211. Old Man of the Lighthouse

It came as no surprise that the first move of the swarm of sea snakes was a roar filled with killing intent.

They were completely unaffected.

Alistair used [Dharmic Gaze] to inspect them.

Name: N/A
Species: Duskscale Serpent (Beast Ruler 1st Evolution)
Class: N/A [Primary Attribute(s): Strength and Agility]
Level: 105
Special Ability: Successive bites amplify venom by 50% each time.

His Skill gave more information than ever before—he didn’t intend to let a single one pierce his skin, but the special ability was good to note.

Then, the bloodshed truly began.

Red was a whirlwind of speed. He fought like the serpents were beneath him. Which they were. His hands were stuck in his pockets the entire time. He only used his legs, kicking hundreds of times a second.

Each time his shin or foot slammed into a poor duskscale serpent, its body simply broke. Red’s stride was one with the Dao, his blows surpassing the speed of sound many times over, yet not a single shockwave was created. Even the force of his blows that should have sent the serpents flying hundreds, if not thousands, of feet merely tossed them aside, dead as a doornail.

Alistair would not let himself be shown up. It was time to show off what he could do as an Adept realm.

If Red was displaying his grace, Alistair displayed his overwhelming might.

[Force Fist]. [Frozen Claw]. [Lightning of Justice]. He used these offensive Skills nearly simultaneously.

The Mana in his Skills was far more condensed and powerful than ever before. Even a simple [Force Fist], unadorned with any Dao energy, was capable of destroying a skyscraper.

Unlike Red, he let his punches and kicks have shockwaves, annihilating serpents simply from the force of his blows. Those that failed to perish from that were targeted with [Frozen Claw], which spread from beast to beast, drawing from Alistair’s insane Mana pool. He added Black Impermanence to the Skill, turning the ice black and sealing them away forever in a state of death.

Lightning struck down far more brilliantly than his medium-range Skill had ever shone, turning the dusk into midday for a tiny fraction of a second. He added the 10% nue to see what it was like, golden electricity rushing to the ground in a column the thickness of a city street.

The nue spread out with the splitting of the lightning into three into nine into twenty-seven into eighty-one, wiping over the hardened Beast Rulers and stunning them. Unfortunately, their lack of intelligence made the thunderclap attacking the Dao Heart useless, but the nue stunned them long enough for Alistair to dart between dozens of them in a hundred of a second, impaling their skulls with freehand Mana.

That was right. For every beast that he killed, he used his freehand shaping Skills, stabbing them all with blood affinity Mana and absorbing their blood essence.

[Blood Hand’s] new spike ability was excellent for dealing with hordes. Twenty-foot-long blood spikes shot out too fast for the serpents to dodge, impaling them and draining their life force.

The serpents weren’t strong in comparison to the two cultivators, but there were so many of them. It felt like the world was nothing but a slithering snake. They were dumb creatures, their only methods of attack being biting and spitting purple venom that sizzled in the air.

Too slow, Alistair thought as he dodged the snakes, letting them crash into each other. He didn’t need the states of Kai’tazake Mutra at all. Spiritual Fighter’s Echo followed wherever his fists did, and while it didn’t one-hit-kill the serpents, it helped him avoid bites.

He used the new ability of Tier 4 [Frozen Claw], swiping his hand and firing hundreds of ice needles into the serpent’s acupuncture points, arresting the flow of Mana and Dao energy in their meridians.

“How fucking many of these things are there!” he shouted after thirty minutes of the carnage. He had killed thousands, but there were more coming. “What the hell do these things even eat? This must be a hundred million pounds of snake!”

Red was a hundred feet away, dealing with his own mass of serpennts, but he still heard and replied. “Getting tired?”

For the first time, Red allowed his blow to impact the world, delivering a roundhouse kick that sent all the hundreds of serpents around him flying thousands of feet away. Alistair caught the tail end of his crimson bloodlust aura, which he still could not ascertain whether it was a real or imaginary thing. Or maybe both.

Red spoke, his voice carrying despite not shouting. “The ambient Mana here is even lower than it should be, even if we are at the edge of Selvitari. I noticed that before, but didn’t come to the proper conclusion.”

