Chapter 1396 - 664: Parallel Easter Egg

Chapter 1396: Chapter 664: Parallel Easter Egg

People in the world always like to fantasize beautifully about Xiaoyao Immortals, imagining them as a bunch of beauties who refuse to let feudal rituals tie down their nature, who don’t care about worldly judgment or power’s criticism, carefree immortal maidens chasing freedom, chasing joy, chasing beauty, Bodhisattvas who hand out blessings to the toiling masses without asking anything in return.

Even though there really are some nasty bad reviews about Replenishment floating around on the market, in the end those are just rumors, gossip, dirty jokes. When all’s said and done, there are billions of people under heaven, and only a handful of Xiaoyao Immortals—how many have seriously witnessed how fierce the Carefree Technique really is? Besides, if it really is that powerful, wouldn’t that be even more awesome?

Ahem. Anyway, plenty of men will think: ah, isn’t it just that little bit of crap down in the pants? No way I’m the one taking a loss here. If there’s a problem, it must be that the other party is old and frail and gets overwhelmed, can’t handle such intense stimulation and exhausting labor. Ah, I’m not like them~

So even when you tell them straight out that the Xiaoyao Sect walks the Demon Path, it still doesn’t stop a constant crowd from waving slogans like "Better to die beneath peony blossoms, even as a ghost I’ll stay romantic," "Don’t ask for forever, just one night in the mortal dust," swarming like bees to flowers, moths to flames, flocking madly toward those Heavenly Immortal internet-celebrity beauties.

But to be fair, while the Mystic Sect often exploits your ignorance, on the Great Dao of Cultivation it never actually lies to you.

Righteous is righteous, evil is evil.

Your own abilities you train yourself; your own opportunities you snatch with your own skill. That is the Righteous Path.

Scheming to the limit, cheating, swindling, abducting, plotting, seizing by force—that is the evil road.

First they use the "land of tenderness, grave of heroes" to charm you, confuse you, drain you dry; once you lose all use value, they swallow you alive, strip you clean, squeeze you until only a sheet of bloody skin is left and then toss you away like worn-out shoes. That is called Replenishment.

The thing Tie Dan is using now is that proper, official "Nine Heavens True Inheritance Sea of All Rivers Carefree Replenishing Method." To be honest it’s nothing that special—just cranking up the power, crazy intake, Essence Qi Cultivation, life-long skills, one breath to suck it all dry, everything taken for my own use.

It’s just that the Leisure Sect belongs to the Mystic Sect after all, so the Carefree Replenishing Method naturally centers on Qi Absorption. It can’t fully swallow the Divine Soul, and it can’t dissolve all those bone fragments and scraps of flesh and skin, so a lot of resources get wasted. In terms of overall utilization efficiency it’s actually far inferior to Blood God’s son’s great method and the Supreme Demon Dragon’s path of devouring evolution.

Moreover, since a Cultivator’s inner scene Qi Sea and all body meridians and Qi acupoints are limited by realm and have an upper bottleneck on Qi storage, basically after sucking one or two people you’re almost capped. The Refining you absorb has to be re-refined before it can be taken in as your own, otherwise it leaks out every moment.

On top of that, this Magic also has quite a lot of restrictions in use—you have to grab someone and suck them dry, which makes it easy for the cast bar to get interrupted, and when you’re trying to handle a large mass of Qi Group it’s hard to deal with group attacks.

Like just now, Tie Dan was actually taking a risk, relying only on catching them off guard and striking when they weren’t prepared, grabbing them one by one to suck. If they hadn’t seen him reveal his Xiaoyao true form and gotten scared limp, if they hadn’t stupidly set up an Array beforehand and locked all the doors and windows, they could long since have scattered in a panic and tunneled away. No need to die here.

Luckily these few were garbage small fry, entirely products of the good times—Heavenly and Earthly Treasures are no longer scarce, so they could just barely follow along up to Divinity Transformation, but their foundations are actually shaky. Once Tie Dan played a small trick and used Taiyin Death Qi to swap out the Heaven and Earth Daoist energy inside the Array, they were completely unable to cast anything and could only sit there waiting for death.

But if this time he’d run into someone like Hu Temple—those Golden Core Path cultivators with foundations solid beyond belief—he probably wouldn’t even be able to suck them, and might get insta-counterkilled the moment his cast bar showed.

After all, the Xiaoyao Sect’s whole shtick is copying the Near Path, with flimsy foundations, and they aren’t the type to fight their way up kill by kill. It’s hard to rely solely on brute force to subdue targets, so their brains get spent on things like fraud, cosmetic enhancements, poison potions and other Left Dao Evil Techniques.

So how could the Immortals not be beautiful? If she doesn’t doll herself up exquisitely and use every trick in the book, how could she fool you into willingly letting yourself be led into her boudoir, surrendering with your hands tied, going to that place where no one else is around, to let her unleash this kind of utterly heartless Evil Path Magic?

Alright, to be fair, it’s not all scams.

Most Xiaoyao Immortals actually aren’t that ferocious. Compared to directly harvesting essence, hacking souls, and stripping someone clean, they prefer to cast a long line and catch a big fish, playing the long-term sustainable development game. Like a dog—you can kill it and toss it in the pot, sure, but you can also keep it for guarding the house, hunting, playing, and providing emotional value.

So in most cases, Xiaoyao Immortals are better at using their social skills to draw people in and make wide connections of Daoist companions, opening a kind of reverse Crystal Palace like collecting Pokémon, roaming the mortal world with a whole entourage. At any time they can pull together a group for raids and dungeon runs; at every stage there’s a huge crowd of masters, grandmasters, senior brothers, junior brothers, disciples, grand-disciples, childhood friends clustering around them, shielding and sheltering them, holding them in the palm for fear of dropping them, in the mouth for fear of melting them. Naturally they don’t lack Heavenly and Earthly Treasures or Immortal Fate.

Of course, if you don’t have that kind of value for long-term binding and exploitation, you’ll probably just be treated as Human Pill Immortal Medicine, eaten clean down to the bones, never to find salvation again.

Then again, which Dao isn’t like that? Cultivation is exactly this kind of thing.

Anyway, after casually sucking these few pieces of trash dry, doing the math, Tie Dan figured that in the short term no blind idiots would jump out to fight over the Sun Tao Body. He picked through the exploded mess of bloody skin and scraps, and from that Can Feng’s storage bag found a clean set of clothes, tied his hair up, and as usual snipped off a few locks of Liu bangs from his forehead, so they wouldn’t block his vision and affect combat.