Chapter 51 51: Crushing A Future Threat
Amon\'s feet landed on the cracked ground, the scent of the disgusting slums filling his nose—tonight would be when he performed something he didn\'t want Tia to know.
He could now hide his actions by turning on an option in his Profile page labelled [Hidden Action], allowing him to speak with Tia, but she could not detect his actions or location.
Amon felt horrible doing this and didn\'t want to mistrust that girl.
However, before they met face to face, he needed to hide the dirty and darker things from her to avoid making her disappointed in him.
Because there were many things, she told him that were wrong, from his cultivation technique and how it works to the true usage of his skills and the spirits.
"I imagine it\'s not her but the thing that brought her here that limited or changed her knowledge..."
\'My Aura is increasing slowly... It seems that Tia\'s knowledge of me is wrong...\'
\'I need to take notes about my cultivation technique in the profile and hopefully discover how it works.\'
\'She claimed I absorb Aura naturally, but how it moves and enters me is more like devouring...\'
\'Then it\'s stored in my abdomen... for what reason I am not sure, but until I kiss or have sex with a female, it doesn\'t seem usable...\'
\'Until I got my character profile cheat, that is...\'
He wore a long coat with a mask covering his face.
This didn\'t look strange and fit in well, thanks to a recent pandemic.
The coat was dirty and unkempt to avoid standing out in the slums as he headed towards a small house with a blue roof.
\'I will check after this... It seems to be the technique I wrote but never used, but I cannot be sure...\' Amon thought before his hands wrapped in black gloves gripped the wall of the blue house coming into view.
The streets and alleys were filled with garbage, the stink of animal and human excrement filling the air while the sewage overflowed with murky brown and grey water.
He slipped forward, currently only a single homeless man in the area.
Shlick!
A sharp claw pierced the man\'s neck, but the blood was kept inside his body, a black flame cauterising the wound instantly as Amon pushed forward, his black boots dirty from the filthy ground, lightly squeaking in the mud.
\'I will not apologise, your life was pathetic anyway, and I cannot afford to be seen.\'
Amon\'s body faded into the mist—a few minutes later, a couple with strange hair and piercings passed the old man.
When they saw his little tin full of coins—they tossed a small handful inside and walked past.
He was not noticing his death due to the black flame in his heart forcing it to appear to beat and his lungs to move.
This would only last a few minutes as the black dragon in his heart and tiger in his lungs would fade from his body within 10 minutes.
Once the couple vanished down the dark pathway, his body stood outside his target house.
Poor quality brick and stone walls rotted and weathered with a makeshift wooden door with countless holes and cracks.
The people of the slums lived in horrible conditions, but Amon was no samaritan.
This was the home of Ethan\'s father and a once powerful cultivator that would eventually regain his powers to support his son and help him find his mother from a higher realm.
Or so the modified story went.
Sizzle!
Amon\'s fingers emitted a black flame that melted the cheap iron lock so fast that it didn\'t even drip onto the ground and was obliterated into ash.
Slowly he crept into the house, his body partially ethereal thanks to constantly using the blink-step to avoid any noise; the bottom floor was a mess, with alcohol bottles, burnt pans and dirty clothes everywhere.
There were countless rats, but his flames spread out and burned their hearts to ash before they could squeak or give away his location.
He steadily checked the rooms, wondering if he was on the old, disgusting sofa in a drunken coma, but sadly, he wasn\'t.
\'Upstairs, huh?\'
In some places, there were strange items that Amon remembered writing into his stories; they were like cultivation tools that detected intruders if they used Qi or came close to them.
However, with the black dragon Qi, it seemed they couldn\'t detect it. Amon didn\'t know that his [Hidden Action] affected the world and people irrelevant to the main story.
If he tried this later when Ethan was going to meet his father...
Amon would have been discovered already—even his presence outside was vague, like a grim reaper only visible to animals and babies.
\'Phew...\'
Once he was upstairs, the scent of unwashed sweat and rotting food filled his nose, a disgusting mixture of sour and burning scents that made his nose and eyes sore.
\'Wow.. this is bad...\'
He couldn\'t understand how someone could live this way, instead feeling a deep shame for writing such a poorly thought character.
