The plateau was a vision of righteous war. Siege ladders swarmed the outer timber walls, now blackened by fire. Disciple fought disciple in chaotic knots on the ramparts. Above, the sky was streaked with the contrails of formation flags—the White Serpent, the Glacier Lake, the Verdant Phoenix—their combined qi pressing down on the land like a leaden weight. The air tasted of burnt wood, ozone, and blood. The Purifying Frost Campaign had come in earnest.
Kaelen watched from a jagged outcrop, his small team hidden in the rocks below the main battle. Goran was pale, leaning on Lan. Rin's face was a mask of grim calculation. The direct approach was suicide. The main gate was a churning maelstrom of orthodox warriors.
"The eastern scarp," Rin whispered, pointing to a near-vertical face of rock and ice that formed the plateau's natural flank. "Their siege is focused on the walls. The climb is… possible." She looked at Kaelen's blood-stained face, his too-bright eyes. "For some of us."
Kaelen followed her gaze. It was a climb that would have killed him a season ago. Now, with the Heartstone's energy humming in his ruined meridians and the world reduced to structures of force and weakness, it was a puzzle. He saw the fissures, the ice-bond holds, the path of least resistance.
"Follow my marks," he said, his voice rough. He didn't wait for assent.
He moved up the cliff not like a climber, but like water finding a crack. His hands and feet found purchase not through strength alone, but through an instinctive understanding of the rock's stress points. He didn't climb; he flowed, occasionally pausing to drive the tip of his spear into the ice, leaving a visible notch for his disciples to follow. The Heartstone's power wasn't active, but its reshaping of his perception was permanent. The mountain was an open book.
He crested the edge and rolled onto the plateau's interior, behind the main defensive line. The scene was worse up close. The central yard was a triage area, filled with groaning disciples, many missing limbs, their wounds cauterized by frost or lightning techniques. The blacksmith's forge was now a medical station, the coals used to heat sealing irons. The air was thick with the smell of seared flesh and despair.
A Junior Disciple, her arm in a sling, spotted him. Her eyes, glazed with pain, widened in disbelief, then desperate hope. "Master! They broke through the west wall! They have Elder Mo trapped at the granary! They're saying… they're saying to surrender you and the Heartstone, or they'll burn the wounded!"
The words cut through the psychic fog in Kaelen's mind like a cleaver. Surrender the Heartstone. So they knew. Silas had been right. The song had been heard.
A cold, focused rage, sharper and more deadly than any he'd felt before, crystallized within him. They weren't just here for territory or justice. They were here as scavengers, drawn by the scent of a power they feared and coveted.
He didn't run toward the west wall. He walked. His disciples fell in behind him, a grim, battered phalanx.
The scene at the shattered granary was a tableau of orthodox triumph. A circle of Glacier Lake swordsmen surrounded a handful of Demon Sect defenders, led by the grizzled Elder Mo, who held a splintered wagon tongue as a staff. At the center of the orthodox ring stood a man who was not a disciple.
He was a mountain in silver-blue armor, ornate and functional. He carried no visible weapon. His presence alone warped the space around him, the air shimmering with cold so intense it fractured the light. A Heavenly General of the Purifying Frost. His gaze swept over the defenders with the indifference of a glacier.
"Your master is a coward who hides while you die," the General's voice boomed, resonating in their chests. "Give him up, and this ends. Cling to your heresy, and you will be made examples of."
"Our master," Elder Mo spat, blood flecking his beard, "is worth a thousand of your righteous butchers."
The General sighed, a puff of air so cold it froze the moisture on his helmet. "Then become an example."
He raised a gauntleted hand. The very moisture in the air coalesced into a thousand needle-sharp shards of ice, swirling around him with a sound like a screaming blizzard. It was a technique of mass execution, beautiful and horrifying.
Kaelen stepped into the open.
He didn't shout. He didn't flare his qi. He simply walked into the space between the General and his disciples.
All movement stopped. The swirling ice shards hung in the air. The General's bored eyes sharpened, fixing on Kaelen, then dropping to the faint, pulsating glow visible through the leather wrap on his left hand.
"The Demon Boy," the General rumbled. "And the trinket. You save me the trouble of digging through ruins."
"You're in my home," Kaelen said, his voice quiet, yet it carried through the sudden silence. "You're threatening my people."