Since Alistair was using more Mana than Red, he had taken out more of the serpents. It was impossible to know exactly how many, but he bet it was in the hundreds of thousands. If he had known how many serpents there were going to be, he wouldn’t have spent his Mana so profligately.

Alistair [Mindshifted] into two hundred feet into the air, his Mana dropping to 7,525.

“Get out of the way!” he shouted to Red.

“Finally,” the red dragon grumbled, opening his eyes for a brief moment. “Take mine flame.”

The sensation of fire hot as the surface of the sun fluttered above Alistair’s bare hand, Materia of True Martial Clarity channeling the Mana straight from the ghost within his Domain.

When he said that the dragon’s Mana pool was 2,300, almost twice Dev'rox’s, he meant the effective Mana pool. As Alistair’s pathways couldn’t hold the dragon’s Mana, it lost much of its efficiency in the open air.

Irrelevant. A dragon’s breath was far beyond the fires of any human source. The ball of fire in Alistair’s hand grew as Ashendar allocated 800 points of pure fire affinity Mana. The red-orange flame grew larger than Alistair’s body, before rebounding back to the size of a golf ball.

The tiny fireball rested over Alistair’s index finger, the process taking no more than half a second to complete. He carefully pointed it downward, seeing the mass of serpents grow and grow without his culling.

For a moment, Ashendar and Alistair’s thoughts synced up, as he experienced the ancient mind of the red dragon.

“Be burned to ash.”

The fireball exploded downward in a conical shape, expanding as it traveled. The flames warped the air with nothing but Mana, so hot and powerful that they used up all the oxygen. Tens of thousands of serpents were incinerated, bones and all, leaving nothing but fine particulate.

The fiery explosion humbled Alistair.

Of course, if he put Dao energy into a [Force Fist], he could level a town block, or if he used his finishing Skill, he probably could destroy a small city, but there was something else about the destructive power of fire. A dragon’s fire. Even without the Dao, it put a primeval fear into the hearts of those who saw it.

His entire field of vision, even with [Reality Sense], was blanketed by flame. Even after it began to subside, the sudden loss of oxygen created a thermobaric effect, a vacuum forming that crushed the organs of any stragglers.

Alistair fell to the ground gracefully, his Fall of Fleet boots completely unnecessary with his current physique.

Red appeared behind him. His origin, Alistair could not say, despite [Reality Sense]. He was forced to admit there was something to the idea that Red’s stride was perfection.

“Impressive,” Red said.

They looked at the damage. The incredible heat crystallized the sand, creating a beach of quartz for two miles in both directions. A gigantic cloud of steam rose above the ocean, where the sea floor was exposed since a huge swath of water was vaporized.

And there were the dead bodies of the serpents, almost all ash, the wind starting to spread everywhere. Alistair was a bit upset he couldn’t drain their blood essence, but he already had a lot from the previous hundred thousand.

“The flames of a dragon really are different,” Red said with the tiniest hint of smile. “The amount of Mana I felt shouldn’t have been this strong. Without a drop of Dao energy, it doesn’t matter. The multiverse itself recognizes that dragons are built different.”

Ashendar snorted from within Alistair’s Domain. “The gifted one speaks truthfully.”

Alistair sniffed the air, his sense of smell appearing as pseudo-heat vision within his omnisense. In terms of distance, it had no equal within his arsenal.

Red looked up, feeling something as well. “They’re gathering.”

“Yeah,” Alistair said. “At the boss fight. Do you know exactly where they are?”

Red adjusted his collar. “I sense patterns in the Dao,” he insisted.

“Okay, but like do you know within, let’s say, a five hundred foot radius?”

“That sounds about right.”

Somehow, the two of them knew what they were talking about, despite never saying it out loud. Alistair readied himself, entering Tranquil Mind so he had the best possible reaction time. {Crimson Bones} opened up out of his palms, granting him foot-long blood-red spears.

Alistair let Red grab his wrist.

His new friend closed his eyes and began to spin. Slowly at first, at the speed that a regular human could accomplish such a feat, if they were strong enough.

Red sped up faster and faster until he became a blur of motion, surpassing Alistair’s speed. He didn’t end there, and in the final thousandth of a second, he unleashed his innate violence, increasing his muscular potential to the peak.

