Chapter 45: Chapter 45—Death
Chapter 45—Death
The prisoner’s body cracked.
The fractures spread across his skin in lines of red, slower than the first prisoner but no less inevitable. His eyelids flew open—wild, cornered, red-rimmed.
"It’s your fault!" he screamed. "I don’t want to die!"
He swung a fist at Lei Cheng’s face, still sitting cross-legged and fast.
"Life Intent."
Lei Cheng’s Life Intent surged and erupted into large green vines that wrapped around the prisoner’s entire body in an instant. The coils tightened.
Crack! Crack!
The bones gave way in sequence. The man went limp and still.
Lei Cheng withdrew his Life Intent and stood up. He shook his head.
"Another failure."
The result matched the ancient records perfectly. That was both reassuring and frustrating.
He felt no particular guilt. The man had kidnapped over a hundred children under the age of five, broken their limbs, blinded them, muted them deliberately, and sent them out to beg on his behalf while he collected their earnings. Lei Feng had also taught his son early—when Lei Cheng was young, he had been made to execute several convicted criminals himself. ’An enemy must be killed. Too much mercy in the wrong moment kills you.’ It was, apparently, a lesson every father in this world taught their children in some form. The world was too unforgiving for it to be otherwise.
"Someone—clean," Lei Cheng called toward the corridor.
He walked to the garden rocks, pulled one close, and sat down next to Hua Mingyue.
"What happened this time?" she asked, not looking up from her book.
Lei Cheng leaned back slightly, arms behind him for support, back tilted toward the sky. "Life Intent fused with Blood Qi and Bizarre Qi still reject each other completely. The moment Bizarre Qi came into contact with the Life-Intent-fused Blood Qi, it reacted violently. There was not a single moment of stability between them. Like fire and water meeting each other."
He explained thoroughly, as he had been tracking the flow of his Life Intent inside the prisoner’s body throughout the attempt. The moment Bizarre Qi arrived, the rejection was total and instant.
Hua Mingyue lowered her book. "Didn’t the ancient supreme beings mention this failure?"
"They tried everything I’ve done before I even started," Lei Cheng said. "I’m replicating their failures in sequence. On purpose."
"Why?"
"Because I want to see the failure with my own eyes. If by some miracle it succeeds—though it won’t—it would be extraordinary. And if it fails, I understand why it fails in a way that reading someone else’s notes doesn’t give you."
Understanding a mistake was often more valuable than memorizing someone else’s conclusion.
He cleared his throat. "The ancient beings knew Bizarre Qi carries Bizarre Intent. They knew Blood Qi, even elevated with Life Intent, still sits only on one half of a cycle. Life Intent is life. Bizarre Intent sits between life and death. So—"
"Death Intent," Hua Mingyue said, cutting in.
Lei Cheng understood all of that from the research notes. And noticing failures made him understand more.
"Yes." He nodded. "The supreme beings attempted the complete life cycle—fusing both Life Intent and Death Intent into the Blood Qi, creating a complete circle of life. Life Intent, Bizarre Intent, and Death Intent. They failed there too."
Hua Mingyue looked at him with quiet attention.
"And don’t you want to witness that failure as well?"
"I do," Lei Cheng said. "But this garden got ugly because of the prisoner’s body and blood. And it’s not a quick experiment."
He signaled for a nearby servant to clean up.
"Then rest first," she said, returning to her book. "Go ahead when you’re ready."
Lei Cheng glanced across the garden. The remaining prisoners—those still bound by vines—had stopped struggling. They stood or sat blankly, having apparently resigned themselves to waiting. The garden was already being cleaned by the household maids and servants.
He called one maid over. "Tell my father that my master is teaching me a skill using prisoners—some of them will die. He should not worry."
The maid trembled, nodded, and hurried away.
She had no idea what kind of skill had required the prisoners to explode.
Half an hour later, the garden was clean, and Lei Cheng was ready.
He called the next prisoner forward.
This one was a nineteen-year-old man, powerfully built, muscles pressing against the already-tight prisoner uniform. His crime was not complicated: he was from a nearby village and had spent years bullying its inhabitants through physical strength. Lei Cheng glanced at the thick frame and noted the presence within it.
’Martial foundation. His Blood Qi will be strong enough on its own. I won’t need to inject Life Intent first to strengthen his body.’
He gestured for the prisoner to sit. The prisoner sat cross-legged in the garden’s center. Lei Cheng sat across from him.
"You can sense your Blood Qi?"
"I can," the bully said, voice flat.
"Give me a thread of it."
The prisoner extended a thin crimson strand from his palm into Lei Cheng’s waiting hand.
Lei Cheng then created two energy threads in his other palm simultaneously—one of Life Intent, vibrant green; one of Death Intent, deep black. He set them rotating around each other in a circle, spinning them faster and faster until they stabilized into a continuous wheel—neither merging nor repelling, simply coexisting in close orbit.
He brought the Blood Qi thread toward the rotating wheel.
