Eight Trigrams City — this frontier fortress that had stood for a thousand years — had now been completely reduced to a living hell on earth.
Death energy, resentment, and fear had all transformed into a sky-blotting demonic miasma, like a massive black curtain that completely smothered the entire city and the surrounding mountain ranges. The battle banners that had once flown from the city walls were torn to shreds, stained with dark red bloodstains and scattered among the broken walls and crumbling ruins. The walls themselves had collapsed in multiple places. Blackened smoke still curled up from the burn marks, and at every gap and breach, the bodies of the defending soldiers and foreign warriors had piled up in gruesome heaps.
Though it was only the end of the second month, the border region was still bitterly cold. Snow was falling from the sky — it had been falling for who knew how long — and mixed with blood, it had frozen all the bodies beneath the city walls into a grim display of corpses. The flesh of many of those bodies had dried and shrunken, as though every last ounce of their life force had been drained away.
Inside the city, the sight was even more unbearable. The streets were strewn with the bodies of civilians — men and women, young and old, none had been spared. A sky-reaching current of resentful energy rose from their corpses, merging into the black demonic energy and adding even more of its dark corruption to it, making it heavier and more terrifying.
And some who still had a faint trace of life remaining but had already been assimilated and eroded by the demonic energy wandered about like the living dead, endlessly attacking everything around them.
The air was thick with the smell of blood, and a nameless, indescribable aura of evil and hollow emptiness permeated everything.
Everywhere Lang Jiuchuan’s gaze swept, there was only the color of blood. Her entire body trembled as the demonic energy closed around her from all sides, like countless slender tendrils wrapping tightly around her, causing her aura to grow ever more cold and savage.
Feng Ya noticed. He reached out and pressed down firmly on her shoulder. “Lang Jiuchuan — stop those thoughts. This is not your fault.”
He understood her nature. She was inevitably telling herself that she and Jiangche, meaning well, had inadvertently destroyed the formation’s eye without knowing the truth, removed the sealing artifact, and released the imprisoned demonic soul — which in turn had brought disaster to the common people today.
But how could this be her fault?
The ones who had designed this entire scheme were Tantai Wuji and the demonic fiend known as the void. They were the true perpetrators responsible for all of this.
Lang Jiuchuan’s eyes were red as she drew a deep breath. She looked at the cavity that had been torn open, at that hollow aura which was even more intense the deeper you went into the pit, and leaped down into it.
At the bottom, deep beneath the earth, there was a small altar — fashioned from Vajra Mystic Stone, covered in properly inscribed talisman patterns — yet now riddled throughout with hairline cracks that spread like cobwebs. Once the talisman patterns were broken, the altar was worthless.
The altar was shaped like an upside-down bowl. In Daoist tradition, this inverted form carried the meaning of suppression — a symbol used to trap malevolent ghosts and evil spirits, keeping them pinned down and denied any peace. Now that the bowl had cracked, it had naturally lost all its power to suppress.
Lang Jiuchuan pressed both hands onto the cracked and overturned stone bowl, lightly closing her eyes. She forced her spiritual power into the stone in a retroactive trace, drawing all that had occurred in this place into her sea of consciousness.
In the next instant, she withdrew her hands. Her complexion was terrible.
Feng Ya looked at her once, and had already guessed. Everything they had speculated was the truth. Seeing that her aura was becoming unstable again, he said: “This is not your problem. Do not let this bring inner demons upon you, causing your foundation in the Dao to darken — that would only play right into the hands of the evil and the wicked.”
Lang Jiuchuan stared at those shattered talisman patterns. Her voice carried a pain and self-reproach that was impossible to put into words. “No — it is my fault. If I had not been presumptuous that day, if I had not told Jiangche to dig up the things beneath the stone pillar, we would not have been used in such a way, and the imperial seal would not have been taken — his foundation would not have been severed, this imprisoned demonic soul would not have been released, the two would not have merged as one. Perhaps they would not have gone so berserk, would not have invited the foreign tribes to break through the city, would not have created this boundless slaughter and turned this place into a dead city of demonic earth.”
