My time in the mystic realm of steel has really broadened my perspective when it comes to the concept of body cultivation. Traditionally, we cultivators rely on external natural factors to rise through the QI condensation rank. Our fleshy bodies typically rise with us naturally or fall behind after that; that’s how it usually is, normally.

  But I understand it now; flesh is strong, but within that strength lies weakness, and that is unacceptable. From the moment I understood this, it disgusted me, so I rid myself of it.

  –Excerpt from ‘The Steel Codex’, autobiography of I Am Steel.

  Harry flung his mind into [Adrenal Burst], activating the trait twice, stacking the effects before funneling the massive boost into his [AGI] stat before lapping from the branch he was perched on.

  The raid flew through the air with grace, something of his size and species shouldn’t have access to at all, landing soundly in the clearing, right behind the Rat kin that was furthest from the group.

  His right paw shot forward, smashing through the rotten log disguise, smashing into the left side of the creature’s skull, cracking it open like an egg.

  Harry felt his predation authority flare up in hunger, but the rat suppressed it, grabbing the bleeding corpse in his mouth. He sprinted to the next, reaching it in an instant. He delivered a similar blow, killing it instantly before allowing his authority to devour this one, ignoring the predation messages for the time being as he moved to his last target.

  The Ratkins on the other side of the clearing had begun to stir by now, but it was far too late. Harry reached the Ratkin within a breath’s pace of time, decapitated it, flung it over his shoulder, and vanished into the thick darkness.

  It was quite cumbersome to move with the two dead Ratkins, but Harry forced himself to adapt, gaining speed rapidly as he maneuvered through the middle regions of the forest.

  Part of Harry wanted to pause, just for a moment, so that his authority could get to work, but his intuition warned him against that. Danger bells were still ringing in the back of his head; the Ratkins were still hot on his tail, and Harry felt numerous cold gazes watching him flee; he even felt some following him.

  The rat didn’t know what or who these gazes belonged to, nor was he interested in finding out, either.

  Inwardly, Harry was cursing as he ran; the [Kin link] trait was a double-edged sword, it allowed him to find Ratkin with pinpoint accuracy, but the same was true for any Ratkin who possessed it also; he just had to enter the forest.

  Now he had to flee with all his might; the longer he lingered, the more Ratkin he felt drawing near, from all corners of the forest.

  Harry knew what they were trying to do; they sought to cut off all avenues of escape, locking off his paths that led to the forest outskirts.

  Harry suddenly felt as if he had been caught in a tightening net, which only caused his heart to pound with dread.

  The rat suddenly paused and spun, twisting his body out of the way as a sharp wooden spike swished past him, embedding itself firmly in the ground a few meters ahead.

  Harry’s heart pounded, but he took the time to free himself of some deadweight; crimson light burst into existence around him, temporarily banishing the thick darkness of the night. The two Ratkin corpses he was carrying vanished instantly, and Harry felt two new notifications pop up at the back of his mind, but he ignored them and burst into motion with an even greater speed than before.

  The Ratkins weren’t the only things he had to worry about, though; other things began to make their move, too.

  If it weren’t for Harry’s fast reflexes, he would’ve been swallowed in one gulp when a seemingly ordinary patch of darkness before him moved with shocking speed and fury. Harry recognized the creature instantly; it was the living shadow he’d encountered on his second day in the forest depths.

  What it was doing in the middle regions was beyond him, but it only made things harder for Harry, who was already desperately fleeing.

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  The creature was fast, almost absurdly so. It somehow managed to keep up with Harry, even in his boosted state.

  The rat couldn’t make sense of it; he understood why the Ratkins were after him, he’d murdered a decent amount of them, after all, but what about this creature? He doubted he could fill the stomach of such a large creature, so what was it, then?

  It pursued Harry as if its life depended on it, which was odd.

  The rat didn’t have time to dwell on it, though; a spike of inky suddenly manifested above the creature before vanishing, crossing the distance between Harry and the shadow seemingly instantly.

  It slammed into the Rat’s head before he had even a second to react, reducing it to nothing more than a mess of blood and pink brain matter.

  Suddenly, green light exploded across Harry’s headless body, growing in intensity until it looked as if a miniature green sun had just bloomed within the once lightless forest.

  -Lethal damage sustained, HP function triggered.-

  Suddenly, the light converged on the shattered head of Harry, and time seemed to rewind. The cracked bone fragments of his skull floated up and returned, alongside the scattered bits of his brain, until Harry’s head fully reformed, then the light vanished.

  Harry’s mind and soul returned to their peak state, right before he died, but his stamina plummeted rapidly, until it was completely drained.

  -Conditions met, Last stand triggered.-

  -Extreme boost granted: AGI

  +100 AGI (TEMP)

  Heavenly thunder suddenly crackled overhead angrily as golden light bloomed across Harry’s body, congealing into a single, golden rune that depicted a simple stick man running. The rat dropped on all fours and vanished, leaving behind a string of afterimages.