The moment it touched, the combined Life-Death Intent pulsed outward with a force that surprised even him.
’Too powerful. One thread isn’t enough.’
He waved his hand. The thug understood without being told and extended more. More threads of Blood Qi passed across. Five threads total.
This time, when Lei Cheng brought them toward the rotating wheel, they fused under his control.
The fusion was successful because he was commanding his intent; otherwise, they would not have fused so fast.
"Whoo!"
The energy in his palm transformed in an instant. It detonated upward from his fingers as orange-gold flames, palm-sized, flaring into the air before vanishing. Lei Cheng wanted to stare at them for a bit longer. The heat that arrived with them was instant and extreme. He threw the energy away from his hand on pure instinct.
Even the bully leaned back.
Lei Cheng stared at his palm and then at the space where the flames had just been. He clicked his tongue.
’If that’s what fused Blood Qi alone looks like before complete fusion without Bizarre Qi—a genuine Bizarre Martial Cultivator at Level One would be a match for a Level One Bizarre Creature.’
He waved the prisoner back in close. "Let’s begin."
He fused Life and Death Intent in his palm—ten percent was the maximum, as he had already established. He pressed the rotating half-green and half-black wheel into the prisoner’s chest.
The bully closed his eyes, sitting still, and began the fusion. His Blood Qi absorbed the combined intent perfectly—all of it, cleanly, without resistance—as Lei Cheng made the intent gentle.
The prisoner’s expression shifted. A broad grin appeared on his face.
"What a power," he whispered.
Lei Cheng could see the evidence even before the prisoner said anything. The old scars across the man’s shoulders—faded. The crooked ring finger on his right hand—healed in real time, the bone resetting itself without any intervention.
’Remarkable.’
"Fuse with Bizarre Qi," Lei Cheng ordered.
The prisoner’s expression became solemn. He nodded once, exhaled, and drew Bizarre Qi from the gray fog into his body.
Crack! Crack!
The fracture lines spread immediately.
Bang!
The body exploded. Lei Cheng shielded himself with a vine wall. He shook his head slowly.
"As expected."
He had now reached the exact point the ancient beings had reached—the same final wall. Every attempt that had ever been made stopped here. He reached into his storage and pulled out the research records compiled by Supreme Yin, turning to the final page.
’The only path remaining is to comprehend the Bizarre Intent within Bizarre Qi—to understand Bizarre Qi directly and incorporate it into the cycle of life and death. No approach has succeeded at this stage.’
Lei Cheng closed the book and threw it onto the ground beside him.
From this point onward, there were no more answers waiting inside someone else’s notes.
He sat on the rock near Hua Mingyue and closed his eyes for several minutes, thinking in the stillness.
When he opened them, he had an answer—but not a comfortable one.
"How did the ancient beings fail to comprehend Bizarre Intent?" he asked, turning to Hua Mingyue sharply. "There must have been some kind of restriction on the comprehension itself."
Hua Mingyue took a slow breath.
"You can only comprehend Bizarre Intent while you are in the state between life and death," she said. "Fully alive, you cannot understand it. If you cross over completely into death, you can sense it—but you will be corrupted. And if you comprehend it during the reincarnation process, the new life is corrupted as well unless proper Life Intent is also comprehended and is stronger."
Lei Cheng sat very still.
"So that’s why the ancient beings failed," he said quietly. "The condition for comprehension is a state that is itself nearly impossible to control." He paused. "Then I’ll attempt it directly."
Hua Mingyue looked at him. "Are you serious?"
"I need the elixirs you gave me before. I’ll take one, and I’ll stop my heart for a few seconds."
Hua Mingyue tapped the rocking chair arm with her fingertips. "Are you certain?"
"I’m certain. A few seconds is all I need. My enlightenment ability will let me grasp Bizarre Intent in that window."
"If your heart stops for more than five seconds," she said, her voice rising slightly, "you may not come back."
"I know." Lei Cheng stood up, and there was a quiet gleam in his eyes that had nothing reckless in it—only resolution. "I have no other choice."
His voice carried no excitement, only quiet certainty.
She looked at him for a long moment. Then she nodded.
Lei Cheng snapped his fingers. Vines erupted and coiled around all the remaining prisoners—including the ones he had made a deal with. They looked at him in disbelief.
"I will be back in a few hours, maybe," he said. "Until then, you stay here."
They fell silent, their expressions bitter.
---
Lei Cheng went to his room with Hua Mingyue. He took the Soul Energy Boosting Elixir from her palm and swallowed it.
It tasted like honey this time. ’Different flavor.’ He commented as he lay back on his bed.
He had his heart surrounded by Life Intent first, by a massive amount on one side.
With careful precision, he activated Death Intent and directed it at his own heart from the other side of the Life Intent. The heart stopped. The silence in his chest was immediate and absolute—he entered the state of death the moment it did, forced by Death Intent. He lost his senses. And his body fell limp.
Hua Mingyue had taken hold of his arm. Her fingers gripped it tightly.
She began counting.
"Five... four... three... two..."
