose a successor, I wouldn't pick you. But you put on the Band of Trial, and now I'm stuck with you."

He sighed, then leaned back and crossed his arms.

"In your current state, your apt.i.tude is too low to receive my inheritance. But I have a way to change that."

I was captivated by his words. Could he make me strong?

"What's your plan?" I asked. My voice sounded weak. Was everything about me weak?

"I see that your soul is in pieces. For you, this may be a problem, but for me, this opens up a pathway."

"You can fix my soul?"

The man leaned across the table and lowered his voice.

"I can re-form it. I will send my consciousness into your soul and integrate my qi with yours. That will grant you access to some of my talent."

The prospect excited me. If I had better talent, I could accomplish greater things! I could be strong. But there was a niggling feeling in the back of my head. A feeling that this wasn't right.

"This will be a dangerous process," he continued, "you can't put up any resistance while I'm doing this."

He seemed excited when he spoke, and the uneasy feeling grew. He was asking me to surrender my soul. I wanted power, but this didn't seem like the way to get it.

The man leaned even closer to me, a few inches away from my face. He grabbed my jaw and spoke in a sinister voice.

"Remember. You are weak. But I will make you strong. Are you willing?"

I was deep in thought, and I nodded almost out of instinct.

"Good choice," he said, and an eerie smile crept across his face.

I realised too late that I had made a mistake.

I didn't care if some cultivator I had just met thought I was weak. Who was he anyway? I didn't sense any power coming from him. In fact, he didn't even seem human.

This world seemed off too. The promise of an inheritance had blinded me. I hadn't made the obvious connections.

The blood red colours? The th.o.r.n.y, so called "Band of Trial?" It was all bulls.h.i.+t. This man was some kind of demonic creature, and he probably came from the bracelet.

The worlds he had shown me weren't meant to teach me anything, they were meant to make me feel helpless. Re-forming my soul? Integrating my qi? He just wanted to control me.

I was dragged back to the real world and felt a disturbance in my core. I drew my attention to my soul and saw a red wisp slip through the fragments.

I cursed myself for being so naive. I had to think fast. How could I stop him from taking me over?

Earlier, he told me not to resist. And he wouldn't have taken the time to break my will for no reason. Did I just have to resist him? Could it really be that simple?

No. There had to be a good reason why Crow put this bracelet on me. Father didn't even seem surprised when he saw it tear away at my flesh.

I watched my soul for a bit, thinking and biding my time. The vines were shrinking, but my soul wasn't falling apart. Red qi had seeped into the cracks. It was holding the pieces together.

Of course! This demon wouldn't inhabit a broken soul. He had to fix me before that.

I came up with a plan. I would let this demon have a taste of his own medicine.

He had access to some of my memories. He knew about Sirius, and that I desired cultivation. But he didn't seem to be able to read my thoughts.

Perhaps he wasn't powerful enough to see everything. Because if he had seen that I knew the Mind Integration Technique, he wouldn't have dared to come anywhere near my soul.

I would use the first stage of the Mind Integration Technique to become one with my soul. This time I didn't need to wait and sense the other soul. It was already within me.

I sat back and let him heal me. The vines had almost disappeared now, replaced by red qi. I prepared my mind and imagined a whirlpool into my soul.

The instant the last gap closed, I let myself be sucked in.

"What are you doing?!" The demon screamed. His voice was squeaky now that he was a wisp. "Don't you want power?"

"I do. So, I'm gonna to take it all."

I could feel the fleeting wisp inside me. It was a disturbing feeling, like a worm crawling under my skin. I imagined myself absorbing it, just like I had last time.

This time there was some resistance. It didn't just soak into me. I felt the wisp struggle and break free from my soul.

"You think you can capture me with your petty technique? You're too weak!"

I panicked when I saw it escape, and tried to reach for it, but my soul drifted too slowly to catch up.

Suddenly, a tendril of light darted out and grabbed the wisp, like a frog capturing a fly.

The tendril curled around the wisp and began to pulse. It drained globules of red qi with each pulse. The demon let out a ghastly screech.

"What is this?! What's happening?"

The demon seemed terrified. He writhed and wailed as the tendril leached his qi. With each pulse, his voice grew fainter.

"You… monster… "

He let out one last dying breath, then turned to dust. The tendril unravelled, then snapped back into my soul. The demon's memories flooded into me, but I didn't have time to look at them.

A familiar, rea.s.suring pleasure filled my body. I had achieved a minor breakthrough. My mind returned to my body, and I woke up in my cot.

Mother, father and Crow stood around my cot in a circle. Mother gasped in relief when she saw my eyes open. Relief turned to confusion as she saw me lolling back in ecstasy.

She tried to hug me, but father stopped her. He picked up my right hand and offered it to Crow. I looked at my wrist and was shocked out of my euphoria.

There was no wound, not a single scratch or scar. Instead, a tattoo resembling the bracelet circled my wrist.

Crow took my hand. I felt something pa.s.sing into me, but it wasn't warm like any of the qi I had felt before. I channelled qi into my eyes to see what was happening.

Father's aura was all consuming. Strangely though, I saw drops of purple liquid rolling down Crow's arm. They seemed to fizz and shrink in the air.

I tried to rip my hand away, but Crow's grip was too strong. The purple liquid was rolling down my hand and into the tattoo.

The tattoo started to throb. After a few seconds, drops of blood seeped out of the tattooed thorns. The blood dripped in a steady patter onto the white sheets of my cot.

Mother gasped in shock.

"You didn't say this…!" she shouted at father.

"This wasn't… to…!" he replied.

I could barely understand what they were saying, but I knew something was wrong. Crow put his hand on my chest and closed his eyes.

I could feel his qi soak into my body. It was like a trickle of water, and it stung when it pa.s.sed through me.

His qi touched my soul, then bounced away and shot out of my body. Crow recoiled and spoke a single word.

I hadn't heard it before, but I recognised the tone and could guess its meaning.

"Monster..."