\'Just because his wife left him for another man in the upper realm, why does he wallow in self-pity and become some disgusting homeless bum?\'
\'Could I not have made him grit his teeth and surpass them both... I was too naive and wanted Ethan to stick out more, but the story about finding his mother...\'
\'Isn\'t it his father\'s story and not Ethans... She was HIS wife before Ethan\'s mother..\'
Amon thought to himself, an author\'s mind never stopped moving and considering how to improve himself—sometimes the comments were hurtful, but he still took their messages to heart, trying to get better.
That\'s why his earliest work and its negatives were like a dagger to his heart.
A weakness he didn\'t want to be revealed to anyone but Tia.
He mapped the upstairs layout, two doors ahead of him and the bathroom to his right; for a slum house, it was quite nice, but then he remembered who wrote the story.
It seemed the pirates who changed things didn\'t touch small things that he made, likely too lazy to put more effort in when it was for easy money.
Amon was grateful as he reached the left door—he remembered writing the scene where Ethan met his father...
Despite being the enemy of his MC Amon... The joy he felt when they reunited led to Ethan becoming more mature and learning more about his Azure dragon technique...
\'Sorry, I will cut that dream short. You are my enemy now.\'
Creak!
His left hand opened the door slowly, the leather glove squeaking from the cheap door that almost fell off its hinges despite him only using a touch of power.
\'Damn... scared the shit out of me...\'
Inside the room was a state beyond anything Amon imagined, the scent of urine and body odour assaulting his nose, causing him to gag and almost vomit. It was that thick.
Only someone who truly loved this man or had no sense of smell could stomach this place, the floor littered with bugs and bottles, his bed without a sheet and dirty stains.
Ethan\'s father lay on the bed, snoring away with a dirty beard filled with food crumbs and matted together like his ginger hair.
Amon\'s body used his blink-dragon step to hover over the ground, his veins and core strained to the limit before he reappeared over the man\'s body, dark violet eyes narrowed as the man slept peacefully.
It was time for revenge.
Gasp!
"What... What the hell!"
The man screamed as he sat up quickly, waking up from his nightmare about his wife having sex with another man, their looks of scorn causing him to feel defeated, like he was worthless. Then his son vanished and left for university and never contacted him.
This was the last place he expected to see someone, especially a child floating in mid-air with his legs crossed and arms folded as if he were meditating.
Amon didn\'t speak.
Instead, his arm transformed into its dragon form, with black scales and sharp claws forming when Ethan\'s father blinked.
The sharp claws penetrated his chest before the old man could even cycle his unused Qi, blood spewing from his mouth.
"Guha!?"
The man presumed him to be from THAT place because of the black flame, the family of men who took his wife!
"Gr.....y-you....bastards..... my s-son.... will avenge--!?"
His voice stopped because he couldn\'t breathe as the hand of Amon seemed to be like some form of a black hole or gaping mouth that began to suck all the life and Qi from his body—the intense pressure crushed his damaged core.
The male\'s face and hair turned older, hair now grey and falling from his head, from a middle-aged man to an 80-year-old in a few seconds.
Amon\'s eyes were glowing bright violet; the test worked! His cultivation was NOT the method Tia believed in.... but something more gruesome and evil...
However, it benefited all the women around him—their bodies, cultivation, and talents would be improved just by having sex with him; even a small kiss would allow them to transfer Qi and improve them both.
\'But she wasn\'t wrong about me needing women to breathe through... fuck!\'
Ethan\'s father died easily while Amon pulled out his hand, the black dragon fire melting and destroying all evidence before it started a natural fire from the cigarettes in the ashtray beside his bed, falling onto the fabric-filled floor.
\'Time to leave!\' Amon thought as his body vanished, reappearing in the opposite room, his hand and eyes looking at the logs of his character profile.
[Killed a Key Character -> Drained 1,200 Aura]
[Aura 2,000/2,000] [Stored Aura 700]
\'I knew it... The things I couldn\'t see without this profile were far too many! No wonder I need a woman to break through... My body cannot absorb the aura as it is!\'
\'At least not yet... with this level of my Black Dragon\'s Descent!\'
\'But Ethan\'s father and all the secrets will burn.\'
Amon didn\'t leave, even after the fire service came to put out the fire, his black flames destroying ALL cultivation resources.
Even the secret diary of the Azure dragon that his father had hidden under the third floorboard of the ground floor was no exception, burnt to cinders.
And the ashes were blown with the wind.
\'Sorry, I will not let you find that by some magical accident when grieving your father. Amon Weltz Is not kind to his enemies.\'