Three days later, eighty thousand kilometers northwest along the Five-Element Range, a veil of natural mists hid a narrow valley. The place belonged to an old secret realm of the Five-Element Sect, its entrance tucked behind a roaring waterfall.
Caverns spread wide beyond the curtain, soaked in dense spirit energy and guarded by layers of untouched formations. Seclusion here felt absolute.
The survivors of all three sects now pressed themselves into that refuge, breaths shallow even when no danger stirred. Deep inside the gorge, an impromptu cave dwelling had been carved from the stone wall. Jared sat cross-legged within, skin the color of parchment, breath so thin it barely fogged the cool air. Spirit threads flickered around him, but his hold on them looked like a frayed knot slipping under rain.
Aurelian had stripped Jared to the waist so the lamplight could reach every gash. Cuts crisscrossed the man’s chest and flanks, but the one that kept drawing Aurelian’s gaze was the fist-sized hole just left of the sternum. The Chaos Return-to-Void Pearl had punched it there, and three days of frantic tending had done little more than clot the rim. Inside, raw chaotic currents still churned, gnawing at flesh that tried to knit.
The grotto reeked of crushed petals, burnt roots, and something metallic. Aurelian had emptied nearly every sacred remedy the Five-Element Sect possessed onto the silk mats—salves that flickered like embers, pills that tingled cold as river stone.
Now a ragged crescent of jade vials crowded Jared’s side. Their contents were already gone, the medicinal warmth moving through his damaged meridians, weaving with the man’s own chaotic celestial energy in a fragile truce.
Aurelian forced himself out of the grotto. The air beyond tasted like dust and old smoke. In the rough stone pavilion, Oswald, Blaine, the Vermilion Demon Lord, and a handful of other chiefs waited, each wearing the same grave stillness.
His throat rasped when he spoke. “The casualty report… It’s finished…” The words scraped out as though he had swallowed gravel.
He lifted the thin jade slip; weak light pulsed across its face, rows of names swimming like ghosts beneath shallow water. Every line he skimmed leeched more color from his cheeks. By the third column, his knuckles trembled, the slip clicking softly against his nails.
“Five-Element Sect…” He forced a breath that hurt his ribs. “Disciples: three thousand two hundred. Dead: one thousand two hundred thirty-seven. Elders or enforcers above Level Eight: forty-eight fallen… Seriously wounded: eight hundred fifty-six. Minor injuries… Almost everyone else…”
“Among the Five-Branch Elders… Ferrum’s life-weapon destroyed, soul maimed, still unconscious… Woodric’s vitality burned, at least five hundred years of life lost… Aquilus, Pyre, Terran—lighter wounds, but half a year before they are able to lift a blade again…”
Silence sealed the pavilion like wax. Leaves hissed in the mountain wind; somewhere downslope, a muffled sob cut the stillness.
Oswald’s voice, usually knife-sharp, barely reached Aurelian. “Heavenly Sword Pavilion…”
“Sword cultivators: nine hundred. Dead: three hundred twelve. Two sword elders gone, forty-six elite disciples lost. Two hundred seven gravely hurt, half the rest carry wounds. My Lone Peak Sword… Shattered…” He lifted only the hilt, the rest of the blade long since turned to glittering dust. He had nursed that weapon for ten millennia. Sword and soul were meant to perish together; the sword had kept its half of the pact, leaving Oswald’s foundation cracked and bleeding.
Blaine cleared a throat that sounded full of gravel. “Myriad Beast Valley…” The once-booming Beast King stooped as if an invisible saddle weighed him down; grey threaded his beard where yesterday there had been none.
“Spirit beasts: nine thousand. Dead: four thousand three hundred. Thunderwing Golden Eagle King slain, Ironback Earth Dragon King critical, Gale Wolf King lost a leg. Beastmasters: four hundred… One hundred eighty-seven dead. All three Beast-Taming Grandmasters… Gone… My own partner, the Three-Headed Flame Lion King… He’s fading…” The last word cracked—half breath, half sob.
Everyone knew the lion was more than a mount; it had shared Blaine’s hunts, his winters, and his triumphs for nearly ten millennia. Now, across the ravine, the once-roaring monarch lay in a shadowed cave. Two heads hung lifeless; the third coughed scarlet foam into the dust.