Through the power of retroactive vision, she had seen it all. Beneath the earth there had been a skeleton — black and red, saturated through with a wicked and sinister demonic energy that filled even the very marrow with revulsion.
Now it was gone. No — it had broken free of its suppression, just as she herself had once done, and had merged with the soul of Tantai Wuji, the two becoming one, each a scoundrel aiding the other.
The overwhelming smell of blood from outside, raw and rank, struck her and made her nauseous. Thinking of the mountains of corpses and rivers of blood outside that pit, these countless souls who had died so terribly as an indirect result of her actions — it felt like the heaviest of shackles, clenching brutally around her heart.
The sharp, piercing pain in her heart made her spine bow slightly.
The boundless tide of resentment and death energy was not only the power of the demonic Tantai Wuji — it had also transformed into an invisible curse that eroded her foundation in the Dao piece by piece. She seemed to hear the agonized wailing of countless souls in her ears, demanding to know why she had not stopped this sooner, why she had allowed one moment of complacency to brew such catastrophe, why she had not foreseen the heavenly mysteries earlier and saved the common people.
Feng Ya said coldly: “Lang Jiuchuan — stop that line of thought. If you think this way, you have fallen into Tantai Wuji’s trap. In this battle, you will then play right into the course he has calculated. At that point, defeat will be inevitable.”
Lang Jiuchuan seemed not to hear him. The Core Formation that had only recently solidified and not yet been fully tempered was trembling faintly. The brilliant golden light that had shone from her Core began to be covered by a layer of gray and shadow.
The pure spiritual energy around her grew disordered. Deep within her eyes, a thread of dark murk — one that shared the same origin as the demonic energy — quietly began to take root. It was the earliest sign of inner demons appearing.
The extreme depths of her compassion and self-reproach, magnified and guided by the wicked demonic energy seeping through the pit, were trying to drag her into an abyss of being swallowed by negative emotions — an abyss not unlike the one Tantai Wuji had fallen into.
She had once been taught by him. She should have ended up walking the same path as he did.
Yes — she was never some great and virtuous person to begin with…
Seeing her aura turning chaotic, Feng Ya was suddenly struck with alarm. He yanked out her Small Nine Pagoda and drove the wooden fish within it, striking it in a steady rhythm, one beat after another. Carrying with it the Buddhist resonance of Venerable Luole, it crashed forcefully into Lang Jiuchuan’s divine soul.
“Lang Jiuchuan!”
A low yet bell-like roar of command exploded within her sea of consciousness.
Feng Ya seized her by the shoulders, and his immense soul power, mixed with the vast partially-refined fortune energy, forced its way into her nearly-lost mind, refusing to allow her to be influenced by the remnant evil energy of this place.
“Wake up for me.” Feng Ya’s eyes blazed as he stared into hers. His voice was cold as ice. “The true perpetrator responsible for all of this is Tantai Wuji — the one who cast aside all human decency and willingly sank into the demonic path. It is the demonic power that invited the foreign tribes through the pass, who slaughtered the living and drove people to kill each other. It is their towering crimes, their desire to transform the world into a demon realm — and not you.”
He lifted her up out of that deep pit, pointed at the mountains of bodies that lay piled up everywhere, and spoke with a tone like the edge of a blade: “Look at them clearly. These innocent lives who have died in agony — if at this moment you allow inner demons to take hold, if your Dao-heart is tainted, you will have truly done what the demonic path intended. Swept along and assimilated by their current, at that point there will be no one in this world capable of standing against them. And you — this so-called martyr drowning in self-reproach and guilt — will only become a puppet of the demonic path, causing the order of heaven to collapse all the faster, beyond any hope of salvation.”
Struck by Feng Ya’s fierce reprimand, Lang Jiuchuan shuddered from head to foot, as though struck by lightning. The resolute thunderstruck intent swept through her spiritual platform, wrenching her free by force from the vortex of self-reproach.
Realizing how close she had come to being drawn into inner demons, Lang Jiuchuan’s fury surged violently upward. Her aura erupted with sudden and overwhelming force, and the chaotic energy around her exploded outward in an instant — coalescing into a massive sphere of light that blasted toward the pit below.
Boom!