For the next two days, Sunny stayed sequestered within his command pavilion on the Blood Plains, but desperate mercenary captains were scarce.
Perhaps his reputation for demanding exorbitant tributes and absolute submission was spreading, or perhaps the front lines were simply too chaotic for anyone to slip away.
Whatever it was, he only managed to complete one minor fusion job in those two days.
That job was to help a terrified scout from the Shadow Pavilion merge a Tier 2 Spectral Bat with a handful of crushed Wind-Spirit Stones to slightly increase its speed.
Sunny had spent a total of two agonizingly boring days pretending to perform a complex, agonizing blood-ritual in order to successfully evolve the bat, just to pass the time and maintain his terrifying facade.
No one was born a supreme demonic overlord. Such beings only existed in the ancient, forbidden scriptures. Sunny was an ordinary accountant.
What set him apart from others was his desperate, sweating paranoia. Every time he used the System, he made the effort to be even more theatrical and cruel-looking. Although he could have finished that bat fusion in just two seconds, he chose to string the scout along, making the man bleed into a bowl for hours just to make the process look 'authentic' to the Demonic Path.
His customer was still terrified overall by the success of the job; just that the paying of Sunny's exorbitant Corrupted Spirit Stone fees pained him quite a bit.
After the two days, it was back to regular Vanguard slaughter. From the previous week of constant, forced feeding of toxic corpses, the Phantom Ash Scorpion had gotten significantly deadlier.
Its body length reached a total of four feet, and its venomous stingers had lengthened too.
Because of the constant infusion of high-tier blood, the Scorpion's appetite also increased substantially.
Its obsidian carapace had also turned a deeper, oily purple with a massive increase in its natural defense. Its multiple legs were thicker and ended in jagged, bone-shearing barbs.
The brutal skirmishes practically filled up all of the disciples' time. Even after the sun bled out of the sky, they had to put in extra hours of grueling survival training in order to catch up with the Vanguard's horrific casualty replacement rate.
Within the last few days, the surviving disciples noticed that there were suddenly many more exhausted, half-dead youths desperately trying to force their fiends to consume enemy marrow around the camp's perimeter.
"Say, what are we actually bleeding our life essence for? Even if we do survive this siege, the Grand Elders might just refine us into blood-pills anyway. After we conquer the Radiant Peak, we would probably end up guarding a miserable, haunted spirit-mine all the same. Actually, who knows if we could even keep our sanity then, let alone become Inner Sect elites," a disciple secretly whispered to a person beside him while scrubbing blood from his armor.
That person agreed, his eyes hollow. "You're right. Why don't we try to bribe the perimeter Enforcers to let us slip into the wastelands?"
"...Didn't Executioner Mian say before? If we run now, he'll hunt us down and feed our souls to the Abyssal Sludge. Why don't we just hide during the major clashes for this moon. After all, they said they would only be taking the top two hundred survivors into the Inner Sect. After a moon, if we just stay alive, we can go back to being ignored in the Outer Courtyards. We can just treat this one moon as a lesson in hiding," the first person smiled grimly while replying.
"Mmhmm, that makes sense. Let the ambitious fools die first."
There were many amongst the terrified Vanguard disciples that thought that way. These few days of horrific, repetitive slaughter made many of them want to desert.
This was a natural thing and also an embodiment of self-preservation in the face of absolute despair.
The Vanguard was not a glorious path to power as they thought, and definitely not as rewarding as the demonic recruiters had claimed. Many of the disciples were beginning to break mentally. After all, there was still the option of slaving away in the Outer Sect. They did not need to risk having their souls purified by Orthodox light every single day.
As the saying in the sect goes, even if the heavens collapse, the Grand Elders will use your corpses to build an umbrella.
Being a Vanguard shock-trooper meant braving the righteous fury of the enemy.
It was hard to say whether or not they would simply be turned to ash by a stray holy incantation.
When a demonic cultivator decides to give up, there are thousands of cowardly justifications one can think of to do so.
All of these treacherous behaviors were clearly seen by Vanguard Captain Kael, who had no intention to give the disciples any merciful warnings.
He simply stood at the edge of the camp, his halberd resting on his shoulder, observing the disciples scheme, without trying to interrupt them to force them into battle.
He only spoke when his Blood-Marrow Hound needed to execute someone for blatant insubordination.
Even if there were disciples hiding in the corpse-trenches, skiving off during a raid, he would turn a blind eye to them. The weak would naturally be culled by the enemy eventually.
Sunny was working hard in his pavilion, enjoying the terrifying isolation.
Sitting on a throne of spines was naturally boring, but as long as he had the ambition of not being murdered to work towards, even the most boring tasks could be transformed into motivation to maintain his glare.
Sunny was holding a jagged piece of Wraith-Bone in his pale hand. Before him, the Phantom Ash Scorpion was darting through a complex array of suspended, razor-sharp iron pendulums with extreme agility.
Sunny lowered his hand the moment the Scorpion made its way through the deadly trap without a single scratch.
