While flipping the beast the bird made him feel better it didn’t solve anything. Sage slid across the thickened air and approached the crimson monster again. While in motion he thought of a new plan and the Blue Icesilver tendrils wrapped around his body, one of them laid against his spine and coated each of his bladed back pieces. Not changing their shape, but adding an additional layer of thickness. The other three tendrils did similar things for his hands and teeth, creating outer blades to act as insulation. The still liquid and mobile parts of the tendrils filled the gaps so his limbs weren’t locked in place.

He’d already learned a few tricks from Hei Bai about manipulating the Blue Icesilver as a single large mass, but this method was tailored to assaulting her golem. He swooped back down from the air with a swish of his tail, and then loped across the ground to close the final bit of distance. The monster was still faster than him, but with Foresight, that didn’t matter much. He could already see the moves that it was going to make.

The shadowy pits of its eyes and mouth could only watch in horror when its opponent slowly swayed out of the way of each of its strikes. Brutally fast and violent swipes of its razor clawed hands passed harmlessly through the air, over and over again. The only damage it dealt to its foe was caused by its own blood spilling upon it. The dragon used its claws and fangs to block and parry the monster’s attacks that it wasn’t fast enough to avoid. At the same time it would spin from time to time, using its tail as a sword to slash huge wounds into the monster’s legs and sides.

Of course, it wasn’t blood spilling, it was that burning hot red oil. It continued to do its damage, but the Blue Icesilver shielded Sage. It stuck to his body and melted the Blue Icesilver with its heat, but Sage continually supplied more Qi, shedding the burning layers and adding new fresh ones. Using it as an ablative coating to engage in battle with the monster. Without Hei Bai there to restrict him, he was free to follow the safest method of destroying the monster, a war of attrition. When his energy started to run low, he retreated into the Formation Machine’s area of effect and bought himself a few moments to rest.

The monster chased after him quite ferociously, but when it hit the area of the Formations, it was drastically slowed. The blood colored monster wasn’t affected by the blinding formations at the outer edge, but it was slowed by high winds, swirling sands, and a torrent of water. None of them really damaged it, but it restricted its strength. Already at a disadvantage, it ran back out of the formations and strode down the path to escape.

Oh right, I was blocking the escape route.

At the fifth rank, the golden core was essentially a Qi generator. It automatically drew in the energy of the heavens and earth, refining it and feeding it into the Dantian. A cultivator no longer had to sit and meditate for hours to recover their energy. That said, it could only produce energy so fast and in battle they usually expended it faster than their core could produce it. There were also innumerable cultivation methods and techniques in this world, all with very different effects and focuses. Like in this case, the Life Nebula Technique that Sage cultivated from the Seed of Life.

He actually didn’t have a large pool of energy to draw upon, which is why he’d already expended the majority of it in the battle. On the other hand, he had an extremely fast energy generation rate. Without doing anything his energy reserves could recover from zero in only a few minutes. His cultivation technique was extremely suited to endure through long battles, the issue was the usage of the Heavenly Materials. Reshaping the Blue Icesilver wasn’t too bad, but creating more of it expended huge amounts of energy. The burning red oil had chewed through his reserves of Qi in mere moments.

The blood colored monster started to retreat when he was only about thirty percent recovered, but he couldn’t allow it to escape. He rushed after it, barreling towards it from behind and then suddenly dug his claws into the ground. Dirt and rubble getting thrown up as he skidded to slow himself. Rolling his head to the side and twisting to the side, he turned his large back plates towards the monster and rolled into a ball.

He yelled curse words in his head as the massive rock he was just passing by shattered into a million pieces. The same huge stone that he’d used to crush Hei Bai suddenly exploded into devastating shrapnel. The red monster wasn’t spared, but it was farther from the rock and so its damage was far less. Sage, on the other hand, was right next to it. He saw the explosion a few seconds in advance, or else he would have been utterly destroyed by it. Instead, he was able to protect himself as best he could with the strongest parts of his body and a thick layer of Blue Icesilver. Even so, the Icesilver was shattered completely and he felt blood running down his back from many small wounds. That stone had been the most hard and dense one he could find within his Inner World, cut from a cliff wall to a size that was the maximum he could move with his true form.

The impact left him feeling sore all over, even knocking out his Foresight. He stayed curled up into a ball for a moment, restarting the Timeless Eyes before lifting his head to see what had happened. At that point he saw the blood golem was dripping onto the ground from many places but there was a spirit form behind it. This ghost was similar to the first one’s he’d seen Hei Bai use, looking like a classical ghost. A human who had lost most of their defining features, and appearing like a blurry white shadow of their old self. Only this one stopped and turned to face him, where he saw the face of an old woman with one eye. She let out a ghostly cackle and flew into the red monster.

If the red monster was like a monster made out of sticky magma, the ghostly old woman hitting it was like tossing the monster into a lake. An immense amount of burning hot steam blasted outwards from the place the two collided. The heat didn’t seem to affect the ghost at all, and instead the red monster was the one screaming in pain. Or at least that’s what Sage felt it was doing. The only sound came from the burning release of steam, the pained scream was not sound, but a fluctuation of its aura. Sage felt it with his Spiritual Sense. Just like aura could show strength or induce fear, he now felt it releasing pain, extreme pain.

The old woman’s ghost slowly sank into the red monster. As it did, the red monster started to lose its color. The red receding and the black once again taking over. It was like the red coloring was being being melted off by that harshly burning steam. When its body was about at the halfway mark, Sage saw a ghostly shape pulling out of the monster’s other side. It was the blood red ghost that had first entered the monster, but now it was being forced out while the old woman’s ghost was pushing its way in.

Sage took the opportunity to recover his strength, the healing ability of the Fat Grass Worm regenerated the many wounds on his back with startling speed. Given the volume of burning steam being released, he chose to avoid further wounds and instead return to his peak condition. After a few minutes it looked like the transfer had finished.

The blood red ghost finally exited the body of the monster and drooped in the air, like it was utterly exhausted. The monster made of black oil started to bubble and then shed its outer layers. The oil spilled to the ground and left the shape of a human body in its wake. It slowly turned around to face Sage and he saw the familiar face of Hei Bai once more. Except now she had both eyes, and was wearing a much simpler black robe. She waved her hand towards the pile of rubble and the bone staff flew out and back into her hand. Then she pointed it towards the red ghost and its aura screamed with pain once again. The skull on the end of the staff seemed to emit some sort of suction force and the red ghost was pulled in like a cloud of dust. Then the skull’s eyes started to glow red instead of green like it had in the past.

“Hah, fortune in calamity. I’ve finally subdued the Blood Ghost!”

That can’t be good.