Seph ascended the stairs and entered the reading room again; he sighed in exasperation before he pulled the bookcase over the secret doorway again.

  As he was getting out to rejoin his mother, the healer, and Lilith, he barely avoided the flying main door of their house, as it flew with force to hit the farthest wall.

  Seph stared at the door in disbelief for a second before he looked to see what caused this. He found a grinning man at the door; his grin was demented and showing two rows of bright white teeth, in contrast with his body that was covered in a substance akin to tar and dripping on the floor where he stood.

  The man didn’t just stand there, as he sprinted towards Seph.

  Seph shouted, “Lilith, we are under attack; protect everyone at all costs!”

  He got out a lump of pestilence from his gourd and threw it at the oncoming enemy, but it slid right off his body and fell on the ground.

  It didn’t look like it did any harm to his enemy.

  He ran towards his enemy as well to keep him as far away as he could from his family.

  Once he was at a sufficient distance, he directed a palm strike towards his opponent.

  The strike traveled the rest of the distance as a ghostly palm because of his arms overreaching passive skill, and it hit his opponent with force because of his arms overbearing passive skill.

  The enemy crumbled on himself as he fell backwards because of the strike, but immediately got up, showing no damage at all.

  Seph followed with another palm strike that threw his enemy outside of his house. He heard his opponent’s ribs crack this time, but as he got up, he could hear them crack again as they snapped back into place.

  “He is way more resilient than I thought he would be; how did such a strong enemy show up in this village?” Seph thought as he ran towards his enemy again, only to halt as he saw a big deep blue scar in the face of reality in the middle of his village.

  It wasn’t as huge as the scar of fate he saw in his visions, but it was big enough to pass a human being, and it looked like it was becoming slightly bigger with each passing minute.

  The enemy used the moment of distraction and punched Seph in the face; Seph spat out his saliva as he flew back a very short distance and fell on his back.

  The strike was surprisingly more powerful than Seph expected.

  As he laid there in pain, trying to will his body to listen to him and get up fast, his enemy was approaching fast to land another strike.

  Lilith, who was inside the house, had warned everyone to not leave the room. As she stood in the hallway watching Seph’s fight, she noticed he was in trouble and used her whip to lasso the enemy by tying it around his neck.

  The enemy tried in its berserk rage to lung at the prone body of Seph, but it couldn’t; after a minute of trying, it looked around and saw Lilith and ran towards her instead.

  Seph stood up as fast as he could, but the enemy was already closer to Lilith than he was to the enemy.

  Lilith tried to do something with her whip, but it wasn’t working as intended on the enemy. Baby opened her mouth at that moment and unleashed a fireball that scorched the face of their opponent, and it dropped dead immediately, as its entire body caught up in flames.

  The dragon mistress ran towards Seph to make sure he was okay, but he didn’t give her a chance to speak as he said, “Take my mother and Uncle Bruce to a safe distance from the scar of fate, and after that you are to go around knocking on every door in the village and help people to meet with my mother and the healer, we have to save everyone. I’ll go with Sun to the scar of fate and try to contain the monsters so that they don’t attack anyone else, it’s imperative that no one else dies today if we can help it Lilith, I trust their lives in your hands.”

  “But you can’t fight them alone; they are too strong!” Lilith said incredulously.

  “I will find a way, you don’t need to worry about me, join me after you made sure that everyone is on their way to the next village, I’ll need your help.” Seph was putting all his trust in her, and he just wanted her to do the same.

  In a way, his life meant nothing to him compared to that of his mother’s, but he wasn’t throwing his life away; he knew he could fight these things, even though he hadn’t checked their level yet.

  Lilith felt like she would let him down if she said no, so she looked at him deeply and said, “You take care of yourself; I’ll kick your ass if I come to join you and find that you got yourself killed.”

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  Seph laughed as he squeezed her hand and ran towards the scar of fate.

  As he ran, he shouted, “Sun, I need you with me.”

  Sun ran towards him and jumped on his shoulders.

  From faraway, Seph counted 4 other enemies that were the same as the one he fought; he used the Eye of the Veteran on one of them to gain more info.

  Name: Tormented Villager

  Class: Brute

  Cultivation stage: Body Dismantling (IV)

  “They are the same stage as me; that’s why they are so strong. So far, I only fought enemies weaker than me by one or two stages.”

  He had to stop them from getting to the other villagers, and he got an idea of how to do so.

  Seph ran towards each enemy and struck each of them with a palm strike to make them come after him and not break into the houses of the sleeping villagers like they did to his house.

  After they were all gathered close to each other and running after him, Seph got out a fire-breathing bottle and threw it in their midst, all four tormented monsters caught in flames but were still running after him, they became slower and slower as they eventually stopped and dropped dead, while fire still burned their bodies.

