Ren exhaled slowly.
He let his Spirit Sense rise without restraint. It wasn't a gentle expansion. It was a tide.
…Go.
His divine sense surged up and out, washing over Polaris City in a single breath.
Noise rushed into his mind—like pressing his ear to the beating heart of the Blood Slaughter Steppes. The roar from Polaris Tower became painfully clear: cheers and curses from watching demons, the heavy thud of bodies slamming into stone, the screech of collapsing defensive barriers, the dull thunder of fists and blades smashing arenas to rubble. On other floors, formations hummed, infernal energy flowed, secret workshops pulsed with forging flames, storage vaults gleamed with Blood Demon Crystals stacked like ore-red mountains.
All of that, he let slide past.
He was searching for something thinner, sharper.
A particular flavor of destruction.
At first, it appeared only in fragments—scattered threads woven into the saber-strikes and spear-thrusts of Giant Demon elites. Here, a saber light that didn't just cut flesh, but gnawed at the target's true essence. There, a saber shadow that sliced past the outer body and made a soul-protecting talisman dim.
Like faint aftertastes on the air.
Ren's awareness skimmed across one duel, then another, Spirit Sense brushing over the Laws hidden in each movement. He ignored heavy killing intent, ignored the savagery that was natural to this land. That all belonged to the Holy Demon Continent.
He wanted something purer.
Something that didn't simply kill—but erased.
Then he found it.
"…Found you," he murmured.
On one of the higher floors of Polaris Tower, in a ring-shaped arena, a Giant Demon's saber was falling in a killing stroke.
The demon's body was tall and powerfully built, muscles like coiled cables of iron. His skin was a dark, infernal bronze, his eyes bright red with excitement and arrogance. In his hands, a black saber drank in the ambient light until it seemed to be carved from a slice of night. Each sweep left behind dark traces that refused to fade—the remnants of a Concept that ate everything it touched.
Maha.
One of the Heavenly Demon Seven Stars, a name like thunder in Polaris City, one of the most famous Giant Demons on this battlefield of slaughter.
Ren's Spirit Sense narrowed.
The saber came down with a low, heavy hum. Infernal energy thickened around it, then vanished—smothered by a thin, gray essence clinging to the blade's edge. The defensive artifact his opponent wore—a bone armor covered in runes—screamed as cracks spiderwebbed across its surface. The man inside vomited blood. His aura collapsed in a single breath, his true essence shredded before it had a chance to surge.
The saber's afterimage tore through his soul protection like dry paper.
The gray trace it left behind crawled along the armor, through the flesh beneath, along meridians, and into the man's soul. Wherever it passed, the target's energy didn't simply dissipate—it vanished.
Body, treasure, true essence, aura, spirit—no difference.
All were annihilated.
…That's the flavor.
Ren's Immortal Soul Bone lit up of its own accord. His Spiritual Sea churned; soul-force surged like a rising tide, and his perception of the Law lines woven into Maha's strike sharpened to a knife-edge.
Compared to the strangeness of Time and the clean sharpness of Space, the Concept of Annihilation was frighteningly direct.
He watched the way Maha's saber tore at space—not in the manner of Space Laws that bent and warped, but by leaving behind a thin gray smear that destroyed whatever clung to existence there. He tracked how that essence migrated—from armor to flesh, from flesh to blood, from blood to meridians and soul.
A simple rule.
Destroy all things. Reduce them to nothing.
Ren faintly smiled.
He didn't imitate Maha's saber technique. That saber-path had been carved by a Giant Demon's body, by Giant Demon battle habits. Mimicking it would only put useless twists in his own Dao.
He simply watched.
Every swing of Maha's blade, every flaring of that gray essence, every ripple of destruction—Ren stripped them apart, dissected them, and fed them into the Immortal Soul Bone embedded in his body. The marrow-deep inheritance there moved like a divine furnace. Foreign habits were crushed, racial quirks scrapped away, and only the pure, universal skeleton of the Concept remained.
The core law of what "Annihilation" meant.
His Spiritual Sea resonated.
Between the star-like nodes representing his existing Laws, a new constellation flickered to life. It was dark, yet somehow brighter than the others—a void that made the surrounding light more vivid. Runes of Annihilation spun slowly, surrounded by faint wisps of killing intent drawn from Polaris Tower's infernal aura.
