MPCW Ch. 102New3 hours ago
The survivors were still on their feet, but none of them seemed willing to be the first idiot to step forward.
Wutian counted them.
Twelve cultivators were standing. One more lay nearby, breathing through clenched teeth but unable to rise. As for the half-step Dharma Aspect elder buried under the broken netherrack, he was either alive down there or dead already, and right now nobody had the nerve or spare attention to dig him out.
In a shit situation, people didn't watch the enemy as closely as they watched the leaders giving orders. Wutian knew that if he looked shaken, the rest of them would feel it right away. Fear would sink into their bones, spread to their legs, and sooner or later some idiot would bolt at the wrong time and die with his back turned.
The lead elder stood on his left, pressing one hand hard against his side. Chenwei had ended up farther to the right, slumped against the base of a crimson tree. His right arm stopped below the elbow. A formation strip had been wrapped tight around the stump, keeping him from bleeding out too fast.
The wither fired again.
Wutian threw himself aside with the others as the skull slammed into the netherrack where three cultivators had just been standing. The explosion chewed open a crater nearly two meters wide, spraying red stone across the formation and forcing everyone even farther out of position.
They pulled back twenty meters before gathering again. Even half-panicked and half-dead, they still knew how to fall into place.
"We can't hold this position in the open."
The lead elder didn't like hearing that. "Yes, I noticed."
"Let's stop trying to hold it." Wutian glanced toward the crimson forest, then back at the cultivators watching him for a decision. "We pull into the trees and make it follow."
No one looked thrilled, but no one had a better idea either. That was the truth of it. So they moved into the crimson forest.
---
The forest was doing half the work for them and making a damn mess of the other half.
The trees cut off the wither's direct sight, so it had to track them through vibration and sound. That gave the cultivators a little space to breathe, not much, but a few stolen heartbeats could keep a man alive when the thing hunting him could cross the distance before his fear caught up.
The problem was that the wither didn't give a shit about the forest.
It tore through the canopy whenever the trees got in its way. Crimson trunks as thick as a man's torso cracked apart under its charge, raining splinters, leaves, and broken branches across the battlefield. That wreckage made the ground harder to read, which threw off the skull volleys and forced their paths into awkward angles. Useful, sure, but only in the way a collapsing house was useful if it happened to fall on the creature chasing you.
Wutian used that bit of luck to check what they still had.
It wasn't much.
Two Nascent Soul cultivators were still rotting from direct skull hits. One of them had figured out that forcing qi into the wound only fed it, so he cut his circulation around it and stopped making it worse. The other fool hadn't reached the same conclusion. He was still trying to crush the effect head-on, burning through his reserves while the wither energy chewed deeper into him.
The lead elder wasn't in better shape. The few formation talismans he had left could maybe hold a barrier together for a few seconds before the wither smashed through it.
That alone was bad, but Wutian had seen battles go bad before. What bothered him was the silence spreading through the formation. If that took root, the wither wouldn't need to kill them all at once. They would break themselves first.
He glanced toward Chenwei, who sat slumped against a tree, his eyes still locked on the wither circling above the canopy, then turned to Mingfeng. If anyone here could pull the others back together before panic took over, it was him.
Mingfeng was the one he needed.
---
Mingfeng was already moving before Wutian finished looking his way.
That was what made him so hard to read. Wutian had spent eleven years watching him throw himself into disasters with that same calm face, and he still couldn't tell whether Mingfeng was reckless or just quicker than everyone else at seeing the shape of a bad situation. From the outside, the two looked damn near identical.
The wither was harassing the far side of the group, and Mingfeng used the opening to cross the formation line before it closed.
Chenwei sat near the edge of the broken formation. When Mingfeng crouched beside him and set a hand on his shoulder, he lifted his head.
"How bad?"
Chenwei looked down at himself. "I've had worse."
He let out a breath through his nose, then gave a faint grimace. "No, I haven't. I just thought a dying man was supposed to say something heroic."
Mingfeng almost smiled, but the situation didn't leave room for it. "Can you still feed the formation if we get one running?"
Chenwei glanced at the stump. "Not as well as the others, but yes."
Mingfeng didn't explain the plan yet. Plans had a way of sounding stupid before they worked, and this one was probably going to sound stupid even after. He checked the formation strip around Chenwei's stump, tightened it by two notches, then pulled a healing talisman from his inner robe. It wasn't one of the good ones. They'd burned through those already. Still, a weak talisman was better than letting Chenwei bleed out.
Above them, the wither fired again, and a cultivator's shout was swallowed by the crack of a defensive technique breaking apart. Something heavy struck the ground afterward.
Mingfeng didn't look up, and Chenwei kept his eyes on the line as well.
"The others are starting to crack," Mingfeng said quietly. "They won't admit it. Some of them don't even realize it's happening, but their bodies are already telling on them. Every time that thing shifts, half of them glance over their shoulders. I don't blame them. Anyone still on their feet after what we've seen today has already done more than most people would. But fear spreads fast once it finds a way in. One man runs, then the next man stops feeling ashamed for wanting to. After that, the line rots from the inside until there isn't a line left."
Mingfeng looked at him.
"I can't let that happen before I get back."
Chenwei's eyes narrowed.
"While I'm gone, they need someone to hold their eyes."
His gaze lowered to Chenwei's remaining hand, then lifted again before it could linger too long.
"If you stay, they'll stay. They'll look at you and think, 'Chenwei's still there. So I can't be the bastard who leaves first.' I need you to keep the others from deciding they've already lost. Hold them together a little longer, and the people still breathing might leave this place alive."
