*Things like sexism and racism are purely for worldbuilding and to make it more realistic. Thank you for your understanding.*
Currently, the expressions on the faces of those two middle Stage 5 humans were ones of absolute shock, fear and horror.
They had heard the pathetic wails of death that these terrifying creatures had caused. They had slaughtered hundreds of Stage 4 cultivators and bad even tore a few Stage 5s in half. It was gruesome.
Their huge yellow eyes that seemed almost animated due to the size only had an elongated black emotionless slit for a pupil. The beastly eyes did not show pity nor aversion to ripping a young, innocent cultivator into many pieces.
The short grey fur of their emaciated bodies could not hide the glaring ribcage and bones that protruded from the skin disgustingly. And the long limbs that could only be described as freakish and strange ended in an amalgamation of horrifying retractable claws that could cleanly slice a skull in two.
And they had seen it.
Those claws slicing open bellies and letting the dirty purple guts spill out like wet cabbage. Those claws cleanly separate faces from skulls without the slightest resistance.
Those fangs that were longer than human torsos plying into flesh amidst a deathly wail before being thrashed into ribbons of red. Those fangs that were stained a horrid red and were used to hiss at them, as if the beast was sneering.
The two stronger of the middle Stage 5s were restraining the male which was much more crazed in its attacks as if it was a rabid animal that only had whites in its eyes. Every movement of those horribly thin limbs would result in the death of dozens of juniors.
That was no honourable death: being torn to shreds without a complete corpse. There wasn't even anything to bury but sludge that had already mixed with the marshy mud of the ground.
And yet...
Before their incredulous eyes and beneath the mad beast that had yet to realise its fate, a demon surfaced from the earth. Tearing through rock and soil in a large explosion, that large white figure with terrifyingly large wings opening up to show the sheer massive figure surfaced. From the earth, from Hell, like a demon.
Shockwaves coursed through the air as a huge white arm led by horrifying black claws thrust upward like a protest against the gods. The arm was easily four meters long as it tore through the air and embedded itself through the top of the male beast's skull.
The eyes of the beast had yet to even realise before they went dull. All that horrifying majesty it had as it continued to stare at the human cultivators withered away into decrepit death. Speared atop the arm of that demon as mere prey hunted for fun, the body was thrown away to the floor like trash.
Blood flooded from the wound as the huge body fell through the sky at terrifying speeds, creating earthquakes that shook the very earth as it collided. Huge swathes of murky water and sludgy earth exploded outwards as the dead body of the paramount beast was submerged in blood, its maw hanging wide open as the mud flooded in.
The two humans cringed just looking at it. It seemed unworthy of such a pathetic end.
Before they lifted their heads again to gaze upon that huge white demon that had done such a cruel thing, there was nothing but air. It had fled with speed they could not even see.
And at that moment...
"ROOOOAAARRRR!!!"
A terrifying roar that made the winds cry in fright emerged! It shook the bodies of the two humans in the air as their ears bled and their noses bled also! The earth seemed to shimmer in horror as the devastating roar exploded outwards and directly surged the earth outwards in fury!
Looking over, the two humans grimaced.
They saw their other two brothers that were fighting the female beast bleeding from all of their orifices as they fell from the sky! However, before one of the bodies could even fall a meter, a surge of black mist materialised beside him and dwarfed his body!
From the mist, terrifying jaws materialised that clamped down on his body and tore right through him! The huge fangs penetrated right through his body and emerged from the other side, leaving gaping wounds on the body!
The fangs bit down and impaled him...
However, they bit down a second time and crushed him into bloody mist!
The two humans screamed the name of their companion, while the other was still falling from the sky weakly!
Looking over to the main body of the beast, its head vanished into black mist, however, it materialised with new bloody flesh covering its fangs! The eyes of the beast were bloodshot and dilated as the slit pupil enlarged by several times, showing its killing instinct getting more intense!
However, the beast didn't even look at the humans after that and fell into black mist before surfacing right before the dead and defiled body of the other male Catsith. Lifting the body even larger than its own by the muddy scruff of its neck, the two beasts were then engulfed by black mist once again and disappeared!
After that, there was only silence.
One of the two middle Stage 5 humans flashed before appearing before the weakly falling body of their companion, catching him and placing him on level ground. His skin was pale and the trails of blood from his orifices were thick, long and dark. Sweat covered his skin and he simply looked as if fear had gripped him eternally.
The other just remained in the air and cast his eyes down at the field of slaughter before him. Merely tens of Stage 3s had to be easily slaughtered for the Stage 4s to arrive. However, over two hundred lifeless and mutilated bodies of Stage 4s and even bodies of lower Stage 5s were strewn about before they had arrived. It was saddening.
