Family Stealing System: your wife, mother, sister, all mine now!
Chapter 24: Manifestation Yo!

Chapter 24: Manifestation Yo!

The manuals called it Weapon Manifestation.

At Stage 4, a cultivator’s spiritual energy became dense enough to coalesce outside the body into tangible weapons. Shields, swords, spears, anything you can imagine.

Though it only lasted a short time, it was indeed a powerful ability.

Kian had seen Core Disciples do it in the old body’s memories: a flick of the wrist and a sword of pure light would snap into their palm, humming with killing intent.

In theory, he should also be capable of such a feat right now.

He held out his right hand, palm up.

The Qi in his new liquid core stirred sluggishly, still settling from the breakthrough, but it answered when he pulled.

Tzz.

Blue-white light bled from his fingertips, not the nimbus from before but something thicker, like syrup made of lightning.

"Just a simple blade," he muttered.

Nothing fancy.

He pictured a short sword, the kind he’d trained with as a mortal—single-edged, straight, a handspan of crossguard.

The light in his palm shuddered, flickered, then collapsed into a wobbly smear that looked more like a glowing pancake than a weapon.

The pancake dripped onto the bedsheet and evaporated, leaving a single mark on it that smelled faintly of a cut.

He frowned.

Okay. More focus.

He tried again.

This time he didn’t just picture the shape—he remembered the feeling of holding a blade. Its weight, its sharpness, its swings.

Just before he tried it, though, he had a feeling:

It would fail.

Kian closed his eyes, even more deeply focused.

What was a sword?

It wasn’t just a shape.

A sword was weight first—the dull ache in the forearm after holding it too long, the way the pommel dug into the heel of your palm when you gripped too hard.

It was the slight give of leather wrapping under your fingers, the cold shock of the flat against your shoulder when you carried it drawn. It was the sound of the edge biting into a whetstone, that high thin whine that set your teeth on edge, and the smell of oil you used to keep the rust off, sharp and mineral and somehow hungry.

It was all of that, yes—but deeper.

A sword was also what happened in the half-second before you swung. The tightening of your lats, the shift of weight from back foot to front, the way your breath caught in your throat and your vision narrowed to a single point. That compression of intent into a line so fine it could split a hair lengthwise.

A sword was a lifetaking weapon that made an intent to kill tangible.

Kian opened his eyes. The blue-white light in his palm had stopped shuddering.

It had settled into a shape—simple, single-edged, straight, a handspan of crossguard—and it didn’t look like a pancake anymore. It looked like something that had been pulled out of his ribs, still warm from the inside of him, and the edge caught the lamplight with a gleam that was not quite metal and not quite light but something in between.

He looked at its edge: It almost looked like a thread, so thin it didn’t seem to have any width at all.

’Let me test you out.’

He didn’t have a whetstone or an ingot of iron lying around, but the lamp on his desk had a brass base, solid and unpolished from years of use.

He brought the manifested blade down in a slow, deliberate stroke—not a chop, just a touch—and the brass parted like wet clay. No screech of metal on metal, no resistance at all.

The top third of the lamp base slid off and hit the floor with a soft thud, the cut surface gleaming mirror-bright, as if it had always been meant to exist in two pieces.

Kian stared at the severed brass, then at the blade still humming in his grip. The edge hadn’t dulled. But the sword’s gleam had become duller. He’d need to replenish it with Qi or it would break down in another swing or two.

With my current amount of Qi, I can make three such swords before I am exhausted.

Nodding in thought, he sat back down and once again got into a meditative state.

He still had more high grade spirit stones to absorb.

He reached for the nearest high-grade sphere and closed his fist around it without ceremony.

The absorption rhythm had become muscle memory by now: the cold rush up the wrist meridians, the ache behind his teeth, the slow unfurling of warmth in his dantian as the liquid energy transmuted into sparks.

Three minutes per stone. He’d gotten faster with practice—the first few had taken closer to four, but his meridians were learning, and improved cultivation was also helping.

The pile of ash on his sheets grew.

He stopped counting individual stones somewhere around the fortieth one and just let his body move through the cycle: grab, absorb, discard, grab again.

The lamp wick burned lower.

Outside the window, the swan lake had gone black and still, the birds long since tucked their heads under their wings, and the only sound in the room was the soft crumble of dead stones and the occasional crackle of Qi discharge when two high-grade spheres touched and sparked against each other on the desk.

His meridians started complaining around stone sixty—not the sharp breakthrough pain from earlier but a dull, persistent ache, like overworked muscles after a long run.

He ignored it.

Unless it actually hurt, it was okay to absorb more Qi.

The system panel flickered with each absorption: 1307, 1397, 1487.

The numbers climbing gave him more satisfaction than any meal or bath ever could, a clean mathematical progress. Not to mention that he could feel it in his very bones.

Kian took a deep breath.

He’d done more genuine cultivation in the past hour than his predecessor had managed in two years of grinding through the sect’s outer disciple resources.

No wonder Core Disciples looked down on everyone else. No wonder Hua Shulong had thought he could kill a fellow disciple and get away with it.

Power, real power, wasn’t earned through years of patient meditation—it was stolen, fused, absorbed in the dark while everyone else was sleeping.

Shaking his head, Kian continued.

Grab, absorb, discard.

The rhythm swallowed him whole.

He forgot everything. His thoughts slowed.

He just continued.

At some point the ache in his meridians stopped being an irritation and started being texture, like the grain of sand beneath a sleeper’s back, something his body had decided belonged to the furniture of existence.

His breath came in four-second cycles, in-out-in-out, perfectly aligned with the three-minute absorption window, and somewhere around the thousandth spark mark he stopped blinking.

The lamp burned down to a nub of oil and his pupils dilated wide enough to swallow the dark, and still the stones kept disappearing.

He didn’t notice he was out until his fingers closed on air.

Hm? Where is the next stone?

The hand swept sideways across the desk in a dumb automatic motion, expecting the cold kiss of another sphere, and found only splinters of lacquer and the faint grit of powdered ash.

The absence hit him like a slap—a sudden hollow silence—and he opened his eyes to discover the pyramid was gone.

Nothing left but a grey-white desert of dead stone dust coating the wood, his robes, the bedsheets, even the back of his own hand that he raised stupidly to the light.

The system panel flickered to his weary eyes.