Lordi waved a hand, a gesture of finality that brooked no argument. "No further discourse is necessary. Consider this Gloomwater Phantom Lily Array your first crucible—an assessment of your evolution post-Tribulation Transcendence. Prove your worth."
The Sword of Red Run, its simple nature utterly swayed by Lordi's logic that resonated perfectly with its core thirsting of bloodlust and validation, hastened to affirm. "Rest assured, Master! How could Red Run ever cower before mere formations, lifeless constructs of Spirit stones and Dao Fulus, devoid of soul? Well, but—"
"Then demonstrate your valor to me!" Lordi interjected sharply, his tone a whip-crack of impatience that forestalled any further elaboration, any hint of a 'but' that might expose the gaps in his knowledge or prolong this dangerous exchange. He would hear no more excuses.
Thus silenced by the absolute authority in Lordi's command, the sentient devil sword offered no further protest.
The very atmosphere wrapping Red Run seemed gathering fury. The cloying, sweet scent of cherry blossoms was violently scoured away, replaced by an electric tang of ozone and a metallic taste of blood that coated the tongue. The air itself grew taut, stretched thin like a drumhead about to be struck, humming with a pressure that felt utterly alien—a weight not of this world, but drawn from some deep, abyssal dimension. The grove seemed to shrink in on itself, every leaf and branch tensing in primal anticipation of the cataclysm to come.
With a sound like a shard of ice splitting the night, the sword ceased its hover. In a motion that mirrored its prior, vicious assault within the Driftdream Loch, the Sword of Red Run inverted itself and ascended.
It was no longer a blade, but a horizon of blood. it metamorphosed into a colossal crimson river that locked towards heavens lethally. It elongated, widening into a churning, crimson river that blotted out the sky, its surface a seething tapestry of molten metal and the shrieking, tormented faces of the souls it had devoured. It was not a weapon, but a piece of the abyss given purpose.
One end of this impossible blood river coalesced, its tip sharpening into a colossal, scarlet rammer aimed with unerring malice at the unseen prison that constrained the entire mountain grove. The very fabric of the night sky seemed to shake above it, and the faint starlight that dared to pierce the demonic glow appeared to bend and flee from its inevitable path.
Then, with the gathering of force, it ascended. The vast rammer did not travel through the air so much as it unmade the space between itself and its target!
A wall of pure violence that hit the celestial barrier and made the firmament itself buckle. The impact was not a sound, but the absolute annihilation of the very concept of sound.
A shockwave of pure malice exploded outwards first, hitting the dozen-mile grove of cherry blossoms.
The result was not destruction, but a beautiful, frenzied madness. Every single tree, for miles in every direction, convulsed as if in ecstatic agony. The shockwave did not break the boughs; it simply stole every petal at once. Trillions of them, a universe of soft pink and white, were ripped from their branches in a single, violent exhalation.
The air vanished, replaced by a blizzard of silk. The vicious wind sent the petals into a frantic, whirling dance, a tempest of delicate beauty born from absolute brutality. They caught the distorted light of the giant devil blade, glowing like ethereal embers in the hellish glow.
What erupted then was a physical, brutal note of pure force—
KKKRRRAAAAA-BOOOOOOOOOM!—
The sound was so immense, a pain that was instantly followed by a ringing, absolute silence.
Yet, for all the sound and fury, the array held. The grand defensive formation shimmered invisibly, its barriers unyielding.
Observing the sword's engrossment with its futile barrage against the grand defensive array, Lordi seized the opportunity and moved. His form blurred, the Blood Spectre Footwork Art turning him into little more than a whisper of shadow sliding through the maelstrom of pink and white.
Lordi, moved not through air, but through a river of petals. His Blood Spectre Footwork Art turned his form into a ghost, a shimmer of desperation weaving through the beautiful chaos. The petals coated his shoulders, caught in his hair, stuck to the sweat on his skin.
He glided silently along the terrain, evading the detection from that devil sword.
He dared a glance back. The devil sword, consumed by its own rage, continued its relentless, thunderous assault on the unyielding array, each blow sending another wave of devastating beauty rippling through the grove.
It was the most brutal thing he had ever witnessed, and the most beautiful.
Moments later, in a secluded hollow shielded awy from the sword's gaze by a thick copse of trees, Lordi paused. His breath was a shallow tide in his lungs. With swift, precise movements, he drew the Blade of Life Hater from his storage pouch.
Then, he called upon the roaring aura within him, the External Spirit Essence siphoned from the Sword of Red Run. A trickle of silver mist flowed from his palm into the bone blade. The bone blade drank it greedily, its pale surface darkening to a smoky grey, its edge now pulsating with a faint, sinister vitality, like a dormant serpent stirring. The transfer complete, he concealed the weapon and fled the grove's confines without a backward glance.
Running for another several minutes, Lordi found a place near a stagnant pond, its waters black and scummed over. Here, in a desolate nook hidden by a thicket of thorny brush and the pond's visual obscurity, he fell to his knees. With frantic, desperate hands, he clawed at the earth, digging a crude, shallow burrow. The smell of damp soil and decay filled his nostrils. Without ceremony, he interred himself within this earthen embrace, pulling the loose dirt over his legs, his torso, until only his face remained exposed to the twilight sky.
Lying in the cold, dark embrace of the earth, a final caution surfaced—a memory of the demonic martial spell's price, its corrosive toll on the spirit. There was no more time for deliberation. Lordi braced himself, and with a final, inward turn of his will, invoked the Withered Heart Technique.
