A transcendental terror swept over the four elders, causing them to tremble uncontrollably, unable to make any movement. Before them stood a cultivator from the divine world, an entity endowed with the power to effortlessly annihilate their own sect in which they had invested their pride.
The reason for his presence was clear to everyone: the divine sect had discovered everything. The shock enveloping them was so intense that, if they had control over their bodies, it would be possible to see the physical signs of this disturbance running down their legs. However, even this ability had been taken from them.
Alm and Bruno, though maintaining silence, were the most tense at that moment. 'What the hell is happening? How could a divine cultivator have been alerted?' Bruno questioned, incredulous at the situation.
'The sealing technique should have retained a portion of energy, even after all the content was removed,' Alm thought frantically. 'Even if it's just a trace of Qi, the formation still remains. There's no way a clan, even from the divine world, could have such a fast perception capability...'
Bruno then tried to force all the Qi from his meridians to flow, but their bodies refused to move. 'Damn! We're screwed, think of something fast.'
'The formation must still be present on the surface; it just doesn't have the Qi runes,' Bruno abruptly interrupted Alm's thoughts. 'Forget the formation! Think about how we're going to get out of this alive, idiot.'
Alm retorted, 'Knowing the cause, maybe there's a path to explore! Help think too, bastard!'
'Ruri is nearby, inside the clan. Her sealing power is active at full strength. If it's impossible for them to find out so quickly, something happened for the seal to be undone and the divine sect to notice,' Bruno analyzed without thinking much. Then, suddenly, he activated all the Qi within their cultivated bodies. However, nothing happened again; they were still frozen along with practically the entire continent and all forms of life.
'Ruri... something happened. Damn! We don't even have a way to survive this; saving her is impossible,' lamented Alm, with a strong emotion burning in his chest.
Bruno, feeling the same pain as Alm, thought in despair. The Qi from the meridians and the physical body were frozen. All the muscles seemed to have turned into iron and refused to move.
'Even the blood is moving slowly... blood... that should work!' Bruno then had a brutal idea.
It all lasted only two seconds, and suddenly, all four elders who were frozen felt the earth tremble. A muffled thud reverberated from behind them.
Following that, everyone felt like the divine being was flipping the world upside down. However, the tremor stopped in less than a second, and the smell of blood hit their nostrils, igniting an even greater fear within them.
On their backs, the round bodies of Alm and Bruno trembled uncontrollably. Another muffled thud resonated, even stronger and louder, all coming directly from their giant body.
First, their eyes completely changed to an earthy brown. They spat out a mouthful of blood. Then, the eyes, ears, nose, and every pore of the skin... everything began to bleed uncontrollably.
Finally, Alm and Bruno managed to take a single step forward with great effort. 'This! Success!' Bruno shouted mentally.
Alm was stunned as he understood what was happening. 'You forcibly ignited the only drop of the behemoth bloodline we had... this... was supposed to make us explode instantly.'
Bruno responded enthusiastically. 'It was a gamble. Divine beasts can forcibly ignite their bloodline when cornered; I thought it might work.'
'WE ARE NOT A DIVINE BEAST, IDIOT! A human body could never withstand this. If we didn't have the system's physical cultivation, or if we were just one level lower in the realm, we would have turned into a bloody mist.' Alm was agitated.
Bruno didn't seem to care. 'I didn't think it through, but it worked out in the end. Screw it. We don't have much time; this will last for an hour at most.'
'Idiot. Well, we're far from the clan. He still has to check things in the clan. Until he figures out that it was us... where can we escape from a divine cultivator?' Alm's gears in his mind were moving furiously, trying to find a way.
'That Divine Cultivator will reach our group anyway... but how will he know that a young cultivator at the seventh level of the Qi Gathering Realm did this?' Bruno analyzed calmly.
Alm then had an idea. 'The sect! Yes, a fat and stupid young man couldn't do anything. Let's just blame them.' Alm then smiled sinisterly. 'Those elders are to blame. But they will never be found, so the sect will be blamed.'
Bruno nodded. 'If they are never found, nothing about us will be discovered.'
'Quick, we don't have time.' Alm said, taking the axe from the spatial inventory. It was the most powerful weapon they had, and it belonged to the muscular man from before.
They could move, but with great difficulty because of the bloodline that had been burned into their bodies. It was replacing the Qi in the meridians, filling the body with fierce energy, but it was a single drop and would last a short time. The elders and Innoa were just inert, unable to move a muscle. Even the Qi in their bodies had stopped circulating.
Crack! Crack!
The sound of two bodies being broken resonated eerily. Innoa and one of the elders in this state were like mere mortals and died with two swings of the axe.
Alm and Bruno then had to use the Yin and Yang tattoos directly on the other three to empty their dantians first. It was a brute force method and impossible to do normally, but now they couldn't defend themselves, and even the Qi in their bodies couldn't react to the overwhelming power nearby.
A tense half-hour passed, and then the axe moved again, finishing off everyone there without giving any chance of escape. Alm and Bruno then put all the bodies and anything that could indicate their whereabouts in the inventory and ran with everything.
They ran with all their might and spat a lot of blood every minute. Their entire bodies were covered in red, extremely damaged internally. As Alm said, a human body wouldn't withstand such madness. But their physical power was at a level above an ordinary human.
They ran until they reached the limit of their bodies, then stopped suddenly with a premonition.
