Chapter 324: Master’s Pride |
The time in the Roaring Thunder Sect with limitless access to valuable alchemical ingredients had enabled many things.
Liam had mainly focused on stockpiling healing products because survival was paramount, and those items would never be useless. They were something cultivators always needed, too, so he had gone wild in that regard.
Another aspect of that seclusion had involved the smoking powder. Growing was crucial to a cultivator, so Liam had stockpiled his core’s main nutrient.
The rank 2 Poisonous Cloud Pills had come next, albeit mostly due to a series of circumstantial factors rather than something Liam had wanted to prioritize.
The deadline had pushed Liam to avoid experimenting, while he had the Cloud Pill’s recipe mastered. That product was also useful in more ways than one, and its new version was deadly, becoming the ideal poison-related weapon to mass-produce under those circumstances.
But there had been another thing that Liam barely had the time to complete, the only experimental project in that whole seclusion.
The dark liquid struggled to pierce the tiles’ surface, but some drops slowly merged with it. The puddle the broken flask had created shrank, but most, if not all, of the process had little to do with physical aspects.
The expanding black patch on the floor wasn’t paint. It wasn’t even an overtaking of the inheritance’s framework like the Church was doing. It was still poison, but one that didn’t corrode or target living beings.
The project was meant to be a life-saving trump card, one Liam could rely on in any situation, condition, or predicament. Still, the cultivation world was big, multilayered, and diverse.
In a way, the poison was the opposite of what the initial blueprint had featured. Liam had taken heavy inspiration from his Master’s creation, the one he had used in the Crimson Warrior Sect, only to alter a lot, be it by choice or compelled by insurmountable hurdles.
For starters, the effects were different. Horace’s creation targeted the ground, causing it to repel Qi, basically removing a whole environment from the cultivation world, making actual cultivation there impossible.
But Liam couldn’t do that. He couldn’t limit his targets to places with ground since it would defeat the trump card’s purpose, and he just wasn’t strong enough to make something that could oppose the Qi in such an uncompromising manner.
After all, Horace’s creation was a rank 4 item, hence capable of taking over the world itself. Meanwhile, Liam’s product was at the peak of the second rank, so it couldn’t possess such overbearing properties.
At least, even if Liam attempted to make his creation overbearing, the world would have the chance to oppose it.
So, Liam had opted for poisoning the Qi instead, creating something akin to a virus specific to that energy. There would be nothing to overcome in that case. The poison didn’t fight the Qi. It just attached itself to it, using it both as fuel and a channel to release its secondary effect.
Horace’s creation was relatively harmless, but Liam needed something deadly. Yet, the weakness issue presented itself once more there, and there were also limits to how many things a single product could do, especially without direct control once released.
So, the deadly part had to become a consequence of that infection, no different from mere waste that the virus-like poison released during its expansion.
That waste soon appeared for everyone to see. Once the black stain became big enough, faint trails of yellowish fumes rose into the air, as if they were the smoke a flame produced.
A humming shockwave immediately resounded, blowing the fumes away, but the Church’s team soon saw the smoke rise from the infected tiles again, being thicker now since the black patch had expanded in the meantime.
The white-wearing rooting experts didn’t try to remove the smoke again. Instead, heptagonal, golden objects materialized around and among the battle formation, creating a compound dome meant to shield them.
In those cultivators’ minds, defeating Liam or dealing with the strange infection weren’t priorities. Their goal was to seize the inheritance, and they would achieve that as long as they held their position around the central altar.
However, the black patch kept expanding, infecting tile after tile, the thickness and quantity of yellow fumes it released increasing alongside its size.
And there was no stopping something that flowed through the Qi. The black patch eventually reached the tiles right under the dome, crossing it without meeting any resistance, while also rising through its golden heptagons.
The infection spread through that very defensive technique, slowly, but inexorably, until even the dome itself began to release yellow fumes.
The event surprised the team, but no one moved. The cultivators covered their mouths, but the smoke began to activate its effects just by touching them.
Initially, nothing happened, not superficially, but the cultivators felt it. While weak, they were being poisoned, but the Qi circulating through their bodies could oppose that invasion.
But more and more yellow smoke rose, delivering more venom, which built up inside the cultivators until their innate defenses gave in.
Holes began to open on the cultivators’ extremities, leaking drops of blood, but a golden halo soon enveloped them. The two in the back chanted their healing technique, closing those injuries as soon as they appeared.
Yet, the yellow fumes only thickened and increased, reapplying the venom at a faster rate, eventually surpassing what the incomprehensible chants could heal.
A death zone had formed and was continuing to expand in the exact place the Church’s team needed to occupy.
And Liam felt all that through his perception, ears, nose, and mouth, a wistful smile on his face while he summoned a rank 2 healing pill from his ring.
That was the first time the original product saw the light of day. Liam hadn’t even had the time to test it in the Roaring Thunder Sect, but the scene reminded him of what his Master had once done for him.
’It works,’ Liam confirmed. ’I’ll call it Master’s Pride.’
After that, Liam casually threw the healing pill in his mouth. The poison might be working, but the battle was far from over. Actually, he was sure the worst had yet to come.