Second Valley

The crimson axe head of his halberd swept wide arcs, cutting through a black and green serpent as wide as a man, and a falcon caught off guard as the serpent blocked its view of the incoming weapon.

Blood scattered as the two creatures were cut deeply, and then again as Lucian moved his halberd in a graceful transition to stab through the head of the serpent with an elongated spear point.

The two bodies hit the ground with dull thuds as their remains began to break down into a faint red mist, but Lucian had no time to waste as another three creatures assaulted him; a jackal with exaggeratedly long canines, a horned earthworm as thick as the snake earlier, and what looked like a relatively harmless beaver if one excluded its black stone teeth and giant size.

Every one of these creatures had strength equivalent to a high 3rd stage Augmentor, though none of the intelligence or martial skill.

With a flourish of his weapon, he readied himself, wary not of their strength, but of the peculiar abilities they hid.

The earthworm and beaver moved first, the former stabbing at him with a large horn on its head as the beaver slapped its weighty tail on the ground, sending tremors and waves beneath his footing.

Using the peculiar shape of the halberd, he controlled and deflected the horn, moving his feet along with the shifting ground so as to maintain his balance as he spun to deliver a swift stab and retrieval between the eyes of the beaver, killing it.

His intuition gave a soft warning as he moved away from the beaver and locked eyes with the Jackal, its jaw impossibly wide as the sound of dislocating bones rang forth. From behind those exaggeratedly long fangs, a bassy rumble assaulted the air as a shockwave rocked through him, shaking his grip on the halberd and sending him spiraling backward in the air.

The earthworm seized its chance to try impaling him as he flew through the air, and it was thanks only to his tranquil state and metahuman levels of bodily control that he managed to rotate in the air to parry the horn while hooking his halberd blade onto it and reining himself in.

A swift arc cut the earthworm almost in half, while the jackal lept in on him. Its oversized fangs should have reached him, if not for his figure dimming for just a moment as he moved. He had taken half a step into the world of shadows, just enough to confuse the simple-minded creature, which allowed him to disguise his movement to the left.

As the jackal missed its mark and fell to his right, Lucian pointed his right hand at the creature and released a bloody projectile that bore a hole through the things head as it slid past.

When the jackal stilled, silence finally reigned.

"Finally." he sighed, looking around at the dozen small balls of faint red mist that awaited him. Even before the serpent whose venom still made him shiver, and the falcon that had been annoyingly agile, there were seven more of these creatures he'd slain.

"And I worried that others may have killed them all" he chuckled at himself with a shake of the head. Every one of these creatures was as strong as a senior-most disciple in a sect, but even in numbers, it was not their strength he feared.

They all held a mysterious power or dreadful venom that could spell his end if he were caught off guard. It was worth it though.

He couldn't steal life or blood from these things to create Trueblood or practice his boundless condensation; after all, they weren't real creatures, but some kind of apparition, a construct of The Maelstrom, he guessed.

The red mist they left, however, was perhaps better than life or blood for his cultivation. After all, ever since the Steel Body technique became insufficient for his use, he'd never acquired another technique for training the body.

The Grand Life Tome strengthened his body of course, by an incredible amount even, but it never hurt to have an auxiliary technique to support that growth.

The red mist here was not something he could mimic outside, but it was certainly a gift he'd accept greedily.

Walking from one ball of red mist to the next, every one of them only faintly red, he touched them each with bare skin, and they absorbed into his body on their own, spreading to strengthen and nourish his physical might and defense.

'At every step of the way, this place shows some incentive. Even in a test of will, there is a small reward for reaching the exit, and the inheritance of a dead man for truly succeeding. Even if the core inheritance has already been taken, just the rest is incentive enough to brave the dangers here.'

The bodily pressure was nothing ignorable now, but still nothing Lucian could not bear. It made his movements more rigid, and his reactions a fraction of a second slower, which was a serious condition facing an equal or greater, but against simple beasts of the 3rd stage, it didn't matter.

He continued up the stairs and more beasts appeared, so he cut them down. Again and again he cut them down, absorbed the mist, and adapted to the pressure. All the way until he reached the constant blanket of white clouds that shrouded the mountain's peak.