Under any other sky, Chenwei might've laughed and told him where to shove the speech. But he couldn't, because Mingfeng hadn't dressed it up as anything prettier than it was.
Chenwei looked past him and saw the same thing. One disciple kept wiping his palm against his robe, even though sweat wasn't the real reason his grip kept slipping. Another had already taken two steps back. No one had run yet, but they were close. They were all waiting for someone else to break first.
He breathed out through his nose. "You're a bastard. You're asking me to stand there and bleed so they'll feel too ashamed to run..."
He looked back at Mingfeng, anger flashing across his face before it quickly died down.
"But don't drag your feet, Mingfeng."
Mingfeng reached into his robe and took out a protection talisman, and Chenwei's gaze went to it. Even at a glance, Chenwei could tell it wasn't some cheap paper charm made for petty fights between juniors. Mingfeng placed it in Chenwei's remaining hand and closed his fingers around it.
"Keep it close, and don't use it unless you have no other choice."
"If it's that precious, why hand it to me?"
"If you go down, the others go with you."
Mingfeng held his wrist for another second before letting go. "There's one more thing. Later, when I give the signal, I need you to trust me. Just agree."
"Agree to what?"
"You'll understand when it happens."
Chenwei stared at him, then gave a dry laugh. "But if your signal gets me killed, I'm coming back to haunt you."
"If my signal gets you killed, then haunt me as much as you like."
The laugh died in Chenwei's throat.
Mingfeng rose before Chenwei could say anything else, and when he turned back to the main group, his expression was calm again.
---
When Mingfeng returned, the others had already gathered too tightly around Wutian and the lead elder. It wasn't hard to understand why. People looked for something solid when they were scared, and those two were the closest things the group had left to anchors. The problem was that fear had packed them shoulder to shoulder, and the wither had been punishing groups from the start.
Mingfeng pushed through them and stopped beside Wutian.
"We need to use the disk."
The lead elder frowned at him. "The disk needs a stationary target and two full minutes of uninterrupted input. We haven't had two uninterrupted seconds since that thing appeared."
"Because we're all moving together. As long as it has the whole group in front of it, it'll keep breaking our formation before you can start. So we split its attention."
Wutian understood before the lead elder did. His gaze shifted toward the clearing behind the trees, then back to Mingfeng.
"You want to draw..."
"I'm the only one here who can keep ahead of it for that long." Mingfeng didn't make it sound brave, because it wasn't. It was just the only piece left that fit. "You prepare the disk while I draw it out. When you're ready, I bring it back through the clearing."
The lead elder looked like he wanted to refuse, but the words didn't come out. Everyone there knew what would happen if they stayed where they were. The wither would keep tearing pieces off the group until there was no group left.
Wutian stared at Mingfeng for a few seconds. "Two minutes. If we aren't ready by then, you leave it and break away."
Mingfeng gave a short nod. "I don't plan on dying for dramatic effect."
He turned before anyone could argue, took three hard steps away from the group, and sent a fire technique snapping into the sky. It struck one of the wither's outer skulls and scattered across the bone without leaving so much as a burn mark, but he hadn't been trying to hurt it. When the wither turned toward him, he was already running.
---
Mingfeng had expected the chase to be difficult from the start, and it was already turning worse than he had planned for.
A tree burst apart behind him, followed by another and another, each impact throwing debris into his path as the skulls tore through the gaps after him. He couldn't treat the shattered wood and the attacks as separate threats when they kept feeding into each other. One skull clipped a trunk, the trunk blew apart, and the path ahead filled with burning shards that would gut him if the next volley didn't reach him first.
The roar of breaking wood told him the wither was close, and old habits pushed him into glancing back.
It was much closer than the sound had made it seem.
He drove more qi into his movement technique, pushing his speed higher as the forest smeared past him. He cut left around a cluster of thick trunks, hoping the turn would buy him space, but the wither barreled through the trees after him. A skull screamed past his shoulder and struck a tree ahead, and this time the explosion didn't just tear wood apart. Fire rolled across half the path, forcing him to vault the burning wreckage as a frown pulled at his face.
That hadn't happened before.
The earlier blasts had shattered trees and scorched the ground, but they hadn't spread fire like this. Still, the volleys weren't random. He had caught that much during the first stretch of the chase. The wither kept firing at where he had just been, not where he was going, and while that wasn't much of a weakness, it gave him a narrow gap after every shot to change direction before the next one came tearing in.
He took what he could get.
A broken trunk jutted from the ground ahead, and he used it like a ramp, launching himself up through the branches. Leaves snapped against him as he broke through the canopy, but he barely made it into open air before the wither tore after him.
That was all the warning he needed.
He dropped back through the canopy before it could line up another clean shot. A skull detonated in the branches behind him, and the blast slammed into his back, sending him hurtling forward. Fighting it would've been stupid, so he leaned into the force, turned that shove into speed, and covered forty meters before his feet hit dirt again.
The transmission talisman against his wrist pulsed once, and he turned back toward the path he had come from.
---
The wither was catching up.
Mingfeng hated turning around. Every instinct he had told him that running toward the creature was a stupid way to stay alive, but instinct was only useful when it wasn't panicking. His head was still clear, so he forced himself back toward the trap zone he had marked before leaving.
About eighty meters behind Wutian and the lead elder's position, the forest opened into a clearing that gave the formation disk room to trigger cleanly. The approach was straight, which meant the wither would have to commit before it realized it was being led into a trap.