Silence returned, heavier than before. Even the Vermilion Demon Lord, slouched against a pillar, let his crimson eyes dull with exhaustion. Aurelian pressed his palm against the crusted blood along his ribs. The pain was nothing compared with the hollowness yawning inside him. Around the courtyard, the lantern smoke drifted upward, but he could not find a single shape that resembled hope.
He drew a shaky breath. “Gerald has fallen, Winslow is dead…” The names tasted like ash. “We also lost five of our best… Azure Firmament swordsmen, elder adepts of the Five Elements Sect, masters from Beast Valley. All of them, Level Nine, gone… Meanwhile, Morven and Malcolm still breathe. Two of Ninefold Nether Palace’s ghost kings are intact, and at least five elders of Malevolent Path Hall remain unbroken… Once their wounds knit…” He let the sentence wither.
He tasted the fear spreading through the pavilion. He had not voiced the ending, yet every face around the stone table turned the same sick gray, as though each of them had supplied it in their own mind. Malevolent Path Hall would come back whole, hounds set loose. When that day arrived, they would sweep the last scraps of the alliance into the dust and call it mercy. In the shape the alliance lay now, Aurelian could not imagine a single blade raised against them.
A harsh whisper cut through the gloom. “That leaves one question,” Oswald said, his poise so brittle it rang like glass. “What now? Hide here forever? Malevolent Path Hall will flip every level of heaven to find us. When they do, we vanish.”
The words screeched to a halt and died. The pavilion breathed nothing but wind and the slow drip of blood from unseen wounds. Silence this time lodged deeper, like a blade that refused to be pulled free.
Aurelian forced the words out, every syllable tasting of surrender. “Right now, we burrow into the dark. We hide.”
“Hide?” Blaine let out a laugh too thin to be humor. “For how long? A month? Three? A year?” As the numbers fell from Blaine’s lips, they felt like milestones on a road that led nowhere.
Aurelian’s eyelids fluttered shut; speaking suddenly wore him like armor two sizes too heavy. “As long as we must,” he said. “At least until young Jared mends. He is the last wick we have.” He drew a breath that rattled. “Beyond that,” he added, forcing his gaze up, “we find whoever still remembers justice… Level Twelve is vast. Someone, somewhere, has not knelt to Malevolent Path Hall. We bind ourselves together and maybe, just maybe… we breathe again.”
The Vermilion Demon Lord’s voice rolled like distant thunder. “One more thing… We expose the Door of Reincarnation for what it is. Let the world see that ‘eternity’ means forging the living into puppets. Rot will eat Malevolent Path Hall from the inside.”
“Easy words,” Oswald muttered. He swept a glare over the table. “After this battle, every corner of Level Twelve has heard the tale: the Lord of Reincarnation raised tens of thousands with a flick of his hand. People now believe Malevolent Path Hall carries heaven’s own seal. Why would they listen to the ruin gathered here?”
The silence folded back over them, thicker than before, as if even the air had decided their plans were fantasy.
***
Inside the cavern, Jared’s eyelids parted. Torchlight crawled across the ceiling like tired insects. Every word of the council’s despair had reached him, syllables traveling through stone to settle in his skull. He knew the shape of the cliff beneath their feet—a cliff with no ledge. The hopelessness pressed in, thick as wet stone, offering no crack of light.
Yet Jared’s gaze held no surrender. A glacial calm pooled behind his eyes, fused with a do-or-die resolve that felt as final as snapping the last bridge behind him. He raised his right hand, letting torchlight glide across the crossing sigils burned into the skin. Five hues shimmered—metal, wood, water, fire, earth—braided with a thread of crimson molten core.
Deep in his abdomen, the dim Origin Star still turned, slow but stubborn, each rotation nudging a spark through his meridians.
“One month,” he rasped, the words scraping out like gravel. “Give me one month… Morven, Malcolm, Lord of Reincarnation… When I walk out, your worlds will burn…”
Outside the window, night thickened until the ridgelines dissolved into one bruise of darkness. Inside the valley, grief and dread pooled like low clouds, suffocating anything that tried to breathe hope.