"This wasteland is no one's home. And your 'people' are a contagion, soon to be purged." The General clenched his fist. The suspended ice shards all oriented toward Kaelen, their points gleaming. "Surrender the artifact. Your death will at least be quick."
Kaelen looked past the General, at the terrified, hopeful faces of his disciples. He saw Fen's stone in his mind's eye. He felt the Heartstone, a bottomless, hungry ocean of power, promising salvation and oblivion in the same breath.
The choice was no choice at all.
He closed his eyes and reached.
He didn't pull gently. He tore the mental dam wide open.
The Heartstone's power erupted from him not as a directed technique, but as a wave. A sphere of silent negation expanded from his body, washing over the yard. It had no color, no sound, no heat or cold. It was an absence.
Where it passed, the General's meticulously controlled, beautiful ice shards ceased to be. They didn't melt. They didn't fall. They vanished. The intense cold radiating from the General's armor… dissipated. The shimmer in the air around him flattened into normality. For a radius of fifty feet, the complex, interlocking qi matrices of the orthodox formation techniques simply… unraveled.
The General staggered, not from a blow, but from shock. His connection to his own cultivated power, to the ambient qi he commanded, was severed. For the first time in centuries, he was just a man in heavy armor.
"Wha— what heresy is this?!" he bellowed, his voice stripped of its resonant, intimidating power.
Kaelen opened his eyes. The world was a screaming tapestry of unraveling threads. He saw the General not as a mighty cultivator, but as a dense, complex knot of layered energies and hardened life force—a fortress of self. The Heartstone's power surged, hungry. It wanted to unmake that knot, to see what fundamentals lay beneath the legend.
No. Kaelen gritted his teeth, blood streaming from his eyes now, mixing with the tears. He wrenched the power away from the General's core, from the temptation of total deconstruction. He couldn't control that. If he started, he wouldn't stop until there was nothing left.
Instead, he focused on the most immediate, physical threat. The General's silver-blue armor, a masterpiece of spiritual forging, inscribed with runes of durability and cold resistance.
He pointed a trembling finger and gave the command: Unmake the bindings.
There was no dramatic explosion. The armor didn't shatter. The runes along the breastplate and pauldrons simply… faded, like ink in water. Then, with a series of sharp pings, the rivets and straps holding the plates together disintegrated. The magnificent armor collapsed from the General's body in a discordant heap of suddenly inert metal, leaving him standing in simple under-robes, exposed and utterly vulnerable.
The silence was absolute. Orthodox and demon disciple alike stared, dumbfounded.
The Heavenly General looked down at his pile of armor, then up at Kaelen, his face a mask of primal, unbelieving terror. This wasn't defeat. This was invalidation.
Kaelen took a shuddering step forward. He couldn't speak. His jaw was locked, every muscle in his body seizing as he fought to contain the torrent within. He lifted his spear, the tip wavering violently.
It was enough. The General, his invincibility unmade, his courage shattered by the inexplicable, broke. He turned and fled, a raw, panicked shout bursting from his lips: "RETREAT! FALL BACK!"
The spell broke. The orthodox forces, witnessing the demigod of their campaign reduced to a fleeing, half-clad man, dissolved into a rout. The momentum of the siege snapped.
On the ramparts, the remaining Demon Sect defenders found their fury and pushed the invaders back with desperate, renewed strength.
In the yard, Kaelen stood swaying, the wave of negation receding. The world's sounds rushed back in—the cries of the retreat, the moans of the wounded, the crackle of fires. The cost of his victory crashed down upon him. He felt hollowed out, scraped raw. Whole swaths of his past felt distant, dreamlike. He knew, with terrifying certainty, that if he ever fully unleashed the Heartstone's power to unmake a person, not just their techniques or armor, a part of his own humanity would be permanently unmade with it.
He had saved his sect. He had broken a Heavenly General without landing a blow.
And he had stared into the abyss of the Path of Unmaking, and felt it stare hungrily back.
Elder Mo approached, awe and deep concern warring on his face. "Master… what… what do we do now?"
Kaelen looked at the fleeing enemy, at the smoldering ruins of his plateau, and finally at the pulsing, patient weight in his hand.
"Now," he whispered, his voice the rasp of breaking stone, "they will truly fear us. And now… the real war begins."
He had chosen his path. He would walk it, even if it meant carrying the abyss within him.