Life as a Rogue Cultivator

Chapter 295: Obtaining the Pill

Liu Xiaolou looked like bad news the moment you saw him. He had on a bamboo hat, a black cloth over his face, and all-black clothes. No one would mistake him for a good guy.The two Lu family cultivators guarding the attic didn’t say a word. They just swung their swords at him.

Liu Xiaolou jolted and was about to bolt when he suddenly realized something. The way those swords were flying wasn’t the movement of real flying swords at all. It was only the fake flying technique used by someone at the peak of Qi Refinement. His heart lit up with glee.

He shifted his weight and slipped past both blades, spinning into the pill tower. A flick of his left arm sent the Mysterious True Cord whipping out and binding the man on the left, who toppled over on the spot. His right hand released the Abyssal Blackstone Formation, pulling the other guard into an illusion.

Seizing this moment, the Three-Mystery Sword shot out. Its soft yet razor-sharp sword-light flickered once, looped around the neck of the man trapped in the rope, and dropped him dead in an instant.

The guard caught in the Abyssal Stone Formation, though, had real skill. Even inside this version Liu Xiaolou had rerefined, he broke free almost immediately. Far faster than Liu Xiaolou expected.

Of course, part of the reason he'd escaped so quickly was that Liu Xiaolou had gone all out to kill the other guard and hadn’t exactly had the bandwidth to manage the formation at the same time.

Even so, a few breaths were enough. The moment that Lu family cultivator broke free, the Mysterious True Cord snapped over to him and wrapped him up. The Three-Mystery Sword finished him just like the first one.

There was no time to think about anything else. Liu Xiaolou swept his hand across the shelves and knocked every pill bottle into his Qiankun Pouch. In the middle of all that chaos, he shot up to the second floor for a quick look. Seeing no bottles there, he dove out an open window and vanished into the forest like a swift darting back to its nest.

As he ran for his life, he kept thinking about that guy who had slipped out of his formation in a heartbeat. Did the man have some rare treasure on him, or was he just naturally gifted with formations?

Maybe he should have checked the body?

That was all hindsight. In the moment, he had neither the time nor the presence of mind to rummage through a corpse.

Thank goodness for the pouring rain. It was the perfect cover for his escape, or so Liu Xiaolou thought as he fled toward Wuling Mountain in the north.

By the time the sky lightened, the rain was still coming down, and he had already entered Wuling Mountain.

Once he was deep in the mountains, Liu Xiaolou finally let out a huge breath of relief. He glanced back. The rain was still hammering down, washing away the footprints. The footprints he's carefully hidden to begin with.

He’d run flat-out for over a hundred miles. All on top of that terrifying, nerve-wracking mission earlier. By now he was completely worn out. Spotting a quiet, hidden spot in the hills, he finally let himself stop and rest.

After an hour, the downpour finally let up. The dark clouds thinned and lightened, and the sky began to clear. Just then, a heavy rumbling reached his ears.

Liu Xiaolou’s heart slammed against his ribs. He shot out of his hiding place, leaping toward the nearest hilltop.

The rumble filled the valley in an instant. A flash flood burst out from around a bend and came barreling straight down.

He was about to climb higher to avoid the flood when a few people suddenly swept across the sky above him. One person was controlling a waist-high pill furnace, fighting fiercely against five black-clad, masked cultivators. Those five were all wielding the same kind of magical weapon: small golden bows that glimmered like sunlight.

The one controlling the pill furnace and fighting those masked men was none other than Elder Lu Boqi, a Golden Core cultivator from Tianmu Mountain.

Liu Xiaolou had no idea how the single black-clad pursuer he’d seen earlier had somehow turned into five, and he didn’t care to find out. All he wanted was to avoid being noticed. Even this far from Tianmu Mountain, he didn’t dare risk exposing himself in the slightest.

He instantly killed his upward leap, snatched a thick old tree root halfway up the slope in the nick of time, and curled himself tight against the trunk.

