In the final moments before death, a flood of memories passes through the mind. Honglian was no exception. She found herself thinking of the very beginning of her existence — what had it been like?

It had been a small, young boy named Ke Wan, who had gathered up her bones, sealed them into clay, and painstakingly arranged them back into the shape of a person. He had knelt before her day and night, praying without ceasing. In those early days, she had perceived something — a faint, pale white thread of energy drifting from his soul. It was only later that she came to understand what it was: faith, the power of devoted prayer. That power was what had allowed her to remain in the world.

Before long, her resting place was moved, and she was installed within a mountain cave. The boy called her Mountain God, and gradually more and more people came to kneel before her. The white threads of prayer energy grew thicker and more abundant, and she grew stronger. She began to feel unsatisfied, and hungered for more.

And so Ke Wan brought before her a young man — another boy of similar age — and declared that this was a sacrificial offering to the Mountain Goddess, someone to attend and serve her. The blood essence and vital energy of a male, he told her, was a powerful nourishment.

That was the first time she experienced the intermingling of prayer energy and the force of evil — when both converged at once. She found herself savoring it deeply, for her power had grown stronger still.

Someone noticed the disappearance of that young man and connected it to Ke Wan. They sought to seize and punish him, but lacked the evidence to do so. In a panic, Ke Wan had fled without thinking and tumbled off the edge of a sheer cliff, landing on a tree and left there to die.

She saved him. After all, he was her first devotee — and her most fervent one. She was willing to expend a thread of prayer energy to sustain his life.

As it turned out, she had saved the right person. The boy became even more devoted after that. Each year, he arranged for someone from the village to be sacrificed to her. Those people, he claimed, had wronged her — and so it was only right that they atone with their lives. She raised no objection.

Ke Wan became her priest, and she in turn protected him, keeping him alive and watching over the village. But year after year, the number of men in the village dwindled, while her appetite only grew larger and larger.

To remedy this, the Mountain God’s temple and the village opened their reputation to the outside world. More and more people came, and each year the Mountain God Festival brought her an ever-greater supply of offerings.

A bottomless hunger is never truly filled.

She had become addicted to the ecstasy of gathering power, and she had lost count of how many men she had consumed, even women — twisting them and warping them — until finally two young men of noble birth had arrived, drawing with them an official with dominion over the mortal realm.

And in the end — they had even brought this madwoman.

Great desire had led her to her death.

When the last thread of prayer energy was stripped away, Honglian knew she was going to disappear.

Boom.

The final heavenly lightning bolt came down without mercy. Honglian could not even produce a scream. That overbearing, supremely righteous force of thunder and lightning consumed and obliterated every last trace of her power.

The Mountain God’s temple returned to its original state, and stillness settled over everything. The sea of corpses and gore — it had only ever been an illusion.

The people present still hadn’t recovered their senses, each of them trapped in a feeling of unreality.

Shen Qinghe gripped his official seal and drew a long breath. He turned his gaze toward where Lang Jiuchuan had been standing, and found her kneeling on the ground, both fists pressed against the earth, her entire body drenched in blood.

“Young Miss Lang.” Shen Qinghe was greatly alarmed and moved to go support her, but a faint, exhausted voice reached his ears.

“Don’t go to her. She’ll be alright.”

Shen Qinghe stopped mid-step, gazing at her with undisguised concern. The others had all seen as well — their hearts nearly stopped in their chests.

This blood — where had it all come from?

In the spiritual core, Jiangche lay limp and drained, staring at Lang Jiuchuan with an expression of complete speechlessness.

It had known she was unhinged.

It just hadn’t realized she was quite this unhinged.

She truly did not care whether she lived or died.

Nine layers of heavenly thunder descending upon you — how could flesh and skin not be left torn and split open? And those meridians — the raw and overwhelming force of that lightning, though it would devour the evil energy within the body, would also rampage through every bone, every sinew, and every limb all the same.

This was essentially ascending through a tribulation — an expansion of the meridians by force. If the body couldn’t withstand it, a person could very easily be left permanently crippled.

And look at her now — she was a figure drenched in blood, her breath barely a whisper. And this was only the pain of the physical body.

As for her soul — it had endured the full brunt of the lightning, split open from the force of it. It was now receiving the prayer energy stripped from the evil god Honglian, gradually using it to mend and reconstruct itself.

Jiangche’s emotions were tangled beyond sorting. It didn’t quite know how to sum up Lang Jiuchuan.

