Dawn broke over Northwatch Stronghold.
Grey light bled across the frozen plains, painting the walls in shades of pale silver and shadow. The cold had not relented overnight; if anything, it bit deeper, as if the north itself wished to remind every soul present that warmth was a privilege, not a right.
The candidates gathered before the eastern gate, a sea of tension and barely suppressed violence.
Chu Feng stood near the back, observing.
The clan heirs had clustered together, their fine robes making them stand out. Lu Chenyi stood at their centre, arms folded, gaze sweeping over the border soldiers with the expression of a man examining livestock. His protector lurked at the edge of the group, scarred face impassive, eyes never quite still.
The border soldiers are more spread out, each man and woman leaving enough space to react. They did not chat and only watched, marking their prey, pretending to be predators.
A formation master stepped forward. Elder Heng, according to the whispers, was a thin man with eyes that held the distant look of someone who spent more time in spirit realms than the physical world. His robes were plain, unadorned, but the air around him shimmered faintly, as if reality itself hesitated to commit to his presence fully.
He raised his hand, forming seals
Behind him, the space began to shift. Light folded inward. Colour drained, then returned in distorted patterns. A gateway formed woven from threads of visible energy that pulsed with ancient rhythm.
"There are no rules and restrictions. All you have to do is survive till the end. The dangers within are real. And if you die inside—" His eyes swept across the candidates. "—well..."
A ripple passed through the gathered crowd.
Lu Chenyi walked toward the gateway. Around him, others did the same, including Chu Feng.
The world twisted, and a vast expanse of forest lay before them.
The trees were wrong.
They rose to impossible heights, their trunks thicker than any ancient oak, their bark covered in patterns that hurt to look at—spirals that seemed to move at the edge of vision, runes that had no meaning yet felt pregnant with it. The canopy above blotted out the sky entirely, leaving only a dim, greenish twilight that made distances impossible to judge.
Sound filtered through the stillness.
A growl, low and distant.
A chittering, closer, somewhere to his left.
The rustle of something large moving through the undergrowth.
Chu Feng's hand found his sword hilt. His consciousness expanded, probing the space around him.
He was alone.
The others had been scattered.
The first scream came from the east, not too far from his current location.
It was high, raw, cut off with brutal suddenness. A clan heir, by the sound of it—someone who had never learned to suffer in silence.
Chu Feng moved toward the sound, but cautiously, his steps silent against the path. The trees offered cover, their massive trunks wide enough to hide behind, their roots forming natural trenches.
He found the body within fifty paces.
Or what remained of it.
The heir—a young man Chu Feng vaguely remembered from the registration line—lay spread across the forest floor. His chest had been opened from throat to groin, ribs splayed outward like the petals of a grotesque flower. Organs steamed in the cold air, half-eaten. His face was frozen in an expression of absolute terror, mouth stretched wide in a scream that had never finished.
Something had fed on him while he was still alive.
Chu Feng studied the wounds, cataloguing details with a calm expression. Claw marks, but wrong—too many digits, arranged in patterns no natural beast possessed. There were teeth marks, but the jaw that made them must have unhinged like a serpent's. And on the ground around the body, tracks that faded into nothing after a few feet, as if the killer had simply ceased to exist.
He moved on.
There was nothing to bury. There was no time to mourn.
The forest played with them.
Chu Feng learned this within the first hour.
Sounds came from everywhere and nowhere. A snarl from the west would answer a roar from the east, but when he turned, there was nothing. The rustle of leaves might signal an attack—or it might be the wind, if the wind could be trusted in a place where nothing was natural.
He killed his first attacker in the second hour.
It emerged from behind a tree trunk without warning—a creature that looked like a wolf, but moved like something that had never known the limitations of a spine. Its legs bent in directions legs should not bend. Its eyes glowed with a light of death.
Chu Feng's sword took it through the throat.
It kept coming.
He severed its head.
It kept coming.
Only when he carved through its chest and scattered its remains did the thing finally stop, dissolving into motes of grey light that drifted upward and vanished.
He stood over the spot, breathing hard, and understood: here, killing was not enough. You had to destroy.
The screams continued.
Some he recognised. The arrogant girl from the Frostcloud Sect, who had sneered at the guards—her voice rose in a shriek that went on far too long, then stopped. The bald veteran with scarred scalp—his death was silent, marked only by a wet, tearing sound that carried through the trees.
Chu Feng kept moving.
He found the scarred woman from patrol rotations in a clearing, her back against a tree, her spear red to the haft. Three creatures lay dismembered around her. A fourth circled, testing, waiting.
She saw him, met his eyes and gave a single, sharp nod.
Chu Feng moved.
His sword took the circling creature from behind, his strike splitting it from shoulder to hip. It dissolved before it hit the ground. He landed beside her, back-to-back, breathing in unison.
"How many?" he asked.
"Lost count." Her voice was steady, but he felt the tremor in her shoulders. "They keep coming from all directions."
They fought together for the next hour.
The creatures came in waves—wolf-things, bird-things, things that crawled and slithered and dropped from branches that should not have been able to hold them. Each kill required more than death. Each required complete obliteration.
By the time the wave passed, they were both bleeding from a dozen small wounds.
The scarred woman slumped against a tree, her chest heaving.
"I'm Miao Ying," she said between breaths.
"Chu Feng."
"I know." A grim smile. "Everyone knows the one who held the breach."
He said nothing.
