Ultimate Villain's Return as a Doctor in the Cultivation World-Chapter 248- Lin Yuxi’s State

He rose into the air.

Settled into the invisible current he’d been using and moved back above the mountain slope to watch the delivery arrive.

---

The slope was quiet when Lin Yuxi stopped hitting things.

She’d run out of accessible rubble in the immediate radius and had straightened up, fists at her sides, blood on her knuckles and tears she was pretending were sweat drying on her face, and she had started the specific breathing exercise that her Foundation Establishment cultivation required when it was misbehaving — the qi routing through the main meridians in the pattern her sect had taught her, the same pattern that worked every other time, the same pattern that was currently arguing with something in her body that didn’t want to be routed.

She was stronger than everyone back home thought.

That was the truth she carried and the lie she performed — because the real truth was more complicated, the real truth being that her cultivation base had breached Foundation Establishment three months ago in a surge she hadn’t planned and hadn’t been able to explain, and had then done something that cultivation bases were not supposed to do, which was ’keep going,’ pushing toward the edge of Core Formation in moments of high emotion, before snapping back down to early Foundation Establishment when the emotion passed.

Unstable.

The technical term, she’d learned from the one text she’d been able to get her hands on without anyone noticing her interest, was ’fractured foundation,’ and the prognosis was not encouraging.

She breathed.

Tried the routing again.

Felt the qi move properly for exactly three seconds and then catch, like a foot catching a step that wasn’t where you expected it, and stumble sideways into the wrong meridian, and she made a sound through her teeth that was not the sound of successful cultivation.

"’—You bastard heavenly demon,’" she said again, quieter this time, because saying it once had not resolved anything and saying it again was the only option currently available.

She felt it before she heard it.

The specific pressure-change of something large moving through air at speed — not spiritual energy, not cultivator technique, just ’mass,’ the way thirty tons of mass displaces the air in front of it when it’s moving fast enough that displacement doesn’t have time to be polite.

She looked up.

Brown eyes finding the sky.

Finding the thing in the sky.

The thing in the sky found the mountain.

The impact was total.

It hit the slope forty meters above her and didn’t stop at the surface — carried through it, the demonic mass of the thing driving into the mountain rock the way a hammer drives into soft wood, the stone fracturing outward from the point of impact in radiating cracks, the entire slope shuddering under her feet as the shockwave ran down through it.

The sound. 𝓯𝙧𝙚𝒆𝙬𝙚𝒃𝙣𝙤𝒗𝓮𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢

Not an impact sound — the word for it didn’t exist in a register designed for normal physical events, it was the sound of a mountain receiving something that had no right to arrive at that velocity and receiving it anyway, stone and demonic matter and the screaming of the thing all happening simultaneously in the same location.

She stumbled.

The slope was moving.

"’—What are you—’"

The monster came out of the crater it had made.

Still alive.

Dazed — the impact had rattled something fundamental in its rebuilt architecture, one tusk sheared off at the base, the red eyes momentarily unfocused — but alive, and processing, and the processing arrived at the specific conclusion of ’there is a human nearby.’

It turned toward her.

Lin Yuxi moved.

Backward, sideways, the specific lateral dodge of someone who had been training for this category of encounter even if not for this specific scale — her body working correctly for the half-second that the dodge required, distance opening between her and the monster’s first charge, her foot landing on stable rock and pushing off.

Then the monster twisted.

It was faster than thirty tons of anything should be.

The kick was not a kick in the cultivator combat sense — it was the rear leg of a thirty-ton demonic beast swinging laterally with the full mechanical advantage of the animal’s body weight and the demonic energy still running through every muscle — a sweep, more than a kick, but the distinction was academic to Lin Yuxi’s ribs.

It connected.

Not the glancing contact of a partial dodge — full, solid, the specific quality of a hit that had decided the outcome before the impact completed, the force of it running through her body from the point of contact outward in the way that force runs through things that were not designed to receive it at that magnitude.

She hit the mountain.

The specific intimacy of a body hitting solid stone at velocity — back, shoulder, skull — the impact that takes the breath out and doesn’t give it back immediately, the white-edge quality of a pain that is too large for the body’s pain system to fully process in real time and so arrives in waves.

She slid.

Down the face of the rock, leaving a red trace where her shoulder and the side of her face had made contact with the stone — scraping, slow, the deceleration of a body that had been stopped by a surface harder than itself.

She hit the slope floor.

Blood from her mouth — she felt it before she tasted it, the specific metallic warmth of internal bleeding reporting through the lips, and she coughed, and the cough was the kind that shook the body and produced more blood, and she felt the ribs.

How many.

She didn’t try to count.

The count was irrelevant.

The monster was still there.

She could hear it — the specific vibration of thirty tons of demonic intent oriented toward her specific location, moving, the ground communicating the approach through the stone under her body before her eyes had fully cleared from the blur of the impact.

She needed to move.

Her arms were present and operating — she pushed.

Her legs — one answered, the other sent back a report about the hip joint that was not encouraging.

She pushed anyway.

The arm of the working leg found the ground.

"’—move,’" she said, to her body, to herself, in the specific flat tone of a person who has used this word to themselves before in difficult circumstances and knows that sometimes it works.

She rolled.

Onto her side.

The monster’s foreleg came down where she had been — the stone cratering under the impact, the force of it close enough that she felt the pressure of the displaced air against her face.

She looked up at it.

At the red eyes above her.

At the tusks — one sheared, one still present, still capable of what a tusk does when applied to a human body.

The red eyes looked down.

’Am I going to die?’

The tusk came down.

She didn’t close her eyes.

Not bravado — just the specific quality of a person who has run out of the energy that closing your eyes requires, lying broken on the mountain slope with blood on her lip and the hip joint sending reports she couldn’t do anything about, watching the descent of the one remaining tusk with the flat, clear attention of someone who has accepted the geometry.

The tusk stopped.

Not gradually.

It stopped the way things stop when something else has decided they will stop — absolute, mid-air, the monster’s entire forward momentum arrested as if the concept of ’forward’ had simply been removed from the available options.

The beast made a sound.