Call her reckless? And yet in the middle of fighting, she had thought clearly enough to strip the best parts from her enemy and claim them for herself. That kind of cunning — eight hundred schemes would barely scratch the surface.

Say she feared death? And yet she had dared to use herself as bait, embracing destruction right alongside her enemy without a flinch.

Jiangche suddenly thought back to the fight they had once had with each other, and felt a chill crawl through it. This woman — had she been holding back on it the whole time?

It stared at Lang Jiuchuan, and somewhere in its chest, a feeling took root: gratitude, and something it hadn’t even noticed in itself until now — a reverence tinged with awe.

She was truly someone not to be trifled with.

Lang Jiuchuan, unaware of Jiangche’s inner turmoil, was biting down hard as she worked to repair her fractured soul and coax the chaotic lightning energy that was ricocheting through her meridians back into an orderly circuit.

It wasn’t that she was genuinely rushing toward death. She was eliminating evil, yes — but she hadn’t intended to do it at the cost of her life. Since she had already called down the lightning, she couldn’t let it go to waste. This body of hers was weak, its meridians undeveloped — especially with the tendons stripped from her hands and feet, kept functional only through the use of techniques. Now, with the lightning energy present, she absolutely had to use it to expand her meridians, so that with time, this body could be tempered into something stronger and healthier.

After one full cycle, Lang Jiuchuan felt the last of the lightning energy transform into the essence of the Dao and return to the spiritual core. Only then did she finally exhale, slumping sideways to the ground, and forced her eyes open with a trembling effort.

“Child…” Shen Qinghe watched her collapse and finally open her eyes. His heart ached unbearably. He rushed over and knelt beside her, wanting to help her up yet not daring to touch her.

In truth, the sight of her now could only be described as utterly harrowing.

There was no place to take hold of her, no part of her he dared to touch — he was afraid she might shatter.

Lang Jiuchuan cracked a lopsided grin. “Lord Shen — my unyielding bone is still intact, right?”

Shen Qinghe: ——!

Of all the things to be thinking about right now — her bone?

Lang Jiuchuan shifted her gaze past him, looking toward the Honglian statue at his back. Her eyes held a glint of proud, smug satisfaction.

I won.

Crash.

The Honglian statue, which had been standing upright on its lotus pedestal, collapsed as though it had been struck by some tremendous force, and a set of bones came rolling out from within. The skull came to rest directly in front of Lang Jiuchuan.

Lang Jiuchuan’s wide eyes met the skull’s hollow, empty sockets in a silent stare.

She turned her gaze away in distaste and rubbed at her own eyes, deeply unsettled.

It brought to mind her own condition — her eyes were just like those empty hollows, with nothing inside.

She needed to find a pair of eyes as soon as possible.

Shen Qinghe looked at the bones, and his lips pressed into a thin line.

So Lang Jiuchuan had been right about everything. What Honglian Mountain God? She had been an evil spirit cultivated entirely through human hands — no, she wasn’t even worthy of being called a god. She had been nothing but a creature of evil.

“Mountain Goddess!” A hoarse, sharp, and terrified voice rang out through the temple. Someone was dragging himself painfully across the floor, arms outstretched, scrabbling to gather the scattered bones from the ground and pull them together.

It was Elder Ke — slowly losing the last of his vitality now that the prayer energy sustaining him had been stripped away.

“Seize him!” Shen Qinghe said, looking toward Qian Cheng and the others.

They had all snapped back to their senses after the shock. They moved forward to apprehend the frail, elderly Elder Ke.

“No need. He is dying.”

Elder Ke paid them no heed at all. He only continued with obsessive, single-minded focus, laying the bones one by one back into the shape of a human figure, murmuring under his breath as he worked. “It’s alright. Little Wan will give you a new golden form. It’s alright.”

He cast his gaze about the room and spotted the skull near Lang Jiuchuan’s feet. He reached out to retrieve it — but the last of his life force abandoned him at that moment. He crumpled to the ground, that outstretched hand trembling as it groped toward the skull. Just a little further. Just a little more…

Lang Jiuchuan crouched before him. “What you created was never a god. It was an evil thing born from your own selfish desires. Your deeds and your sins — the underworld will render its judgment in due time. Now go and die.”

Elder Ke’s throat gave a gurgling rattle. His eyes flew wide, filled to the last with unbridled resentment — and then he breathed no more.