Zhennan rose to his knees as if underwater, every breath a blade. He could taste copper and dust; the world had narrowed to a ring of crimson light and the keening of his own blood. He turned when he heard the soft sound of approaching footsteps—slow, deliberate—and saw his father step forward with that same empty, terrible calm.
In one blink everything changed.
A fist slammed into Zhennan's stomach. The air was driven from his lungs like a bellows, and he folded onto the stone. He tasted bile. He tried to roll toward He Ruying—toward the small, fragile shape of their son—but Han Zhenwu was faster than grief. In a motion that made Zhennan's blood run cold, Zhenwu snatched the child from He Ruying's arms.
Lightning crawled along Zhenwu's skin as if it were a living thing. He thrust his palm forward; a lance of cold, blinding light struck He Ruying through the ribs. She flew like a rag, skidding across the floor until her body crashed into the wall. A soundless, perfect hole gaped through her belly. Her fingers clawed at air. Her eyes fixed on Zhennan—wide, incredulous, wet—and for a second time stalled in the world as if the world itself could not believe it.
"Ruying!" Zhennan screamed. He heaved to his feet, fury detonating in his chest—an animal sound, raw and unrefined. He lunged, blind.
Zhenwu met him with another crushing blow. Zhennan's vision fractured; stars and color flared and died. Fingers like iron seized his throat and lifted him, dragging him toward the center of the ritual circle as the runes around them flared ulcerous red. The air smelled of ozone and iron. The whole room seemed to tilt.
"You know what I gave you," Zhenwu said, voice flat as a blade. "I fed you, trained you, guarded you for twenty years. I made you my heir—my living sword. I even put a wife before you on a silver plate. I gave you a son."
He tightened his grip until Zhennan's head rocked on his shoulders. Flesh slumped. Breath rattled.
"And yet you threw it away," Zhenwu continued, each word spit slow, deliberate, brutal. "You let go of the inheritance for something as expendable as a wife and a child. You could have had a hundred wives—counted, arranged, useful. But you chose to play at being some chivalrous fool, a husband with a golden heart. You are young, spoiled, foolish. Before I reached your age, I was already forged by fire. Your life has been a golden child's life, and you squandered it."
He thrust Zhennan down until his face pressed into cold stone. Pain lanced through every jaw muscle. Tears blurred Zhennan's sight but he did not cry; he roared instead, a sound more animal than man. It came out ragged and sharp. He tried to pull himself free; his hands scrabbled on the floor, nails biting dust.
Zhenwu laughed—no heat in it, only the thin creak of a man who had worked his cruelty into a craft.
"I want you to see," he said, and shoved his shoulder forward. "I want you to see the light leave her eyes. I want you to see her corpse grow cold. Watch, boy."
He brought his palm down. The strike was animal and scientific, a simple calculation of bone and force; Zhennan did not even have time to scream. He Ruying's head lolled. Blood frosted on her lips. The child in Zhenwu's arms whimpered, an infant sound that tore holes through Zhennan's chest.
Those were the moments that unmade him.
Madness comes not as a single storm but as a thousand small betrayals that form a hurricane. Zhennan's survival instinct kicked with a crystalline clarity: protect child, shield wife, kill father if he must. He rose—because there was nothing left to fall to—and lunged in a desperate, howling arc. Zhenwu met him and smashed him face-first into the stone until his teeth tasted grit and copper. Even rage had limits here; the world narrowed around the pressure in Zhennan's skull, and consciousness threatened to peel away like old paper.
Zhenwu shoveled Zhennan into the center of the circle and forced him flat. He placed the child—warm, small, fragile—beside his son's chest.
"You never resembled me," Zhenwu said, pacing once around the boy like a predator inspecting a kill. "You are like my father—foolish, kind, soft. All those words you learned about honor and kindness? They are synonyms for weakness. My grandfather was different. He had the will to do what must be done. That's why my father killed him because he saw him as a monster and that's why i killed my father because i saw him as a soft weakling that didn't deserve his power oir family is built on generations that oppose the next one's, just like my father was the opposite to my grandpather and i was the opposite of my father and you are the opposite of me it's like a curse that makes sure our clan never has a common goal within it's members and generations. but that means to nothing to a person who never wanted such a thing as unity." He spat as if those words tasted of iron. "But I care nothing for the old myths. Power is not mercy. Power is survival. I took this clan by killing; I kept it by lying and by ruthlessness. You were given everything, and you chose a lullaby over a blade."