Ren sank into it.
On the arena floor, Maha cut down another opponent. Then another. Then another. Each kill sent a fresh ripple of Annihilation intent through the tower's structures, echoing through the formation network like distant thunder. Ren devoured them all, consuming every trace as calmly as if he were breathing.
The Concept of Annihilation had none of Space's nuance, none of Time's distortions.
It was simple.
But simplicity carried a kind of edge that nothing else could blunt.
Destroy.
Destroy again.
Destroy until there was nothing left to resist.
A stick of incense burned down somewhere in one of Polaris Tower's meditation halls. To Ren, it felt like an entire cycle of heaven and earth had turned.
By the time Maha's saber flicked one last time and he stepped out of the ring with a cold, satisfied look, the new constellation in Ren's Spiritual Sea had settled.
Its hum was deep and quiet—entry-level comprehension, roughly equivalent to a first-step grasp.
For most martial artists, comprehending a top-tier Concept to that degree would already be cause for celebration, a thing to dream of for years.
For Ren, it was a warm-up.
"All right," he said softly. "That's the bite."
His gaze slid away from Maha's ring.
"Next…"
His Spirit Sense, which had been anchored to the Giant Demon, suddenly plunged downward.
Past the dueling floors.
Past audience stands full of Giant Demons and Imps, their bloodthirst rolling in waves.
Past private training chambers, forging rooms, gambling dens, and the hidden monitoring formations the High Lords used to watch their butcher's arena.
Down, down, like a spear sinking into the bone of Polaris Tower.
There, beneath the tower's roots, something vast and tightly sealed slumbered.
A stone chamber—no, a space carved out beneath reality—its walls woven with terrifyingly complex arrays. Heavenly Demon runes coiled together into an invisible force field that pressed down like the gaze of an ancient emperor. Space within was folded and twisted into countless cages, stacked one atop another, stretching into a white, endless plain.
The King's Cage.
A comprehensive smelting ground for genius.
It tested soul, true essence, and body all at once. On the surface, it was a trial of endurance and will. In truth, it housed part of Empyrean Primordius' inheritance: the Asura Martial Intent, one of the three pillars of the Heavenly Demon intent.
Here, a few monsters recorded in ancient scrolls had sharpened their comprehension of Space and Time to terrifying heights, laying foundations that reached toward the realm where one could step onto the Road of Emperor and eventually grasp emperor-level power.
A faint gleam stirred in Ren's eyes.
…Perfect.
Space tightened around him.
His Space Laws stirred. The Immortal Soul Bone awakened in response, patterns of countless worlds' Dao-lines flashing through his Spiritual Sea like constellations. Ren activated his Universal Travel art—but stripped all the foreign pieces away.
No devil seals.
No divine artifacts.
No external border tricks.
Just pure Space and Time.
He reached.
The world around him lurched.
…
A heartbeat later, the cramped alley he'd been standing in vanished.
Ren stood alone in a vast, colorless land.
It stretched in every direction like a plain of smooth white stone, featureless save for thin, almost invisible cage-walls that divided it into sections. The sky was likewise white: no sun, no moon, no stars—only an oppressive vastness that felt like a lid on the world.
Pressure poured down from that empty sky.
The Asura Martial Intent.
It was like standing at the center of an ocean made of killing will. Every breath tasted of iron; every heartbeat sounded like war drums in his veins.
Ren lifted his hand, letting the pressure fall on his body without resistance. It pressed against skin and muscle, seeped into meridians, pushed at his bones, and tried to knead his true essence flat.
His Hell Suppressing Immortal Physique stirred lazily. Acupoints flickered to life one by one, like stars waking in a twilight sky. What should have been suffocating oppression became a breeze.
"Mm," he said lightly. "Good place."
A sharp intake of breath sounded off to his left.
Ren turned his head.
Not far away, a youth stood with his back to one of the invisible cage-walls. Pale jade skin, faintly pointed ears, a slender figure wrapped in fitted armor—the stamp of a Fey bloodline was clear in his features. His aura was keen and sharp, like a newly forged blade. Killing intent flickered under his skin, still young but promising.
His eyes were wide, fixed on Ren with a mixture of shock and alarm.
Clearly, he had not expected someone to simply appear out of the air inside the King's Cage.
