Chapter 57: Chapter 57 - The Upper Management Audit and the Tactical Retreat

Elder Han released his Golden Core aura.

The air in the VIP room instantly transitioned from oxygen into liquid mercury. It became suffocatingly, impossibly heavy.

Su Bai’s knees violently buckled, cracking the floorboards as he was forced to the ground.

His heart pounded wildly against his ribs. ’So this is the absolute stat-check of a Golden Core,’ Su Bai realized as he gritted his teeth.

He had fought a 9th Stage Foundation Establishment cultivator using tricks and positioning.

But a Golden Core expert? Their Qi had undergone a fundamental, qualitative change. It was no longer liquid or gaseous. It was solid, compressed, and terrifyingly dense.

Desperate, Su Bai tried to activate the Devouring Maw to siphon the oppressive aura off his shoulders.

For the first time in his life, the technique failed. The Golden Core Qi was simply too dense. It was like trying to drink a solid brick through a plastic straw.

Su Bai wanted to speak and to throw the ledgers at the Elder’s feet, but the suppression was so absolute he couldn’t even part his lips.

"Filth," Elder Han said coldly. He flicked his pristine white sleeve.

A single, glowing flying sword materialized in the air. It was coated in the Elder’s true Dan Fire (Core Fire) that could melt steel in seconds.

The sword shot forward. It was aiming directly for Su Bai’s throat. It didn’t just fly straight. It curved and maneuvered with terrifying, autonomous intelligence.

Sword Intent.

Su Bai’s mind rang with blaring alarms. His Reversal Body could invert debuffs, but it couldn’t reverse the sheer kinetic force of a solid, blazing sword severing his head from his neck.

Struggling against the crushing gravity, Su Bai forcefully rerouted his internal Qi and slammed both hands onto the floor.

Weeping Willow Binding!

Dozens of massive, jagged crystalline vines violently erupted from the floorboards, weaving together into a thick, reinforced barricade in front of Su Bai.

The golden sword punched through the bone-like vines like they were wet tissue paper. But the barricade slowed the blade down by exactly one microsecond.

That was all the lag Su Bai needed.

Under the crushing suppression, he desperately triggered the Frictionless Phantom Step. He couldn’t leap, so he simply allowed his upper body to slide an inch to the left.

Sssss!

The blazing sword missed his throat and grazed his shoulder. It seared his flesh.

But Su Bai wasn’t finished. As the sword passed his head, his eyes flashed. He coldly flicked his wrist, then attached a microscopic, unbreakable Nether-Thread directly to the hilt of the passing blade.

With a vicious yank, Su Bai used the sword’s own massive, forward momentum to violently slingshot himself across the heavy room.

He ripped right through the gravitational suppression. He smashed through the pagoda’s outer wall and burst into the sky.

Elder Han’s eyes widened in genuine shock. A Foundation Establishment ant had just dodged his Sword Intent and used his own weapon as a tow cable to escape.

"Presumptuous!" the Elder roared. His pristine image shattered into fury. He stomped his foot.

The single golden sword hovering outside suddenly multiplied. One became ten. Ten became fifty. An inescapable array of identical, solid swords of Dan Fire hovered in the sky.

They completely locked onto Su Bai’s escaping figure.

They rained down all at once.

Su Bai hit the ground running. He chained Frictionless Phantom Step over and over. His boots glided silently across the cobblestone roofs of Blackwater City. The Golden Core’s Spiritual Sense was locked firmly onto his physical body.

Explosions rocked the city as the solid swords rained down around him. Su Bai pushed his speed to the absolute limit, but the barrage was too dense. A sword grazed his thigh. Another clipped his side.

Wounds accumulated. Blood stained his robes. But his corporate mind remained chillingly focused. He just needed to survive the shift.

Suddenly, the attacks paused.

Su Bai glanced down. He had crossed into the densely populated residential slums. Elder Han, for all his blind arrogance, was still a righteous cultivator. He wouldn’t flatten thousands of innocent mortal just to catch a single spy.

Taking advantage of the cease-fire, Su Bai used a few more consecutive _Phantom Steps. He successfully slipped through the massive gaps in the city’s outer gate.

He burst into the wilderness, then summoned his flying sword. But just as his foot touched the blade, the air in front of him warped.

Elder Han was already waiting for him. The speed of a Golden Core cultivator was simply monstrous.

Su Bai’s heart raced. He held his bleeding shoulder, deciding to try one last desperate PR pitch.

"Senior," Su Bai said respectfully. "I am not a Demonic Cultivator. Inspector Zhao has been colluding—"

"Shut up!" Elder Han barked, not giving him a single second to explain. "You dare defile the dead in my halls and then spew lies about my men?!"

Su Bai’s eyes turned pitch black.

’Of course,’ Su Bai sneered internally. ’A typical, out-of-touch executive. He’d rather blindly trust his corrupt middle-manager than listen to an external auditor. Fine. You want to ruin the company? Do it yourself.’

Elder Han raised his hand. The fifty solid swords of Dan Fire materialized once more, forming a perfect, inescapable dome around Su Bai. There were no blind spots. Every path was a dead end.

The swords shot forward.

Su Bai didn’t try to dodge. He closed his eyes and forcefully called upon his foundation.

CRACK!

His Crystalline Sapling Root violently surged. It erupted from his back, not as a small plant, but rapidly expanding its obsidian branches into a terrifying, massive umbrella to shield him.

The golden swords slammed into the canopy. The impact was apocalyptic.

The Sapling violently absorbed the first forty strikes. It violently trembled and screamed with the sound of snapping timber. It held the line for two agonizing seconds before finally shattering into pieces. It retreated back into Su Bai’s Dantian to survive.

The final ten swords blasted through the shattered canopy. They slammed into Su Bai and launched him backward through the ground.

One of the glowing swords pierced directly through his abdomen, lodging itself deeply into his Dantian.

"Gah!"

Su Bai crashed into the dirt. The searing heat of the Dan Fire burned his internal organs, but far worse was the structural breach. His precious, hard-earned liquid Qi immediately began violently venting out of the wound into the cold air, like a punctured radiator.

He fell to his knees, then clutched the glowing sword-wedge in his stomach. He put immense physical pressure on the wound to stop the Qi from bleeding out completely.

He stared up at Elder Han with an intensely dark, indignant glare.

Elder Han sneered in contempt. He slowly walked forward, then raised his hand to deliver the final execution strike.

"A futile struggle," the Elder scoffed.

It was then that Su Bai’s bloody hand slipped into his robes.

He... activated two Slumbering-Lotus Fog Talismans and slammed them into the ground.

FWOOSH.

A massive, incredibly dense cloud of pale, sweet-smelling fog erupted. It instantly enveloped the entire clearing.

"Petty tricks," Elder Han sneered. A Golden Core cultivator’s physical body was highly resistant to such low-level sedatives. He simply waved his sleeve and unleashed a burst of solid Qi that violently blew the entire cloud of fog away in an instant.

The clearing was revealed once more.

But Elder Han’s eyes widened.

The ground was stained with blood, and a crater marked where Su Bai had been kneeling. But the man in the dark cloak was gone.

In his place lay nothing but a single, fallen leaf.

Realizing he had been completely outplayed by a heavily wounded junior, Elder Han’s face twisted into an ugly mask of sheer, humiliated rage. 𝓯𝙧𝙚𝒆𝙬𝙚𝒃𝙣𝙤𝒗𝓮𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢

"FIND HIM!" the Golden Core Elder roared. His voice shattered the trees for miles.