As if to punctuate the lesson, Zhenwu set his hands over Zhennan's wrists and drove a set of cold, runed manacles into the boy's flesh. They bit like winter, a thousand tiny needles sinking into bone. Zhennan writhed, but the iron gramatically resonated with the ritual's runes—ancient seals that drank Qi and spat silence back. He felt the burning, intimate cold of his own life-force being threaded into the metal.
"Chains," Zhenwu murmured, methodical and empty. "A little restraint until the final act."
With the same clinical care, he pressed the sealing talismans to Zhennan's temples. The runes shocked, a flare of white and black energy that sucked at the channels and meridians like a starving mouth. Zhennan's Qi screamed and the world dimmed to a soft, reedy howl. His limbs went leaden. He tried to move, to wrench away, but the chains were anchored in the runes and the runes were carved into the very floor. The spell swallowed his Qi whole—sealed, capped, knotted. The heat that had burned in his dantian subsided into a cold, aching absence.
Zhenwu crouched close enough for his voice to scrape Zhennan's ear.
"In all honesty," he said, the words low enough that only Zhennan could hear, "you never resembled me. You are a pale imitation. My grandfather was cruel like me. His son was soft like you. It seems to be the breed. The world is not shaped by sentiment. It is shaped by will. Where talent and lineage fail, will fills the gap. I was treated as a bastard soldier; I clawed my way up. I will not be the weak link anymore."
He hammered the final seals into place. The manacles whispered and tightened and Zhennan felt his Qi fracture into a thousand frozen points. The light in the ritual circle bent and sank like the last breath of day.
Zhenwu straightened and looked at the broken heap of his son and the still body of He Ruying with the apathetic, far-away gaze of a man who had long ago traded feeling for a ledger balanced in blood.
The words fell like hammered nails. Around them the runes pulsed—patient, inexorable—filling the chamber with a sound like a beating heart. The ritual was alive, hungry. Outside, the world was closing in. Inside, in the hollowed center, Zhennan's breath came shallow and tinny beneath the iron taste of sealed Qi and the frozen, unbearable stillness of a man stripped of his power.
Zhenwu turned away, methodical as ever, and set about the next phase of his work with the calm of a man who had already unmade a life and now only needed to finish the accounting.
Tianhun and the elders gathered before the mountain's sealed entrance, the barrier flickering with intricate patterns of gold and violet. Each strike against it rippled like lightning trapped in glass — immense, unyielding, and ancient.
They could feel the power woven into the formation. Even a full-force strike from a True Emberwake cultivator barely chipped the edges of the seal. None dared to exhaust themselves fully — to do so in front of rival sects would be suicide. So, they took turns: one elder at a time stepped forward, releasing controlled bursts of Qi to chip away at the formation.
Lu Chenhao stood to the side, watching grimly. His son, Lu Zhenhai, clenched his fists, helpless. The mountain trembled with each blow, but the shield still held — shimmering, stubborn, defiant.
---
Inside the mountain, the scene was far more horrific.
Zhennan's body convulsed as streams of Qi were forcefully ripped from him, his veins glowing like molten cracks beneath his skin. Blood poured from cuts carved across his arms, chest, and shoulders — deliberate, ritualistic wounds made by Han Zhenwu. The blood flowed unnaturally, coiling in the air, weaving itself into an orbiting circle above the ground.
It was not light. It was absence — a circle of darkness that devoured the glow of every torch, every rune. Inside that blackness, something vast and hungry turned.
Zhenwu's hands moved with surgical precision, tossing one rare material after another into the circle — jade dust, golden sand, talismans burning with symbols of old, and the glittering cores of slain Emberwake beasts. Each one shattered in midair, devoured by the void as it expanded.
Zhennan's screams echoed endlessly.
Zhenwu's mind was steady, cold, pragmatic.
It seems I won't even need his son for this. He'll be useful as an anchor in case I need to escape the inheritance realm.
He turned, intent on retrieving the infant.
Then he stopped.
He Ruying was moving.
Or rather, crawling — dragging herself across the ground, her body drenched in her own blood, every motion trembling. Her eyes were vacant, yet a single thread of will kept her moving forward. One hand after another, inch by inch.
She was crawling toward her child.