[Force Fist] overlaid with a [Hand of Karma] made from 50 points. [Mindshift] in midair, along with boosters of fire out of his heels, thanks to Ashendar. The [Steel Body] tensing everything all at once, his {Crimson Bones} sticking out. The active of [Monk Motionlessness] adding 15% to all Attributes.

Alistair couldn’t even comprehend how fast the combination of Skills and launch from Red made him.

From his starting point, he flew 14.8 miles to a towering lighthouse in under two seconds.

Red underestimated himself, or perhaps he was just humble—his swing took Alistair exactly to the place he needed to be.

The wall of the lighthouse was no more, [Force Fist] carrying everything away. The Dao of the Fist was one with his strike. A fist could explode things, but it also pushed.

He simply pushed away the thick walls, which flew apart on both sides.

This flying attack was an anomaly for an Early Adept. Positive Karma hid his strike, and even with the being’s danger sense going off, even a Beast Ruler whose second evolution had bathed his lineage in the Dao was not fast enough to dodge.

Alistair’s fist blurred into a streak of coral and crimson light, meeting the chest of the Beast Ruler who inhabited the lighthouse. There was the deafening thud of a mountain collapsing into the sea, a shockwave that permeated through the Dao.

Venom-spattered dusk-scales cracked like glass, and the beast’s form bent around his fist in a perfect arc. They were launched nearly another mile into the churning surf below, when his [Force Fist] finally ran out.

The Beast Ruler was a grotesque fusion of serpent and man, standing twelve feet tall with an elongated, humanoid torso rippling with unnatural muscle, its skin a deep dusk-purple patterned with porcelain-like scales that shimmered in the fading light. Its head was narrow and sleek, shaped like that of a sea snake, framing a cruel, almost regal face with no nose, slitted golden eyes, and fangs that curled past its chin. Four arms jutted from its torso—two too-long and clawed, two serpentine and lined with barbs. Its lower half was an immense snake tail, veined with glowing purple venom lines.

Name: Old Man of the Lighthouse

Species: Duskscale Serpent (Beast Ruler 2nd Evolution) / Consumed Elemental Superhuman II

Lineage Variant: Fisherman Slaughter [Primary Attribute(s): Strength and Constitution]

Level: 160

The bones of Alistair’s right hand and arm shattered into a dozen pieces. Constitution was his lowest Attribute. His own body could not handle the forces of his strike, coupled with the Beast Ruler’s absurd Constitution and internal Domain.

Black ichor dripped out of the Old Man of the Lighthouse’s side. His shattered ribs sizzled, the lingering Dao energy of Alistair’s blow preventing them from healing. For now.

Both parties, recovered from the initial shock, went to war.

With a guttural roar, the duskscale serpent king regurgitated a torrent of venom—waves of purple mist and liquid billowing from his mouth. The beast couldn’t tell Alistair apart from his nue clone, but what did that matter if he destroyed everything?

Perhaps it was the recently acquired dragon within his soul. A savagery overcame him, as he realized that this was kill or be killed. While powerful, the flood of venom was not the most the beast could do.

[Thousand-Armed Dragon Buddha Renewal’s] first appearance was glorious.

The air shimmered as a literal thousand scaled arms burst forth of pure red light. Unlike his previous finishing Skill, Alistair was the centerfold, as instead of the serene Avalokiteśvara emerging, a true Dragon Buddha materialized around his body without the former one-second waiting period.

The Dragon Buddha was the perfect harmonization of the majestic power of a dragon and the compassion of a Buddha, his iridescent, scaled arms taking on golden, blue, and coral spirals, coursing with lightning, ice, and force affinity Mana respectively. Standing fifty feet tall, his thousand hands reached up another fifty on top of that, pointing downward at the enemy below.

A roar escaped the maw of the Dragon Buddha, a combination of nue and Buddhist sutras of contrition that simultaneously calmed the heart and arrested the mind.

Unlike his previous finishing move, this was no mere barrage of force. Each arm carried a different aspect of his power—some crackling with lightning, others dripping with blood essence, and more still trailing spectral frost. Some were combinations of all three, as all possibilities made up [Thousand-Armed Dragon Buddha Renewal]. All were covered in Karmic energy, enough to bring Alistair’s total to 0.

