Chương 73: Chapter 72 — Heart Demon

The tribulation clawed directly downwards, but the thing wearing Lin Che's body reached up to it and opened its mouth as though it were drinking the lightning itself. It summoned the Hollow Bell Resonance wide outwards from him in a barrier, but, at the external edge of this shield, it somehow managed to run the Boundless Intake Sutra — bypassing any physical contact that the 'hole' concept required. It swallowed the tribulation Qi.

The Heart Demon threw its head back and laughed as it drank, its shoulders and legs quaking from the sheer excess of the intake. Its veins bulged out prominently at its throat and forearms, even more so as the sutra forced more raw tribulation Qi into his body. Rather than straining under the weight of the power, it simply grinned wider and drank like a thirsty man in a desert who had finally been given water.

Elder Wong moved her fingers in that same piano-key gesture she'd used before, reaching into the connection she'd previously established with Lin Che's body via the pill-core hybrid sitting in Lin Che's chest. But nothing happened. She tried again, lancing her Qi harder and more directly into this purpose-built thread of control, and she finally found a connection.

She smiled as she tried to disrupt the flow of the Heart Demon's Qi — in an attempt to get the tribulation Qi absorption to backfire — but, again, nothing happened. The Heart Demon turned its head towards the invisible tether, entirely unbothered, and let a thin trickle of the tribulation Qi run backwards down the connection. Elder Wong terminated the connection entirely to prevent burning her own meridians.

Her composure cracked for a second, before meeting the grinning Heart Demon in the eye and smiling right back at it.

"Fine," she said, shedding all evidence of the girlish tint in her voice. It had now been replaced with a manlier growl. A jet of wet clay beneath her feet propelled Wong directly at the Heart Demon, who was still in the process of readjusting to its body and newfound power supply of tribulation Qi. Once she was mere inches away from the Heart Demon, Elder Wong grasped three cores within her hands and activated them, causing them to bloom into full mannequins, but this time they were armed.

One had a sword, whilst the other two were its vanguards. Before one of the guards could fully form, the Heart Demon absorbed its Qi-body using the Boundless Intake Sutra, and then dodged the incoming Wong and burped in her face.

"Thank you for the meal," it laughed, as a familiar sensation washed over its body.

"Ex-military puppets?"

"They're the most disciplined puppets I could find," Elder Wong snapped back, already summoning spears of hardened earth up through the train floor in a ring around the Heart Demon. They hovered in the air for a brief moment, before all charging at it in a random order in random arcs simultaneously, making it near impossible to avoid. And yet dodge it did, relying on an upgraded Swallow Returns to the Nest, which allowed him to preempt each strike and dodge accordingly.

The sword-armed mannequin closed the gap whilst the earth spears headed towards their target, but the Heart Demon caught the flat of the blade between his two fingers and stopped its strike dead in its path. Then, it pulled the construct off balance and pushed it in the direction of Elder Wong's own next strike — her clay-reinforced knuckles propelled forwards by a clay jet. She punched clean through the mannequin's chest.

"You're going to run out of toys before I run out of appetite," goaded the Heart Demon, grinning at her over the twitching wreck of the construct now skewered on her fist. Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website. The third construct moved to guard Wong as the Heart Demon advanced forwards in her direction. She appeared behind the Heart Demon as it boomed a solid burst of sound Qi in the face of the mannequin, which caused it to shatter into a core.

She thrust her sharpened nails forwards, hoping to pierce through Lin Che's body, but her strike was met with air. It was a silhouette. The Heart Demon had already moved upwards, and it landed on her outstretched arm. It pushed down with all of its might, destabilising Wong just enough to tip her off balance and cause her to trip over the slippery brain matter still on the train floor. The Heart Demon laughed as Wong fell, and threw a fist down before grappling her body.

It was delighted as it poured out strength through its palm and into her skull, allowing the tribulation Qi to flow externally. It branded Lin Che's handprint onto Wong's head, before making a swiping motion in the air, sharpening the Qi enough to slice it clean off just as the light in her eyes faded. The barrier between it and Shen Yue finally dispelled, as the summoner was now dead.

It allowed Wong's head to drop to the floor before kicking it up into the air and catching it, and only then did it make direct eye contact with Shen Yue. It looked at her with ravenous eyes, as though she would end up being its next meal. The noxious red bloodlust that had spread throughout the room was gone within seconds, at least from Wong's contribution to the total. The rest of it came from the Heart Demon, and it aimed towards the one other person in the room.

Shen Yue stood frozen in place, her face pale and bloodless as she watched her now-husband inspect the severed head of the most respected elder in the Shen Clan. She took a step back — whatever killed Elder Wong could just as easily kill her, and the emergency door mechanism was just behind her. Its fingers spun to drill a hole directly in between both eyes, revealing a pill not dissimilar to the one which was previously in Lin Che.

The Heart Demon pocketed it for later, before pressing both hands together with the head in between, compacting it into nothingness. Dust sifted out from between the Heart Demon's palms — all that remained of Elder Wong's skull — and it opened its hands to let the last of it scatter across the train floor. It was already looking at Shen Yue.

"Don't," it said as her hand found the emergency door release behind her.

"At this speed, you'd just fall out and die somewhere else." Shen Yue's white-knuckled fingers stayed where they were regardless, and the Heart Demon tilted its head at her. It threw her the core from Elder Wong, which she let land on the floor in front of her instead. Its grin still hadn't faded since the fight ended.

"I wonder what you'd do if I asked nicely."

"Stay back," said Shen Yue, already drawing on what little Qi she had left. Her pills were closer to Lin Che than to her, and she wasn't sure she'd survive long enough to power up using them. The grin on the Heart Demon's face began to falter. Lin Che tried to break through and surface as the pilot of his own body, but the Heart Demon fought to keep him down.

It had finally tasted violence and found it sweeter than anything in the entire world, and it clearly did not want to let go of the body it was currently occupying. Shen Yue stood by the door breathing harder in anxiety. Lin Che fought back. Images of her from countless lifetimes flashed before his eyes — the reveal of such a beautiful wife wearing a green qipao the first time he ever married her, an action sequence of her pocketing and consuming plums at an impossible rate.

Their first date to the aquarium and the following jellyfish conversations — the first time she ever laughed at something he'd said, and their first date to the American diner where the cold-faced Shen Clan heiress ate without grace. He used every memory of her like a rope pulling him up to the surface of his own body, and the grin on the Heart Demon's face shook once again.

"Not yet," it mumbled to itself, as it advanced a few steps towards Shen Yue. She didn't retreat further — there was nowhere left to retreat to. There were shattered windows reasonably near her, but jumping seemed like a terrible idea, especially when the man in front of her was strong enough to kill such a powerful elder. He'd be able to get to her before she could get to the window. She tried to press down on the emergency door release, just slightly to make sure it was functioning, and it went down smoothly.

That meant she had a way out.

"Lin Che," she said, quietly. The Heart Demon's grin widened at the sound of the name, delighted and moved by the plea. It slowly moved one hand towards her face, with a gentleness that seemed so much crueler than the violence which just occurred. Shen Yue closed her eyes and was about to push down hard on the release, when the train suddenly stopped beneath both their feet. A robotic voice announced the stop: "This station is Dalian. This train is terminating at this station.

Please ensure you take all your luggage with you."