"You—how did you—"
Ren's gaze slid over him once, calm and faintly bored.
Geniuses of this level weren't rare on the Holy Demon Continent. In a place like Polaris Tower, they were common currency. This one had good bones, a neat little seed of slaughter, and some incomplete comprehension of wind or metal.
Promising.
But just a seed.
Ren smiled faintly.
He lifted a finger.
A thin strand of power flicked out. It carried no roaring aura, no dramatic law-light, just a razor-fine thread where space itself shuddered—a small twist of Space Disruption wrapped in the nascent glow of Annihilation.
The air in front of his finger cracked like fraying glass.
The Fey youth's protective artifact flared desperately, a pale barrier blooming around him. Runes raced across its surface.
It didn't matter.
Ren's finger-light slipped through the barrier as though it were mist. It passed through armor, through skin and bone.
For an instant, the Fey stood whole.
Then his body simply… came apart.
He exploded into fine red mist and drifting ash. True essence collapsed without a sound. His soul, snuffed by Annihilation, never even had time to scream.
The King's Cage force field moved with greedy precision. The released energy was swiftly dragged away, folded into the nearest cage-walls. The faint outline of the barrier behind him brightened by a fraction.
Ren lowered his hand, indifferently blinked once, then turned forward.
The sense of invisible bars stretched out ahead. The nearest cage-wall pulsed faintly, like a beast waking and sniffing at a challenger.
By the tower's rules, martial artists here would be slowly pushed forward, cage by cage. Each barrier would be hammered at with all their strength, day after day. Every ten days, the pressure would rise, grinding their foundation. They would exhaust their true essence, sit in meditation, recover under constant suppression, then push again.
Months, years.
A harsh, grinding road meant to temper geniuses into something worthy of Asura.
Ren took a single step.
The cage-wall in front of him hummed.
He extended his hand—not to strike, but to feel.
The wall was made of Asura Martial Intent, compressed to frightening density. Each fragment carried traces of slaughter and domination, the remnant will of a being that had once ruled this continent with killing alone. Threads of Space and Time ran through the barrier, stabilizing and twisting it, turning the smelting field into a domain where every clash, every breath, sharpened one's understanding.
Ren's heart stirred.
"All right," he said, almost pleasantly. "Let's see how far you can push me."
He drew his fist back.
No techniques. No exaggerated movements.
Just Laws.
Space spiraled around his arm, compressing the distance between his knuckles and the cage into a thin, brittle layer. Time slid along that spiral—slowed at his fist, accelerated for the cage—so that from the barrier's perspective, the punch arrived early, loaded with more momentum than it should have had in this moment.
Wrapped around both, like a hungry shadow clinging to the surface of reality, was his newborn Concept of Annihilation.
Destroy.
He punched.
The world thundered.
The invisible cage-wall rippled like water struck by a hammer. Layers of Asura Martial Intent peeled away, shredded under the combined pressure of Space, Time, and Destruction. The very structure of the space-cage quivered, cracks spreading through the force field that bound this section.
In the depths of Polaris Tower, demonic inscriptions flared to life in the monitoring room. Several High Lords suddenly sat up straighter.
Ren didn't stop to savor it.
He punched again.
And again.
Each strike carved a new path through the barrier's essence. Each counterflow of force taught him something—the way the cage's Space tried to rebound, the way Time compression resisted disturbance, the way Asura pressure tried to suppress his true essence and soul.
He learned with every impact.
The King's Cage had been built for long, weary battles where accumulation decided life and death.
Ren turned that accumulation into instant comprehension.
The first cage shuddered.
Then, with a sharp crystalline crack, it shattered. The barrier dissolved into scattered motes of infernal energy, soul fragments, and killing intent.
Pressure surged.
The Asura field seized that energy and rammed it into Ren's body. It slammed against his Hell Suppressing Immortal Physique and Ancient Ming bloodline like a tidal wave striking a mountain. His flesh sang; bones boomed like war bells; true essence caught the Law threads in that pressure, tore them apart, and integrated what his Dao could use, burning the rest to ash.
The weight multiplied.
Ahead, the next cage brightened, sensing a challenger.
Ren rolled his shoulders once.
"Let's skip the warm-up."
Space folded beneath his feet.
