Poison God's Heritage

Chapter 912: Instinct

The First Born screamed, and Solarous answered.

The wail didn’t just roll over the ruined world like thunder. It tunneled through it. It slid into stone, into marrow, into the thin seams between a cultivator’s thoughts and their body’s obedience.

Whatever still lived in Solarous, whatever hadn’t already been crushed, burned, devoured, or driven mad by their mother’s rampage, jerked awake as if the scream had hooked a claw into its skull and yanked.

Creatures bolted in blind panic from nests, burrows, and collapsed dens. Wings beat against ash-choked air. Scales scraped broken ground. Even the insects, those stubborn little survivors, went still for a heartbeat, then scattered as if fleeing an unseen boot.

The cultivators were the worst hit. Pride didn’t matter when the sound ignored dignity.

Men and women who had been standing, breathing, glaring upward, folded like wet paper. Knees hit rubble. Hands flew to ears too late. Blood didn’t politely seep, it forced itself out. Noses ran first, then ears, then the corners of eyes. A few tried to circulate Qi in frantic circles, attempting to shield the delicate structures inside their skulls, but the wail didn’t care about their methods. It battered everything equally, like a tide slamming into a city that thought its walls mattered.

"Tsk," the White Sun snapped his arms and pulled several times on the laws of the world, muffling the incoming scream and saving the cultivators, not just from the sound attack, but also from the other rakshasas that didn’t care for their First Born’s pains.

His movement wasn’t theatrical. It was authoritative, like a man grabbing the world by the throat and forcing it to swallow its own scream.

The air thickened. Space itself seemed to tighten, as if invisible cords had been drawn across reality. The wail didn’t vanish, but it dulled, shoved behind something dense and unforgiving. The cultivators still trembled, still bled, still gagged on copper and fear, but they stopped collapsing in waves. Their bodies were spared from turning into ruptured sacks on the ground.

That wasn’t all. The moment the laws shifted, the scavengers circling the scene, rakshasas with hungry patience, paused mid-prowl. They’d been waiting for weakness, waiting for the scream to soften prey into helpless meat.

The White Sun’s intervention didn’t just muffle sound. It drew a boundary in the world’s fabric, and even monsters born from broken Dao understood when a Sun had decided something was his.

My hands came together again.

"CRY FOR ME SOME MORE!" I howled as I slapped both hands together once again. The Soulsteel Poison that was in contact with the First Born was no longer something I could control.

The poison on the First Born, deep inside torn flesh and violated tissue, was beyond my leash now. It had gone feral the moment it touched the firstborn, as it became something deprived of Qi and law. But it didn’t lose its effect.

It was chewing, proliferating, learning.

But what was left behind?

That residue mattered. It was thin, threads and motes and smears of metallic venom that had burned across the upper air like ash caught in a storm. Most of it was already being eaten by the atmosphere, dissolved by friction and strange celestial pressure, scattered to nothing. If I let that happen, I’d be throwing away a blade I’d paid for in blood. Effort and brain cells.

I wasn’t someone who wasted.

So I pulled.

Not gently. Not cleverly. Like a starving man clawing food back from a fire before the wind stole it. I gathered it, I compressed it, and my body answered the demand the only way it could, in pain.

My nose burned. My throat scraped raw. My lungs tightened until each breath felt like pulling air through needles.

I bled again.

The blood I spilled from my mouth and nose was no longer red, but black as Tar. Still, I couldn’t let out. This was our chance to rid this world and the Beyond of this threat.

It wasn’t poetic when it happened. It was disgusting. Heavy. Thick. The black ran warm down my lips and clung there, refusing to drip like normal blood. It tasted like metal and bitterness and something scorched. Each swallow dragged that taste deeper.

My vision tried to dim at the edges, my body’s blunt attempt to shut the curtains and save itself. I forced it open. Forced my focus into the poison like an iron spike. If I blinked too long, if my intent wavered, the residue would scatter and this moment would be wasted.

I’m willing to pay a price for this freedom.

There was no drama in these words; there was only a will to survive. And a will to struggle.

After all, we’re all strugglers here.

I struggled, it because it was the only thing that kept my hands steady when the tremor started in my fingers.