The clearing came into view just as the crashing behind him got worse.
He crossed into the clearing and stopped.
The wither charged in after him, and the disk came alive.
Golden light surged up around the edge of the clearing, forming a tall barrier threaded with flickering runes. The patterns were complicated as hell, but even someone who couldn't read a single stroke would know they weren't there for decoration. Outside the barrier, the Nascent Soul cultivators powering the disk had already gone pale from the drain, though the formation still managed to hold when the wither slammed into it.
The impact sent a violent ripple through the golden light, and Mingfeng's eyes narrowed as the disk shuddered under the strain. For two seconds, it looked like the whole thing might break on the first strike, which would've been a truly miserable joke after all that planning. The backlash hit the cultivators outside almost as hard. Several of them staggered, and one dropped to a knee, but he kept feeding spiritual energy into the formation.
Once the light steadied, the wither pulled back. It started circling along the inside, testing the formation as it moved and looking for any crack that could turn the trap back on them.
Mingfeng was trapped inside the containment zone with the wither sealed in beside him, which was a miserable position but not a death sentence. As long as he kept moving, the creature couldn't reach anyone beyond the boundary, and the disk still held the whole mess in place.
Then the wither turned on him.
He had less than a second to react, which was just a fancy way of saying he was screwed if he picked wrong. He'd known this could happen, but knowing trouble might come knocking hadn't given him a clean answer for when it kicked the door in. There hadn't been time to prepare anything clever, so he raised the fastest defensive technique he had. The shield snapped around him, and the strain in its surface told him it couldn't take the hit.
If no one took his place, he was dead.
They hadn't planned it out in words. There hadn't been time for that. Mingfeng had only told him to trust the signal, and now Chenwei understood what that meant. He forced himself to his feet and reached the edge of the golden barrier with the talisman burning in his palm. Mingfeng met his eyes from the other side, and neither of them wasted breath pretending there was a better choice. So he stepped through.
Mingfeng triggered the spatial switch the instant Chenwei crossed the boundary.
He had spent forty years refining that technique, turning it into one of the few skills he could take real pride in. Every time he'd used it before, it had been to pull himself out of danger. This time, he used it to put someone else in his place, and even with Chenwei's consent, the decision still tasted foul.
Space twisted around them, and when it settled, Mingfeng found himself outside the containment zone while Chenwei stood where he had been.
The wither hit him before he could take another step. The protection talisman flared bright as it took the impact. But it couldn't fully block a charge like that, not when even a proper Dharma Aspect defense would have struggled, but it kept Chenwei from being driven straight into the ground. The remaining force threw him sideways into the inner wall of the formation, where golden light burst against his back and held him for a second before letting him drop onto the netherrack inside the containment zone.
Mingfeng didn't move from the edge of the boundary until Chenwei's chest rose again.
The formation gave another pulse, and the wither's attention snapped back to the golden track carved through it. It slid away from Chenwei and resumed its circuit around the containment zone, that rotten pressure trailing behind it.
No one spoke at first. After watching Chenwei get used like bait, even the loudmouths had the sense to swallow their noise.
Wutian looked at Mingfeng.
"He volunteered."
"That doesn't make it better."
Mingfeng had no answer to that. Chenwei was still alive, but calling that a victory felt like pouring mud into a cup and pretending it was wine.
Wutian turned back to the disk. The cultivators feeding it were already trembling. An immortal-grade formation disk wasn't meant to run on human spiritual energy for this long, not at full strength.
The lead elder stepped up beside him. "What's our next move?"
"We decide what to do with the creature while it's still contained." Wutian kept his eyes on the wither as it circled the barrier. Every time it pressed into the golden wall, the formation rippled, and the cultivators holding the disk nearly buckled. "We can't keep it trapped like this."
"Then kill the damn thing!" one of the Nascent Soul cultivators snapped.
The man beside him turned and stared at him. "You think we haven't tried? If it were that easy, it'd already be dead!"
That shut him up.
The disk had caught the wither, but keeping it there was bleeding them dry. Even if they scraped together everything left in their cores, it wouldn't kill a monster that had walked through a mass talisman detonation like rain on a roof.
There was another problem too. The white-haired teenager still hadn't stepped out of the trees.
Wutian hadn't missed the trident strikes during the chaos. None of those strikes had been wild. The boy had waited for the wither to drag everyone's eyes away, then struck clean from the edge before slipping back out of reach.
He hadn't said anything earlier because they had been trying not to die. Now that the creature was trapped, the second blade at their throat couldn't be ignored.
"We have another problem," he said quietly to the lead elder. "The boy has been fighting from the edges this entire time. He's been using the creature to hide his hand."
The lead elder looked toward the treeline, then back at the golden barrier. "This day has become unplea..."
The disk shrieked, and the sound rang across the clearing like metal being bent past its limit. It looked like the wither had struck the formation again, but the light didn't ripple outward like before. It twisted toward the center, pulling tight around the creature as the disk under the cultivators' hands began to shake. The men feeding it went pale, and one of them tried to pull back before the backlash locked him in place.
White light tore through the containment zone.
But it was gone almost as soon as it appeared. One of the wither's outer skulls had been split open from crown to jaw, and blue aura flickered through the crack.
"Chenwei..."
Wutian saw it clearly. So did the three cultivators pouring power into the disk. One of them sucked in a sharp breath through his teeth, but before that small trace of hope could spread, the wither healed. The crack closed as if it had never existed, and the blue aura settled back around it.
