The battle abruptly halted.

Those who had been screaming and fighting to the death just moments before now stood frozen, weapons still clenched in their hands as they stared up at the sky with their mouths agape.

Not a single speck of moonlight or starlight pierced the suffocating darkness above. Beneath that pitch-black expanse, an abyss so absolute it could scarcely be called a sky anymore, the eyes of those gazing upward reflected nothing at all.

“The sky…!”

Young, hot-blooded warriors who had never believed in superstition shivered as violently as the chill that seized their spines.

“The sky has closed…!”

“Is Tengri furious with us…?”

Even the most seasoned, veteran martial artists of the Sword Clan fell silent at the apocalyptic sight. Silence swallowed the battlefield. Friend and foe alike ceased all movement, utterly captivated by the pitch-black void that yawned overhead like a gaping hole in the heavens. It was a bizarre, terrifying tableau.

I will offer everything and take refuge…!

Offer everything? Take refuge?

Eulogist Scholar, a Sword Clan armed general who had been preparing his final strike to sever his opponent’s windpipe, frowned. Confusion and a deep, creeping unease clouded his mind as he pondered the meaning of those fanatical words and the sudden, unnatural darkness descending upon them.

At that moment, Ju-ho, a first-generation disciple of the Huashan Sect who had lost an arm and suffered horrific injuries, opened his mouth. A torrent of bizarre, incomprehensible ramblings spilled out.

“I see it. The other side. Beyond the wall. I see it,” he muttered, his eyes rolling back into his skull. “Ah, this is the place. Where sweet dew flows and five-colored clouds shine brilliantly in the sky. This is the immortal realm, the very place where the divine beings reside.”

Spitting bloody saliva with every convulsive twitch, the fanatic rattled off his nonsense in the blink of an eye.

“The seven thousand five hundred teachings of Mount Hua are entirely false,” Ju-ho babbled frantically. “The enlightenment bestowed by the twelve immortals at Lotus Peak twelve thousand years ago is nothing but a fabrication. Faith is a mere fiction, empty phrases meant to deceive ignorant seekers of the Dao!”

Disturbingly, the sound echoing from his throat did not belong to a single man. It reverberated like dozens, perhaps hundreds of overlapping voices, all murmuring countless sentences at once.

Is this a side effect?

The Sword Clan armed general bearing the alias “Eulogist Scholar” narrowed his eyes. Massive blood loss in extreme situations, severe physical trauma, and the catastrophic collapse of one’s blood vessels and danjeon often triggered unpredictable, maddening reactions when they collided with a sect’s mental cultivation methods or ultimate techniques.

“All death aligns with the absolute truth, while life brings nothing but pain and agony,” the grotesque chorus droned. “The moment of the apocalypse descends…”

Tuning out the incomprehensible drivel, Eulogist Scholar slowly sheathed his blade.

“Even if we meet on the battlefield as bitter enemies destined to kill one another,” the veteran murmured, lowering his stance until he crouched closer to the earth than a four-legged beast, “how could I not feel compassion for a fellow human being?”

A vicious, piercing screech erupted from his scabbard as the trapped blade wailed like a madman.

“The bitterness and resentment from the subterranean depths of Luoyang reached the false heavens, severing the cursed royal bloodline in a single month and overturning the dynasty in two! This is…”

The sickening crack, crunch, and snap of bones fracturing and flesh tearing echoed across the battlefield as Ju-ho’s remaining limbs and torso twisted into utterly unnatural, horrifying angles.

“I will end your suffering swiftly,” Eulogist Scholar promised, preparing to draw his blade and sever the mutated disciple’s neck.

At that exact moment, someone screamed, “Danger!”

The warning came too fast for Eulogist Scholar to identify the speaker. Yet that desperate shout, combined with the razor-sharp combat instincts he had honed through decades of life-or-death battles, saved his life.

Screech!