BOOM!!!
A pillar of destructive Qi rose into the sky, making the entire continent, and possibly the entire planet, tremble.
'We're not far enough! We have to use this! Even if it's risky.' Bruno spoke urgently.
Alm agreed, and then, a four-petal lotus appeared in his hands. All the power of the thunder core was sealed within it perfectly. If everything went as planned, all the elders would die in a single explosion; their fate had been sealed from the moment they left the clan. However, with the sudden changes, they were able to kill the elders and Innoa without it. That explosive sphere would now serve another purpose.
The lotus began to glow in gold and purple furiously. The two tattoos on their hands shone with all their might. Dense and pure Qi, coming from the cores of three elder cultivators, covered their entire bodies, creating a defensive barrier.
Bruno was tense. 'Focus on the Thunder Qi. I'll take care of the Yang. If we fail, we'll explode just like we set up for the elders. It will be ridiculous and humiliating.'
They didn't have much energy left to move; their bodies were almost collapsing, and the power of the ignited blood was in its final moments. They had to stay as far away as possible from the divine cultivator and the clan; he had already discovered the theft and would begin the devastating search.
That was the last desperate hope. Then, extreme Yang merged with the frenetic rays, and an apocalyptic surge of energy created a small sun in the midst of all that darkness.
BOOM!!!
The roar wasn't on the same level as the one caused by the being from the divine world, but it managed to shake an area of several kilometers. This immediately startled the man with red eyes and black clothes. It was the divine cultivator who had seemed to want to sink the entire planet into a sea of blood. He then turned in a direction and shot up into the sky like a black lightning bolt.
In the next second, he appeared at the center of a gigantic crater several kilometers wide, observing everything attentively and sensing the environment.
His red eyes seemed to grow increasingly tense and bloodthirsty until he spoke, incredulous: 'How... this power doesn't seem to have come from this trashy place.'
Then, he looked towards space. 'Thunder and Yang... speed and explosive energy... it can't be!' He quickly leaped into the sky in an almost manic frenzy.
With his leap, the entire world below seemed to collapse into a new explosion of world-destroying power. That vast area trembled violently for several minutes until, finally, everything calmed down.
As the dust cloud began to settle, at a point farther from the center, rocks started to move... then, two red and swollen hands emerged from the trembling earth.
'We did it...' Bruno spoke with almost no energy.
'He will realize he was deceived very soon, quickly.' Alm also spoke very weakly. They were now more like corpses than living beings; everything was broken, and not a single part was intact.
Alm and Bruno manipulated the explosion to rise toward space in the direction of the divine world. Since the power of the lotus was on the same level as the divine world, it deceived the cultivator. He thought the theft was connected to a divine cultivator and left in pursuit.
Then, with great effort, they got up. All the Qi that was stagnant in their meridians now circulated again, ready to be used, as the cultivator was gone.
They didn't care about dignity or anything else; there were no conditions to care about that. All the Qi were used in a single point of their feet in an explosion. Then, they flew like a ball... or a meteor of flesh and blood, feeling to the south of the continent.
***
A day passed, and within the darkness of an underground cave, Alm and Bruno opened their eyes, still completely weakened. The world returned to being stagnant in an oppressive way.
'He's back, hahahahah. We're already far away,' Bruno commented cheerfully.
But Alm didn't give any response. Suddenly, Bruno sighed; a tremendous pain and emptiness were transferred from Alm to Bruno. The two felt and shared everything, and Bruno could understand well why.
'The clan shouldn't have escaped his wrath...' Bruno spoke with a slight tremor escaping his eyes. 'Ruri must have been buried along with the entire clan...'
Bruno then sighed sadly. 'We sensed that guy's Qi. One day, we'll go to the divine world. It won't be hard to find his clan... revenge will come... calm down a bit.' Even though Bruno said those words, he was struggling to contain himself. He felt something disturbing that he hadn't felt in tens of thousands of years... the urge to cry.
Alm then spoke calmly. 'It always comes back to the same point... revenge, blood, and killing...'
'Our fate is always terrible. On earth, then in the other universe, and now, we barely arrive here, and the worst has already happened...'
Bruno sighed, looking at the ceiling. 'We've been through this before; there's no use thinking too much. We just look and move forward. We have all the runic formations, so let's use them soon. Let's heal ourselves and think about the next step.'
They closed their eyes and sighed heavily one last time...
Then, their minds flowed to the spatial inventory. Hundreds of pulsating runes were there silently. In the center was a bloody rune that, just by staring at it firmly, could make their frail bodies tremble.
'Let's start with the weaker ones, just to recover. Then we can try breaking through the levels and ascending realms,' Bruno spoke calmly.
Runes were slowly taken out, and they began converting into Qi with the Yin and Yang Supreme Qi Collector Cultivation Technique. Thanks to that, their bodies started to recover slowly.
They used two or three runes, and then they moved another one...
'Hmm? There is something different inside the inventory,' Bruno commented incredulously.
Alm then shifted his focus from body recovery to the inventory. Suddenly, the heart of the giant whale began to beat violently. It was so loud that the sound could reverberate throughout the entire cave.
Alm was shocked out of his mind. 'Impossible! The inventory shouldn't be able to hold living things!'
Yet, right there in the middle of all those runes, they sure say a little figure floating in the middle of the void. Obviously, the same question appeared on their minds. 'How did Ruri end up there?!'