Malcolm swayed beside him, the same arrow-made emptiness flickering in his chest like a doorway to nowhere. His reincarnation aura, usually stitching wounds before blood could fall, found no purchase and slid away uselessly.
The anti-magic principle woven into the Divine Arrow pried at his foundation of rebirth, widening the hole by the second. They were alive, technically, but the fight had been stripped from both of them as cleanly as their flesh. Breathing stayed possible; thinking already felt extravagant.
The arrow never slowed. It disappeared into the distant horizon, leaving behind a ragged seam in the sky that refused to close. Silence collapsed over the battlefield—a terrible, absolute silence. Every gaze slid toward Jared, toward the Divine Bow cooling in his hands, its gold already fading to plain, ancient wood.
Jared’s gaze snagged on the two High-Immortal cultivators he had just skewered. Both chests gaped, ribs jutting outward, their breaths thin as spider silk. Only then did he dare focus on the arrow itself; its black shaft still quivered in mid-air, humming with a power that felt far too large for any mortal hand.
An ache of silence stretched over the field until it tore under a wall of screams from the Malevolent Path ranks.
“Hall Master is down! Pull back! Retreat!” The black-robed elder’s shriek rose sharp, fear bending the pitch into something almost childlike.
“Shield the Ancestor! Get the Ancestor out!” Dozens of Ninefold Nether voices cracked in panicked unison. Robes and boots churned mud as disciples trampled toward the crater where Morven’s body still bled shadow.
The coalition’s backbone snapped. Order dissolved into raw instinct. Men who had bragged minutes earlier now bolted like feral dogs, clawing and slicing at comrades just to seize open ground. Blood sprayed because someone chose the wrong direction to run.
Alliance fighters tensed to pursue, but Jared rasped through blood-stiff lips, “Don’t chase… We withdraw too…”
He knew why better than anyone. The Divine Bow granted miracles and demanded limbs. His right arm already felt borrowed, cut off from the rest of him, fingers frozen in the shape of the draw. Inside his core, the Origin Star faded to a dull ember, fresh cracks mapping its surface. Worse, the bow had scooped spirit from his skull until thoughts fluttered like torn flags. Vision kept blacking out at the edges; the ringing in his ears felt permanent. One wobble, and he would be unconscious.
Their side bled, too. Gerald had vanished in magma and flame. Winslow lay cooling beneath shattered talismans. Three of the Five-Branch Elders breathed through pain; two more could barely stand. Heavenly Sword Pavilion mourned two sages and a mountain of young blades. Beasts from Myriad Beast Valley carpeted the dirt, their handlers scattered among them.
If they kept swinging, victory would taste like ruin. And then who would guard the realm tomorrow?
“Heed Jared! Fall back!” Aurelian barked, eyes webbed with blood, voice rasping like bellows scraped by rust. The Sect Master’s shoulders twitched toward the smoldering treeline, as if muscles alone could drag him after the fleeing enemy.
Jared felt the same iron tug—slash them down, grind them into dust, buy silence for the brothers who would never stand again. Yet duty clamped down on the man like a collar. Jared watched him inhale once, steady, choosing the breathing sons of the sect over the dead who could no longer hear him.
Blaine’s lone arm trembled on his knee; Oswald’s eyes flared but never blinked. Neither man liked surrendering ground, yet the shape of the moment offered no other door.
The Three-Headed Flame Lion King sagged beside Blaine, three tongues of fire guttering like candles drowned in wax. Blood soaked the stump where his right arm should have been; every heartbeat felt like someone kicking the cork out of a wine jar. One more clash and both master and beast would simply stop moving.
Oswald lifted his iron sword; the blade looked like frozen mud crazed with drought-lines, ready to peel away at a breath. Inside him, sword-intent flickered—a candle fed on its own wick, flames shorter with every draw.
“Fall back!” Blaine and Oswald shouted, voices striking the air together like twin gongs.
Order rippled through the ravaged ranks; bodies pivoted, not toward flight but toward survival. Lines that had charged an hour ago now folded with disciplined quiet, moving as though each heartbeat carried a glass of water they dared not spill. The gravely wounded were hoisted first, slung across spare shoulders or makeshift stretchers woven from shattered spears. Those still walking leaned into one another, boots scraping ash. The fallen received only a hurried mound of earth—no marker, no time.
Jared’s knees threatened to fold, and the Vermilion Demon Lord slipped an arm beneath his ribs, keeping him upright. At the edge of withdrawal, he turned, forcing one final look at the ground they were abandoning.
Hills of bodies glistened under a skim of settling smoke; severed limbs poked from the heaps like driftwood after a storm. The plains beyond were nothing but scorched mud, stretching red and black for what felt like forever. The blood of Gerald and Winslow had already drunk its way into the soil, merging with countless other streams until the earth itself looked wounded.
Every footprint Jared left filled with dark red moisture, as though the ground were weeping up at him. The wind carried a thin, uneven keening—alive voices mourning voices gone silent. The sound snagged on Jared’s ribs more cruelly than any blade he had met that day. The air tasted of pennies and charcoal, laced with the copper tang of reincarnation aura and the sulfur rot of Ninefold Nether Demonic Aura. Together they brewed a sickness that wanted to crawl down his throat and set up a grave inside him.
He wrapped both hands around the Divine Bow. The wood felt dead cold. Still, beneath that chill he sensed a pulse, hot and furious, begging to be loosed. That heartbeat was Gerald’s and Winslow’s, the ranks who had fallen beside them, the stubborn blood of everyone too angry to pass on. It surged through the bow now, looking for a hand willing to draw.
“Morven… Malcolm…” The names scraped out, each syllable grated between clenched teeth. Every word tasted of rusted iron, of oaths he could never unsay. Jared felt them brand the roof of his mouth, glowing with hatred brighter than any spell he knew.
“Today’s debt will return a hundredfold…” he whispered to the blood-soaked earth. “The day I come back will be the day you end…”
His voice cracked, but the vow did not.