The strike was so blisteringly fast that even Eulogist Scholar, a master who had surpassed the Wall, failed to track it. Flinging his upper body violently backward, he barely avoided decapitation, though the heavy steel face guard shielding his visage tore away like wet paper.

What seized the general’s attention was not the ruined steel, but the weapon that had nearly killed him.

A sword? he thought, before immediately rejecting the idea. No, this is…!

The object that had just grazed his face was absurdly long and razor-sharp, yet it was unmistakably woven from raw bone and sinew.

“An arm?”

It was a human arm.

And its owner—

“Gradual Plum Blossoms!” the same voice that had warned him yelled urgently, the speaker closing the distance in a flash.

An ordinary martial artist would have found the phrase utterly meaningless. Eulogist Scholar, however, instantly grasped the tactical significance of the shout. Throwing his weight backward, he executed a flawless mid-air backflip and, even before his boots reconnected with the earth, drew his sword.

Channeling the Sword Clan’s Heart of the Resonating Sword technique, he shifted into the Reverse Sword Stance and unleashed its ultimate secret art, the Rebounding Zenith.

At that precise moment, tens of thousands of plum blossom petals, redder than fresh blood, crashed against Eulogist Scholar’s defensive sword wall. A deafening barrage of metallic shrieks tore through the air.

Gradual Plum Blossoms.

It was one of the Huashan Sect’s Twenty-Four Movements of Plum Blossom Sword techniques, a lethal harmony of phantom blades and chaotic strikes that began as a single elegant branch before bursting into countless blooming flowers.

Armed with nothing but the technique’s name, the general had still constructed a flawless defense.

“As expected of the Eulogist Scholar,” the man who had warned him murmured, landing lightly by his side. “That was an astonishing response.”

The newcomer was none other than the Mount Hua Sword Dragon, Gam Woo-hyeon.

“I owe you my thanks,” Eulogist Scholar acknowledged, his now-unmasked face exposed to the chilling air. Surprisingly, beneath the ferocious steel visor, he was an elderly man in his early twilight years with a remarkably tranquil demeanor.

Gam Woo-hyeon, however, had far more pressing concerns.

“Ju-ho,” he breathed, his voice trembling with a potent mix of grief and rage.

Staring at his martial junior—the loyal companion who had staunchly guarded his back for years, now reduced to an unrecognizable, towering monstrosity of corrupted veins and pulsing flesh—the Sword Dragon ground his teeth.

“Those damned Demonic Cult bastards…!”

As if in response, the grotesque flesh-golem that had once been Ju-ho unleashed a thunderous, ear-splitting roar saturated with murderous intent and malicious curses.

“Aaaaaagh!”

That bloodcurdling scream shattered the stillness. The battlefield instantly dissolved into a pit of absolute pandemonium. Soldiers shrieked in terror, scrambling desperately to escape the nightmare.

“Monster! It’s a monster!”

“The Heavenly God is furious! Our ancestors have abandoned us!”

“It’s divine punishment! The heavens are punishing our tribe!”

Driven by sheer, unadulterated panic, men trampled their fallen comrades and ruthlessly stabbed allies who blocked their path to safety. Even accounting for the sudden appearance of a logic-defying monster, the sheer madness infecting the troops felt utterly unnatural.

“The Demonic Cult, you say…?” Eulogist Scholar asked, frowning heavily at the massacre unfolding around them. “It’s true, the cultists I faced in the past wielded bizarre, unfathomable martial arts. But they certainly didn’t mutate humans into monsters.”

The veteran general’s age lent weight to his vast combat experience.

“Furthermore,” he added, scraping his heavy military boots across the earth, “they never scattered garbage like this.”

Squish.

The countless fragments strewn across the ground crunched sickeningly beneath his steel-toed soles. The flurry of red petals that had assaulted him earlier had not been a phantom of plum blossoms at all. They were literal chunks of human flesh.

