Blue Wind Nation.
A land of rolling hills, forested mountains, and burgeoning sects. Compared to the savage wilderness of Azure Cloud, it smelled like cultivation and civilization. Every town hummed with profound energy. Every valley held hidden dangers.
Li Fan arrived unnoticed.
He always did.
No one marked the lone traveler with a black hood and a pack of stitched hide. No one noticed how the beasts near him never howled. How birds avoided his path. How his scent was neither man nor animal.
He stayed far from the cities. Far from the sects. But he listened.
Information passed through the taverns, merchant wagons, and whispering couriers. From a peddler with a broken foot, he heard of a "genius" from Floating Cloud City who had entered New Moon Profound Palace—and then humiliated Xiao Luocheng of the Xiao Sect in a single blow.
"Yun Che…" Li Fan murmured beneath the trees, watching a lantern float down a distant stream. "Already turning heads."
He wasn't envious.
But he was hungry.
---
The Devouring Continues
The outskirts of Blue Wind Nation were teeming with minor sects. Most were arrogant, territorial, and undisciplined. They sent young disciples into forests to kill beasts and "temper their hearts."
Li Fan followed these disciples silently. Like a ghost.
He didn't attack them.
But when they fell—by beast, by cliff, by their own incompetence—he would emerge from the trees and feast.
He didn't need to take much. A few fragments of muscle memory. A hint of an elemental technique. A taste of sword stance or spear rhythm. If they were weak, it faded quickly. But if they were talented...
"Then I remember you," he would whisper, hand on their cooling skin. "And you become a part of me."
He grew faster now. Sharper. He could mimic the first few stances of a sect's core sword style just from devouring one disciple.
But more than that... he could feel his own evolution accelerating.
He no longer felt the cold. He no longer needed fire to sleep.
His skin had grown subtly resistant to shallow wounds. And when he bled, it closed almost instantly.
"Not cultivation," he whispered to himself one night, watching the moon. "Adaptation. Evolution."
"I don't climb realms. I consume them."
---
He didn't dare enter New Moon City itself. The palace guards were too alert, and Yun Che's growing fame meant powerful eyes were watching.
So he stayed in the forests on the outer edge, hiding among the branches like a beast of myth.
He watched Yun Che sparring in secret one night—from a mile away, high in the trees. He could feel the strange rhythm of his profound energy, the chaotic fire of the Evil God flowing in unnatural waves.
"He shouldn't be that strong," Li Fan muttered.
"Not without cultivation techniques. Not without real foundation."
But then he remembered.
"He's not just Yun Che."
"He's carrying an entire life's worth of knowledge. The Heretic God's veins. The Sky Poison Pearl. And Jasmine."
He watched as Yun Che broke through a boulder during solo training, then sat under a tree to rest, clutching his chest.
"Still… he burns his own life to grow stronger. It'll cost him."
Li Fan turned and vanished into the woods.
He had no need to confront the boy.
Not yet.
---
Weeks later, Li Fan approached the mountain lair of a rogue sect known as Crimson Flame Hall.
They were cruel. Bandit cultivators in truth, masquerading as a sect. They raided towns under "protection taxes" and killed beasts far beyond their cultivation levels using poisons and traps.
Li Fan had watched them from the cliffs for days.
When he descended, he did so without a sound.
A guard by the outer post vanished mid-sentence. A cook turned to find only a trail of footprints ending in nothing.
Li Fan moved through the camp like a specter, dragging men into darkness, feeding on their screams—and then their souls.
By the time dawn lit the mountain, Crimson Flame Hall no longer existed.
No survivors.
No answers.
Only rumors of a demon in the woods.
---
Li Fan sat atop the sect's shattered stone altar, blood drying on his sleeves. His heartbeat was slow. Steady.
He had consumed five cultivators in a single night.
He'd gained fragments of three different flame techniques. He couldn't use their profound energy... but his body remembered the movements, the reflexes, the muscle contractions that accompanied each strike.
A smile crept onto his face.
"Soon… I won't just eat skills."
"I'll eat laws."
"And when Yun Che reaches the mid-Stages of the Sky Profound Realm…"
His claws flexed behind human skin.
"I'll eat someone like him."