  Seph then headed for the scar of fate, and as he stood in front of it, he pondered how he was going to close it.

  He knew the method of siphoning its energy, but he didn’t think it would work fast enough if he siphoned it by himself, since in Scorn’s memory there were five powerful cultivators doing it at the same time.

  As he stared at the scar of fate pondering his options, he noticed he could see a different world inside the scar, and he made his mind immediately that he was going to step inside and fight the monsters in their lair.

  As Seph stepped inside the scar of fate, he felt like he was moving through heavy water, only it was all around his body; the heaviness submerged him.

  With considerable effort, he finally broke through to the other side, only to find himself somewhere that was a replica of his village, but all the houses were damage and had fallen into disrepair.

  The sky was also different, unlike the village’s sky that night, which was dark because of the absent moon. Inside the scar of fate, it was a full moon night that lit everything in a blue macabre hue. It felt like a funeral in honor of their destroyed village.

  The difference in atmosphere and how sorry his village looked surprised Seph, but in a few seconds, he shifted his gaze to the moving enemies all around him.

  They were moving aimlessly and didn’t seem to have noticed him yet; they didn’t all look the same as the five he fought outside, as they had unique body characteristics; their bodies were either made or covered with different substances.

  Seph guessed it must mean that they had different groups that fought differently and had distinct advantages.

  He cursed under his breath that he wouldn’t be able to just torch the lot of them.

  Seph sneaked towards one of them, but it suddenly became alert to his presence and ran towards him to attack.

  Seph took his fighting stance in front of it, but it stopped right before it reached him by 3 meters and unleashed a hellish scream that made Seph’s ears bleed.

  From that moment forward through all the fight, Seph couldn’t hear much.

  As if that wasn’t bad enough, the scream alerted all the monsters to the intruder in their midst.

  They all came running and gathered in front of Seph.

  At that moment, Seph finally noticed a horrifying truth. These were all the same villagers he had murdered just under an hour ago.

  Some of them even carried their mundane weapons.

  All of this happened in three seconds; Seph hadn’t check on his monkey companion yet.

  He looked at him; he was holding his ears, still hurting from the scream, but otherwise his ears weren’t bleeding like his own.

  The situation was dangerous, but Seph couldn’t even try to escape. He was advised to not fight an enemy that could end his cultivation road early. Become stronger and go back and kick their asses. That was the golden rule of the cultivation world.

  He had to choose to save his life, or the villagers, including his mother’s. He thought he didn’t save her just to abandon her now.

  If he couldn't do anything at all, he would at least buy her and the villagers’ time.

  He owed the villagers this much after killing so many men in their families.

  He took out another fire-breathing bottle and threw it in the middle of the gathered mob.

  Only five more caught on fire and died because of their burns, as they started running in frenzy with their burning bodies toward Seph, and all the monsters were making way for them to avoid getting burned as well.

  They didn’t get far, as they slumped on different distances from Seph with their still burning bodies.

  This killing only enraged the others as they started jeering angrily at their opponents; their grinning faces and jeers were way more terrifying than their overwhelming numbers.

  Seph’s body was sturdy enough; he felt he was going to get out of this somehow.

  As they started collectively inching towards Seph, he instinctively took a step back, only to hit a body behind him.

  Seph jerked his head suddenly to look at who was behind him, and he found five of his enemies, but these looked different.

  Their bodies seemed to be made of sand, and as he looked at their jeering ugly faces, they came apart like a falling sandcastle hit by the waves, and they coagulated into one giant of a man that stood behind Seph.

  “What the fuck!” Seph said as he saw his new opponent's form that was even bigger than his friend Gabalawi.

  Sun suddenly screamed, “Eeeek!” Seph thought he was screaming for the same reason that prompted his exclamation, but that wasn’t the case, as someone had thrown a wide pitchfork towards Seph, that was thrown with pinpoint accuracy and imprisoned Seph’s neck on the wall of a man behind him.

  The sharp points of the pitchfork had just missed hitting his actual neck, but it was aligned perfectly to hold his neck in-between its tines.

  Seph tried to spring his neck free from the pitchfork, but he couldn’t, as the behemoth of a man behind him clenched both his arms and crucified him on his own sandy body.

  Sun ran up the giant man’s body and hit its face with his staff, but it didn’t do any damage at all.

  As Seph was struggling, he suddenly got the wind knocked out of him as one of his jeering enemies punched his unprotected stomach.

  Before Seph could finish saying Oomph, another of his enemies punched his stomach again.

  He was made into their punching bag for a considerable time, he couldn’t feel the time anymore from all the punishment he had to endure, and during it all Sun was attacking one enemy after the other trying to protect his friend, but it was no use. The attacks were too weak, and they totally ignored the monkey like he didn’t deserve their attention.

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