Red Talon Piercing The Darkness

Hong Zhao stared down at the man as he turned the dark soil red around him. As he looked him up and down, he began to frown. Looking all over the area, he spotted what he was looking for. Within the grass a distance off, he saw a finger sticking up, almost to indicate that it was there. Smiling, Hong Zhao made it off of the path towards the appendage. Growing closer, he could see the rest of the bloodied hand. Picking it up, blood still oozed from the blown off part.

Holding the hand with his finger and thumb, he slid the ring off of the previous owner's finger and stashed it in his storage ring. He then dropped the hand with a look of disgust. "I'm sure this treasure will do me much more good than it will do you now." He said with a smile as he looked back at the corpse of Liang He. With that part of the battle over, all he had to do was round up the rest of the forty men and kill them. He wanted no survivors who could go inform Zheng Guo of his existence.

Activating vortex thrust, Hong Zhao jumped to the treetop. Yet he came up short. Falling, he clutched his stomach and doubled over in pain the moment he hit the ground. "What the hell?" His stomach felt as if it was being torn apart from the inside out. "Why?" He silently mouthed, as he was in too much pain to voice his question.

Immediately, he sat in the lotus position and began to cultivate, yet no qi swirled around him. Instead, a raging storm of qi surged within his body. 'The qi I absorbed through the devouring qi claws!' He thought in alarm. He did the math quickly in his head as he watched the storm like qi surge through his dantian. 'Lan said that an average ninth star student rank was only ten percent of my strength. So if I had slain twenty two cultivators of that level, wouldn't that mean I have two hundred and twenty percent of my base cultivation?' He thought in a panic.

Hong Zhao began rotating the qi within his dantian at a frantic level. Even if he rushed, he still painstakingly compressed the qi into its natural white luster. Instead of taking pride in his performance, he moved on from one qi thread to another, adding it to his qi spiral. It didn't seem to matter just how much qi he refined, the storm seemed to stay at the same level! Yet Hong Zhao was determined. He would not see his foundation weakened just because of a little extra qi.

An eternity passed within his cultivating state as he continued to refine the qi. The qi spiral that had once not shown much growth after reaching the third star student rank now seemed to burst with energy. As it grew to the wall of the qi cave, he felt the pressure as it broke through once more.

Beads of sweat formed on his brow, and the qi blocking uniform quickly became drenched, yet he did not allow his attention to waver. If he did, the result would be a disaster. Though the wall of the dantian cave quickly gave way, the qi spiral still grew without slowing. It wasn't long until once again, he felt the pressure from the wall caving. The qi spiral was now double the size it had been previously.

Finally, the rampant energy began to slow, before it stopped all together. His qi spiral was now some space away from the dantian wall, and it began rotating slowly, as if it had always been that size. Hong Zhao opened up his eyes, which shone silver in the noon day sky. He let out a foul breath and wiped his forehead. When he brought his hand gloved hand away, the black garment was stained brown.

"I broke through!" He said with amazement as he looked at his glove. He knew the sweat was the impurities being purged from his meridians, which had happened after every increase in strength, yet the thought that he had been so far away from achieving the next rank, and then being sent not one, but two ranks ahead was simply unheard of!

"About time." A haughty voice sounded. Hong Zhao sighed as he looked over at Lan. "I thought you would take another week to absorb all of that qi." She raised an eyebrow as she looked him up and down.

"A week?" Hong Zhao's eyebrows rose. "I've been cultivating for a week?"

"You should be lucky you can still cultivate at all." Lan said with narrowed eyes. "You played a very dangerous game using those claws twenty two consecutive times."

"It was the easiest way to gain strength." Hong Zhao shrugged.

"And you completely disregarded the warning!"

"Warning?"

Lan saw the perplexed look on her student's face and sighed deeply. "You trained the technique and used it for five years, yet never paid attention to the warning?" She smacked Hong Zhao atop the head. While the boy held his head, Lan rolled her eyes. "The deeper the red within the claws, the less you should use them. If you continue past blood red, you risk doing damage to your dantian. And considering what a deep red it was, I'm surprised you didn't explode from the force of qi that made its way into your dantian!"

Hong Zhao looked at the angry Lan for a minute before he gave a friendly smile. "Well, either way thank you for watching over me while I cultivated."

"Ha!" Lan mocked Hong Zhao. "You thought I watched over you?" She pointed towards Naje. "That would be Ren Cai. If she didn't find you as soon as you began cultivating, I'm sure Zheng Guo would have already found out about you!" Lan's face turned slightly red as she yelled at him. "She hunted down the remaining bandits before they were able to escape and tell the City Lord about you!"