Ning looked around at the bloody fog and tried to come up with some sort of idea. "Can I…?" he wondered something.
"No time to think about it."
He put his hands forth, touched the bloody fog, and started pulling in everything towards his hand. The bloody fog started spinning around his hands and slowly entered it.
It wasn't just the bloody fog that was entering his hands, but the air around it as well. He was directly collecting the entire atmosphere into his storage space.
Fortunately, his storage space stored items in it based on mass and not volume, so despite collecting so much of the surrounding air, he was still fine.
However, the problem he was now facing was that the fog was way too massive and it was taking him well over a minute to gather the entirety of the blood essence that was floating in the air.
'Dammit,' he thought. 'I can't do this with every single one of them, and I have less than 3 hours to get to them all. Even if I take a minute with finding every single one, it's not enough time.'
He needed to think of something else.
"Think! Think!" he started saying to himself to get new ideas.
"Can I throw them— No, their cultivation is too high. They won't be pulled as easily," Ning thought. "What about if I send them to the secret realms? no, that doesn't work either. There are bound to be a few people that can easily open up a gateway out of those secret realms. Since Jha'Akim is in Origin, I can't take them there either."
"I can't even feed them pills given how different their physiology would be," Ning thought.
"Dammit, the only way to stop them is to kill them before they can kill themselves, isn't it?" Ning thought. He tried thinking of other ways, but that seemed to be the only course of action he could take.
"Fuck it, let's do it," he thought. "System, the moment I teleport, immediately locate the person on the list."
<Confirmed>
And so, Ning teleported away. He was immediately relocated on top of a massive group of people in the middle of a market in a city.
Information immediately entered Ning's mind and he turned left. He could see an old man wearing a black robe walking amidst the many people.
The man seemed to have noticed Ning looking at him and turned around as well.
Ning didn't speak at all and immediately dashed towards the old man.
"What the?" the old man couldn't even finish his sentence before a blade cleanly cut off his head from his torso. In the next second, both the head and the body of the old man disappeared.
The second after that, Ning disappeared.
The people from the market cried out for a second when they saw someone die, but after realizing that neither the attacker nor the victim was present anymore, they started wondering if they were perhaps hallucinating.
Ning reappeared on top of a mountain in the southern continent and saw a middle-aged woman flying through the air at a brisk pace. After getting confirmation from the system that it was indeed her, Ning rushed up to the woman.
The woman had only turned around to see who it was when she too died. Ning recovered her body so as to not let a single drop of blood fall anywhere and teleported once more.
When he reappeared, he once again got information about the next person on the list. After killing that person and recovering their body, he left once more.
He did this a couple of times before he was starting to get the hang of it all.
"Who the hell do you think you are looking at, you bastard," a man shouted at Ning. Ning didn't take into mind his words and simply killed him.
It had only been a minute since he started finding these people, but he had already taken care of about 7 of them.
"If I keep this up, I can do this in less than an hour," Ning thought with a smile. This bit of information was slowly turning into a source of motivation for him.
Having been encouraged, he teleported once again. He looked around and the information about the next person entered his mind.
He turned to look at the person and stopped. "A child?" he thought. The person who seemed to be his next target was just a young man that looked like a teenager.
Ning hesitated to kill this child for a split second, and that was all it took for the tragedy to occur.
Before Ning could even realize it, the boy exploded his Nascent soul and his body turned into mist along with it. The nearby people also died along with him given that they were just some weak mortals or cultivators that were just into the range of an exploding Nascent soul cultivator.
"No!" Ning cried out and immediately rushed to the place and started taking in as much of the blood mist as he could. However, the deed was done. Whatever the young man had come to do, he had accomplished.
This was the middle of a marketplace, so the people who witnessed the explosions started screaming. People whose friends and family died in the explosion were crying and screaming in the terror they just witnessed.
However, that was just the beginning. Since they had breathed in the blood mist before Ning had taken care of it, it had entered the people's bloodstream by now. The people in the area started to involuntarily cough as intense pay appeared from deep inside of them.
Ning watched as hundreds of people started falling onto the ground, screaming in pain, forgetting the tragedy they just witnessed.
He could see the changes starting to appear in the people. Some of them were developing horns, and some were developing fangs.
Each one of them manifested some sort of change, but that change would then change to something else. The human body wouldn't be able to hold out against that many changes, especially given that some of them were directly from the legendary beasts as well.
Sooner or later, most of these people's bodies would give out, and they would die.