He saw the look of fear on the Old Man’s reptilian face. “W—”

Only a single unfinished syllable left his mouth as the thousand arms annihilated the wave of venom. They were weaker than his previous finishing Skill, but a thousand was far, far greater than the sixty palms of [Thousand-Armed Bodhisattva Judgment].

The strikes began landing on the Beast Ruler. Karma severed Fate, lightning struck the nervous system, ice seared the meridians and the soul, blood boiled the body and stole life force.

And fist? Fist drove away everything. His Fist removed evil. This beast had killed hundreds of humans, consuming their flesh to gain more power.

Alistair stood at the center of the spectral avatar, his broken arm hanging limply. His eyes glowed with the tricolor light of his Daos—Justice, Ghost, and Fist combined into a single purpose.

The Beast Ruler fought back desperately, its remaining four arms lashing out with blinding speed, trying to parry the sea of claws.

From its mouth erupted not just venom but concentrated Dao energy that took the form of a mass of sickly green serpents. The beast had learned from its meals, as Alistair got the sense that his move was like an Adept-level proto-Domain.

“Renewal,” Alistair whispered.

The Old Man had barely noticed the symphonic noises created whenever one of the dragon’s claws landed. But once enough had made their mark, the melody became obvious. Once it had been allowed to play for too long, it was unstoppable.

The harmony was one with the Dao, soothing all who heard it for dozens of miles. Babies stopped crying, and families were filled with a sensation of everlasting love.

The resonance became visible in the air, a bright red shimmer that broke apart the Old Man’s ghostly serpents in the same way Alistair pieced apart his opponents with Tune of the Fight.

Once the Dragon Buddha reached his state of peak omniscience and understood the components of the serpent’s Dao, the harmony tore it apart at the seams. The clawed paws crashed into the duskscale serpent, blowing the sea back for a hundred feet.

The final strikes happened so close to together, carving an island-sized hole in the beach and ocean.

The Beast Ruler refused to submit, even as the cycle of renewal and compassion was laid forth. His sins were too deep and his inveteracy too central.

Only the cleansing of death could make his soul innocent once more.

Even though one thousand whole arms of Alistair’s finishing Skill struck the Old Man, he still lived. His body was an almost unrecognizable heap of flesh and bone, his arms torn off and large swaths of his torso missing.

Even still, his healing factor began to knit his body whole again. Despite the deep layer of the Dao that Alistair imparted, the internal Domain of a Beast Ruler was nothing to scoff at, already rejecting the foreign Dao.

The Old Man of the Lighthouse roared in fury and pain. “What is this? Why would you strike your ally?”

Alistair, who was unable to move while the Dragon Buddha was active, said nothing. The red tune began to dismantle even the Old Man’s internal Domain, stopping his healing and starting to even take apart his cells, but then the Dragon Buddha vanished.

His finishing Skill was finished.

Alistair dropped to a knee. He was still at full Health and had almost 6,000 Mana, but he couldn’t ignore the deleterious effects of so much quintessence exiting his body at once.

If it were just Mana, he would have been okay, probably, but he used up 2,000 Mana, a third of his Dao energy, a fifth of his nue, and all his Karma in a single attack.

And the serpent was still healing and gnashing its teeth. “Why? Why? Why? You’ve ruined everything! I told your master it’s almost complete!”

Alistair needed something that wouldn’t stress his pathways. Should he have just opened with his Domain? Right now, he was in no position to invert his meridians and unleash his projected space. There was only one option.

He called on Ashendar’s power once more. That was the one benefit of existing only within his soulcore. 1,500 Mana, all that the red dragon had left, concentrated into a fireball and erupted from his fingertip with apocalyptic force, condensed dragonfire in its purest form.

What began as a sphere of concentrated flame expanded into a devastating cone of red-hot destruction, so intense that the air itself ignited.

The beam carved through the Old Man and ocean like a divine blade, vaporizing seawater instantly and leaving a steaming valley in the depths a dozen miles long. The sky darkened with steam as millions of gallons of water transformed into vapor, forming unnatural clouds that crackled with heat lightning.