The sight crushed whatever courage had started to rise in them, and as the pressure in the air grew heavier, the golden barrier began to buckle. When the wither forced its way forward, the formation gave out, and the backlash tore through the disk, snuffing out its light and dragging the cultivators bound to it down with it. Most fell to their knees and couldn't rise, while two went face-first onto the netherrack.
Before anyone could recover, the wither passed through the broken formation and struck the nearest cultivator while he was still staring at the empty space where the barrier had been, sending him hurtling backward through one crimson tree and into another before the forest darkness swallowed him.
Nobody had time to think about the flash. Wutian caught Mingfeng's arm and pulled him into the treeline before either of them could waste breath asking stupid questions. Two more impacts hit behind them in quick succession.
Wutian didn't look back. The sound alone told him what had happened, and turning around would only waste time they didn't have.
He kept running, pulling Mingfeng through the ruined terrain as the wither followed the tremor of their steps. Stopping would've killed them, but running wasn't much safer. It only bought them seconds, and right now, seconds were all they could ask for.
They cut past split trunks, torn roots, and chunks of ground the wither had smashed apart earlier. The wreckage caught at their feet and slowed them down, but it also kept the wither from charging in a straight line. Each time it rushed forward, the broken terrain forced it to adjust, and that small delay was the only reason they hadn't been caught.
Mingfeng was bleeding under his left arm. He had been for a while, but he hadn't said a word, which told Wutian the wound was either something he could still move with or so bad that talking about it wouldn't change anything.
Wutian couldn't spare much attention for it anyway. The wither-effect graze across his ribs was still eating at him, held in check only because he kept his qi flowing around the injury. That kept the corruption from digging deeper, but it burned through his reserves.
The Nether didn't replenish qi, so every bit they used came from what they had brought through the portal. Every breath and step wore that reserve down, and any burst of speed burned through it even faster. There was no quiet corner where they could hide and recover, and once their qi ran dry in this place, there wouldn't be anything left to do.
The wither came crashing through the canopy above them, and Wutian pulled Mingfeng sideways behind a pair of fallen trunks just as the charge tore past. The force shook loose bark across their shoulders and carved a fresh path through the crimson forest before the creature overshot them. He took the few seconds before it could turn back and dragged Mingfeng deeper into the wreckage.
Mingfeng looked at him, but Wutian didn't ask what he was thinking. They had fought together for too many years to waste breath saying what both of them already knew. Through the gap the wither had torn in the canopy, Wutian could see open ground beyond the trees, and Alexei was standing right in the middle of it. He turned toward the forest's edge, and Mingfeng followed.
---
Alexei heard the disk fail before the light caught up to him, and the timing told him the blast had started inside the containment zone. Before he could look that way, a cold killing intent swept across the ground and fixed itself on him.
He turned toward the pressure and saw the lead elder crossing the open ground toward him. The old man didn't look back, even as the wither tore through the surviving cultivators behind him, and that single-minded focus made his choice clear.
The old man had stopped hesitating, which meant Alexei couldn't afford to either. He pulled the enchanted golden apple from his inventory and finished it in four bites while the elder crossed the open ground. The absorption settled over his body just as the distance between them shrank to twenty meters.
Alexei placed the trident on the netherrack in front of him and stripped off his armor. Most of his gear disappeared into his inventory until he stood there in cultivation robes and golden boots.
The elder looked at the trident first, then at the missing armor.
Alexei knew how it looked, but he hadn't come this far just to hide behind gear that could decide the fight for him. His gear was useful when he wanted something dead. But it was useless when he wanted to understand how far his cultivation had come.
For this, he needed his techniques to do the work.
"You followed me out of the city, which means someone wanted something from me. I'd rather know what it was before this turns into more killing."
The elder didn't answer right away, but the fact that he was considering it meant the words had landed. "The person behind you has created something that could change the future of an entire clan. It would be strange if no one reached for it."
"That's a polished way to say greed. Why dress it up?" Alexei looked him over once, then asked, "Who gave the order?"
The elder stayed silent.
Alexei sighed through his nose. "We can do this with fists, but you're relying on qi coating right now, and you aren't a body cultivator. This won't end well for you."
The elder's expression barely moved, but his eyes gave him away. Alexei caught the change just as the man rushed in, closing the distance in one burst and driving his palm toward Alexei's shoulder.
Alexei raised his hand and snapped his fingers.
The netherrack beneath the elder cracked open. Broken chunks tore free and flew toward Alexei, pulled by his spiritual energy. They slammed across his torso and arms just in time for the strike to land, forming armor that looked ugly as hell.
But he didn't care. Ugly rock was still rock, and for now, it stood between his body and the elder's palm.
The elder sank lower and changed the angle of his next strike, slipping past the thick plates toward the joint gaps. His palm caught an opening, broke through two plates, and drove the force into Alexei's shoulder, forcing him back a step. Before the elder could press in again, Alexei pulled more netherrack from the ground and slammed it over the broken gap, sealing it in a rough, ugly patch.
The fight was starting to pull the piglins closer. They circled the edges with their weapons ready, snorting around their tusks as they watched for a chance to rush in.
The elder caught the first one that came at him, twisted with its charge, and drove it into the netherrack. The second piglin came right after, swinging wildly, and he put that one down too. The third was the one that caused trouble. It came from the wrong side while he was already turning, and the shift in his attention gave Alexei the opening he needed.