He went down to his other companions and stood over them before he spoke.
"This was a devastating loss, I-"
And he was hoisted up to the sky, a huge white arm impaling the centre of his chest, so wide that it even tore him in half. He instantly died, his heart impaled and crushed along with the organs and bones that also stood in the way of those black claws.
Behind him, a huge figure seemed to suddenly appear.
He was dwarfed so pathetically, impaled on the large arm like some small accessory that one wouldn't even notice unless they looked twice. His tiny body was hoisted so far above the ground as his head fell lifeless, blood heavily trailing from his mouth before it simply ran out.
The last remaining middle Stage 5, who was fit for battle, suddenly turned from the unconscious companion that was almost lifeless on the floor. He had heard it: a sickening sound, a weak groan, and a pitter like rain. And he had felt the sun disappear, shrouded by something.
Turning around with quick speed, he tried to kick back off the earth and create some distance without turning his back to his enemy.
However, the white demon moved forwards with sickening dexterity unbefitting of its size. A single step bridged the gap and landed on the feet of the backstepping Stage 5. The shoeless, huge feet that were animalistic as they bent inwards with an extra joint reached over and crushed the feet of the Stage 5 effortlessly.
He fell backwards, another foot landing on his head and pushing it to the side as it rested atop his scalp, the crushing pressure sending him into a massive panic. The middle claw on the foot was not dissimilar to a velociraptor as it was moved just like an appendage, tapping against the skull of the human and sending out clear sounds as it pierced his flesh and tapped upon his skull.
The human's eyes widened as he had yet to even cry out from the front of his feet being crushed.
And under the horrified eyes, that could feel their own death steadily approaching, the sharp claw tapping on his skull became rougher and rougher, and rougher...!
He could feel his skull start to be chipped away...
He could feel the strange sensation as a millimetre of claw finally pierced his skull and touched the flesh inside...
He only felt stranger as the claw made it's way deeper and deeper with every tap...
He felt his skull dully crack as it was plied apart hard enough...
He felt dim thoughts overtake him as he sank into confusion, that strange, almost ticklish, feeling of his brain being touched getting rougher...
And he felt darkness, the claw having its last tap that sent the man into death.
Taking but a moment to kill the two humans, the vigilance began to leave Qing Fang's eyes. His body was vastly stronger than theirs, being a minor realm above, however, they could level out the playing fields with middle Stage 5 Law fragments. That was the reason they could fight the adult Catsiths.
So, he just wouldn't give them a chance.
Qing Fang looked over at the last remaining middle Stage 5 that lived, however, he was incapacitated from the deathly roar that attacked him at close range from the female Catsith. He looked dead already, and Qing Fang would help him get there.
The huge velociraptor-like black claw of his right leg landed on the chest of the man and independently struck down with enough force to pierce the chest and embed halfway into the heart. Qing Fang had nerves in his claws, and he felt the skin of the heart bend under the sharpness and get pierced like a balloon.
The unconscious man didn't even awake or react, he just breathed his last breath.
To die under the foot of another; humiliating.
Reaching down to all three middle Stage 5 corpses that remained, Qing Fang clawed at their hands and fingers, prying the delicate spatial rings from them. And soon after, five identical spatial rings lay in his palm. It seemed that the same Forge Master had made them all.
All three of them held a single spatial ring each and Qing Fang had found the other two on lower Stage 5 corpses that lay about.
Qing Fang desperately needed the rings. After all, this much blood simply couldn't fit in his stomach no matter how much he compressed it. Besides, he didn't like the bloated feeling.
Before, his rock-hard and defined stomach had constantly looked a bit inflated as the amount of blood sat in there simply stretched his stomach lining to its limits and even surpassed it. Now that his stomach was empty of it all, he felt a lot lighter and healthier. So, he would probably put blood in these spatial rings from now on.
The rings were extremely heavy. Despite being so small, each of them easily weighed nearly a ton and veins were bursting from Qing Fang's arm as he held all five in his palm.
He inspected the rings and guessed that there must have been a rune inscribed there while the masters of the rings lived. It would have probably dwelled in their soul space, just like slave branding runes had, just like Nu Li's and Long's rune was still next to Qing Fang's soul right now.
It was probably to stop anyone other than the master from getting inside and seeing inside the ring. Smart.
However, with all of their deaths of them, the runes had vanished. Qing Fang wondered how the runes were placed there in the first place? Was there personalisation done by the Forge Master personally, or would it appear with a new imprinting? Qing Fang was no expert and had never possessed a spatial ring, only a spatial bag which was much inferior.