His body blurred forward, the distance between cages collapsing. To the King's Cage's own formation, the figure that had just broken the first barrier vanished, then reappeared near the heart of the second. The monitoring runes flickered, briefly confused.
No martial artist was supposed to move like that here.
Ren didn't care.
He walked through them one by one.
In one cage, the bars were invisible, formed entirely from compressed killing intent. Every breath cut the lungs, every heartbeat threatened to burst the heart. The air tasted like knives.
Ren raised his hand.
The Concept of Annihilation whispered on his fingertip. Invisible bars turned gray, then crumbled. Killing intent burst like dry dust under a boot.
In another cage, the bars were made of time itself. Every step forward sent his body aging, organs weakening, true essence decaying as if decades passed with each breath. Veins shriveled. Joints ached.
Ren laughed, a low, amused sound.
He exhaled once.
Time around him froze, then reversed. The cage's decay rolled backward into nothing, the "years" pressed onto his flesh unraveling in an instant. Threads of Time Law condensed into glimmering lines that he wrapped idly around his wrist.
The cage broke.
Others pressed on him with sheer weight. The Asura field multiplied his burden, suppressing physical strength, strangling organ undulations, slowing true essence circulation, dimming perception. Ordinary High Lords would have been forced to crawl.
Ren didn't bother resisting that suppression.
He let it crush him.
Every time it pushed down, he allowed his consciousness to sink into his own Dao Heart.
He let his mortal body—Xiantian true essence, Peak Pulse Condensation flesh—feel the weight as honestly as any lower-realm genius. He sealed away the support of his higher-world cultivation structures, Rejected the comfort of his Twelve Fate Palaces, ignored the terrifying advantages of his Primordial Saint foundation.
Here, he was just Ren Ming, a young martial artist from Sky Spill World's lower continent.
And he walked forward anyway.
Time blurred.
Days might have passed.
Or hours.
In this white world, there was no sun or moon, no shadows to mark the flow of time—only the rise of pressure every ten days and the beating of one's heart. For other martial artists, every increase in pressure was a nightmare, a place where many lost their lives.
For Ren, each surge was another hammer striking hot steel.
Fourth cage. Fifth. Sixth.
Tenth.
Twelfth.
Each one fell with increasing ease—not because the cages weakened, but because his understanding grew faster than they did.
Finally, the air in front of him twisted.
A new cage appeared.
This one was different.
Its bars weren't iron, or killing intent, or time's decay. They were nearly transparent, like threads of glass woven into a net. Every strand bent in strange arcs that hurt the eyes, warping in ways that felt wrong, as if each bar existed in several places at once.
Where they crossed, tiny cracks flickered—thin, black lines that appeared and vanished faster than thought.
A Space-Time cage.
Ren's smile deepened.
"Here we are," he whispered.
The pressure here was terrifying.
Space condensed until every movement felt like pushing through congealed blood. Time fractured: his heartbeat sometimes slowed to a crawling drum; other times, several heartbeats overlapped, creating a chaotic rhythm that threatened to tear his consciousness apart.
The Asura suppression field here reached its peak. Breath itself became expensive; every moment drained true essence; every flicker of inattention promised disaster. This was a place designed to grind even Heaven's Chosen into dust… and to offer the Asura Martial Intent only to those who persisted through everything.
Ren inhaled.
His eyes drifted shut.
He did not rush to attack.
He sank.
His awareness spread across the crisscrossing bars. Past, present, and near-future traces braided together: where the bars had been, where they would be, how their vibrations changed when the Asura field pulsed, how Space bent around each intersection, how Time stretched and compressed along each strand.
In his Spiritual Sea, the Space rune expanded. Lines multiplied, layering into an intricate diagram that wrapped around a portion of his inner void.
The Time rune followed suit, its structure unfolding, weaving itself between Space's patterns.
The Annihilation rune split. One segment sank, condensing, its black-red light thickening until it resembled molten metal. Another extended filaments into the Space-Time diagrams, embedding annihilating hooks at key junctures.
Space stepped into a new realm—Spatial Genesis.
Time rose alongside it—Genesis.
Annihilation rose to match—its Concept deepening, its runes no longer just hungry teeth, but chains that could bind and erase even divine attacks.
Ren opened his eyes.
"…Good enough."
He stepped forward.
His foot fell.
