Crash!
The genesis of a new world.
A segment of the pitch-black sky fractured like brittle glass, its jagged, crystalline shards raining down upon the earth. That apocalyptic spectacle alone embodied absolute, unadulterated wonder. Yet, as they peered into the endless void expanding beyond the broken firmament, the onlookers felt no grand, solemn, or divine reverence.
Instead, a suffocating chaos, a grotesque amalgamation of sinister foreboding, profound blasphemy, and primal terror, clawed at their hearts.
“A… a solution, you said?” Gam Woo-hyeon, the Mount Hua Sword Dragon, shuddered violently. Consumed by equal parts awe and dread, he barely managed to force the words through his trembling lips. “W-what in the world is that…?”
He could not tear his gaze away from the shattered heavens, as though an invisible force had securely anchored his head in place. He did not even realize his question had trailed off into nothingness.
“I… I had only heard the rumors.”
The Sword Dragon was not the only one paralyzed. The Sword Clan armed general, Eulogist Scholar, was similarly captivated.
“This is my first time witnessing it with my own eyes…”
Even Eulogist Scholar, a seasoned veteran who had long believed he possessed no capacity left for surprise, spoke with a noticeable quiver. Under normal circumstances, Eulogist Scholar would have eloquently recited a poetic verse to capture the moment. However, the sheer, oppressive violence of this cosmic anomaly utterly overwhelmed him, crushing any trace of poetic inspiration.
“…Astonishing,” he finally breathed, offering a distinctly ordinary sentiment.
“Gwoooooooh!”
Perhaps sensing a profound threat that denied its very existence on a fundamental level, the flesh-golem, once Mount Hua’s first-generation disciple Ju-ho, tilted its grotesque head toward the heavens and unleashed a deafening, drawn-out roar to reassert its presence.
It was a bellow capable of quaking the earth and rupturing eardrums. Yet neither man felt the paralyzing shock they had experienced during its initial scream.
Snapping out of his stupor, Gam Woo-hyeon roughly seized Eulogist Scholar’s shoulder pauldron. “Well?!” he yelled. “What the hell is that thing?!”
At that exact moment, a voice whispered directly into his ear.
“How unexpected.”
Gam Woo-hyeon flinched. At first, he mistook it for another insidious whisper from the Demonic Cult.
He was wrong.
The voice, resonating like the deep, guttural churning of boiling molten iron, bore a passing resemblance to the cult’s telepathic intrusion, yet it felt fundamentally, intrinsically different.
“Gam Woo-hyeon, Sword Dragon of Mount Hua.”
The voice emanated from directly behind him. Gam Woo-hyeon immediately tried to turn his head.
“I was absolutely certain that you would be the one to succumb to the Demonic Cult’s temptation.”
Flinch.
With every syllable the entity uttered, an icy, paralyzing chill brushed against the nape of his neck. It felt as though a razor-sharp blade were wedged precariously between his cervical vertebrae, completely robbing the Sword Dragon of his nerve to move.
“W-who are you?” he stammered. Not since his early childhood had he felt such pure, unadulterated terror.
Despite the courage it took to ask that question, the entity ignored him entirely and continued its own monologue.
“I assumed the Lotus Peak of Mount Hua had long withered, drained of its vitality by the intoxicating allure of wealth and power,” the entity mused. “To think a green sprout still remained.”
“What do you mean?!” Gam Woo-hyeon flared, his pride briefly overriding his fear. “What kind of ancient master are you to speak so disrespectfully?!”
“Youuuuuuuu?!”
Spotting the entity standing behind Gam Woo-hyeon, the demonic flesh-golem roared with unprecedented ferocity.
“It’s you!”
Its voice, which normally sounded like hundreds of men speaking in unison, magnified until it resembled the enraged screams of tens of thousands. Raising its single remaining arm, the abomination pointed its massive maw at the figure.
“The grand, prophesied plan! The predetermined history, you ruined it all in Luoyang!”
A grand, prophesied plan? Did this newly resurrected Demonic Cult possess a grand design? As Gam Woo-hyeon frantically carved those words into his memory, the entity behind him scoffed.
“How amusing.” The molten-iron voice dripped with mockery. “How can a plan that is already crumbling by my hands be considered predetermined history?”
