Shen Xuan stood amidst the swirling mountain mist, a silhouette of ivory and moon-silver set against the backdrop of a bleeding sky.
He did not merely walk toward the assassin leader; he manifested, his very presence folding the space between them as if the laws of distance were merely suggestions to be discarded.
"Who are… you…?"
The leader wheezed, falling to his knees as the pressure of Shen Xuan's gaze bore down on his spirit.
Up close, the boy did not look human; he looked like a shard of the ancient cosmos, cold, eternal, and utterly indifferent to the life he was about to extinguish.
The air around Shen Xuan vibrated with a low, humming resonance, the sound of a power that predated the birth of the current stars.
"Who am I?" Shen Xuan's lips curved into a glacial smile that did not reach his void-gray eyes.
"Does an insect crawling in the mud truly deserve to hear the name of the sky? You seek the identity of your reaper when you should be spending your final breaths repenting for the noise you've brought to my summit."
"You...!" The leader's pride, forged in the brutal hierarchy of the underworld and tempered by a hundred successful assassinations, flared one last time.
He lunged, his broadsword erupting in a jagged, sickly black flame.
"If you killed my brothers, do not think you are qualified to face me! I have already half-stepped into the Divine Transformation Realm! I have touched the threshold of the laws!"
Shen Xuan didn't move his blade. He simply took a step forward.
He did not touch the stone; instead, a single, drifting petal of a mountain flower caught beneath his foot, serving as a celestial walkway.
He ascended through the void as if walking a garden path, his movements possessing a fluid, terrifying grace that defied every principle of physics known to the Chaos Vessel Realm.
"Is this... even possible? Moving through the air without the Law of Flight?" The leader's heart hammered against his ribs. His resolve, once a pillar of iron, shattered. Fear, cold and absolute, took hold of his marrow.
"Die!" he roared, a scream born of pure, unadulterated desperation.
He ignited his life essence, sacrificing centuries of potential for a single moment of explosive power.
His aura turned into a corrosive, black steam that hissed as it touched the falling mist of the waterfall.
He threw the entire weight of his cultivation into a vertical cleave, a strike intended to split both Shen Xuan and the very mountain itself in two.
Shen Xuan's eyes narrowed into slivers of gold. This was the "hard work" he had anticipated.
In his current, fragile vessel, a body barely starting its journey in the Chaos Seed Realm, the air pressure alone from a desperate half-step Divine Realm strike threatened to liquefy his internal organs.
He could feel the porcelain-thin meridians in his arms groaning under the atmospheric weight.
Clang!
Shen Xuan didn't meet the blow head-on. Such an act would be suicide.
He parried with a surgical, minimal tilt of the green light-sword, allowing the heavy broadsword to slide harmlessly off the edge of the blade.
Yet, the shockwave was immense. A jolt of white-hot agony tore through Shen Xuan's arms, and he skidded back across the slick plateau, his feet carving two shallow, smoking grooves into the ancient stone.
"Your strength is a debt paid in blood," Shen Xuan said, his voice straining for the first time.
"A hollow flame that consumes the wick but produces no true light."
The leader followed with a savage horizontal sweep. A crescent moon of black energy tore through the air, momentarily severing the waterfall's flow, creating a vacuum of silence in its wake.
Shen Xuan drifted over the strike like a dandelion seed caught in a gale. But the assassin was relentless, driven by the knowledge that failure meant death.
He lunged, the tip of his broadsword glowing with a murderous, soul-searing radiance.
The black metal pierced through Shen Xuan's pristine white robe, grazing the skin of his ribs.
A thin line of crimson bloomed against the white silk, spreading like a blooming spider lily. For the first time since his awakening from the long seal, Shen Xuan felt it, the sharp, vulgar, and startling sting of mortal pain.
It was a reminder that he was no longer a old Shen Xuan , protected by the Mandate of Heaven; he was a boy of flesh and bone.
The girl on the rock gasped, her eyes wide with a mixture of horror and awe.
"Run… get away! You've done enough!"
Shen Xuan didn't run. He allowed the pain to act as a catalyst, sharpening his focus until the world slowed to a crawl.
His silver-gray eyes erupted in a terrifying golden-purple light, the signature of the Shen Clan's true lineage.
He realized his Qi was nearly depleted, his small Chaos Seed trembling with exhaustion. He had exactly one breath of power left.
He stepped inside the leader's guard, a suicidal gambit that ignored every defensive instinct.
"What…?" The leader's eyes widened. He tried to pull the broadsword back, but the weapon was too heavy, its momentum now a trap of its own making.
Shen Xuan didn't use the green sword for the final blow. He pressed his open palm against the leader's chest, right over his beating, frantic heart.
"Law of Chaos: Discord."
A vibration, subtle as the beat of a butterfly's wing yet heavy as the collapse of a star, passed from Shen Xuan's palm into the man's chest.
It was a fragment of a Supreme Law, the power to unmake the frequency of life itself.
The leader froze.
The black flame around his blade flickered and died.