In front of him, space compressed into a single paper-thin plane. Time around that plane froze for an instant. Every bar that pierced that plane ceased moving, caught mid-twist.
In that heartbeat, Ren's finger rose.
Heaven-Piercing Martial Intent surged. Multi-colored light coiled around his hand—violet thunder arcs, earth-red flame, translucent wind halos—all compressed to their limit. Space shortened along his finger's path; Time arranged itself so that every micro-moment of the strike stacked perfectly.
Wrapped around it all, faint but terrifying, was Annihilation.
He thrust.
The line of light pierced through the frozen plane of space.
Bars shattered.
Waves of Law essence erupted like a dam bursting. Cracks spiderwebbed out from his strike, racing through the cage. Space-Time bars twisted and snapped; the entire structure trembled on the verge of collapse.
The Asura force field howled.
Endless killing intent surged toward him like a floodtide, trying to crush soul, body, and true essence together. Suppression spiked, dragging down his strength at every level, desperate to force him back before the cage fully broke.
Ren did not retreat.
He raised his head.
In his Spiritual Sea, beneath the spinning diagrams of Space, Time, and Annihilation, something vast slowly turned.
Asura.
Across endless battlefields, a presence that crushed opponents before the first strike. A field that oppressed divine soul, physical body, and true essence at once, sapping fighting will, smothering potential.
That was Asura.
Ren allowed the killing intent to pour in.
He did not resist it.
He welcomed it.
He allowed it to flood his Spiritual Sea, to batter his Dao Heart. Every battle he had fought flickered into existence there—Bloody arenas in Sky Spill World, shattered cities of devils and gods, every footprint he'd left on the Dao. Slaughter layered on slaughter until they formed a dark storm.
The Asura Martial Intent took shape in that storm.
It wasn't Primordius' in full, nor identical to any other Heaven's Chosen who had passed this trial. It was Ren's—tempered by his Heaven-Piercing ferocity, stained by the cruelty of an Ancient Ming who felt nothing when enemies exploded into ash.
In his Spiritual Sea, the Asura force field expanded.
If he unleashed it, it would become an omnidirectional suppression domain. Within that domain, enemies' physical power would plummet, organ undulations slow, true essence circulation choke. Perception would dull, fighting intent falter. Weak martial artists stepping into it would feel as if they had fallen into hell itself; some might have their hearts stop from sheer terror.
The Asura Martial Intent bloomed once.
The Space-Time cage shattered.
Silence fell over the white plain.
Ren lowered his hand.
He looked at his palm, flexed his fingers. Space around his knuckles twisted subtly. Time along his wrist thickened, each moment stretching, then snapping back. A faint black-red glow flickered along his veins.
"…Fifth-level Space and Time," he murmured. "Annihilation rising with them. And a fresh Asura field."
His smile turned a shade cruel.
"Not bad for a little detour."
Around him, the King's Cage trembled.
Layers of formation lines lit up, reacting to the complete destruction of its internal structures. This trial had been designed for Heaven's Chosen to slowly climb, for legends to form around those who survived to the upper levels. Very few throughout history had reached the end.
Ren hadn't climbed.
He had simply walked through.
He could feel it—the distant shock of Polaris Tower's High Lords as readings went wild. In some hidden chamber above, ancient demons who believed they'd already plumbed all the Cage's mysteries suddenly rose from their seats.
"Impossible…"
"Somebody cleared all levels… in this short time?"
"And that pressure… it dropped all at once!"
"The Asura—did the Asura Martial Intent move?!"
Demonic voices talked over one another, their schemes momentarily shattered. Calculations that had guided their slaughter-steppes for centuries had never accounted for someone like this—someone who treated their supreme trial as a stroll.
Ren didn't care what they thought.
"If they're smart," he said mildly, "they'll pretend nothing happened."
His Asura field rippled once, then sank back into his Spiritual Sea, coiling there like a sleeping beast. The force field of the King's Cage loosened. The white world began to warp and crumble. By its rules, he should have been ejected back to Polaris Tower's special practice grounds.
Ren's Spirit Sense spread outward again.
The trial delivered a prize beyond Asura—infant threads of the Heavenly Demon intent, fragments of Primordius' greater Martial Intent. But he wasn't done with Polaris Tower yet.
He ignored the escape talisman that coalesced in front of him—a small, glowing charm, safety for those at death's edge. He let it fall to the ground.