  Harry moved like a bolt of golden thunder, his feet light and agile as if imbued with the essence of speed and the wind. He danced through the frozen world with breathtaking grace, like a streak of bright golden light against a black backdrop.

  The rat traversed through the middle regions within an instant and was already at the outskirts of the forest in a single breath's time. Harry didn’t slow down, though; he only pushed himself more as he moved, moving through the thick grass fields and onto the town road that connected Lu town with this one.

  Harry felt like he couldn’t continue hunting in the forest anymore; he knew that if he dared to enter again, he’d be swarmed and devoured in an instant. His intuition felt the same about the other forest, too, so even that was ruled out.

  Even stronger Kin existed there, apparently. Harry didn’t find that too surprising; they were connected, after all. The only other option left for Harry here was to stick to the lowlands and rule the grass fields, much like the snake he’d accidentally devoured did.

  That wasn’t what the rat wanted, though; he had greater ambitions than that. Seeing that he’d momentarily exhausted all available avenues of growth here, Harry decided to return to Lu Town.

  The rat felt that, with its current strength, it could truly begin repaying all those in full who’d done him wrong in the past. Atop his list of creatures to repay was, of course, Ballcrusher, the rat who made his life a living hell for the better part of 20 years.

  Harry planned to kill him and his entire family, then consume every remaining rat in Lu Town.

  Thoughts like these surged in Harry’s mind as he moved along the stone-paved road in the dead of night, alight with a golden glow. Harry glanced at the left corner of his mind, where a timer steadily ticked away.

  He had precisely 52 seconds left, and Harry knew that he’d reach Lu Town in just two, leaving him with a total of 50 seconds of godly speed to use however he liked. It truly deserved the name ‘extreme.’ At first, Harry didn’t know what to do with so much free time until he realized he could explore the strange grass field growing near the town.

  He really doubted anything existed in there that could match up to him in terms of speed at the moment; if there was, then the heavens truly had no eyes, and his was worse than a dog’s.

  He also wanted to find one of his initial targets: Pink Lump. The familiar stone walls of Lu Town came into view two seconds later, tall and prominent, just as Harry remembered them. Then the strange grassfields, on his left and right.

  It didn’t feel as dangerous to Harry anymore, he was no longer the weak rat he once was. He knew that in the grand scheme of things, his perceived strength was laughable, but here? It was dramatic.

  He still felt a mild sense of danger, but it ended there; he knew that had to be coming from Pink Lump. Harry didn’t think anything else existed here worthy of being dangerous. Harry leaped from the road and into the grassfield on his right the moment the timer reached 50 seconds.

  The insides were strange, it felt as if he’d step into a completely different world. The grass seemed to tower over him, despite Harry being certain that they weren’t, at least they didn’t look that way from the outside.

  He instantly wanted to retreat after realizing this, but his intuition wasn’t screaming at him, so the rat concluded that this wasn’t some elaborate trap; it was merely a trait of this grassfield. The blades of grass were large but extremely spaced out, which made navigation extremely easy.

  Once Harry’s mind adjusted, he swept through like a tide, pouring over every nook and cranny he could find, which only took him three seconds, and if one took into account the second he took to adjust to the weird perception warping, the entire ordeal only took four seconds.

  Harry was disappointed; there was nothing of note here, no hidden creature, no strange plant other than the grass which composed the grassfield. Harry planned to devour some of those, too, but not at the moment; that would be a waste of valuable time.

  The rat exited with one large, graceful leap, landing back on the road before jumping into the grassfield on the left.

  This one didn’t warp his perception like the last but radiated more spirituality and danger; it barely tickled at his intuition, though, so Harry didn’t hold back and began moving through it boldly.

  It was around this time that he came across something odd within the absolute center: it was a massive, melon-sized burrow. That wasn’t where the strangeness ended, though; it had dirt walls surrounding it, which were decorated with various expensive-looking trinkets and Jewelry. Harry even saw bowls of food to the side, filled to the brim with meat.

  Harry’s mind raced; he knew Pink Lump was alive and well, but not this well…. It was almost excessive. The rat couldn’t wrap his mind around how such an old and supposedly weak rat had acquired these things, and so much at that.

  Something wasn’t adding up, and that made Harry extremely weary, even though his intuition asserted that though danger lurked down there, it wasn’t anything he couldn’t handle, in his current state at least.

  But even so, his mind couldn’t help but wonder; just how much of his information had been wrong? Was Pink Lump really a cripple, was it even him that lived here? It had to be another rat, there was no way that a rat who was in constant pain and suffering, barely capable of thinking coherently, was living like this.

  At least, that was what he thought, until he made his way down the intricately carved mud-brick stairs and into a vast, well-lit chamber.