Yet somehow, impossibly, the Beast Ruler remained. His body was a nightmarish tableau of ruination—charred snakeskin split open to reveal bubbling, liquefied organs, scales fused into cancerous clumps oozing black ichor, blackened and flaking bone jutting through melted tissue, his partially severed spine jutting out with no tail.

Even without limbs, even as the thermobaric effect of the dragonfire collapsed inward in a sickening crunch, the beast launched himself toward Alistair.

It was at that moment he found assurance that his move to start with his finishing Skill was correct. The level 160 Beast Ruler was far faster than he could defend or dodge, even in his prime state.

Red kicked Alistair away in a blur of motion.

The Old Man of the Lighthouse’s jaws clamped down on the man’s leg and arm with a crunch that sounded like bone getting crushed into hundreds of fragments. Red’s habits came back to bite him as his right hand got snagged too, since he kept it in his pocket as he kicked.

The red-haired man did not so much as flinch.

Instead, his dull gray eyes darkened, his collar slipping just enough to reveal a smile of impossible malice.

Alistair was certain that the world itself cowered from Red’s unrestrained violence. Color and the Dao fled as he became the source of an aura of bloodlust directly reflecting the hue of his hair.

Red’s free hand became a knife-edge of pure force that cleaved downward, rendering the Beast Ruler head and skull in twain. Soft, charred flesh split apart like smoking rubble.

Their enemy was no more.

Level up! You are now level 102. +20 Strength, +18 Agility, +16 Wisdom, +20 Charisma, +18 free Attribute points, +140 Upgrade Points.

Badge Acquired: “Adept - Heraldic Underdog” (Untiered Heraldic Badge): Defeat a humanoid creature 50+ levels higher than you in the Adept realm. All Attributes +30%.

Limited Quest Available: [Clear Water Sect Conspiracy]: You have discovered a potential conspiracy within the Clear Water Sect. Discover the collaborators and purge the sect of evil. Task: Uncover and report the members of the sect involved with the Old Man of the Lighthouse. Reward: Middle Adept Dao Fruit. Time Limit: 1 year. Penalty: None. Accept (Y/N)?

Alistair, partially groggy from Red’s kick that hit outside his perception, ran over to the injured man.

Somehow, despite the venom now pumping through his veins, he pulled out all the four-inch fangs from the right side of his body. He was bleeding profusely from huge puncture wounds. Even Alistair would have a difficult time healing from that, since the Beast Ruler’s internal Domain was present in his teeth.

But Red did not fall. Somehow, he didn’t even look like he was injured, despite his mangled body and blood and guts. It was like he was trying to will the world into believing he was fine.

Even as magnificent a star the gray-eyed man was, even if he had forty teeth like the Buddha, he was still only an Adept realm.

Alistair propped Red up on his shoulder. He regretted not buying a Tier 1 Adept Health Pill when he had the chance.

“How are you doing?” he asked.

“Never better,” Red said. “You know, this is the first time I’ve been injured since… I couldn’t tell you, to be honest.”

“Thank you for saving me. I would have died.”

“That’s why I did it.”

Alistair placed his hand on Red’s side. The prodigy used his Dao energy to flush out as much of the beasts’s venom as he could, while Alistair used his freehand shaping to inject blood essence into his friend.

The wound began to stabilize, not closing, but at least not growing. The blood flow slows to a crawl.

“We need to get you to the Infirmary fast,” Alistair said. He eyed the corpse, but before he could even say anything, Red nodded.

Alistair, the greedy bastard that he was, went straight to absorbing the blood essence of the Old Man of the Lighthouse.

{Letting of the Beast}: +5 Endurance.

Alistair made haste scrummaging through the dead beast’s flesh. He grabbed the two halves of the skull, putting one half over his head and another in his right arm. He took the Beast Core and stuffed it in his robes’ pocket, and then hoisted Red onto his back.

“It seems we’ve uncovered a conspiracy,” he said, finally mentioning the elephant in the room—the strange last words of the Old Man.

Without a doubt in his mind, he accepted the Limited Quest.

Red closed his eyes, visible in Alistair’s omnidirectional view. “There’s a madman in the Clear Water Sect. Or a traitor. Or both.