Zhenwu blinked in mild surprise. She should not have survived the earlier strike. Her Qi had been shattered, her organs torn apart. Yet she moved still — not by strength, but by something far deeper.
He sighed. "Persistent woman." He raised his hand, lightning gathering at his fingertips — just one flick would end it.
Then the mountain shook.
His brow furrowed. The formation was weakening — faster than expected. Impossible, he thought. Tianhun shouldn't be able to breach this so soon… unless he's brought reinforcements.
Even so, he would not allow distractions. He could kill her in a heartbeat.
He Ruying didn't care. Her vision was dark at the edges, her body barely obeyed her. She could hear her husband's agonized screams, her child's frightened cries. She reached out with trembling fingers, her hand brushing against Zhennan's ankle as he lay bound in the ritual circle.
Zhennan, barely conscious, lifted his head just enough to see her. His eyes widened — his wife, her face pale, covered in blood, smiling faintly through tears. She reached toward him, her lips forming silent words he couldn't hear.
And then—
A flash.
A thin, silver blade of lightning cut the air.
It pierced through her neck cleanly.
Time froze.
Her hand fell limp. Her head rolled to the ground with her eyes still open — the faintest smile frozen upon her lips. The life faded from her pupils like embers drowned in water.
Zhennan's scream shattered the air.
It wasn't human anymore. It was pure agony, raw, unfiltered, endless.
He struggled violently, tearing his wrists against the chains until his skin split. "WHY?! WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS!?" His voice cracked, his throat bleeding. "You raised me! You helped me her!, Why—why—!? OU DAMNED BASTARD I'LL KILL YOU!!"
Han Zhenwu didn't even glance at him.
He was busy lifting the child.
The infant cried, unaware of the blood dripping from Zhenwu's wrist as the man smiled. "You'll be of use yet, little one," he murmured. "If i can't leave the inheritance through the front door I'll just use you to create a backdoor."
Zhennan's body was a ruin — pale, trembling, his face hollow, eyes sunken. His life force was being sucked out of him, piece by piece, as the dark portal in the air stabilized.
Zhenwu looked upon his work and allowed himself a thin, satisfied smile.
The circle pulsed once — then split open into a gaping vortex of shadow.
He turned to finish the job — a single lightning bolt gathering in his palm to kill his son.
But before it struck, a translucent barrier snapped into existence around Zhennan, crackling like shattered glass made of light.
Zhenwu froze mid-step. Someone else was here.
The air quivered.
He glanced toward the mountain walls — the outer formations were crumbling too fast now. A flicker of cold understanding crossed his face. "Tch. faster then i expected ."
He didn't hesitate. A true predator never lingered when cornered.
With a blur of movement, he sprinted toward the swirling black gate — attacks rained from the cracks in the formation, streaks of light and Qi smashing into him. He evaded them all with serpentine agility, leaping through the collapsing ritual and diving straight into the vortex.
And then he was gone.
---
Outside, Lian Yue of the Stormbreak Sect stood with her hand raised, sweat beading on her forehead. Small stone puppets crawled over the rocks — her work. Through their eyes, she had seen inside the mountain, directing precise, coordinated attacks at the weak points of the formation.
Her control was astonishing — every puppet was far away, yet she manipulated them as if they were fingers of her own hand. Each movement drained her Qi, but she didn't falter.
It had been her intervention — a single burst of sealing energy channeled through her puppets — that had created the barrier around Zhennan just before Zhenwu's killing strike.
The others broke through moments later.
Tianhun and the elders entered the chamber first, followed by Lu Chenhao. The stench of blood hit them immediately. He Ruying's body lay motionless, her eyes still open, the child wailing softly beside her.
Zhennan was still alive — barely. His breath came in weak gasps, his eyes rolled back, and his body trembled uncontrollably as dark Qi coiled around his wounds.
Maro, the VenomHeart elder, was the first to move. He knelt beside the young man, pulling a handful of pills from his pouch and forcing them between Zhennan's lips. Then he poured a glowing liquid down his throat — a high-grade elixir.
"Swallow it, boy," Maro muttered, steadying his jaw. "Don't you die now. You're the only one who knows what that bastard did."
The others gathered around as Zhennan's faint heartbeat began to strengthen, though his eyes remained closed.
The ritual circle still pulsed faintly in the background — a doorway half-open, humming with the echo of Zhenwu's escape.