He felt as if the bones in his shoulder had been completely shattered.
That force... was more than terrifying.
He hadn't felt such pain even when his relatives had beaten him hours earlier... His body was completely sore and paralyzed, but fortunately, the sword was still in his hand, and the right side of his body could still move.
He wasn't stupid.
His brain worked quickly to find the answer, and he found it.
An anomaly in the attack pattern.
It wasn't impossible for this to happen; it was something that occurred in powerful beasts. The stronger a beast is, the more difficult it is to guess its attack pattern.
Although he had guessed it initially, he became overconfident, thinking that they were simple "Level 1" beasts, and forgot that he was also at the same level; worse still, he was currently weaker.
When the scream occurred, instead of thinking about killing it as soon as possible, he should have protected himself, because the possibility of an anomaly in the attack pattern increases when they feel threatened.
It had been his mistake!
Although he was in pain, he knew he had to get up quickly because he was still the target of a fast and powerful beast.
He had to resume his defense and offense as soon as possible, as he couldn't allow it the freedom to call its allies. Then, he would surely be finished.
But when he got up, his face was filled with fear for a brief moment. The figure of the spider was too close to him.
He moved almost instinctively to one side, while his sword attacked the other.
CLANK!
The deadly attack aimed at his heart was firmly deflected by his sword, but he quickly lost momentum. The beast's strength was greater, and he had been taken by surprise. As a result, his body was forced backward, losing its balance.
'Damn it!'
Losing your balance in front of a beast that has not just two ways to attack, but six, is a serious mistake.
He soon witnessed this.
His body was once again impaled by one of the spider's legs, but this time he didn't fly away because there was a wall behind him. Instead, he was stuck to it, like an ornament nailed to a wall.
Once again, his bones roared with pain, and his body trembled. But his eyes remained steady, waiting for his moment.
Another of the spider's legs dug into him, this time quite close to his stomach... it wanted to make him suffer.
Even so, he did not lose sight of his target. And he found it.
The spider was within reach of his sword, partly because its legs, which were clinging to him, had become deeply embedded in the wall behind him due to its poor condition.
He smiled.
His sword, which had never left his hand, moved from bottom to top in a perfect vertical attack, striking firmly on the right side of the head, right where the spider's nerves were.
It shuddered; it hadn't expected its prey to be so strong despite being impaled. Its body twisted backward in pain and dizziness, causing the two legs stuck in Xiaotian's body to finally come out.
He fell to the ground and, despite the pain, bit his tongue to resist it and stomped forward, raising his sword above his head in a lunge, until he managed to drive it fiercely into the core...
He had struck it twice before, so it was already weakened.
Although it still had spiritual energy near it to protect it, it was not enough to stop the sudden, powerful onslaught. His eyes flashed with madness, further increasing his strength, and suddenly...
Pst-
The sound of an echo escaping from the container reached his ears...
"Damn... traitors..."
Shocking words escaped from the core before the spider's body disappeared, transforming into a bluish crystal that fell to the ground with a loud thud; it clearly weighed quite a bit.
Xiaotian fell behind the core, kneeling on the ground and staring at the floor. The pain enveloped him so completely that he even ignored the echo.
It is usually recommended to listen to them carefully, as echoes may contain clues about how to close a ruin or possible tests, but this time, he didn't need to.
He knew this ruin better than anyone else. Despite the variables he had encountered, he also knew that city-type ruins did not have special tests, so he didn't need to pay much attention to the specters' nonsense.
Although he would have done so if he hadn't been in so much pain. But he was seriously injured and didn't have time for that.
'I still have several low-level specters and the queen to clear this ruin, and I'm already this bad...'
He looked at his wounds; he was bleeding. 'I have to stop the bleeding,' he said to himself.
He immediately ran his hand over the spiritual crystal lying on the ground and stored it in his inventory. He didn't need to check the weight, but he knew it would be very useful when he set out on his path to cultivation.
Then he covered the wound in his lower abdomen, the one that was bleeding the most, and began to walk quickly toward the house where he had been a short while earlier. It was a safe place.
That specter had discovered him earlier in some unknown way, but he still had to wait for him to leave the house before jumping on him. Perhaps it was because they had some restriction or fear of entering houses, or perhaps because they didn't want to fight in an enclosed space.
Whatever it was, it didn't matter right now. The important thing was to stop the bleeding.
He jumped out the window and fell rolling. As best he could, he crawled to the room where he had been before and entered the enclosed courtyard, where he had gathered a pile of herbs, as it was the most hidden place and the only one whose door still worked.
He went in and closed the door, then threw himself on the floor.
Since he had no bandages or anything like that, he grabbed his shirt and tore it into strips to make bandages.
Then he quickly proceeded to wrap them around his serious wounds.
"Agh..." A groan of pain escaped his mouth as he bandaged the wound on his stomach, but he endured it.
Once he had bandaged his stomach and shoulder, he was finally able to breathe.
'That was really dangerous,' he thought...
Unfortunately, the danger was not over.
His sigh of relief had barely begun when he immediately noticed something.
He looked at his stomach and frowned.
The bleeding hadn't stopped; the bandage was soaked through.
The bandage was only prolonging the inevitable, which was normal, but this rate of bleeding...
"Shit." He was suddenly overcome with frustration and slammed his fist hard on the ground. The blood leaving his body would not return, and that would weaken him... until death.