Alexei pushed his hand into the crack, and netherrack ripped up between them in a jagged pillar. The elder tried to break through it, but Alexei shoved the whole mass sideways and forced him to move. He stepped right to avoid getting pinned, only to run straight into two more piglins closing in from that direction.
His barrier thinned during the adjustment. A crossbow bolt scraped over his shoulder, and Alexei didn't let the gap close. Netherrack crawled over his hands as he drove both fists into the weak point.
The elder's balance broke, and his knee struck the ground. The piglins took that as their chance and rushed in, crowding over each other as they kicked his ribs, chopped at his back, and brought their weapons down wherever his guard slipped. But the elder still wasn't finished. A half-step Dharma Aspect cultivator didn't lose all threat just because he had been forced down. Even on one knee, he avoided the worst blows, knocked weapons off course, and made every piglin that leaned in too far pay for it.
If he had been given a little more time, he would've survived the swarm. His reserves were nearly gone, but his skill was still there, and tired hands could still kill.
Alexei didn't give him that time.
He picked up the trident, and the elder had only just looked up when the weapon was already flying through the opening. It pierced his chest, sank deep, and tore free as it snapped back toward Alexei's hand. The old man's hands lifted by reflex, still trying to call up a defense that wasn't there anymore, but all he managed was a broken breath before his back hit the netherrack. The piglins backed away once they realized he wasn't getting up.
He stood over the elder sprawled on the ground and felt about as much as he would for a kicked-over chair. The old man was down, and that was all there was to it.
The real problem was still inside the forest.
The wither was tearing through the trees, but the noise coming from that direction wasn't the same anymore. The voices had thinned out, the screams were fewer, and the survivors had clearly given up on standing their ground. From the sound of it, they were running hard, and the distance between them and the fight was growing fast.
Alexei listened through the chaos until he caught what he needed, then turned his attention toward the trees. Anyone still trapped out there was having a terrible day.
Wutian came out of the forest first, with Mingfeng only a few steps behind him. They stopped at the edge of the clearing, roughly thirty meters from Alexei. Broken netherrack lay scattered across the ground between them, along with splintered debris and the bodies of four cultivators, while the wither kept smashing its way through the canopy behind them.
Wutian looked like he was barely holding himself together. His qi was almost drained, and Mingfeng wasn't in much better shape. The wither was going to break into the clearing soon, but the first thing Wutian saw was Alexei standing in the open with a trident in his hand and a pack of piglins waiting behind him.
"Is this your territory? Which faction sent you? Who are you?"
Alexei stared at Wutian.
"Wow. Look at you. You're real talkative now, aren't you?"
The wither crashed through the last row of trees behind Wutian, its shadow sweeping over the clearing. Alexei looked from the creature to the piglins beside him, only for a cold feeling to spread through his chest before he could make sense of it.
When he looked back at Wutian, he was smiling.
"As for who I am..." he said as white light flashed through his eyes for a second. "Let's just say I'm the last builder."
A piglin beside him let out a sharp cry and lifted his weapon. Another joined in, and then the rest moved with them, raising their weapons as their voices rose into a rough roar. Before Alexei could make sense of it, they were already rushing past him toward the treeline and the enemies ahead.
"What the fuck is going on?"
MPCW Ch. 103New3 hours ago
The piglins that had charged past Alexei weren't acting like piglins.
He stayed near the edge of the clearing, watching the fight with a growing frown. The longer it went on, the more wrong it looked.
Piglins were nasty and greedy, but they weren't complicated. As long as you wore gold and didn't touch their belongings, they could be dealt with. Break those rules, though, and they turned on you fast. They rushed in together, crossbows firing and swords swinging until the target dropped or ran. That was how they fought. The ones that wandered into the nether fortress alone were almost pathetic. Without a pack behind them, they just charged ahead and died on whatever weapon happened to be waiting.
These piglins weren't doing that.
They chose Wutian as the threat, which wasn't stupid. He wasn't wearing a scrap of gold, and even half-drained, he was still the most dangerous thing in the clearing. Three piglins rushed him at once, only for him to cut them down in under two seconds. A fourth tried to come in from the left, but he shifted with the charge and forced it into the path of a fifth, ruining both attacks before they could box him in. The two piglins crashed together, giving him the only opening he needed.
He was tired, but tired didn't mean helpless. His technique hadn't dulled, and as long as the piglins kept coming at him one at a time, or in small, disorganized groups, he could keep cutting them down until his body reached its limit.
One of the piglins seemed to understand.
It was larger than the rest, with a crossbow bolt buried in its shoulder, but it didn't try to pull the thing out. While the others threw themselves at Wutian and got butchered for it, this one stayed back, watching the rhythm of the fight.
When two more piglins charged in, Wutian killed the first before it could even swing. He moved straight for the second, and that was when the larger piglin stepped in from behind and rammed its shoulder into Wutian's back. Sloppy as shit, but the timing was mean. Wutian's weight had already shifted forward, so the hit knocked him off balance.
The second piglin took the opening and slashed his arm before Wutian recovered.
The larger piglin picked up a gold sword from a dead comrade, turned it once in its hand, then looked back at Wutian.
---
Wutian had noticed the larger piglin as well.
His qi was nearly spent, and the wither from the earlier graze still hadn't stopped chewing through him. He could manage against ordinary piglins by reading their rhythm and moving before they fully committed.
That trick started falling apart when the big guy changed.
At first, he thought it was just luck. Then he broke left, and the large piglin didn't bite on the opening to the right. He tried the same redirection technique that had thrown three others off balance, but the fourth time, the big one pulled back and shoved another piglin into range.
