67 Leading The Tiger

A violet streak of light moved fast like a lightning bolt, dodging the corpses and rocks that were sparse around the large cave. It moved toward the south, towards a large entrance surrounded by strange statues of vertical eyes.

The violet figure left behind it a strange trail of grey swirling lines that immediately congregated themselves to form barriers. Those strange high grey doors lasted only for some moments, before being destroyed by the passage of another figure.

Right behind the violet bullet, constantly destroying the barrier left behind by violet shadow, there was a dark silhouette constantly trying to catch up with.

The speed of the two colored lights was almost equal. At least for a while.

When the grey traced left behind by the violet shadow became weaker and formed smaller barriers, the dark pursuer started to gain speed over the violet.

One hundred meters.

Fifty meters.

Ten meters.

One.

The two light were now running side to side. The black one darted on top of the violet, trying to intertwine itself with the violet light.

The moment right before the violet shadow could be caught by the black silhouette, the former burst with a great explosion of grey energy. The detonation helped the violet light to escape, propelling it for thousands of meters while pushing behind the black shadow for hundreds.

However, while the black shadow managed to ride the grey wave of energy, the violet one was overwhelmed by it. The explosion forced the violet light to the ground, crushing it so hard that it formed a large cloud of dust a deep dent on the ground.

When the dust settled, an out of breath violet serpent emerged a small hole.

The violet light was obviously Devassa.

She was bleeding and looked exhausted. She had nasty looking grey veins that were protruding all over her body. Her eyes were bloody and the aura around her was incredibly unstable.

Her sorry figure was way different from the mysterious and prideful cultivator from the journey towards the tomb.

"Dammit... not even the Karmic Kage stopped him"

Her voice was broken, directed to no one in particular as the only living thing there was her and the countless mushrooms that lit up the place.

Her eyes run towards a certain direction and she saw that the black shadow that was following her, stopped for a second. It was a small black snake, with purple energy covering his translucent scales and shining violet eyes.

A deep sense of danger fell over her when she locked her eyes into the evil eyes of the creature. She could feel the madness and the ferocity contained inside them even with the great distance that separated them.

The snake looked at her for a second and roared with anger, dispersing the last traces of grey energy that kept him from moving. He then immediately again to move towards her direction.

"Fucking idiot"

Cursed the snake, transforming herself in a violet light and darting toward the large structures towards the south.

The shadow that was following her was Darkscale! The serpent had completely lost his mind after absorbing the Ghost insect.

At first, she didn't understand what it was happening, but seeing how his aggressivity continuously increased more he fought with her, she finally understood what was happening.

Those overly aggressive methods of attack that he was employing were an indication of Soul contamination. It seemed that the black serpent didn't absorb only the energy of that ghost, the fool absorbed even his bloodline power!

Only a complete moron would do something like that. Even the bravest of Devils wouldn't dare to take in the bloodline of someone else inside his body.

Bloodline Energy and normal Energy were two completely different things!

If one had an affinity to a certain element, let say Fire, he could easily absorb Fire Elements thanks to a Fire Cultivation Technique. However, if the same cultivator had also an affinity to a certain bloodline he couldn't simply go around and absorb bloodline using the same Fire Elemental Technique!

To absorb Bloodline Energy one first needed to have the same bloodline already inside of him.

There were cases where someone without bloodline managed to gain one by taking the bloodline power of someone else, but those were very far and few. The majority of cultivator that tried to gain a bloodline by injecting themselves with bloodline power, died excruciating deaths.

Absorbing Bloodline energy was even more dangerous than absorbing elemental energy without having an affinity with it. The latter thing only made it very difficult for a cultivator to manipulate that energy, the former was a death sentence most of the times.

Why? Energy was usually without owners. It was clear of impurities and could be absorbed with little to no effort. There were exceptions, but those could be also compensated by using powerful methods and cultivation techniques.

For example, Ghost Energy was energy that was contaminated. Being literally the soul power of dead people, it was obviously contaminated by the owners. It contained wills, fears and even fragments of memories.

It was very difficult to use it without sullying one's cultivation base and soul. Absorbing it raw was possible, but it could turn someone completely mad in the long run.

However, a powerful method like the Heavenly Battleground Technique was able to purify that energy and transmit it in its clear form to the cultivation base of the user. Only the power was kept, all other irrelevant information was extracted by the technique and expelled.

This made the Heavenly Battleground Technique incredibly valuable. However, the purification didn't work on everything. The Heavenly Battleground Technique only worked on Battleground Energy.

It couldn't purify Bloodline powers!

When Darkscale absorbed the large insect, he should have expelled the bloodline energy instead of letting it fuse with his own. Not doing so he contaminated his own body and soul with the impurities that still were hidden inside the bloodline energy.

Devassa used her secret Negative Karma technique to examine the body of the serpent during their fight and noted that the black snake had been contaminated by the energy of the Ghost Insect.

She understood that trying to reason with him will be pointless, so she decided to lead him toward the place where she found the Insect. Maybe there were other agglomerations of Negative Energy similar to the Ghost Insect in that place.

If she was lucky, the serpent would leave her to go fight with the other Ghosts.

While she knew little about Bloodline users, she had some experience with Devils that lost their minds after devouring too many cores.

She knew that even when they lost their minds, Devils would always feel the position of suitable preys and even abandon fights to the death to go and try to devour those suitable preys.

She just hoped that bloodline users were similar. The violet snake moved rapidly, her eyes full of worry. She needed to be fast. The next time the snake would come near to catch her, she wouldn't have the energy to use another Karmic Kage to stop him.

After moving for hundreds of meters she finally arrived at a distance where her probing technique could be used to scan that strange place she was heading to.

Devassa gathered a small amount of grey energy from her cultivation base, and pushed into her eyes activating her cultivation technique and scanning with her gaze the location she was moving towards.

"Yes"

She immediatly saw three big negative energy traces that moved around. Tears of happiness started to fill her eyes. She was right! There was still a chance to survive.

Then her eyes fell into a fourth Negative Energy trace and her heart skipped a beat.