She pushed off the tree. "We need to keep moving. Standing still draws them."
They moved.
The forest changed as they travelled.
The trees grew closer together, their trunks pressing inward until walking became a crawl through spaces barely wide enough for a body. The green twilight darkened to something closer to black. The sounds grew louder—not just growls and chitters, but voices, whispers that seemed to come from inside their own skulls.
You will die here.
No one is coming for you.
Everyone is already dead.
Chu Feng ignored the voices.
Miao Ying gritted her teeth and kept crawling.
They emerged into a cavern—not natural, but formed from the same wrong substance as everything else. Stalactites hung from above like teeth. The floor was slick with something that steamed faintly in the gloom.
Bodies lay scattered across the cavern floor.
Five of them. Clan heirs, by their robes. They had died together, huddled back-to-back in a final stand. Their wounds were catastrophic—limbs torn, chests hollowed, faces locked in expressions of agony that spoke of prolonged, conscious suffering.
One of them was still moving.
A young man—barely older than Chu Feng—lay with his lower body crushed beneath a fallen stalactite. His intestines spilt across the stone, steaming in the cold. His eyes were open, aware, screaming without sound.
He saw Chu Feng.
His hand reached out, trembling, desperate.
"Please—" The word was a croak, barely human. "Please, kill me—"
Chu Feng's sword moved.
One stroke. Clean. Final.
The young man's face relaxed into something almost like peace.
Miao Ying stared at the body, then at Chu Feng. Her expression was unreadable.
Chu Feng cleaned his blade, not offering any explanation and kept walking.
They found Lu Chenyi in the next chamber.
The heir stood alone amidst a pile of dissolving remains, his Vermilion Bird blazing so brightly that the cavern walls glowed red. His fine robes were torn, his hair dishevelled, his chest heaving with exertion. But he was alive. Unbroken.
He saw them.
For an instant, something flickered in his eyes—relief, quickly suppressed. Then his expression hardened into its familiar arrogance.
"You survived," he said flatly. "Unexpected, but useful. We'll form a triangle formation and push toward—"
"No."
Lu Chenyi blinked. "No?"
Chu Feng walked past him without slowing. "Form a triangle, and we all die."
Lu Chenyi's face darkened. "You dare—"
Miao Ying stepped between them. "He's right. I've seen it. The more of us cluster, the more they come."
For a long moment, Lu Chenyi stared at them both. Then, slowly, his Vermilion Bird dimmed.
"Fine," he bit out.
He turned and vanished into the darkness.
Miao Ying glanced at Chu Feng as he kept moving.
Hours passed. Or days. Time seems to have no meaning.
Chu Feng lost count of the kills. Lost count of the bodies. Lost count of the times he nearly died—a claw raking his side, a jaw closing on his arm, a weight slamming him to the ground and pressing, pressing, pressing—
But each time, he rose.
Each time, he fought.
Each time, he destroyed.
The whispers grew louder, more insistent. They spoke of his father, alone and unprotected. They spoke of Jin Bao, dead in some distant frontier. They spoke of the twins, their bodies broken, their eyes empty—
He silenced them with steel and will.
Then, without warning, the world folded.
The forest collapsed inward. The caverns dissolved. The screams faded to nothing. For one endless moment, Chu Feng existed nowhere again—no ground, no sky, no sensation.
Then reality returned.
He stood before the eastern gate of Northwatch Stronghold.
Morning light fell across his face. The same grey dawn. The same frozen ground. The same gathered crowd stared at him with expressions of shock and horror.
He looked down at himself.
Blood covered him from head to foot. Some was his own. Most was not. His robes hung in tatters, his sword still gripped in a hand that would not stop trembling.
Around him, other survivors materialised.
Miao Ying appeared ten paces away, her spear gone, her arm hanging at a wrong angle. She looked at him and nodded once.
Lu Chenyi materialised near the gate, his Vermilion Bird extinguished, his face pale as snow. He met Chu Feng's eyes for an instant, then looked away.
Others appeared. A few. Not many.
And then—
Gasps rippled through the crowd.
Chu Feng turned.
Figures were emerging from the gateway that should not have been emerging. The arrogant girl from the Frostcloud Sect—the one whose scream had gone on too long—stumbled onto the frozen ground, her face the colour of ash, her eyes wide and unfocused, clearly surprised she is still alive.
The bald veteran with scarred scalp followed, his hands shaking, his gaze fixed on nothing.
One by one, they came, all those who had died.
All of them had surprise written on their faces as they confirmed they were indeed still alive.
The ones Chu Feng had seen die. The ones whose bodies he had passed. The ones whose final moments he had witnessed—the young man with his intestines spilt across the stone, reaching out, begging for mercy.
They were alive.
Pale. Shaken. Trembling. But alive.
Miao Ying's breath caught. "How—"
Elder Heng stepped forward, his thin face creased with something that might have been satisfaction.
Chu Feng looked at his hands.
Blood. Still blood. But beneath it, no wounds. The gash on his side was gone. The claw marks on his arm had vanished.
None of it had been real.
And yet—
He remembered the weight of the blade ending that young man's suffering. He remembered the look of peace on a face that should have been a stranger's.
They all felt real.
He closed his eyes and breathed.
The survivors were led away to recover.
As Chu Feng passed through the gate, he felt eyes on him—dozens of them, from heirs and soldiers alike. They stared with a new expression now.
As he walked to his quarters