Premature Ending of Raiden's First Arc

Bang!

It went without saying that Lan Shu didn't make it up the stairs after finishing that sentence. Thanks to some Soul Essence from Astoria, one tug of his back foot caused him to faceplant on the third step, destroying the step and his nasal bone.

"Fuck! My nose! ARGH!" Lan Shu cried out in pain and distress as he held what was left of his nose bridge.

Since Lan Shu was a martial artist, his body was naturally extremely strong. By this point in his cultivation journey, his skin alone was stronger than most rock and just as durable as the cobblestone stairs he was walking on.

But that was only on the surface layer. He hadn't tempered his bones or muscles yet. So, while his outer skin was as tough as the cobblestone, his soft nose wasn't.

So, sandwiched in between the rock-hard steps and his tempered body, his nose was crushed like a grape between two rocks.

"Hehe." Giggling to herself in the ring, Astoria motioned to Raiden to continue on. The fate of this nobody did not affect their goal. In a few minutes, Lan Tien would die, and they would leave this desolate village soon after. 

It was not their concern in the slightest how Lan Shu reacted to his crushed nose. 

Nodding, Raiden stepped over the aching Lan Shu and swaggered into Lan Tien's house as if he owned the place.

With Astoria by his side and his future accomplishments rising by the second, he was starting to regain his former aura. 

By this point, in the boy's mind, Lan Tien would be his, Raiden's, first stepping stone back into the Black Lotus Domain!

Inside the house, Lan Tien was sitting on a couch with a wine gourd at his side, looking very relaxed and comfortable. And once he heard the door open, he looked up and began to speak.

"Shu'er, why did you take so long? And what was that…" The rest of Lan Tien's sentence was put on pause as he turned around and saw who exactly had nearly kicked down his door. Instead of seeing his twenty-something-year-old, he saw a child walking in with wide steps and a smile.

Stunned, Lan Tien didn't comprehend what was happening and rubbed his eyes, thinking his age was getting the better of him.

On the other hand, inside the immortal ring, Astoria was also looking at Lan Tien, Raiden's supposed first true stepping stone.

"Potbelly, check. Thick and wild beard, check. Thighs thicker than tree trunks, check. Yup. This is exactly how I imagined a backwater martial artist to look like." Astoria said once she finished analyzing the man.

Her interest quickly began to fade.

"Do you want to mess with him for a bit, or do you want me to cut the nonsense and just kill him?" she asked Raiden.

Not expecting the ruthless witch in his ring to act nice for once, Raiden paused before answering.

"No, you can just kill him. Unlike Lan Shu and Lan Tie, their father didn't really bully me much beyond extorting me out of so much money. Mental abuse like that has no real effect on me. At least not anymore." Raiden answered truthfully, but his voice had become melancholy by the end of his speech.

He didn't mention it directly, but Astoria knew what he meant in his last sentence. 

However, what could she do? She planned to help avenge the boy.

Chu Tian was a heaven's pride in the Black Lotus Domain. They would eventually cross paths, and once they did, Astoria had no qualms about killing him, but she couldn't resurrect the fallen.

The strength required to do feats like that, at least from her knowledge of novel writing, required one to ignite their divine flame and ascend to the God Realm. The problem was that by the time the two of them reached that step, the souls of Raiden's parents would've reincarnated dozens, if not hundreds, of times already.

By then, were those souls even his parents anymore?

It was the ship of Theseus paradox theory by that point, and she wasn't a philosopher.

Astoria shook her head inside the ring without mentioning the sadness in his tone and simply stood up to exit the ring.

'One of my parents abandoned me while the other f*cked me up mentally. I can't relate to Raiden's situation at all.'

Astoria hated both of her parents and wished they had never been in her life to begin with. It was the polar opposite of what Raiden wished for.

Without a similar experience, Astoria couldn't offer any solace, so she didn't. She would help him in other ways.

'Your grudges are mine, kid. We'll travel together for a while. I might as well fix you up along the way.' Astoria thought to herself as she exited the ring. And once she saw how bright a smile was on Raiden's face, she almost felt something warm in her already dead heart.

'And maybe you can do the same to me.'

While he was a country bumpkin through and through, Lan Tien was also a local snake with some experience, so while he couldn't believe Raiden acted the way he did, it didn't mean that he would keel over and die because of it. He was merely stunned for a few seconds.

So once he regained his composure, he roared out in anger.

"Raiden, what the hell are you doing?! How dare you swagger into my house?!" Lan Tien roared out.

While doing so, he didn't stand still like a mannequin; instead, he took a wide leap at the teenager, stretching out his left arm in a clawing motion and priming it at Raiden's neck.

In the face of all this, Raiden didn't bat an eye. He simply found a nearby seat and sat down without a care. It was as if he had not seen the charging 2-meter giant and was in his own home.

'What the hell is this kid on?' Lan Tien was even more bewildered by Raiden's actions, but that didn't mean he would stop mid-charge. 'I'll grab his neck and question him afterward. It's not like I planned to let him leave alive anyway.'

Planning a bit further ahead, Lan Tien stopped thinking so much and put his focus back on Raiden, but once he did, he realized something had changed.

Before, only Raiden and Lan Tien were in the room. 