A blade slipped past Wutian's guard and ripped across his shoulder.
His barrier was gone. His qi had fallen to maybe four percent, and even that felt generous.
Mingfeng was about ten meters to his right, trapped in the same mess with another group of piglins pressing in around him. His movements were still controlled, but the sharpness was fading, and every technique he used spent qi he couldn't afford to waste. Wutian could already see where this was headed. They were both running dry, and once they hit empty, this clearing would turn into a slaughterhouse.
Wutian feinted left, then cut right before the large piglin could trap him, but the creature read the move. It shifted with him and blocked his path before he could finish the turn, its gold sword sweeping in at waist height. If Wutian pushed forward, he would run straight into the blade, so he pulled back with his foot scraping over the netherrack and felt the open space behind him shrink again.
A fallen cultivator lay a couple meters to his left. Near the body was a golden sword, likely dropped when one of the piglins went down. His gaze snapped to it. If he could grab it, he might still have something to use.
He ducked low and caught the hilt, only for the sword to stay where it was. Clenching his jaw, he pulled harder and drew on what remained of his qi. The blade dragged across the ground by a few centimeters before his strength failed, and the weight of it told him the truth. He couldn't use it. Trying again would only tear his hand apart before the piglin even reached him.
So he released the hilt and rose to face the creature.
The large piglin had let him try without showing the slightest concern. A rough sound came from its throat, and then it advanced.
---
Alexei watched the big piglin for a few seconds, and his unease only grew. Something was off about it, and not in the usual way that came with strange monsters doing strange things. The piglin moved with purpose, like there was more behind its eyes than hunger or brute instinct. He couldn't tell whether that made it a threat to him right now or just a problem waiting to become one, but ignoring it would be stupid. Maybe he should just call it the champion piglin from now on, if only so he didn't have to keep thinking of it as "the strange big one."
That thought barely passed before he realized the wither had gone quiet.
That was never a good sign.
He turned and found the wither hovering ten meters behind him, just outside the trees, all three skulls fixed on the champion piglin. For some reason, it had ignored everyone else and locked onto that one enemy.
The wither fired.
Alexei moved into the shot and caught the skull on his shield. The blast hit harder than anything from the first phase, driving him back three steps before the force bled out through his boots.
The champion piglin didn't even look over. It kept staring at Mingfeng, like Alexei taking a skull to the face for it was none of its business.
"Yeah, you're welcome by the way," Alexei muttered, then snapped his hand toward his trident.
The weapon shot into his grip, stretched to ten meters, and drove straight for the wither.
All three skulls turned toward the incoming point and took most of the blow before the tip sank into the wither's central body. The strike wasn't as clean as he wanted, but it didn't need to be. The impact knocked the wither sideways and sent it crashing into the netherrack near Mingfeng, scattering red stone across the ground.
Mingfeng took one look at the wither standing less than two meters away and decided he had urgent business somewhere else. He spun to run, but while he had been busy staring death in the face, the champion piglin had already crossed the clearing. He crashed straight into it before he could stop himself.
By the time he realized what had happened, the piglin's fist was already coming up under his jaw. The uppercut landed clean, lifting him off his feet and sending him flying over the clearing with his limbs loose.
Alexei followed him with his eyes, clinging to the hope that the cultivator would at least come down somewhere that wouldn't kill him outright. That hope didn't last long, because the wither pulled itself together and looked up.
Mingfeng reached the top of his arc with nowhere left to go. Fire gathered in his palms, and he shoved it downward with everything he had left. Apparently, even half-dead and flying through the air, he still hadn't learned how to do anything except push forward.
The wither opened its mouths and sucked the flames in.
The fire disappeared down its throats. Orange streaked through the blue haze around its body, and when the wither exhaled, it blasted the clearing with a column of flame that scorched the netherrack black before ripping onward.
Mingfeng had spent everything, so there was nothing left to slow his fall.
---
"Damn..." Alexei watched fire chew through the clearing like the Nether had decided it wanted the place extra crispy. "That's definitely not a normal wither."
He had killed plenty of withers before, so he knew the usual bullshit. They didn't burn, sure. That was part of the deal. But throwing fire back? That wasn't in the standard package.
The champion piglin had shifted to his left, its eyes locked on the wither with the same focus it had shown Mingfeng earlier. Its priorities were clear now. The giant glowing three-headed monster came first, and everything else could wait.
The wither seemed to change after every kill. Its skulls snapped toward new targets faster, and each shot struck with more force, pushing farther through the air after impact. Alexei had noticed it after Mingfeng died, but once the wither turned toward Wutian, there was no mistaking the pattern.
Wutian stood in the center of the clearing with nothing left. Running wouldn't save him, and sitting down would only be surrender before the attack even reached him. He didn't seem interested in giving death that satisfaction.
The wither fired, and Wutian raised both hands to force out the last of his power. The defense broke almost as soon as it formed. The burning skull hit him in the chest and blasted him into the netherrack, cracking the ground beneath him as fire washed over the impact point. As the flames began to fade, the body was gone, leaving only ash to drift across the scorched ground.
Alexei stared at the ash for a second, then put away the trident and drew his netherite sword. Beside him, the champion piglin turned its head and lowered its stance slightly. Whether it was ready to fight with him or just waiting to see how stupid he was about to be, he couldn't tell.
"Let's do thi..."
He stopped as black smoke gathered under the wither.
