Poison God's Heritage

Chapter 911: Turning Tide

Don Ma shot up like a meteor, far faster than sight and sound, as he arrived in a split second toward the middle of the three First Borns. He did not rise gracefully.

There was nothing elegant about it. His body tore through the lower clouds in a straight line of violence, leaving behind a cone of ruptured air and burning vapor. The ground beneath where he launched cracked in a wide circle, and several nearby cultivators were thrown off their feet despite the distance.

The wounded First Born turned, too slow to react, though its many mouths opened as if it sensed the incoming threat.

Don Ma arrived like an afterimage, and stopped immediately with his palm on the creature’s flesh.

The touch of the creature that corrupted the heavenly Dao made Don Ma’s arm sizzel, but that was too littel pain to pay for what is to happen next.

There was no explosion at first. That was the terrifying part. The force entered the First Born and vanished into it, swallowed by that moon-sized body in a silence so brief and so complete that my poisoned mind counted the fraction between impact and result. Then the creature’s flesh moved.

The creature’s entire body moved as a water balloon struck with a punch, roiling upon itself where the impact of inertia and momentum had nowhere to let loose.

Waves passed through it from the point of contact, massive ripples warping its pale body as if it were liquid trapped inside a skin sack. Its forward motion stuttered. Not stopped, not truly, but broken just enough that its descent faltered.

In some places, however, the flesh was weak. The bounding and twisting of flesh was too powerful for it to stop or resist the powers crashing inside it. So, they burst out, pus, blood, and whatever in between, erupted out of the wounded firstborn, and from its unholy mouth a shout that could rend one’s soul and tear an ascendant cultivator’s body echoed. Powerful enough that I saw the very atmosphere of the planet waver for a bit.

The other two First Born continued downward, but the wounded one lagged behind as its enormous body tried to correct itself.

It didn’t serve much in terms of killing it. Nor did it serve much in terms of damaging it.

It served one purpose and one alone.

Slowing it down.

That was enough.

For I shall end what had wrongly begun.

"I AM DU SHEN!" I howled as the Soulsteel poison that erupted out of the mangled and rotten appendages followed my will and order.

The words tore from my throat with more madness than dignity, but dignity had no place on this field. The Queen’s severed limbs, those colossal rotten appendages spread across Solarous like butchered pieces of some dead continent, began to burst open. The poison inside them answered me. Gray-black Soulsteel liquid surged out in rivers, then lakes, then seas. It dragged bits of flesh, bone, and corrupted tissue with it before dissolving them into itself. The smell became unbearable, a mix of molten metal, corpse rot, bitter venom, and something cold enough to sting the lungs.

"RISE FOR ME!" I howled once more. And it shot up.

Enough poison to make the clouds ashamed, enough of it to cover a planet of the vast expanse, enough of it to smother a sun from shining light upon a world, and it all rose up from all around Solarous toward the heavens, toward the three moon-sized maggots.

The entire battlefield darkened beneath it. Shadows spread as the poison left the ground in vast columns, thousands of them merging into one impossible upward tide. It moved like an ocean deciding gravity was a suggestion.

The cultivators below looked up in horror and awe, many of them forgetting for a moment that Rakshasa were still trying to kill them. The Suns noticed too. Even the Red Sun, in the middle of reducing entire swarms to burning ruin, spared a glance toward the rising mass and laughed like a man watching a good joke reach its punchline.

"Good one Shen Bao! For someone not yet a Sun! GOOD!" he howled as he continued his carnage.

The waves and columns of poison’s target weren’t the healthier First Borns; no, those two immediately stopped in their tracks when they saw the massive amount of poison that they were about to connect with.

The two unwounded First Born were not stupid. Whatever passed for instinct in their obscene bodies recognized danger. Their descent shifted violently, their enormous forms twisting aside with surprising speed for things so massive. The atmosphere screamed around them as they altered course, and the clouds below were shredded into spirals by the pressure of their movement.

They stopped and pushed themselves aside to dodge it. difficulty but successfully, they moved away.

They were never my target, otherwise they wouldn’t have escaped.

The wounded one, still reeling from Don Ma’s impact, could not move fast enough.

"NOW!" The poison shaped itself into a massive serpent, the size of a small Primordial Serpent God, but even a small Primordial Serpent God can easily eat a moon. And that is what happened as the poison encased and gulped inside its jaws the creature, which stood still, unable to move.

The serpent’s head formed first, not with the perfection of the true Primordial Serpent God, but close enough in outline that something deep in my soul stirred in offended familiarity. Its jaws opened across the sky, wide enough to swallow continents, its fangs formed from condensed Soulsteel poison so dense they looked like blackened stars. It rose around the wounded First Born and closed upon it.

For one heartbeat, the moon-sized abomination disappeared inside the serpent’s mouth.

Then the poison wrapped.

The Soulsteel liquid poison warped and wrapped around it, yes, it was guided by Qi, yes, it was moved by it, and controlled by it. And once it came in contact with the First Born, I’ll be disconnected from it and won’t be able to guide it.

I felt the connection snap in places the moment the poison touched the First Born’s flesh. It was like having nerves cut. Whole sections of the serpent vanished from my control, dead weight no longer answering my will. The thing’s body resisted me, its nature rejecting my Qi and severing the command threads I had forced through the poison. The strain backlash hit hard enough that blood sprayed from my mouth, and for a moment, the world tilted.

Yet, that wasn’t what I was planning on.

"Physics 101. Every object with mass has a gravitational pull," I said.

The Dusking Sun looked at me like I spoke some foreign language.

To be fair, I probably did. Explaining gravity to cultivators during an apocalypse wasn’t high on the list of things I expected to do today, but life had become a series of strange inconveniences stitched together by blood and bad decisions.

But the result was visible.

A large portion of the poison that shaped the serpent and was disconnected from my own Qi fell down to the planet’s gravitational pull.

Solarous was a giant planet anyway. It had a great gravitational force, and that was enough to pull everything that was close to it toward it.

The severed poison mass began collapsing back toward the world in vast curtains, pulled by Solarous as soon as my control left it. From below, it must have looked like the sky itself was melting and collapsing upon this world.

Gray-black rivers fell from the heavens, breaking apart into colossal streams that hissed as they reentered the atmosphere. Some of it burned. Some of it froze into jagged metallic droplets. Most of it simply fell, too much and too heavy to remain suspended without my will.

But still, a good enough portion still stuck to the firstborn, the injured firstborn, the weakened firstborn, after all, it was too the size of a moon and had its own gravity.

That was the part I had gambled on.

The First Born’s own mass held the poison close. Not all of it, not enough to bury it forever, but enough. Thick layers clung to its flesh, wrapped around wounds, flowed into cracks, and crawled across the places Don Ma’s strike had destabilized and ruptured. The creature thrashed, but every movement smeared the poison deeper. It tried to shed the infected parts, but the Soulsteel liquid had already entered too many openings. It wasn’t merely on it anymore. It was with it.

For a breath, nothing happened.

The wounded First Born hung there above Solarous, half-wrapped in falling poison, its body convulsing as if trying to decide whether it had been harmed or insulted.

The two healthier First Born twisted away from the descending streams, their cries distorting the clouds below them. The battlefield beneath us continued to burn, freeze, and bleed, but for that small stretch of time, every mind capable of understanding the scale of what had just happened looked upward.

Then the poison found something vital.

So, what happened next was pretty much what I expected.

The sweet, sweet sound of agony.