“Have you had enough fun yet?”

“Fun? I’m just trying to see what he can do.”

“You’re just wasting time because you’re itching for a fight. Don’t try to pretend.”

At this time, Sage was interrupted by the voice of Guan Zhenyan. He was just starting to enjoy the battle, but that excitement was instantly fizzled by those words. What he said was true, just a few weeks of traveling monotonously through the levels of the tower meant it had been years since he’d been in a real fight. He was almost starting to wonder if he should bring his Soul Clone out of the Inner World, but even if he seriously wanted to do so, he had already rewired his brain to work in a completely different way. There was no telling how much damage he might cause.

Without any difficulty he avoided the swings of Count Voctem’s scythe and then struck back with his Poison Qi blades. The cracked tooth man was quickly covered in small cuts and the poison was already spreading through his spirit. After being reminded by Guan Zhenyan, Sage was annoyed enough that his instincts took over and he couldn’t hold back the hundreds of years of constant training. While his aptitude in most fields was mediocre at best, the many thousands of years he had on the Inner World meant he only had to train a few hours a week to exceed the training time of most he’d run into. Yet, because of his paranoia he spent a good portion of each day training, especially after the Lang Clan researchers could take over that task from him and the Adjutor’s multiplied their progress.

Realizing what he’d done, Sage frowned at Count Voctem as he saw the man’s shabby state. Voctem didn’t seem discouraged and he reached one hand towards the large charred tree and formed a grasping claw with his fingers. All of the ghostly seedpods split apart and released new ghosts, these looking even more disfigured and tortured than the others. They let out pained wails and flew through the air towards where the two of them were fighting. Previously, this would have excited him to see what Voctem was going to do next, but after being reprimanded by Guan Zhenyan, it really put a damper on his enjoyment. Before, he had felt he was gaining experience by getting exposed to unusual methods and techniques. Yet, now that he was reminded that the fellow was watching, it felt much more like he was bullying a weakling. Just wasting time and giving Count Voctem useless hope. Worse yet, he was also giving the man a chance to self destruct or do some other ridiculous actions that might actually injure him if he wasn’t careful. It would be especially bad if Voctem destroyed all his valuable assets.

No longer interested in messing around, Sage released the full might of the Qi he’d been pouring into the ground during the fight. The bushes that captured the zombies were only the tip of the iceberg. Vines sprung from the ground and crawled over all the trees that formed a cage in the distance. Others climbed up and over the dark tree in the center and sprung up around the pool of magma. More and more of the vines kept sprouting out of the ground and wrapping around the trees till they were completely covered.

Before the ghosts could reach him, Sage turned and released a burst of white flame many times larger than he had before. He turned his head and used the Divine Breath technique to shape the flow of flame into a column that he swept back and forth. Instead of a dispersed cone, this controlled stream of flame easily tracked through the crowd of ghosts. He released the flames for three seconds before destroying every ghost. Count Voctem tried to attack him while his head was turned, but Sage’s arm moved with terrifying force and struck out many times harder than he had been before.

He reached out and grabbed at the air, like he was snatching something invisible. There was a sudden explosion in the center of his palm that blasted outward, knocking Voctem backwards and off his feet. The blast tore off the clothing from his upper body, leaving it a tattered mess and the man bleeding from numerous small wounds. Sage closed his mouth and turned back towards Voctem, who now looked horrified. The man hefted his scythe and swept it across with a backhand motion, using one hand to move the huge polearm even faster than he had earlier.

Sage wasn’t scared by what must be some special technique to multiply Count Voctem’s strength. Instead he just threw another punch with spread fingers. At the end of it, just before contact, his hand snapped closed again with sudden speed and another explosion erupted from his palm, blasting away the scythe as well as dispersing the blackish-green energy surrounding it. Then without any delay he brought his fist back and then struck a third time, slamming the resultant explosion up against Count Voctem’s chest. The man’s sternum collapsed and the front of his torso was changed into a bloody mess.

The burly woman finally crawled her way out of the molten pit, and surprisingly her colorless Qi had protected her from the heat. Her body was only red and smoking, not burnt to ashes like might be expected. She used the sharp points of the bat wing shape of her axe like a pick, pulling herself out of the pit like an ice climber. It was too bad that just as she finally pulled herself out, a mass of vines was waiting for her. She slashed through the first wave, but then the magma behind her swelled up and splashed against her back. She turned around to slash it, but then more vines ensnared her feet. Thin threads spread from the vines and even after she cut off the vines to free her limbs, the tiny threads of the Parasitic Roots multiplied inside her body.

The jade green aura around Sage’s hand suddenly turned a bright crimson and he slapped it all over the Count’s body. A moment later the red poison sunk into Voctem’s body, paralyzing him and letting Sage send him into the Inner World. Sage dashed over to the burly woman and repeated the process. He wasn’t sure what this woman was, but the combination of the paralytic poison, Ruby Blood, as well as the Parasitic Roots inside her worked to disable her. Sage tossed her into the Inner World as well and then rushed over to collect the coffin she had come out of. Then he sent in the dying Cerberus and the smashed carriage.

With most of the place cleaned up, Sage let out a pair of the members of the Purple Mist Sect and they ran off in search of Voctem’s servant, Grikori. In the meantime, Sage directed the branches of the Sacred Banyan’s he’d created to tear down the cage of trees around this clearing and also to uproot the charred tree in the center. He wasn’t sure what it was, but he didn’t want to leave any loose ends so he pulled out the tree that had spawned so many ghosts and threw it into the Inner World as well. For curiosity’s sake he also stomped the ground a few times and used the Sovereign Stone to smash it apart, making sure there wasn’t anything valuable beneath the surface before heading off towards the direction that the Purple Mist Sect members had run towards.