Wither skeletons dragged themselves out of the netherrack, spreading through the battlefield to intercept the piglins. Alexei clicked his tongue and sent the blade stretching to sixty meters before sweeping it across the wither's flight path. The wither pulled back before the cut could split through its frame, then answered with three skulls. Two screamed toward Alexei, and the third shot toward the champion.
Alexei knocked the first skull aside and took the second across his left side. Dark light flashed over his armor, but the backlash missed the wither and ripped through the skeletons it had summoned earlier. The ones holding back the piglins broke apart, and the sudden gap gave the piglins room to move.
The wither noticed it immediately. Black smoke gathered beneath its frame as it began calling up another batch of skeletons, but the champion was already moving. It ducked under the skull flying toward it, rushed in, and drove its sword up into the wither's central frame. The wither barely reacted, but that tiny twitch was all Alexei needed to choose his target.
He shortened his sword to two meters while closing in, then brought the blade down on the same spot the champion had struck. Before the wither could pull away, he hit it again.
The champion kept circling, forcing the skull heads to track it, while the remaining piglins rushed the wither's lower frame. Most of them were thrown off almost as soon as they latched on, but each one that reached it pulled away a little more of its focus, and that gave Alexei something to work with.
Then the wither opened up with its new fire attack.
He sprang back, forced the sword out to forty meters, and brought it down with both hands. The blade smashed into the wither and drove it straight into the netherrack, sending a hard tremor through the clearing. Before the wither could gather itself, he shrunk the sword back to fighting length as he moved, while the champion attacked from the other side and kept the creature from turning toward either of them.
The wither's health kept falling, but it refused to die quickly. It was still healing from whatever scraps it could steal out of the fight, and every kill fed more power into it, even though the remaining piglins were weaker than before.
The champion kept pace through all of it. Whenever the wither tried to pull away and climb, the champion was already underneath it, forcing it back down before it could get clear of the ground. The wither tried twice, and both attempts ended with it slammed back into reach.
When the champion pinned the wither low, Alexei enlarged the sword to its full size and brought it down like a falling tower. Then, before the wither could recover, he shrank the blade again and carved into the central frame, keeping it fast and close before the creature could reset.
The third time the wither tried to take off, it barely got anywhere before crashing into the middle of the clearing. This time, it stayed down, its blue aura fading into the dry Nether air as the skull projectile forming in its mouths broke apart before it could fire.
The champion stood over the corpse, staring down at what was left of it, then turned its head toward Alexei, who stared back. Neither of them said a damn thing.
There wasn't anything worth saying.
---
Alexei dropped onto a chunk of netherrack and stared across the clearing. He needed answers about the Xu Clan, but every person who could've given him one was dead. That was the trouble with killing an ambush too well. It solved the problem, then left you sitting in the mess afterward with nothing but corpses and guesses.
So he went through the spatial rings.
The Xu Clan hadn't come in sloppy. Most of the rings still had things inside, just nothing that tied them to anyone useful. He kept digging until one ring gave him something worth a second look.
Inside was a folded map with a route marked from Obsidian Ridge City to the area he had been heading to recently. There was also a timing note written beside it, and the schedule matched the ambush far too closely.
While Alexei was still working through that, the piglins began gathering the bodies. He barely paid attention at first, since piglins looting dead enemies wasn't exactly strange. Then he noticed the piglins were dragging the corpses toward the edge of the clearing and stacking them together.
The champion directed the whole thing from nearby, giving short grunts and pointing with quick gestures. A few piglins shifted direction, hauling one corpse to the left, turning another over, and dragging a third onto the growing pile.
"Huh."
Alexei had meant to handle the bodies himself, but disposal in the Nether wasn't difficult. Lava was everywhere, and it had a reliable way of turning evidence into something no one could prove had ever existed.
The piglins saved him the trouble. They were already dragging the bodies away and picking through whatever they wanted from the dead, whether that meant meat, bones, gear, or something he had no interest in naming. He didn't need to know, and he sure as hell wasn't going to stop them when their scavenging made his life easier.
He gave the clearing one last look before he left, checking whether the fight had thrown anything useful somewhere out of sight. When nothing else turned up, he headed for the Nether portal and noticed the champion standing nearby, silently watching him.
Once their eyes met, the champion lifted one hand. The other piglins stopped what they were doing and turned toward Alexei before raising their hands as well.
He hadn't expected a send-off like that, but after looking over the group, he couldn't help smiling faintly as he nodded back.
"I'll come by again. Try not to get yourselves killed before then."
Then he flew over to the Nether portal, pulled out an obsidian block, filled the gap in the frame, and lit it.
----------
[POV: Xu Ran]
Three hours became four, then four began creeping toward five.
By then, Ran had already forced himself to stop pacing. It was useless, and worse, it looked useless. A man in his position couldn't afford to circle the hall like some servant waiting for punishment. He took the largest chair, sat with his back straight, and kept his eyes on the door.
Two hours ago, the Immortal Alliance had issued a mobilization notice. Not long after that, the protective formation around Obsidian Ridge came alive, and that was the detail he couldn't ignore.
A city formation wasn't something they used for petty problems. No Dharma Aspect elder would leave seclusion over a street killing or some spoiled young master getting embarrassed in public. If the elder guarding the city had raised the barrier, then the situation beyond the walls couldn't be simple anymore.
Ran had repeated the facts to himself until they almost sounded convincing.
His team had gone out on what should've been a standard capture operation several kilometers from the city. Their auras were concealed, their clan insignia were removed, and nothing about the job should've had anything to do with the Immortal Alliance, much less forced Obsidian Ridge to lock itself behind a formation.