“…Nevertheless, it is undoubtedly the Demonic Cult’s doing,” Gam Woo-hyeon insisted, mildly appalled by the older man’s composure in the face of such absolute horror. “I clearly heard their whispered temptations.”

Eulogist Scholar’s frown deepened. “Ah… I have heard rumors of such things.”

He knew the tales of the Demonic Cult silently approaching the most desperate individuals at their darkest hour, offering irresistible pacts.

“I dismissed it as mere gossip at the time,” he admitted.

Thump. Thump.

“Youuuu…”

Standing five or six times the height of an average man, the grotesque flesh-golem—looking as though hundreds of human corpses had been ground up and fused together—began to lumber toward them.

“Why would you think that?” Gam Woo-hyeon asked, swallowing hard as he raised his blade.

“Simple logic,” Eulogist Scholar replied smoothly, mirroring the younger man’s fighting stance with a casual shrug. “If those rumors were true, battlefields throughout history should have been swarming with these abominations, don’t you think?”

He had a point.

Then… what is the reason behind this anomaly? What makes this current war so distinctly different? Or is something fundamentally wrong?

Before Gam Woo-hyeon could follow that thought to its end, Eulogist Scholar muttered softly to himself, “It seems the Grand Young Master was right after all.”

Grand Young Master? Did he mean Yeon So-hyeon of the Luoyang Sword Clan?

“What did the Grand Young Master—?!”

Gam Woo-hyeon never finished his question.

“It’s coming.”

KABOOM!

The monster’s power utterly eclipsed the two masters’ expectations.

As the flesh-golem slammed its colossal foot into the ground, the entire battlefield convulsed as if shaken by a massive earthquake. The earth rippled like a violently churning ocean; horses collapsed, and soldiers tumbled helplessly in every direction.

Only the two martial masters managed to launch themselves into the air, frantically fighting to steady their balance.

Yet, in that brief moment of suspension, a chilling realization struck Eulogist Scholar.

“Wait, that wasn’t an attack—!”

BOOM!

By using the localized tremor as a Stomping Step to exponentially amplify its momentum, the monster weaponized its single remaining arm, lashing out like a devastating whip. That singular, unprecedented strike obliterated the terrain, caving in the ground and leaving a massive crater in its wake.

Having snatched the exhausted Gam Woo-hyeon by the scruff of his neck to dodge the blow by a hairsbreadth, Eulogist Scholar’s expression twisted with sheer disbelief.

“This is completely absurd…!”

Once again, the commander was brutally interrupted.

“It’s the Soaring Thunder Strike!” Gam Woo-hyeon cried through a veil of cold sweat as he was hauled to safety.

“Are you insane…?!” Eulogist Scholar cursed.

As one of Mount Hua’s profound ultimate techniques, the Soaring Thunder Strike was never limited to a single attack. Advancing with a relentless series of stomping steps, the monster drove its whip-like arm at the two masters again and again.

Wielding a destructive force that defied any common sense, the beast unleashed a second consecutive strike, which the two men dodged by a margin of barely two paces. The third strike missed them by a single step.

By the fourth—

Smash!

Eulogist Scholar and Gam Woo-hyeon were swatted away like insignificant toys, carving deep, agonizing furrows into the earth as they tumbled dozens of times before skidding to a halt.

“It’s still not over!” the Sword Dragon roared, intimately familiar with his sect’s martial arts.

Gritting his teeth against the searing pain, Eulogist Scholar twisted his tumbling momentum into an attack, swinging his sword dozens of times at lightning speed.

Rumble!

It was a terrifyingly precise counter that would have diced any ordinary human into hundreds of pieces. Yet as the beast’s severed flesh scattered in a gruesome shower of gore, the monstrosity that had once been Ju-ho merely stared down at them and laughed.

“Truly foolish,” it mocked. “Do mere insects dare resist an ascetic who has attained the absolute truth?”

