Life as a Rogue Cultivator

Chapter 264: Dried-Up Human

He’d been running all night, barely got a couple hours of rest, and now he had to run again. Liu Xiaolou didn’t even know what to think anymore."What really made him want to cry was that the spirit leopard hadn’t been dazzled by the Bewildering Fragrance at all. If anything, it got even more fired up. Its eyes glowed green, it let out a howl like spring itself had arrived. And all its attention was on him. If that thing tackled him… he didn’t even want to imagine the consequences.

The formation was useless. The fragrance backfired. The Three-Mystery Sword was afraid of the lightning in the leopard’s tail. The only thing Liu Xiaolou had to defend himself was the Glass Shield.

Fortunately, the Glass Shield wasn’t made of metal, so the lightning crackling from the spirit leopard’s deadly tail couldn’t damage it. If it had… things would’ve gotten really ugly.

He kept running, but in just an hour the overly-excited spirit leopard caught up to him three separate times. Each time he swung the Glass Shield behind him, there’d be a heavy , and he’d be sent flying five or six zhang.

Sure, each time he managed to use the force to get a bit of distance and catch his breath for a moment, but being stabbed from behind over and over, slammed by that deadly weapon again and again... Liu Xiaolou was really having the worst time of his life.

After four hours of this, with the shield taking a dozen blows, he felt like his organs had all been knocked out of place. His head was spinning, his stomach was churning, and all he wanted was to find a corner and throw up his guts.

But the spirit leopard only got more fired up, showing no sign of tiring. When Liu Xiaolou was sent flying yet again, he completely lost control of his body and slammed straight into a thick tree trunk.

There was a loud . The whole tree shook three times, showering him in falling leaves.

He slid down the trunk, and before his feet even touched the ground, the spirit leopard was already on him.

Liu Xiaolou panicked. He’d barely turned around when the spirit leopard’s two front paws pinned his arms to the tree trunk. Its green, hungry eyes were right in front of him, staring as if it couldn’t get enough."

It opened its jaws roared. So loud Liu Xiaolou’s eardrums nearly burst. Through the ringing in his ears, he saw a tongue almost a foot long slide out and sweep across his face twice. Its thick, stinking saliva hit him, reeking like death and rot, and that was it. He couldn’t hold it in. He puked, hard and fast, all over the beast.

The spirit leopard curled its tongue over his face, scooping up the vomit with a couple of sloppy slurps. And then it lashed the tongue back out to lick Liu Xiaolou again.

His stomach was already empty, so getting licked a few times by the beast didn’t really matter anymore. What matter was that the most dangerous moment had finally arrived. The spirit leopard coiled its body, then suddenly lunged forward with a headbutt.

It slammed straight into the Glass Shield Liu Xiaolou had barely managed to raise in time.

The leopard twisted its hindquarters and lunged from another angle. But Liu Xiaolou caught the shift in its movement and swung the shield around to block again.

Another resounding

The sound echoed through the thick forest, drawing the curious eyes of nearby wild animals.

"The spectators included, but weren’t limited to, squirrels, wild rabbits, foxes, stray dogs, and all kinds of birds."

Then, all of a sudden, the ground began to shake. All the watching animals scattered in a panic

The tremor finally snapped the spirit leopard out of the haze of lust stirred up by the Bewildering Fragrance. Its pupils tightened, the green glow in its eyes shifting to blue. Forgetting all about poking at Liu Xiaolou, it sprang backward in alarm.

Two vines suddenly shot up from the soil, looping around the spirit leopard’s tail and yanking it out of the air.

Lightning crackled along the leopard’s long tail, scorching the vines that held it. But the moment they burned through, the charred skin flaked off and the vines writhed back to life, revealing fresh green shoots underneath. New tendrils sprouted rapidly, driving themselves into the leopard’s tail. The leopard shuddered violently, its body going rigid. Its lightning sputtered out completely.

More vines burst from the ground, whipping upward and coiling around the leopard’s legs. They wrapped around a tall tree, hoisting the beast into the air.

Liu Xiaolou didn’t escape either. As a matter of fact, the vines got to him even before they caught the leopard. He’d already been hoisted up against another tree trunk, bound tight. Fresh green shoots sprouted along the vines wrapping him, pushing under his skin. A tingling numbness spread through his whole body, sealing up every meridian.

Even with his cultivation already at the eighth layer of Qi Refinement, he couldn’t fight it at all. He hung helplessly in midair.

From this angle, he could see everything far more clearly. Far more horrifyingly.

All those vines poking up through the soil were actually the roots and shoots of the giant tree beside him. Most of the time they hid underground, but the moment prey wandered close, they surfaced to snare it. When the tree finally revealed all its tendrils, they spread across nearly two acres. That entire stretch of earth was its hunting ground.

Now he hung beneath the trunk, helpless, feeling the countless soft, needle-thin shoots burrow into his body and drink him dry. His true qi, his blood, his flesh.

The feeding was agonizingly slow, which only made every moment sharper. He could feel his strength draining away bit by bit, stolen by those tiny tendrils. His life force seeped out in a long, terrible trickle. Fear flooded his mind. He could already picture himself in a month, maybe two... nothing but a withered husk swaying under the tree, like a dried-up man-shaped leaf left to dangle in the wind.

But he couldn’t do anything to stop it. Not even use the Bewildering Fragrance. He couldn’t move his true qi at all.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the spirit leopard hanging a short distance away. It was handling things better than he was; at least it could still let out soft, pitiful cries. In those cries, he thought he heard a hint of regret.

Regret? From , you damned beast? If not for you, I wouldn’t be dying here!

Liu Xiaolou seethed in silence, furious but helpless.

Hung there for two whole days, he was suddenly drenched by a torrential nighttime downpour. Thunder roared and lightning slashed across the sky like fiery snakes. The spirit leopard seemed energized by the storm. Or maybe it was drawing power from the lightning itself. It thrashed violently, tugging at the vines and swinging back and forth. And for a moment it looked like it might actually break free.

But it was all for nothing. More vines pushed up from the ground and wrapped around it again, winding tighter and tighter. The leopard finally stopped struggling, letting out a low, trembling whine, almost like it was crying.

Liu Xiaolou didn’t even have the strength to cry. The branches buried in his body kept draining everything from him, and at the same time they secreted some kind of toxin that numbed him completely. The poison didn’t hurt him; it only left him dull and drifting, caught between sleep and waking, like he was barely here at all.

Lost in a fog, Liu Xiaolou could no longer make out anything around him, nor feel anything inside his own body. The only thing he could still sense was a faint, blurry glow.

The vines had already spread through every meridian, claiming one primordial pool after another. Each of those pools had become nothing more than storage cells for the tree demon to drain and feed on.

Then, just as a cluster of tender new shoots crept into the Hand Faint Yin Meridian and took over the Daling acupoint, a flash of green suddenly lit up from deep within that pool.

The delicate little shoots eased their way into that glow of green, swaying and testing the space for a long moment. Then, as if they had confirmed something, they suddenly darted back, pulling out of the Daling acupoint, retreating from the Hand Faint Yin Meridian, withdrawing from every channel, and finally slipping out of Liu Xiaolou’s body altogether.

Liu Xiaolou dropped from midair and hit the ground with a thud that knocked a grunt out of him. He lay there on his back, staring up at the sky, sprawled in the muddy earth.