The timing should've been a coincidence. The problem was that his team still hadn't come back.
He kept telling himself there was still a proper explanation. The trouble was, he couldn't find one that wasn't bullshit.
Twenty late Nascent Soul cultivators and three half-step Dharma Aspect elders should've been more than enough to settle this quietly. No one outside the clan should've even known it had started until it was already over. But three hours had passed.
By now, success should've come with a report. Failure should've come with a warning. Even if things had gone sideways, someone should've sent back a message before the whole thing collapsed.
But there was nothing.
Silence meant something had cut them off cleanly, and there weren't many things in the region that could do that to every single person they had sent.
Unless that thing had been with them from the start.
He was still sitting in the chair when a servant stopped outside the door.
"The Immortal Alliance is asking the clans to send representatives. They said there's been a situation outside the city."
"Tell them we'll send someone shortly."
"Yes."
The servant left. Ran sat there for another five minutes, going through the operation again from the beginning, trying to make the numbers say something different.
----------
Alexei stepped out of the portal into late-afternoon light, with the sun already sinking toward the horizon and the day mostly wasted behind him.
He'd stayed in the Nether too long.
He took the portal frame apart, packed the blocks away, then turned toward Obsidian Ridge City. Its walls were visible in the distance, and every piece of the ambush seemed to point back there.
Someone in Obsidian Ridge had known where he was headed. That narrowed things down fast, since he hadn't been making friends all over the city. Liang, Elder Fei, Gu, and Ping were the only names with weight, and once he connected them to the ambush, none of them looked harmless.
He kept walking while the thought worked through him. The attackers had known too much for this to be chance, which meant someone involved had access to his plans, or at least knew someone who did. When the outer approach to the city came into sight, he still couldn't point to a culprit, but he knew which floorboards to start tearing up.
Before he saw the gate, he saw the crowd.
Thousands of cultivators hovered in the air outside the city walls, gathered in a broad formation over the approach. At a glance, it could've passed for training, but only if everyone involved trained with clenched jaws and murder in their posture.
Nine figures held the front of the formation. Their cultivation pressure was heavier than the rest, and from the way the nearby disciples kept a step behind them, they were either elders or people with similar authority. They weren't standing in a straight line, but their spacing sealed off the open ground before the gate all the same.
Elder Fei stood with them.
Alexei walked toward the group. Several cultivators noticed him before he reached them, though most only gave him a quick look before turning their attention back to the road. The elder at the front was different.
The elder at the front didn't look away so quickly. He glanced over Alexei's armor, noticed the mud on his boots, and let his gaze drift toward the road behind him before meeting his eyes.
"I am Elder Rou, assigned by the Immortal Alliance to assist with the current investigation. Young friend, did you come from outside the city?"
"That tends to happen when someone walks toward a city gate."
A few of the younger cultivators glanced over. The elder didn't react much, but the pause before his reply made it clear he had heard the tone.
"With the formation active, we have to ask a few questions before letting anyone through."
"Okay." Alexei slowed near the edge of the group and stopped there. "I was heading toward the site of a recent rumor, but I got delayed. Now I'm coming back to restock before going out again."
The elder studied him a little more closely. "A rumor?"
"People were talking about something unusual outside the city. I didn't get close before other things got in the way."
"There was a significant disturbance in that direction earlier. Some cultivators were involved."
Alexei glanced toward the road behind him, then looked back. "Then I picked a good day to be late."
"That may be true."
The elder expected him to continue, but Alexei let the conversation stop there. He had learned that silence made people uncomfortable, and uncomfortable people often rushed to fill it. The elder had decent control, but from the way his gaze stayed on Alexei, he wasn't enjoying the game.
After a few seconds, the elder continued. "Entry isn't being handled normally right now. We need to confirm identity, affiliation, and reason for return."
"I have sect identification. I also have a commission record with the Xu Clan. Unless the city changed its rules in the last few hours, both should still be valid. Elder Fei can verify it if you need confirmation from someone here."
The elder turned toward Elder Fei, who had been standing with the front group without saying much. Elder Fei met his eyes and gave a small nod.
"The commission is real. He completed the requested work and delivered the items. As far as that matter is concerned, his record is clean."
"As far as that matter is concerned?" Alexei asked. "That sounds pretty heartless, don't you think?"
Elder Fei didn't look offended. "I'm sorry if it comes across that way, but I'm not responsible for anything else you do."
"That's fair, I guess."
The elder listened to the exchange, then turned his attention back to Alexei. "So you took a job from the Xu Clan."
"That's what I said."
"You're working with them?"
"I accepted a commission. That's not the same as working for them."
The elder's gaze flicked toward two cultivators near the front, and one of them lowered his eyes to the ground.
"Your documents will be checked at the gate. If everything is in order, standard entry can be granted. The Immortal Alliance is also speaking with anyone who left the city before the formation activated."
"I'm available."
The answer made the elder pause, but he soon stepped aside and motioned for the perimeter to open. The disciples closest to the gate moved aside, though they left only a narrow path.
Behind him, the elder leaned toward the cultivator beside him and spoke in a low voice. Alexei couldn't make out the words even with his enhanced hearing, which meant a silence formation was in place, but the content wasn't important. The Xu Clan name had changed the old man's posture, and the Immortal Alliance wanted to question people from the area Alexei had supposedly failed to reach.
He had come to the city for answers about what had happened outside its walls. He just hadn't expected the Immortal Alliance to hand him such a convenient excuse to get involved.