Touching the rings and making contact with the object with his soul, or "human essence" as the dead Stage 5s would call it, the rings suddenly reacted. The small silver things shone with renewed golden light and formed into a rune that followed Qing Fang's soul and appeared next to it in his soul space.
Feeling through the rune next to his soul instead of looking at the actual ring itself, Qing Fang could see a vivid picture appear in his mind.
A large space sat there as if frozen in time. It was like he was looking through a golden lens as everything was dyed the same colour.
'Interesting.' Qing Fang thought as he saw piles of silver and bronze as well as clothes, food and many other items he didn't care to look at. The space inside was seemingly unlimited, maybe the weight of the ring wasn't reduced and all that limited its capacity was the strength of a cultivator?
'Seems so.' Qing Fang thought as the weight of all the silver, bronze and other items seemed to equal a ton in weight; the same as the ring weighed.
Qing Fang then looked around at the hundreds of bodies and felt the pressure. That was not something he could wear freely; there was simply too much. One couldn't forget that the blood of cultivators was many, many times denser than the blood of mortals. So, over two hundred Stage 4's blood was a cataclysmic weight.
Firstly, Qing Fang emptied the spatial rings of all the bronze coins and other things, leaving only the silver coins that he could use. He placed all of them into one single ring and counted two hundred silver coins; that was not a small amount. It was a fifth of an entire gold coin!
A mountain of bronze coins, delicate foods and furs appeared before him from within the spatial rings. There was simply a huge amount of things and they were all of high quality. Despite them sinking into the mud, Qing Fang didn't care.
After that, Qing Fang positioned himself in the centre of the battlefield with all the bodies strewn around him. He began to move his arms, reaching out to the Blood Law fragments and directly controlling them.
Hundreds of dead corpses started to shift and shake, their blood leaking out of them from all over their orifices and even the pores of their skin. The blood flew into the air and was separated from the dirty corpses and mud from the ground.
There were well over two hundred corpses here, with most of them being Stage 4 cultivators. However, the size of the city was not to be underestimated. Merely hundreds of Stage 4s was not a huge amount, though they will be sorely missed.
Eventually, the blood formed into a huge river of blood tens of meters long and nearly ten tons heavy in the air. This was not even close to the current limit of Qing Fang's Law fragment manipulation with his current cultivation. He could easily manipulate a river of blood a hundred meters long and weighing a thousand tons. And despite the river of blood weighing nearly a thousand tons, Qing Fang could still manipulate it freely.
That was the difference between the physical body and Law fragments. While Qing Fang's higher Stage 5 body could lift tens of tons with his maximum exertion, lower Stage 3 manipulation could move a hundred times that. It could be seen that the main battle power of a cultivator truly came from Law fragments and not merely the body.
Sooner or later, Qing Fang would come against an enemy he was physically superior to, yet could not defeat.
It was truly a sea of blood that floated upon the sky, the thick liquid swirling with the conveyed weight that could crush many beneath it.
Then, Qing Fang manipulated the blood to flow toward him, and as it approached, a golden light shone from the five spatial rings and engulfed the sea of blood as it approached like a tyrant wave. Even the ring full of silver had rivers of blood filling it.
Huge amounts of weight were lifted from Qing Fang's manipulation, but also appeared on the rings which heavily weighed him down. And as the last remaining blood swirled and frothed as it entered the five rings, Qing Fang felt his entire body sinking into the earth.
To begin with, Qing Fang's huge body weighed six and a half tons with his current cultivation! But with an added ten tons, he could still move relatively freely, however, his movement was definitely heavily restricted.
Qing Fang ignored all the spatial bags on the battlefield as well as the flesh of high-level cultivators that could sell. If he had more time, he would scour the battlefield thoroughly, but he was pressed before reinforcements from the City Administration arrived.
The five rings seemed to adapt with size so Qing Fang didn't have any trouble putting them on his monstrous fingers. However, he was having a hard time keeping his balance as there was an uneven number of rings and he couldn't distribute the weight equally across his body.
Then, Qing Fang began to flee the battlefield. He was but a couple of thousand meters from the towering city walls and where his worries lay. Nu Li was waiting for five kilometres in the other direction, and Qing Fang would probably only be as fast as he was currently!
However, it was still a shame that Qing Fang didn't manage to get the blood of the Catsiths or even kill the remaining adult female. Although he had made it seem as if the humans had killed their kitten, there was now a murderous Catsith roaming the marshes alongside him.
Now, Qing Fang planned to rid himself of these heavy rings and place them inside his underwater cave before going to explore the depths of the marshes. Maybe he could find some fortune where there was danger.
However, before he had even gone as far as to reach Nu Li, he saw thick black mist amalgamating not far before him...
*3,039/3,000 words*
More coming soon