The flood slammed in almost instantly, water surging higher and higher until it lapped at Liu Xiaolou’s back. Waves hammered him from behind, each one bringing fresh stabs of pain as rocks and branches scraped and smashed into him.

Above him, some thirty feet up, Lu Boqi was still locked in a furious battle with the five black-clothed cultivators.

One twitch, one slip, and he’d be spotted. So Liu Xiaolou didn’t dare move a muscle.

He had no idea how long it lasted before Lu Boqi finally gained the upper hand. The five masked cultivators let out a sharp whistle and retreated to the north. Lu Boqi wasn’t about to let them escape and immediately gave chase.

Once they were finally far enough away, Liu Xiaolou sprang to his feet and scrambled out of the flash flood. Mud covered him from head to toe.

Getting blasted by a mountain torrent isn’t something a mortal man could survive. Even with his cultivation at the peak of Qi Refinement, his back was raw and angry red. Branches, stones, and grit had slammed into him at high speed and left their marks.

He didn’t dare slow down. Kept pushing through the night until he finally cleared the Wuling Mountains. By the next evening he was back at Wulong Mountain.

He pushed himself up onto Ganzhu Ridge. Fighting through the exhaustion, he made his way straight to the summit . It was time to see what he'd managed to snatch in the chaos.

There were twenty-seven bottles of spiritual pills in all. None of the bottles were labeled, so he would have to inspect them one by one.

The Lu clan was famous for alchemy and known for producing top-tier pills. Liu Xiaolou had purchased many them before, and gave them to his Wulong Mountain comrades during the Battle of Zhuoshui.

The biggest haul was Heart-Nourishing Pills, used to protect the meridians: 9 bottles, 27 pills total.

Next were six bottles of Heaven’s Heart Tiger Bone Pills, 30 pills altogether. They treated external injuries and were potent enough to practically regrow flesh.

There were four bottles of Green Essence Spirit Nourishing Pills, eight pills total, meant to replenish and repair one’s spiritual sense.

And five bottles of Ginseng Essence Pills, 35 in all. They helped regulate one’s qi and speed up the recovery of true qi.

That made 24 bottles, worth over 200 spirit stones, probably somewhere between 250 and 300.

But there was no way those Long-surnamed bastards put in all that effort and risked their necks just for these pills. The sum they had been willing to pay for the formation diagrams alone far exceeded 300 spirit stones.

Thinking of the five black-clad cultivators who’d teamed up to fight Lu Boqi, Liu Xiaolou even began to suspect if their real goal hadn’t been the Foundation Establishment Pill at all.

Liu Xiaolou didn’t recognize the last three bottles.

He opened the first one. Inside were three pills. As far as he could tell, the Lu clan would never store three Foundation Establishment Pills together, so this bottle probably wasn’t it.

He opened the second bottle. It held a thick, oily spiritual liquid. He had no idea what it was, but it definitely wasn’t a Foundation Establishment Pill.

Then he opened the third bottle. This one held a single pill. Its surface glimmered with a dark, reddish sheen. And a strange fragrance rose from it, carrying a hint of metal and stone.

He racked his brain, dragging up that old job when Wei Hongqing summoned him to help Lu Yan retrieve her Foundation Establishment Pill. He’d seen one back then, just for a moment, when it passed through the hands of Xishan Hermit. Everything happened so fast and Wei Hongqing whisked it away almost immediately, so he hadn’t gotten a good look.

He tried to dredge up the memory, comparing the pill in his hand to that brief glimpse from ten years ago. Sometimes it seemed like a match, and the next moment he wasn’t so sure.

He should have asked that informant in the Chicheng Market’s black market one more question. Surely he’d know what the Foundation Establishment Pills from each sect looked like.

Liu Xiaolou kicked himself for forgetting.

Still, it wasn’t a big problem. After forcing himself to hold out for half a month, he went back down the mountain and made a sweep through Tianmu's black market. There, he finally got his answer.

The dark red pill was indeed a Foundation Establishment Pill refined by the Lu clan. And it was their newest batch.

The theft of the Lu clan’s Pill had already become the talk of the cultivation world. Everyone knew about it.