Death's Favorite Warlock

"Kill. Kill them all." It's the first four words Lars usually wakes up to every morning, a voice telling him she's just giving him a "quest" that will help him "level". But even if he wanted to do it, he can't. They're cultivators: beings with ancestral bloodlines that have powers he could only dream of, while he is stuck as a puny human. Even if he could kill them, the people who bullied him, beat him, treated him like a punch-bag pariah for being a "tailless worthless human", he wouldn't. That is, until a vicious group of murderous psychopaths called a "sect" descend on his village.

Getting strong enough to survive was only the start. What was once horrific is now becoming an addiction. When an elder cultivator powerful enough to destroy Lars with a gesture spirits him away to the Sect of the Spring Rain, he ends up as the subject of a twisted plot to uncover and exploit his secret cultivation technique. Can he navigate the treacherous power struggles of the sect within, or will he be killed off by the factions vying for power? What happens if his grisly methods are exposed? 

A crazed princess, royal intrigue, relentless assassins, and a merciless army—Lars must overcome all these and even deadlier challenges as he navigates new threats in the brutal cultivation world he had thought he finally understood.

After an explosive attack by his former sect master Dea leaves many of Lars's companions dead and Yumi captured, Lars is forced to return to the sect only to find that some of his closest and most precious allies have also been taken hostage and imprisoned by the schemes of vicious, vengeful elders. As Lars scrambles to rescue them, he quickly learns that the sect is even more dangerous and corrupt than he remembered, with power struggles and violence lurking around every corner.