"Shen Bao! You’re pushing yourself too much!" Yu Yu came to my side as she rummaged through her holding bag.

Her voice hit my flank like a tug on a cracked bone. Too close. Too concerned. Her hands were already digging to find something, frantic and purposeful, vials clinking, talismans sliding, cloth tearing. She was trying to solve the problem the way a healer solves everything: by patching the bleeding part and praying the rest holds.

"Stop, I’m losing focus!" I snapped at her, without meaning to sound angry, but if I lost focus here, it would cause a greater issue.

The words came out harsher than I intended, scraping my own throat on the way. I could hear it in the edge of my voice, how thin my patience was, how close my concentration sat to a cliff.

Yu Yu froze.

She looked at me in surprise, a small reaction that pained me, but I couldn’t humor her right now.

That tiny pause almost cost us. I felt the poison wobble above like a rope going slack. Panic sparked in my gut, hot, ugly, and I crushed it immediately, forcing my intent back into shape.

The residue finally obeyed.

It didn’t become a perfect sphere. It became a mass, dense, churning, dark with a metallic sheen that caught the light wrong. The atmosphere gnawed at its edges constantly, stripping away wisps, hissing softly as if the sky itself hated what I was forcing it to hold. Too much of it vanished anyway, stolen by the world’s resistance, but enough remained for my purpose.

I opened my palms, spread my fingers, then pulled my hands into claw shapes. The motion wasn’t for show. It was a blueprint, telling the poison what it needed to become.

When my clawed hands shoved toward each other, the condensed mass unraveled and flattened, stretching into a lattice that filled a horrifying portion of the sky. Lines of Soulsteel venom pulled taut like cords. Intersections formed a mesh, wide enough that, for a moment, it looked like I’d thrown a net meant to catch the moon.

That was the point.

I wasn’t going to stop the other two First Borns. Not in the way people fantasize about stopping monsters. I only needed to steal momentum. Force hesitation. Make them slow down enough that they didn’t slam into the planet like thrown mountains.

If they came in at speed, Solarous wouldn’t just suffer, Solarous would end

. The crust would crack. The ground would fold. Oceans would boil if any were left. Even if they didn’t mean to destroy the world, their mass would do it by accident.

That would unleash their mother onto the world outside.

The worst-case scenario.

Don Ma arrived to my side, his right arm completely shattered.

He shouldn’t have been walking. He shouldn’t have been upright. His shattered arm hung wrong, bone threatening skin, sleeve soaked in dark blood. The limb twitched sometimes, useless reflex, like it still believed it had function.

He stared upward with the expression of a man watching doom hesitate.

He can’t use it again, "For an Origin Cultivator... you’re incredible," he muttered.

I didn’t answer him. I couldn’t. My jaw was clenched hard enough that it ached, and my tongue felt too thick in my mouth. Any unnecessary word risked shaking my focus.

The lattice spread further, rising into the path of the descending giants.

"SPREAD!" My howl made my brain feel like it rattled along my own skull. But you needed intent with handling Qi, and this was the only way.

The command ripped out of me like I was tearing it from my lungs with my nails. The net obeyed immediately, widening until it sat directly in front of the two descending First Borns like an ugly choice made visible.

Go through it and take the poison, whatever it did, whatever it meant, whatever that scream behind them promised.

Or slow down, divert, and lose the advantage of descent.

Behind them, their wounded sibling’s wail, muffled but still horrific, gave them the only lesson they could understand.

They didn’t know, they didn’t understand.

My trap wasn’t based on their knowledge. It was based on their ignorance.

It was a gigantic risk I’ve taken, and it paid off.

The First Borns never succumbed to something as measly as ’Fear.’ Or pain, they never knew it. They were born of matter that challenged the heavenly order, of a broken Dao. They never knew what pain or happiness meant, what joy or sadness meant.

Since they have never suffered since they were born.

Thousands of years ago.

They were built to consume and gluttonize. Never to endure. An apex predator that had no hunter.

So, when they heard the heart-wrenching screams in the voice of their third sibling. Something inside them moved, something far more dangerous than any emotion they could or could not feel.

Instinct.