His attention turned elsewhere.
Blood Demon Crystals.
They were the common currency of the Giant Demon and Imp races, stones that contained immense condensed energy—heaven and earth origin energy fused with infernal blood essence. To demons, they were like refined true essence stones. To humans, they were even better, refining the body, bolstering the soul, supporting all aspects of cultivation. A single Blood Demon Crystal could rival dozens of mid-grade true essence stones in value.
Ren's perception swept through Polaris Tower and its surroundings once more.
He dismissed scattered crystals in warriors' bags, ignored vaults full of low-grade stones. He searched for density—for a distortion in the natural flow of qi, a place where so much Blood Demon Crystal had gathered that heaven and earth bent slightly around it.
He found it.
On the fourth floor of one of the twelve Skysplit Towers, a conspicuous blood-red altar had been erected. It was carved in a single piece from high-grade Blood Demon Crystal, the entire thing a seamless chunk of ore the size of a small house.
In normal mines, Blood Demon Crystals were dug out in chunks the size of a head or a torso. An unbroken mass of this size almost never appeared.
The entrance to the Road of Emperor.
Ren's eyes narrowed in satisfaction.
"Right on time."
The white world around him began to crumble faster, patches of nothingness spreading out from the horizon. The smelting trial had concluded. The King's Cage was trying to spit him out.
He refused.
Space folded under his feet again.
This time, he didn't lean on the Cage's own arrays or the tower's transmission paths. He used his own Laws—Space and Time at Genesis, Asura suppression, Annihilation, the Universal Travel art.
His body became a streak of light threaded through the gaps in the tower's defenses. For an instant, he danced along the thin edges of transmission tunnels, skimmed past the awareness of hidden High Lords, and stepped between layers of protective arrays.
Then—
He stepped out.
…
He stood on blood.
Not real blood.
Blood Demon Crystal.
The altar beneath his feet was dark red and translucent, veined with deeper crimson patterns that twisted and writhed like ghosts in its depths. Infernal energy gushed from it in waves, mixed with tyrannical origin energy and the faint echo of a will that had once peered down on this continent like a god.
Above the altar, the air shimmered. Blood ghost energy coiled lazily, forming half-illusory shapes.
Ren drew in a slow breath.
He could feel it—the logic of the Road of Emperor beneath the altar. A transmission array similar to the Demon God Imperial Palace's, but tuned differently. It did not simply span distance. It spanned qualifications.
Ren placed his right foot more firmly on the altar and smiled.
"Primordius," he said quietly, like greeting an old acquaintance through a sealed door. "I'll borrow your road for a bit."
He lifted his hand.
Space Laws surged, compressing the distance between his palm and the altar's core runes until they were one. Time shivered, aligning his current breath with the moment the Road's creator had inscribed his will here. The fresh Asura Martial Intent stirred, lending oppressive weight to his presence. Annihilation's black-red rune flashed at his fingertip.
He didn't ask the Road for permission.
He reached directly into the altar's skeleton of Laws—and twisted.
The high-grade Blood Demon Crystal trembled.
Then it blazed.
Internal runes awakened in sequence, like a long-silent choir rising to song. Lines of blood-red light shot upward from the altar, joining together into a massive pillar that pierced the tower roof and stabbed into the sky. The air filled with an ancient, boundless will—not fully conscious, more like the lingering echo of an Empyrean's intention, but still enough to make heaven and earth bow.
Throughout Polaris Tower, demon experts looked up as one.
Giant Demons froze, blood boiling. Imps groaned and clutched their chests. Even the High Lords on their lofty thrones abruptly stood, eyes sharp.
In the deepest monitoring hall, an Elder with horns like twisted blades slammed a hand onto the armrest of his throne.
"Who activated the altar?!"
"Was there a qualification test scheduled? Who reached Seven Star?!"
They turned their senses toward the altar, unable to see anything but crimson, unable to sense anyone at the altar.
Ren tilted his head back.
Crimson brilliance washed over his face, painting his features in darker hues. His expression didn't change. His eyes were still lazy, faintly amused, like a man about to step onto a boat for a casual trip rather than onto a path that had birthed emperor-level existences.
He stepped forward.
Blood light swallowed him whole.
The altar shook.
The Road of Emperor opened.