Subconsciously agreeing with the logic, the Sword Dragon gave a faint nod.
“Yooooouuuu bastard!”
Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump.
In a mere four colossal strides, the towering flesh-golem closed the distance.
“He who arrogantly dismisses our bitter resentment and excruciating agony shall be torn apart a thousand times, strangled a thousand times, and boiled alive a thousand times!”
Clang!
Gam Woo-hyeon hurriedly raised his blade, his mind reeling in sheer disbelief. How had that massive beast crossed the battlefield before he, an established master, could even twitch his sword?
“The first child born in the subterranean depths of Luoyang starved to death! The second was crushed flat beneath falling rocks! The third died in the womb alongside its exhausted, starving mother!”
How was it physically possible for the beast to spit out so many words in the fraction of a second it took Gam Woo-hyeon to lift his sword tip?
“Thousands of children perished, their corpses devoured without a trace by the starving, ravenous masses! Weeping tears of blood, we thanked the heavens for the meat while cursing our own wretched existence!”
And, most inexplicably of all, how had the entity standing behind him already bypassed him before either he or Eulogist Scholar had fully raised their weapons? He could not comprehend any of it.
Flap!
A long, pitch-black coat fluttered past Gam Woo-hyeon’s eyes. Tracing the movement, the Sword Dragon caught sight of an ominous white mask concealing the figure’s face. Clustered haphazardly across the porcelain surface were bright yellow talismans crafted from sophora paper.
Talismans?
As those distinctive visual markers clicked together in his mind, Gam Woo-hyeon recalled a highly classified intelligence briefing held within the Huashan Sect.
Luoyang? A white mask? A pitch-black coat?
The title slipped past his lips involuntarily. “Venerable One of Dark Heavens…?”
Smirk.
Perhaps hearing his name, the Venerable One of Dark Heavens glanced back. In a fleeting moment where time seemed to slow to a crawl, he bared a savage, razor-sharp smile beneath the edge of his mask.
Whoosh.
Leaving behind nothing but twin trails of eerie blue ghost-fire sparking from the mask’s eye slits, the Venerable One of Dark Heavens vanished from Gam Woo-hyeon’s sight.
“Gwoooooooh!”
Before Gam Woo-hyeon or Eulogist Scholar could fully grasp the shift, the Venerable materialized directly beneath the flesh-golem’s descending, merciless arm.
“Does your resentment and hatred,” the Venerable One of Dark Heavens asked, his voice slicing through a reality so heavily saturated with demonic energy that time itself seemed to warp, “does it truly justify the mountainous accumulation of evil karma you have blindly committed?”
KABOOOOOOOM!
The devastating strike that had pulverized Eulogist Scholar and Gam Woo-hyeon dozens of times in the hallucination detonated with full force in reality. A deafening explosion collapsed the earth, instantly launching a massive geyser of dust into the air.
“Venerable One of Dark Heavens?!” Gam Woo-hyeon cried out.
Rumble…
Piercing through the dense dust cloud, from directly beneath the behemoth’s crushing blow, the Venerable’s voice echoed with absolute composure.
“Can forsaking your final shred of humanity to exact revenge ever truly be rationalized?”
“Shut uuuuup!”
The monster’s assault did not end with a single blow. Its grotesquely twisted arm coiled back, preparing to unleash Mount Hua’s Soaring Thunder Strike.
“Watch out!” Gam Woo-hyeon screamed, attempting to warn the Venerable of the technique’s name just as he had done for Eulogist Scholar. “It’s the Soaring Thunder…!”
The Venerable One of Dark Heavens’s calm voice cut cleanly through the warning. “Mount Hua’s Soaring Thunder Strike?” He had already seen through the technique before it fully unfolded. “A thoroughly outdated method, and executed with abysmal perfection.”
Bang! Kaboom! Cra-crack!
Dancing effortlessly within the sunken crater, the Venerable One of Dark Heavens deflected the storm of explosive sequential strikes as if brushing away falling leaves.
“Was it merely to obtain this pitiful level of strength?”
It was an inconceivable sight. Gam Woo-hyeon could not utter a single word as he watched a spectacle that defied all martial logic.
