Shattered Jade: Ascending soul

Shredding the Wild

The alpha wolf didn't just run it launched itself like a heavy red-eyed boulder through the sheets of pouring rain. Its jaw split wide, long strings of thick saliva flying from its yellow fangs, aiming straight for Li Xuan’s exposed throat.

Lin Chen no, Li Xuan didn't flinch.

Inside his stomach, the sensation was pure, unadulterated hell. The ten thousand jagged shards of his ruined jade core were grinding against each other like a meat processor. It felt as if a thousand razors were trying to slice their way out through his skin from the inside. The sheer pain would have made a common cultivator faint instantly.

But Li Xuan’s mind was no longer common. It was filled with a toxic, burning ocean of absolute hatred for Mo Fan and Ning’er. That hatred acted like an anesthetic, numbing his nervous system and turning his agony into cold, focused focus.

"You want to eat a God?" Li Xuan whispered, his voice rattling with a metallic, layered echo.

He didn't have a sword. He didn't have a single drop of normal, liquid Qi in his channels. But as he flicked his index finger toward the lunging alpha beast, the dark emerald light inside his chest violently flared.

SHRREEEEEE!

A sound like a thousand mirrors shattering at high speed ripped through the stormy night.

A microscopic, razor-sharp shard of dark emerald energy invisible to the naked eye but carrying the absolute, condensed weight of his broken soul shot from his fingertip. It didn't just pierce the air; it literally tore a clean, empty line through the falling raindrops.

SQUELCH.

The alpha wolf didn't even get to bark. The invisible emerald razor struck its forehead, slicing through its skull, its spine, and its entire muscle structure so cleanly that the beast was instantly split into two perfect, symmetrical halves mid-air. The two bloody pieces of the wolf crashed uselessly into the mud on either side of Li Xuan's boots, its hot blood instantly washed away by the cold downpour.

The other two Abyssal Wolves stopped dead in their tracks, their paws sliding in the mud. Their primitive, monstrous instincts violently screamed at them to flee. The dying mortal they had come to eat had just turned into something infinitely more terrifying than any demon in the wasteland.

Li Xuan slowly dragged himself up from the mud. His tattered grey robes were soaked in blood, but as he stood upright, the hundreds of green cracks across his chest and torso began to glow even brighter, pulsing in sync with his ragged breathing.

Fractured Ascension: Level 1.

The natural laws of the heaven stated that a broken dantian could not hold energy that it would leak out like a sieve. But Li Xuan's broken jade shards didn't try to hold the energy. They reflected it. Every time the raw, chaotic spiritual energy of the stormy night tried to leak out of his wound, it slammed into the jagged surfaces of the shards, bouncing back and forth, multiplying in speed and cutting power until it turned into a lethal hurricane confined inside his flesh.

"My turn," Xuan murmured, his glowing white eyes locking onto the two remaining beasts.

He didn't wait for them to run. He simply took a sharp breath, pulling the freezing storm air deep into his lungs. He didn't use an intricate martial arts form. He just opened his palm and swept his arm forward in a wide, careless arc.

SWOOSH!

A violent wave of fifty dark emerald shards erupted from his palm, flying through the dark like a swarm of glowing green hornets. The razor-sharp energy blades minced through the rain, hitting the two wolves before they could even turn around to fly.

MINCE. CHOP. SLICE.

Within a millisecond, the two massive beasts were completely dismantled, turned into a fine, red mist of blood and bone that splattered across the dark tree trunks. Not a single scrap of meat remained whole.

Li Xuan stood alone in the dark, raining wasteland, surrounded by the minced remains of his first victims. He didn't feel happy; he felt a deep, dark hunger. The fractured jade pieces inside his stomach were still spinning, empty, demanding more energy to grind.

"This wasteland... it's a graveyard for thousands of rejected disciples and dead monsters," Xuan muttered to himself, looking deeper into the pitch-black valley where old bones and rusted weapons lay buried under the mud. "To anyone else, it is a hellhole of trash. To me... it is an infinite mountain of raw material."

Suddenly, the heavy sound of squelching boots came from the path behind him.

A tall man wearing the cruel, dark iron armor of an Azure Sky Sect Outer Warden stepped out from the trees, carrying a heavy iron lantern. He had been sent to verify that Li Xuan's corpse had been properly eaten by the wolves.

The warden stopped, his lantern light catching the bloody halves of the alpha wolf and the tall figure standing in the center of the clearing. His eyes widened in absolute shock as he recognized the wild black hair and the jade-cracked chest.

"Li... Li Xuan?!" the warden gasped, his hand instantly flying to the hilt of his iron sword. "You're still breathing?! Your core was destroyed by Young Master Mo Fan himself! How are you standing?!"

Shen Xuan turned his head slowly, his glowing emerald eyes locking onto the warden’s throat like a physical blade. A cold, bloodthirsty smile crept across his ruined face.

The warden’s heart hammered against his ribs. He was a Level 5 Qi Refining warrior—a trained killer of the outer peaks. But looking into Li Xuan’s white, soulless eyes, he felt an icy, primeval terror that made his fingers freeze against his sword hilt.

"You... you freak! You must have used a demonic forbidden art!" the warden screamed, trying to shake off his fear. He drew his iron blade, channeling his dull yellow Qi into the metal. "Young Master Mo Fan paid me twenty gold coins to bring back your severed fingers as proof of your death! If you're alive, I'll just have to chop them off myself!"

He lunged forward, his blade cutting a yellow arc through the heavy sheets of rain.

Li Xuan stood perfectly still, his tattered robes whipping around his bleeding chest as the dark emerald hurricane inside his stomach roared for its first human harvest.