Rise

Adonis after cutting Tristan cleanly in half looked at his bloody corpse for a short moment and then turned his attention to Vichon's unconscious body. When Adonis stepped toward him he felt a searing pain through his entire body and a large amount of dizziness.

"Fuck...I am too fatigued and lost too much blood..."

"Damn...it...I need to at least...kill Vichon...first..."

Adonis tried to walk to Vichon but he collapsed and gritted his teeth and crawled toward him.

Adonis got to him but both his arms were too tired to deal the final blow. Adonis then decided to bite down on the hilt of his broken sword and pointed the end of the blade at Vichon's neck, letting his weight take over as his blade stabbed deeply into Vichon, making him bleed.

Adonis stopped biting the sword and fell to the ground, he looked at the sky as his vision got blurry.

"With the sword in his neck...he should bleed out...now."

"Crap....what do I do...?"

As Adonis said this, he remembered his soul domain.

"Right...I just...need to....concentrate..."

Adonis focused on his soul domain and fought being unconscious, cause he knew he would die if he lost it.

Adonis kept focusing and fighting to stay alive, but his consciousness kept drifting away no matter what he did.

Eventually, Adonis couldn't keep up anymore and fainted.

.

.

.

"Uhhh..."

Adonis groaned as his entire body was sore. He looked around and found a vast and beautiful grassland, with an even more beautiful evening sky.

"Did I...make it..."

Adonis looks at his arm, and although his sleeve was ripped apart, his arm was perfectly fine.

"My body...it's fully healed!"

He was able to pick himself up and look at his body which was perfectly fine, the only thing ruined was his green robes which were ripped and soaked with blood.

"I thought I died for a second there! Thank god I survived!"

Adonis took a few minutes to calm down from the fight and everything that he did.

"I didn't know I was capable of doing such things...hell, I didn't even think about what I was doing the entire time or even feel anything."

Adonis felt conflicted: on one hand, what he did was justified as he protected himself from the ambush. But, on the other hand, during the middle of the battle when he faced Vichon, he felt ecstatic at the thought of killing and felt a new, darker side of himself come out of him at that moment.

"Ahhhhhh fuck...whatever, let's not think about this too deeply."

Adonis decided to focus on something else, which was his cultivation. He had faced multiple people, used his Anima to the limit, and had a close encounter with death. He was sure that his cultivation will rise substantially.

He put himself in a meditative position and started to cultivate. After a minute, he reached 4-spark.

"HOLY CRAP! That was fast! I still feel I can go even further though!"

Adonis continued to cultivate, and even though he was struggling more as time passed he was able to reach 5-spark.

"Haaah, thank you, Tristan and Vichon, your guy's death wasn't so futile after all."

Adonis was excited as now he was on the edge of going into the Refinement Stage.

'I could only dream of going into the next stage, but now here I am, on the brink of walking into it.'

Adonis let the moment pass and looked inside his body to look at his current cultivation.

When cultivators look at their cultivation for themselves or other people, it looks like a core is at their sternum filled with mana and the sparks branch out of the core, and at the end of the line is a spark that shines brightly. When a person reaches the next stage, the sparks explode into a wave of mana that courses through their entire body, powering it up. It's through that; that the human body can withdraw more mana from the core inside them, furthering its strength.

Adonis looked at his core and all five sparks with satisfaction and was now going to go back into the real world and plan what to do next.