His vital essence snuffed out. His spirit energy retracted, folding in on his dantian until not a single ripple remained. The light in his eyes faded, his breath stilled in his lungs, his heartbeat fell into a silence. To any sense, he was no longer a living man, but a lifeless husk, a mere part of the landscape—his presence utterly erased amid the grove's lurking shadows and the distant, thunderous sword slash.
Atop the sky, the Sword of Red Run reveled in the fray with the grand defensive array, heedless of its diminished state following the depletion of its Spirit Essence.
Strike upon strike rained down, each more fervent than the last, eliciting great quakes from the array top sky above that propagated downward, straining the illusory floral expanse below.
Beneath the dirt, the solid land became uncertain. A tremor, slight as the shiver of a fevered, rippled through the soil.
The ground was no longer trembling; it was convulsing.
Then the true rending began.
Lordi lied as a corpse amidst the settling dust. The Withered Heart technique held him in its cold embrace. His heart did not beat; no breath plumed in the frigid air. Yet, his mind was a scalpel, sharp and cold, sensing the shifting hell around him second by second.
He did not feel fear as a common man might. The great dread that crawled up his mind was an intellectual thing, a chilling understanding of the scale of annihilation.
The land before him was not simply broken. It was unmade.
A jagged, lightning-bolt scar that lanced across the land, splitting the world into fractured pieces. The ground groaned open, a yawning, dark mouth exhaling the cold, damp breath of the abyss. What was once a grove became a nightmare of tilting, canting planes of dirt and grass, each section lurching to a different, jarring rhythm.
Cherry trees, their roots clawing at nothing, screamed as they were torn from their cradle of soil and hurled sideways, their trunks snapping with reports like cannon fire. The ground heaved upwards in some places, creating monstrous, shuddering minor hills, while in others it sank into gaping pits.
And then, gradually, as the land finished its violent convulsions, the truth was laid bare. The shattered grove of cherry tree trunks crumbled away like a false façade, unveiling the vast grove's authentic, horrific visage. This was no mere orchard. It was a necropolis.
Beneath the thin skin of soil and blossom lay a graveyard of desiccated arboreal corpses, their bark like ancient, flayed skin, their limbs contorted skyward weirdly.
Beneath these skeletal sentinels, the earth was a charnel house. Ossified human remnants were piled in macabre heaps. Between them, flickering ghost flames danced erratically, casting a pallid, sickly illumination.
The soil itself exuded a sanguine tint, as if the very earth wept tears of old blood. It was saturated with a dead essence so profound it permeated the air, a miasma of profound desolation and spectral malice that sought to leach the warmth from souls.
Then, it came not from the sky, but from the deep—a low groan that vibrated through the soles of the feet and up into the bones. The very earth shuddered. The surface of the vast lake, once placid, suddenly bulged upwards as if a large beast were awakening from millennia of slumber.
High above, the intricate, shimmering web of the Gloomwater Phantom Lily Array flared with desperate, blinding light. The ancient runes etched into its ephemeral fabric burned like dying stars, channeling every last vestige of power to contain the unimaginable pressure rising from below. It held for a moment. Then, with a sound like a thousand panes of glass shattering, the Inner Formation failed. It did not simply fade; it ruptured spectacularly, its energy scattering into a million motes of extinguished light, its protective illusion torn asunder.
Freed of its constraint, the lake erupted.
The world dissolved into a roaring, vertical ocean. A column of water, mountain-sized and furious, blasted into the heavens. It was not a wave; it was the entire lake, countless tons of water, hurtled into the air with the force of a mad god's wrath.
As the wall of water collapsed and the thunderous echo began to fade, the thick, perpetual mist that had cloaked the region for centuries simply… vanished.
And there, revealed in the suddenly clear air, miles away but rendered with impossible clarity by the scrubbed atmosphere, lay a sight that stole the breath from every onlooker.
No longer hidden behind the aqueous veil, a vast and mighty mountain range stood bare, the two mountain peaks clawing at the sky. And at its heart, the unmistakable silhouette of the Twin Peak Hill.
There, nestled between them, laid bare to the world for the first time in generations, sprawled the entirety of the Hanz Clan Estate.
The cataclysm was a symphony of chaos, and the Sword of Red Run, thrummed with a vicious ecstasy at its crescendo. As the world drowned and the Inner Formation shattered, It turned toward Lordi, its form vibrating with a low, hungry hum, prepared to vaunt its prowess and demand praise.
But its gloating was severed, not by a voice, but by a sight that struck its very core with the force of a physical blow.
The earth-shattering roar from the lake's annihilation still echoed, but from the heart of the newly revealed Twin Peaks, a new soundless power answered. A translucent silver light, so pure it seemed to cut the soul itself, pierced the heavens. It erupted from the highest point of the mountain, from the very epicenter of the Hanz Clan's Ancestral Shrine, a shimmering pillar of absolute resolve that tore through the lingering black clouds and stained the night.
It was not mere light. It was intent. A formidable, razor-sharp Sword Intent that did not ask for dominance, but simply asserted it as an immutable law of nature.
"Master?!"
The cry was not spoken aloud, a raw emission of pure, unadulterated shock. The unvanquished Outer Formation, the intricate trap it was meant to oversee, was instantly forgotten by the sword.
Without another moment's hesitation, the Sword of Red Run abandoned its post. Its form dissolved from a solid weapon into a streak of bloody light, a comet of panic and dread hurtling through the ravaged air. It cut the air a desperate, frantic scar toward the mountain's peak, toward the source of that terrifying, familiar Sword Intent.