Chapter 4512 — A Precarious Moment

"Heh heh, still not giving up even now? Admirable persistence—just a bit stupid. You don't even know how to bow to the inevitable. A brainless puppet is all you're fit to be!" The Xishan Old Sect hovered leisurely within the black mist, watching Wei Zhao flee madly across the ground.

Wei Zhao kept running without breaking stride, though inwardly he could not help but sneer. "Bow to the inevitable"—that's advice meant to make a man switch sides. Right now you're trying to refine me into a puppet. Who in the hell would willingly become a human puppet? A heretic cultivator is a heretic cultivator—even a Mountain-Opening giant has no culture...

Of course, sneering was sneering. Wei Zhao was not so foolish as to turn back and trade barbs with the Xishan Old Sect; that would only slow his flight. Perhaps he still had a sliver of a chance at life—and to squander that last sliver just to win an argument was a stupidity he would never stoop to.

And yet, that sliver of a chance Wei Zhao imagined was, in the eyes of the Xishan Old Sect, not worth a fart—more precisely, not even worth that.

True enough, Wei Zhao's speed at full exertion of the Super Butterfly Microstep movement art was indeed extraordinary. He had previously outrun Cheng Haonan in his fully blackened state, a feat enough to leave the vast majority of seasoned Nascent Soul cultivators far behind. Unfortunately, his opponent now was the Xishan Old Sect.

The gulf in strength between them was simply too vast—so vast that their very understanding of movement and speed belonged to two entirely different orders. Wei Zhao's speed was still only speed in the plain spatial sense, speed as ordinary people conceived it. The Xishan Old Sect's understanding of speed, however, had already reached the level of space-time.

That sounded mystical in the extreme, yet in the present reality, Wei Zhao's form had already blurred into a string of afterimages; even a powerful bow and swift arrow would struggle to keep pace with him. Such extreme speed was enough to make one's jaw drop. And then look at the Xishan Old Sect in midair—its manner of movement had departed entirely from the range a normal mind could accept.

One instant it had been left a full four or five li behind; the next, the Xishan Old Sect, shrouded in black mist, would materialize without the slightest warning directly above Wei Zhao's head. It felt as though it had shattered the bonds of space itself, achieving something as uncanny as a spatial leap.

Time and again the same sinister thing happened. No matter how Wei Zhao adjusted his course, no matter how he concealed his aura, it was useless. Whenever he managed to open up a bit of distance, the Xishan Old Sect would appear above him at its leisure. All his efforts were in vain.

Had Wei Zhao's nerves not been tough enough, anyone else would surely have collapsed to their knees by now. This immense, ever-present pressure was truly enough to drive a man to despair. In truth, even Wei Zhao, facing this unprecedented situation, could not keep his mind from wavering ever so slightly.

"Heh heh, at last this sect has caught its chance!" Delighted at the sight, the Xishan Old Sect sent a tendril of malevolent, darkness-made-substantial divine sense instantly enveloping the crown of Wei Zhao's head—one strike to strip away his soul. Soul-Hooking Hand!

If it had merely wanted to kill Wei Zhao, then with the Xishan Old Sect's methods, a hundred Wei Zhaos would long since have been reduced to dust. But its heart was set on capturing Wei Zhao to make a puppet, so it had no wish to strike too hard.

A corpse could serve as a puppet too, true—but only an ordinary puppet. To refine a trump-card puppet, the minimum requirement was living flesh. Of course, so long as the flesh was alive, that was enough; as for the soul and divine sense, the cleaner they were wiped out, the better. After all, such things brought no benefit whatsoever to the refining of a trump-card puppet—only harm.

Still, the souls of human cultivators were innately formidable. Even an ordinary person's soul was exceedingly tenacious, to say nothing of a high-tier cultivator. Even with the Xishan Old Sect's methods, wiping out an entire soul and divine sense in one stroke was no easy matter; a suitable breach had to be found first.

When a man's mind was shaken and his defenses lost, his spirit was most vulnerable to grievous injury. This was the opening the Xishan Old Sect had been waiting for. To that end it had not grudged the waste of time, descending above Wei Zhao again and again to provoke him, all for this very moment.

In any case, Wei Zhao was already locked onto by its divine sense. Beneath its very eyelids, no matter how fast or how far he fled, it was useless. A single thought, and it could tear through space to appear above his head. So the Xishan Old Sect was not the least bit afraid of Wei Zhao escaping. For a rare specimen that might be refined into a trump-card puppet, a little extra trouble was only proper.

With the Soul-Hooking Hand descending over his head, Wei Zhao—whose feet had been driving the Super Butterfly Microstep with all his might—was suddenly frozen in place. A boundless, bone-piercing cold enveloped his whole body in an instant, as though he had been flash-frozen solid, unable to move a hair.

Panic seized Wei Zhao at once, for in that moment he felt as though the crown of his head had been pried open. An invisible hand was unmistakably dragging his soul and divine sense out of his body bit by bit, and his whole consciousness was beginning to blur.

So this was the power of a Mountain-Opening heretic giant! This time Wei Zhao's eyes were well and truly opened—only to pay for the privilege with his life, and afterward to be refined into a puppet with its consciousness extinguished. Yet he could offer no resistance at all, only feel his awareness dispersing and receding, little by little.

There was no help for it. To this day Wei Zhao had never come into contact with such a high order of power. It was like an ancient bladesman suddenly ambushed by a modern firearm—the two were simply not on the same plane. His whole mind had long since gone blank. How could he possibly know, in that moment, how to resist?

Seeing Wei Zhao offer no resistance, his aura growing ever fainter, the Xishan Old Sect burst into a smug, cackling laugh. Its own nephew Wu Baoliang had died somewhat regrettably, and Cheng Haonan's death was of no consequence at all—but to trade those two for such a superb puppet specimen was, in its eyes, no loss whatsoever.

"Brat, are you just going to resign yourself to this?" A thunderous shout suddenly rang out in Wei Zhao's mind—none other than the voice of the ghost thing.

"S-Senior..." Wei Zhao mumbled, his consciousness fading, like a drowning man clutching at the last straw, straining to struggle—yet all that showed in the end was the faintest twitch of his fingers. Nothing more.

That was already the limit of what he could do. With his entire soul and divine sense caught in the Xishan Old Sect's Soul-Hooking Hand, his body no longer answered his command. If this dragged on a moment longer, his soul and divine sense would be completely hooked away, and he would lose consciousness entirely—and then truly not even the gods could save him.