"Acceptable. Its reaction speed has stabilized," said Sunny, his voice a cold whisper, while wiping absolutely zero sweat from his brow, because he hadn't moved an inch in an hour.
Completing the deadly run, the Scorpion scuttled over with its many little legs for a reward. Sunny didn't pat its head; he simply tossed a pulsating, venomous organ harvested from a dead Paladin's mount onto the floor.
The Scorpion gobbled it up with corrosive saliva sizzling against the obsidian tiles. It was eating the organ like a delicacy.
Watching the Scorpion's ruthless efficiency, Sunny's internal panic also gradually cooled down.
Toxic organs were the Scorpion's primary catalyst for growth. They were rich in dense, dark energy and lethal properties.
Especially these organs that were soaked in the ambient death aura of the battlefield. They were swollen with power and their tissues were saturated with agony. They were also highly volatile, making them a perfect fusion material.
"Young Master Sunny, you seem to have refined your fiend into a perfect instrument of murder," said a voice that sounded like grinding tombstones.
Yup, the voice was harsh and completely devoid of warmth. Grinding tombstones was the right phrase to describe it.
Sunny slowly turned his head, his glowing crimson eyes locking onto the intruder. He saw a figure entirely cloaked in shadows, as though the darkness of the pavilion had detached itself from the walls.
He didn't move a muscle, projecting an aura of absolute, unbothered superiority. Standing just inside the entrance flap was a female cultivator wrapped in bandages that seeped a dark, necrotic fluid.
She had hollow, sunken eyes, a jawline that looked entirely skeletal, and an aura of pure, concentrated malice.
If all these features were on a corpse, it would definitely make it look like a high-tier Draugr.
With such a macabre frame, just standing there alone brought an immense feeling of spiritual decay to anyone around her.
"..." Sunny offered no thanks for the praise, merely staring at her in freezing silence.
Beside him, the Scorpion noticed the dense death aura of the stranger, so it raised its stingers obediently, ready to strike at a moment's notice.
Given the girl's horrifying appearance, there was no way Sunny wouldn't recognize her from the sect's infamous rosters.
This was Disciple Vesper. She was the Poison Pavilion's most terrifying prodigy, who was constantly feared by the Elders themselves for her volatile experiments. After the Vanguard was formed, she had chosen to walk straight into the vanguard's deadliest cohorts.
In the eyes of many, she was a walking calamity along with the likes of Sunny Shen.
This was because among the thousands of disciples forced into the Vanguard, only she and Sunny seemed entirely unbothered by the slaughter. They already had terrifying reputations, but they chose to immerse themselves in the bloodiest parts of the war instead of hiding in the rear.
A lot of people did not understand their macabre actions. Would it not be just as feasible to cultivate safely within the sect's hidden sanctums before challenging the Orthodox armies? Why choose to be a frontline butcher now?
"I am here because I require a pact of mutual slaughter with you," said Vesper in a forthright, chilling manner.
"A pact?" Sunny was internally screaming. A pact with the poison girl? If I shake her hand, my arm will probably rot off! But outwardly, he just raised a single, arrogant eyebrow. He also recalled that Captain Kael had brought this up before. After the first culling, the surviving disciples would be forced into pairs. Each pair needed to have a complementary killing style, in order for them to execute advanced tactical strikes.
Towards the climax of the siege, these pairs would be sent deep behind enemy lines to assassinate Paladin commanders. Their survival would depend entirely on their partner.
"Why seek my shadow?" Sunny asked, his voice dripping with condescension.
After all, he wanted to avoid combat at all costs.
"Because the rest of this cohort are all fragile, weeping meat-sacks when it comes to true agony. I have no use for their weakness," answered Vesper with brutal, sociopathic honesty.
This Vesper... really has a way of making me want to run away! Sunny sighed internally.
"Where is your instrument of murder?" Sunny saw Vesper standing alone without her contracted beast around and asked, projecting an air of mild, dangerous curiosity.
"Rot-Weaver!" Vesper did not whistle; she merely pulsed her necrotic aura.
In the darkest corner of the pavilion, a massive shadow that Sunny had assumed was just a pile of discarded armor suddenly detached itself from the ceiling. Multiple glowing green eyes snapped open in the gloom. Then, with an agonizingly slow, clicking sound, it descended on a thick thread of highly acidic silk. The obsidian floor hissed and smoked as the entity landed, radiating a stench so foul it made the air physically heavy.
The terrifying Vesper looked almost human next to it.
Hiss—
It made a sound like a dying man exhaling his last breath.
Vesper did not rub the terrifying, arachnid-like beast's head.
She merely let it loom behind her, its massive, dripping fangs twitching eagerly.
This horror seemed to exist solely to consume. It remained perfectly still, waiting for an order to liquefy everything in the room.
[Monster Name]: Rot-Weaver Arachnid
[Monster Level]: Tier 3 (Peak)
[Monster Grade]: Perfect
[Monster Attribute]: Poison/Decay
[Monster Condition]: Starving (Lethal)