Grand Ancestral Bloodlines
chapter-1905

The Silent Quibus didn't even look alive anymore. He looked like an amalgamation of flesh and blood, but the fury in Ryu's eyes didn't dissipate in the slightest. That wasn't because he felt that this wasn't enough, but because in all his fury, he still couldn't manage to shatter the man's bones.

The only attack that had managed to was when he reversed the connection he had with his corpse puppets. But even those shattered ribs had already healed. Even when he reversed the injuries Nemesis had given him, that hadn't managed to cause any damage.

Ryu didn't believe that this was because of some difference between the Fate Reversal coming from him versus several corpse puppets. It was instead because Silent Quibus had learned from the first and found methods to counter him somewhat.

And even now… he wasn't dead.

...

The world on the outside couldn't see through this. Well, at the very least the disciples couldn't. They were in abject shock, and even those that could see through some of the issues felt like they were observing something that didn't make much sense at all.

They all knew how powerful Silent Quibus was, so how was it possible for Ryu to be so completely and utterly dominant? Even if it was only for a short time, even if he capitalized on a mistake, there didn't seem to be any explanation for… this.

At that moment, an eerie laughter sounded.

...

Ryu didn't react to the laughter at all. He stood there in silence, his breath causing hot steam to spread into the surroundings.

"Tired already?"

Silent Quibus suddenly let out a mad cackle. His previous stoicism seemed to have vanished as he weakly looked into the skies. His eyes had been blinded by Ryu, but he could still seem to see the looming [Heavenly Dao Tree] and the White Phoenix that flapped its wings above it.

Then, he began to stand. His body rattled as though it was made of various mechanisms, and from what Ryu could tell, maybe it truly was.

Silent Quibus had obviously begun to refine his own body not much differently than he did his corpse puppets, and it was clear that he had gone exceptionally far with it as well. That was because Ryu had already seen through the fact that that cancerous mark on his forehead was none other than Corpse Poison.

Corpse Poison was a very sinister existence, and it was something that was avoided by most Necromancers, and those that were exposed for using it were ostracized.

Corpse Poison wasn't just poison that manifested from corpses. It came from torture, from a chaos of the soul, from a backlash against reincarnation itself. Its production could be put on the same level as those monsters that massacred entire towns, cities, countries, even worlds for the sake of their cultivation.

Wrathful spirits had many legends that were spread about them. But what many didn't know was that forming a wrathful spirit was only the first step of forming Corpse Poison.

Ryu's gaze turned to the side and he picked out one of the skeletons. He scanned it, and beneath [Lines of Fate] and his Dao, he could practically read through its past life. It was even easier than doing it with a real person because the horrors it had experienced were quite literally the source of its strength now.

This skeleton had once been a woman, a powerful one at that. She had been of the Omniscient Realm and would be entering the Lord Realms in just a few more years at most. She definitely had the talent and momentum to do so.

That was when Silent Quibus caught her. Through mysterious means, he drugged and subdued her family, then forced her mother, father, and brother to watch her be raped right before their eyes.

Ryu could feel every raw emotion of that moment. The humiliation, the unwillingness, the begging for death and yet being unable to have it…

And yet, that was just the beginning. It was nothing more than a primer.

After he had had his fun, Silent Quibus unleashed an air of debauchery over the whole family. Things that happened afterward were too disgusting even for him to describe, but after they were all awakened from their stupor, whether it was her mother, her father, or her brother, they all committed suicide right before her eyes.

She wanted to follow after them, but how could Silent Quibus allow such a thing? He was only just starting. She would certainly become a wrathful spirit if she died now, but that wasn't enough.

He made her give birth to the child she conceived after those matters, made her raise it, and then one day, he fed it to her.

Ryu felt his stomach churn. He was a person who killed without blinking; he was a person who treated the lives of his enemies as though they were absolutely worthless. But even before the changes to his life, he wouldn't be able to stomach such things… let alone now that he had much more sympathy for life itself.

How could he easily assign value to people if he was one reincarnation away from becoming any one of them?

But he still watched the rest of it silently.

Only when the woman had reached this level of absolute despair did Silent Quibus feel that it was just barely good enough, and he began the refinement process. He finally allowed the woman to kill herself, only to begin to refine her soul right then.

The interruption of the reincarnation process was precisely what he needed to form Corpse Poison. The woman's soul was being pulled in three ways: one to become the Quibus' corpse puppet, the second to reincarnate, and the last to become a Wrathful Spirit.

Together, they formed a trinity formation that created a Chaotic Reincarnation… one that had the byproduct of Corpse Poison.

If there was a perfect Corpse Poison out there, it might very well be the counter to Embryonic Qi… one on the side of life… and the other on the side of death…

Silent Quibus finally stood all the way to his feet and waved a hand. Nemesis suddenly appeared to his side.

The Quibus opened his mouth wide and took a bite out of Nemesis' neck.

Hot blood splashed all around.