Inside him, the "vessel" of his cultivation didn't just break; it dissolved. His blood reversed its flow, his bones turned to fluid, and his own Chaos Qi turned inward, devouring him from the soul out.
He was being unmade from within.
"You… what… are you…" The leader's mouth filled with black, clotted bile. He looked at the boy and saw not a child, but the terrifying reflection of the End.
"Nothing," Shen Xuan whispered, his face pale as ash, sweat dripping from his chin. "I am merely the silence you've been seeking."
With an elegant, almost mournful flick of the green sword, he severed the silver thread of the man's soul.
The leader collapsed, falling backward into the lake, vanishing into the red-stained depths alongside the brothers he had led to slaughter.
Silence returned
to the summit, heavy and absolute, broken only by the rhythmic thrum of the falling water.
Shen Xuan stood trembling, leaning heavily on the green light-sword.
His side was bleeding, and his internal Chaos Seed was pulsing with a violent, erratic rhythm, protesting the strain of channeling a Supreme Law through a mortal shell. He turned slowly toward the girl on the rock.
She stared at him in a daze. To her, a boy of fifteen had just dismantled a team of killers who should have been his absolute superiors.
She saw the blood on his side, the exhaustion in his eyes, and a wave of profound, soul-deep sorrow washed over her. She knew the price of such power.
"The danger is gone," Shen Xuan murmured, his voice barely audible over the roar of the falls.
He walked toward her, each step a Herculean battle against gravity. His vision began to tunnel, the vibrant greens of the forest and the blues of the lake fading into a gray haze.
As he reached her side, the green light-sword flickered like a dying candle and vanished, returning to its scabbard.
Shen Xuan looked down at her, his vision blurring into a sea of silver and shadow.
"Now," he whispered.
And he fell.
The girl, despite the terminal nature of her own injuries, moved with a strength born of pure, transcendent will.
She had already consumed a seventh-grade healing pill, a gift from her teacher intended only for the final moments of a Saint.
It could not save her; her meridians were shredded beyond repair, her Chaos Vessel a ruin of shattered glass.
But it could give her these final, precious minutes of clarity.
She crawled through the wet grass, every movement a symphony of excruciating pain. She reached Shen Xuan's side and gently, with hands that shook like leaves in a storm, pulled his head into her lap. She felt the heat of his fever and the chill of his exhaustion.
With trembling fingers, she placed her very last healing pill, a treasure that could restore a dying soul, into his mouth.
She watched him, her heart aching with a debt she knew she could never repay.
To save her, a stranger, a dying spark, he had nearly extinguished his own brilliant sun.
Using the last of her waning strength, she tore strips from her fine silk robes, her fingers gentle and reverent as she bandaged the jagged wound on his ribs.
"Uhh…!" Shen Xuan groaned in his sleep as the contact sparked fresh pain. His brows knit together in a frown of agony, a small, pained sound escaping his lips that made the girl's eyes well with tears.
"Hold on… you'll be fine. I won't let the cold take you," she whispered, her voice a fragile melody lost in the roar of the waterfall.
As she looked down at his face, so young, yet possessing features that seemed carved by the gods themselves, a strange, unnameable emotion stirred in her chest.
It was a mix of maternal instinct and a profound, spiritual recognition.
She felt as if she were looking at a fallen star. She slid her own storage ring, a repository of a high-plane legacy and forbidden knowledge, onto his finger, removing the soul-binding restriction with her fading breath.
"This is all I have left to give," she whispered.
She took out parchment and ink from the ring. With her life-blood literally cooling in her veins, she began to write a final letter. Her strokes were careful and elegant, the calligraphy of a noble house, even as her vision began to fail.
She finished the missive, folded it with trembling hands, and placed it firmly into his palm, closing his cold fingers around it.
Her eyes drifted to his lips, stained with a trace of his own blood.
Without fully understanding the impulse, whether it was a final act of gratitude, or a recognition of a soul as profoundly lonely as her own, she leaned down.
She pressed a brief, ghost-like kiss against Shen Xuan's lips. It was cold, soft, and tasted of iron, snow, and the coming end. It was a seal of fate, a silent goodbye from a Saint to a Sovereign.
Then she pulled back, her heart slowing to a final, rhythmic crawl. She leaned her back against the wet, mossy stone, closing her eyes as the mist enveloped them both.
The letter was tucked securely into his palm. She was ready now. Ready to become part of the mountain, to let her spirit dissolve into the winds of the Spirit Mountain Range.
But beneath the soil and within the
thickening mist, the Spirit Mountain Range began to stir. The "Terrifying Existence" that the city-dwellers whispered about in fear was no longer dormant.
It had smelled the spilled blood of a Sovereign and the fading aura of a Saint. The very trees began to lean toward the stone platform, their branches creaking like the joints of an old god.
Something was coming for them, moving through the shadows with a weight that made the earth tremble. Shen Xuan lay unconscious, the letter clutched in his hand, unaware that the trial of the mountain had only just begun.