He'd expected the clouds to feel either fluffy or moist by their appearance and what little he knew of them, but strangely, they had no feel at all here. Like they were simply visual phenomena.

It took three minutes to pass through them all, his vision as clouded as in the Valley of Mist, but when he did finally free himself of them, and reach the top of the mountain, something astonishing lay before him.

Not a mountain peak. A mountain valley.

A valley shared by two mountains of different sizes, each with a set of stone stairs that scaled them. For half a second, he thought it was another test of will, that he was back at the start and would have to do it again, but the shortest mountain was not visible, and the skies here were not red. They were a deep, dark blue, with strands of light swimming within.

Those strands of light, usually a lighter blue, but sometimes flecked with orange, seemed to form a vague spiral, though it was hard to tell.

'How on earth?' Looking down, the clouds were still there, as was the stone path he'd climbed.

"That's about how I looked when I got here." A voice called from his left.

Turning to look, it was a short and thin man, sat down on a log of deadwood within the valley clearing, eating dry and rough meat. Nil of the Mountain Movers. The man looked haggard with torn and bloodied clothes but seemed to sit straight.

"You didn't continue up?" he asked as he approached the man.

"Not yet." A look of consternation played out on Nil's face. "I hate to admit it, but I almost died on the last one. This place doesn't have much love for daoists." He made a humorous smile, but it looked pained to Lucian's eyes.

Nil's face was pale and sweat beaded on his forehead.

'I wonder if he's still injured.'

His eyes drifted down to the dried meat in Nil's hand, and the man seemed to notice as he pulled it back an inch or two.

"You don't need that," Lucian said, half to himself.

"Your hunger won't worsen in this place. Just the occasional pangs."

Despite the confident words, he caught himself licking his own lips. He'd not eaten since halfway through the labyrinth. Even the creatures he killed left no bodies to make food from. His words weren't lies though, the hunger never developed beyond slight pangs in the stomach. It just left a deeper desire for food, having gone so long without it.

"All the same." Nil said, "I'll enjoy it while I have it."

Wary eyes said that he meant to enjoy it alone, and Lucian gave up his plans for the jerky.

"Have at it then. Do you know anything about this place? In the records I read, there were no mountains to scale and no timeless labyrinth." He gave a small sigh of content as he sat by Nil's side.

"Labyrinth? Well, I don't know anything about the mountains, but my first trial wasn't any maze. A black fog manifested would-be heart demons. We lost one of our own to them, got separated from the two elders, and the rest left at the first sign of an exit."

He gave a small scoff at the latter part but then sighed in resignation.

"Oh well, it was their choice I guess."

'So not everyone experienced the labyrinth.'

"How long were you in the first trial?"

Nil paused for a moment to consider before shaking his head. "I don't know. That place, it was dreamlike. The black fog clouds the mind and all sense of time kind of goes out the window. I barely maintained enough wits about me to recognize the exit for what it was when it appeared. I reckon the others didn't understand it was a door of surrender even after I told them."

He directed a sidelong glance at Lucian as he spoke. "And by your expression, I'm guessing you can't pin the time either?"

Relaxing on the dead log, Lucian shrugged and reclined.

"Not a clue."

'If I had to guess… No, it's better not to set an expectation.'

Feeling a sense of loss at the time that may or may not have passed, he decided to sit straight and cross his legs. His eyes were already closed by the time he asked Nil:

"You don't mind if I share the seat for a while?"

The shorter man answered something, but Lucian was already investigating within. A small black seed, the legacy of that broken soul, remained within his mind. There were still techniques and memories, as well as shards of comprehension gone untouched, but he didn't look at those this time. Instead, it was the other half of that legacy.

A cluster of pure and neutral power. Of ownerless, featureless energy that he'd not dared to incorporate into his cultivation hastily. The more he'd probed the ball of energy, the more he felt it was truly harmless.

'If I do refine it through my cultivation, will I be able to change it to lifeforce? If so, just how much Trueblood could I create?'

He may be in the 4th stage, but there was no rule that said he could not continue building up his 3rd stage cultivation. After all, Trueblood was still Trueblood, it would be what gave him the edge over others of the same realm.

Already he had more than was reasonable to keep count of, but if he absorbed this? Well, it was time to find out.