Bang-bang-bang-bang-bang!
“Did you truly abandon everything noble and precious about yourself… for just this?”
The flesh-golem possessed no lungs, freeing it from the need to breathe. It lacked a heart that would burst upon reaching its limit, and it had no muscle fibers to tear from exhaustion.
Bang-bang-bang-bang-bang!
Yet all those biological advantages meant absolutely nothing against the Venerable One of Dark Heavens.
“Did you intend to ruin the world and slaughter every living soul upon it… just for this?”
Demonic energy twisted and warped all reality. However, when the demonic aura of the Scripture that Commands the Dark and Quakes the Heavens forcefully suppressed the Demonic Cult’s foul presence, only one metric remained: the pure, unadulterated depth of their martial comprehension.
And in that regard, the disparity between the two entities was unfathomably vast.
“Youuuuuu?!” the monstrosity shrieked. “How could someone born with every blessing possibly understand the agony of a pathetic commoner like us?!”
Bang! Kaboom! Bang!
“Do you know the torment of living with an insurmountable ceiling on your talent?! Of being forced to live exactly as the world dictates?! Do you know the pain of bleeding dry just to fulfill the role the sect assigned you, only to die exactly as predestined?!”
Eventually, the voice bleeding from the beast ceased to sound like the collective wail of the Demonic Cult. Instead, it sharpened into the desperate, agonizing plea of a specific individual.
“…Ju-ho,” Gam Woo-hyeon murmured, his voice heavy with sorrow as he called his junior’s name.
“Do you know the agony of ordinary disciples who are discarded the moment they fall behind?! Of being ordered to sacrifice our lives on the spot just to ensure the survival of the elite disciples?!”
The accusation was hurled at the Venerable One of Dark Heavens. Yet it was the Mount Hua Sword Dragon who hung his head in shame.
Were you harboring such profound agony all this time?
However—
“How amusing.”
The Venerable’s aura, which had passively absorbed the monster’s assault until that moment, shifted in an instant.
Using the principle of Neutralizing Energy to effortlessly catch the beast’s strike, he pivoted smoothly, converting the absorbed momentum into Silk Reeling Force. He then condensed that coiling force into Hidden Energy, clashing it violently with his internal qi before detonating it at point-blank range without a single preparatory motion.
It was the Yang Clan’s Secret Tradition: Roaring Thunder Heaven-Piercing Cannon, modified.
KABOOOOOM!
With an eruption that could only be described as a catastrophic explosion, the beast’s remaining arm was obliterated. Blood geysered from the severed stump as the monstrosity shrieked in sheer agony.
“Gyaaaaaaagh!”
But the Venerable One of Dark Heavens’s assault had only just begun.
“Then, what about you!”
Tearing off his ominous white mask, the Venerable finally revealed his face. Gam Woo-hyeon’s jaw dropped in absolute shock.
“G-Grand Young Master?!”
Grand Young Master Yeon So-hyeon roared at the mutilated beast.
“Do you understand the pride of those who, despite being bound by those exact same limitations and constraints, burned themselves away to remain human until their very last breath?!”
“…….?!”
For a brief second, the flesh-golem, First-Generation Disciple Ju-ho, could not find the words to respond. He had surrendered that very pride, abandoning a dignified end to succumb to the Demonic Cult’s honeyed whispers.
“This is the martial art of a man who burned everything he had as a true martial artist until his final moment.”
Squelch!
The Grand Young Master’s Sword Secret Finger pierced straight through the beast’s abdomen, sinking deep up to his elbow.
Vwooooom!
A lethal sword art designed to completely eradicate the enemy from the inside out through terrifying high-frequency vibrations.
Wudang Sect, Secret Sword: Profound Void, Chaotic Cherry Blossom Lethal Art.
“Kuaaaaaaagh!”
That technique belonged to none other than the martial artist who had scattered into ash after pouring his entire being into a duel against the Grand Young Master in Shenyang not long ago.
The Manifestation of the Profound of the Wudang Sect.
It was the martial art of Immortal Master Baek Cho, a man who had lived his entire life in the deep shadows of Mount Wudang, yet had never once relinquished his unyielding pride as a martial artist.