The night was thick with fire and screams.
The war had fractured across the Shadow Mountain basin like cracks in glass. Cultivators fought along charred ridgelines, atop broken plateaus, and through ashen gulches where spirit energy clashed like storms. The air trembled with violent Qi—poison, fire, blood, light—and beneath it all, the earth itself groaned, hollow and unclean.
And yet, amidst the inferno, one flame cut a straight path.
Kai led the assault personally.
Yin Shuang moved beside him like a silent blade, the Peerless Sword a blur of motion as it carved down demonic spawn that lunged from every corner. Behind them followed Bai Fu, his spirit-fire roiling around his blade, eyes hollow with purpose, grief now tempered into steel.
They advanced as a spearhead—twelve elite cultivators following Kai's call—bound together not by sect or oath, but survival.
The horde knew they were coming.
The path to the portal was drenched in trap sigils, ghost formations, and inverted talisman arrays laid with cruel precision by dark formation masters. The route was not merely watched—it was designed to devour intruders, spirit and body alike.
Kai called the signal rune.
The sky cracked.
"Push forward!" he shouted.
And the real assault began.
They entered the Valley of Crooked Stone beneath a veil of thunderclouds summoned by Kai's seal. Lightning seared the air behind them, masking their spiritual signatures for a few precious seconds. It was enough to breach the first perimeter.
"Watch the fog," Yin warned, eyes narrowing.
Demon fog. A cursed mist born from corrupted Qi, it did not simply blind—it whispered. It clawed at the minds of those who dared walk through it, dragging out guilt and failure like poison in the lungs.
They moved fast, keeping close. Yin's blade hummed faintly with moonlight, slicing a path forward as it purified the miasma in her wake.
One step into a false formation and they were surrounded.
The very ground erupted as ash beasts coalesced from stone and bone, wielding jagged clubs and shrieking in voices not their own. Bai Fu sprang forward, whirling his blade in wide arcs of flame. His eyes had the distant burn of someone who no longer feared death.
"We don't have time for this!" he roared, cleaving through three in one blow.
Kai didn't speak. His palm shimmered with Chaos and Celestial Qi fused into one, and with a sweep of his hand, the sky turned black.
He called down a starburst.
A swirling mass of silvery-gold flame burst from the heavens, detonating on contact and turning half the valley into molten glass.
Silence followed.
But the path remained cursed.
Six of their warriors fell to blood-triggered traps embedded in the cliffside. Two were dragged into the earth by vine-chained wraiths. One woman—an archer from the Wind-Hawk Sect—vanished screaming into the demon fog, never to be seen again.
Only five of them remained when the black gate came into view.
It was not a door.
It was a wound.
A ragged tear in the very fabric of the realm, stitched shut with chains made of soulmetal and bound to three massive soul furnaces, each one pulsing with the screams of what had been sacrificed to forge it. Around the wound knelt thousands of demon spawn, endlessly spilling through like insects from a hive.
And at its base was the altar.
Cracked.
Old.
Once divine.
Now twisted into a monstrous gateway of malice.
Kai stood at the crest of the final slope, Yin at his side. Bai Fu and the two remaining cultivators crouched behind a jagged outcropping of basalt.
"This is it," Kai said softly.
The moment hung between them.
Yin looked to him. "We break it?"
Kai nodded. "If we don't… it never ends."
He raised his hand.
A Celestial Eclipse technique blazed bright across his palm.
"Now!"
They surged forward.