Beneath the monster’s looming shadow lay a horrifying sight.

“General Jo…?!”

Despite executing a flawless counter, Eulogist Scholar had been utterly crushed by the sheer physical mass of the strike—or so it seemed. His mangled body lay flattened against the crater, pulverized as casually as a fly swatted against a wall.

“In… insane…” Gam Woo-hyeon stammered, his blood running cold.

Crunch, squelch, tear.

As a massive new arm regenerated from the beast’s stump as if nothing had happened, Gam Woo-hyeon found himself paralyzed by an absolute, suffocating terror he had never experienced in his entire life. It was an entity he could not even dream of defying.

This is madness!

Whether one was a master or a novice, whether they had surpassed the Wall or not, such trivial distinctions meant absolutely nothing in the face of this insurmountable gap in power.

“Do you see?” The insidious whisper he had heard earlier seemed to echo through his memories again. “The great current that dwells above all existences, completely imperceptible to powerless insects.”

Awe-inspiring landscapes crafted by that grand current.

An indescribable heaven beyond the heavens, transcending all logic and worldly laws.

The mutated first-generation disciple glaring down at him had seemingly evolved into a being of that profound realm.

“Foolish insect. To reject the acquisition of such magnificent power…”

And what was Gam Woo-hyeon? A so-called master who strutted about with empty pride. He was utterly worthless, nothing more than a pathetic bug squirming on the ground, struggling to survive—

“Snap out of it.”

Smack!

A vicious slap sparked fireworks behind his eyes, yanking Gam Woo-hyeon back to reality.

“Gasp…?!”

The man who had just slapped him was unmistakably Eulogist Scholar—the same man whose pulverized corpse he had just seen.

“G-General Jo?!” Gam Woo-hyeon choked. “You… weren’t you dead?!”

“I knew it…” Clicking his tongue in annoyance, Eulogist Scholar raised his chin toward the front line. There, standing exactly where it had been from the start, completely uninjured and unmoving, was the towering flesh-golem. “Just as the Grand Young Master warned, the enemy uses the smallest seeds of temptation to indiscriminately broadcast intense hallucinations and phantoms.”

“That was an illusion…?!” Gam Woo-hyeon gasped.

Eulogist Scholar nodded gravely. “In my hallucination, I watched you die dozens of times.”

“How the hell…?!” Gam Woo-hyeon stammered, his shock twisting into incredulity. “How did your Grand Young Master possibly anticipate this?!”

Never lowering his sword or relaxing his guard against the grotesque beast, Eulogist Scholar answered steadily, “I was informed that a similar incident occurred in Luoyang’s Valley of Sins a few months ago.”

“In Luoyang?! The Demonic Cult?!”

On that fateful day, during a massive battle in the location now revered as the Holy Land Valley, hundreds—perhaps thousands—of individuals had been trapped simultaneously in the Demonic Cult’s maddening illusions.

“T-Then what is our countermeasure?!” Gam Woo-hyeon demanded.

The older general gave a short, helpless shrug. “I don’t have one.”

“What…?!”

“Gwooooooh!”

Letting out another eardrum-shattering roar, the abhorrent mutation of Ju-ho finally began to advance in reality.

“What do you mean you don’t have a countermeasure?! What are we supposed to do?!” the Sword Dragon yelled frantically.

“You young people really lack listening comprehension,” Eulogist Scholar chuckled, a surprisingly relaxed smirk touching his lips despite the looming catastrophe. “I said I don’t have a countermeasure. I never said no one had a countermeasure.”

“What do you—?!”

Right at that moment—

CRACK!

Massive, jagged fissures ripped across the suffocating, pitch-black sky.

Shatter!

Like a dome of dark glass, the blackened heavens fractured completely, raining crystalline shards into the abyss below. Watching the spectacular celestial destruction, Eulogist Scholar’s smirk widened into a triumphant grin.

“Our solution has arrived.”