Lan Shu was still screaming out in pain and had not entered the house. But now, another figure hovered next to Raiden like a ghost.

This figure was obviously Astoria, who had just exited the ring. As her first action, she simply waved her ghostly left hand downward, sending Lan Tien, who was nearly perpendicular to the ground, crashing into the cobblestone floor.

"Shame. You could've lived a bit longer if you hadn't tried to attack Little Tian so quickly. Why do Neanderthals like you always go right to violence? Is it so engraved in that muscle-filled brain of yours?" Astoria emotionlessly said as she floated over to the immobilized Lan Tien.

Lan Tien was a Rank 2 expert in the Body Tempering path, which was also called the Skin Tempering Realm.

Right now, while Astoria was only a Rank 2 expert, she had access to a nearly infinite amount of Soul Essence, thanks to Rictoli, so she was practically unparalleled below Rank 4. 

Plus, when you factored in the fact that Astoria was cultivating the immortal-grade exercise Divine Resonance of the Mirror Realm, while at the same time, Lan Tien didn't even have a Body Tempering Art and reached this level using raw medicinal herbs and the like. The gap between the two was like a chasm.

Even if there were 1000 Lan Tiens, they still couldn't resist their fate of being fiddled with until their deaths. 

Astoria and Lan Tien knew this from the first moment they locked eyes. So, as an old fox who had lived for more than 70 years, Lan Tien switched from hard to soft without hesitation.

"Senior, please forgive this minor villain! I had no idea that Little Raiden was related to you. If I had, I would've acted like that even with one hundred times the guts!" Lan Tien screamed out in a panic when he saw Astoria drawing closer.

If not for being immobilized entirely with his stomach flat on the ground, he would've been in a kowtow trying to appease this ghost.

It was a long shot, but any chance to live was something he would take at this point.

Sadly, his pleas fell on deaf ears.

Raising her fair hand, Astoria was just about to use Soul Extinguishing Light again, but just before she could, Lan Tien shouted out something that he thought could save his life.

"Senior, my youngest son has just become the disciple of a Dao Core Realm expert! Please spare this one's life, and I'll help you foster a good relationship with that mighty figure!" Lan Tien shouted out, surprising both Astoria and Raiden.

Meridian Opening, Qi Refining, Foundation Establishment, and then finally, Palace Formation were all of the realms below the Dao Core, the realm that Lan Tien mentioned.

This meant that whoever had taken Lan Tie on as a disciple was a Rank 5 cultivator of the Qi Refinement path.

Even now, with all of Rictoli's Soul Essence at her disposal, Astoria was only a Rank 2 cultivator of the Soul Cultivation path, and yet they were already facing a Rank 5 boss.

Granted, Astoria had a path paved out for her to advance to the Elder Soul Realm, which correlated to Rank 6, but that would take a long time.

Astoria would have to purify the Soul Essence into the Mirror Realm's version of it, then sift through Rictoli's memories and take what was useful, and while doing all of this, ensure her foundation was rock solid.

To juggle all of that, Astoria estimated that it would take her at least 2 to 3 years to reach the Elder Soul Realm.

Of course, to the standards of the Nine Desolate Domains, reaching the Elder Soul Realm in just a meager three years was nothing short of cheating, but Astoria didn't care at all. What she did care about was this so-called Rank 5 Qi Refiner they had come across.

'The Black Lotus Domain barely has enough Spiritual Qi to foster a Foundation Establishment Realm cultivator once a year. How the hell did it birth a Dao Core Realm monster? Unless…'

For the first time since entering the room, Raiden asked what he and Astoria were thinking.

"This expert isn't from this domain, is he?" 

Strength was an addicting factor in this world, and there were very, very few people in the entire Nine Desolate Domains who would willingly forever halt their progress. Like political power back on Terra, strength on the Nine Desolate Domains was extremely addicting. Very few cultivators could see their strength go up, day by day, and then choose to stop the journey.

The only ones who would do so were people trying to build factions, like family heads or sect leaders. However, since there was no known Dao Core Realm powerhouse in the entire Black Lotus Domain, only one option was left. 

He wasn't from here and was merely visiting.

Lan Tien, afraid they would catch him lying and act accordingly, nodded at Raiden's question, not knowing he had sealed his fate right there.

"If that's the case, then you have no use," Astoria laughed. She had been scared for a moment, thinking that the Lan Family had latched onto a big thigh, but once she found out that this thigh left the second he came, her fear disappeared.

"Even for a Dao Core Realm powerhouse, leaving the Black Lotus Domain will take months at the minimum. When you factor in how long Lan Tie will cultivate peacefully in his new sect before returning, your graves will have a foot of weeds growing out of them."

With her fear gone and her confidence regaining, Astoria raised her finger again and pointed it at the still-immobilized Lan Tien.

"Have a nice next life, bum."

"WAIT!" 

Liu Mie didn't let him finish his final plea before snuffing out his soul. Seconds later, he fell limp to the ground like a puppet whose strings were cut.

"Go loot his house for whatever he has hidden. I'll clean up the sobbing mess outside," Astoria said as she floated back out.

'Did he hurt his nose that badly? How the hell is he still crying? Moreover, did he not hear his father yelling for his life just a few feet away?'

'Weird world.'

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