The jade slip rested innocently on the scorched dirt. Even from several paces away, Krogh could recall its imagined feel: cool to the touch, its surface so smooth it seemed not carved but conceived, a sliver of absolute order won from the heart of absolute chaos.
He gazed upon it, and the sight was a mirror reflecting his own ruin. Wrinkles, deep as canyon cracks, mapped a lifetime of struggle onto a face that had aged centuries in a single night. His long white hair, which had billowed like a vengeful banner moments before, now lay lank against a skeletal frame. Each labored breath was a shallow, rattling thing, his aura guttering like a dying ember in a vast, cold hearth.
This jade slip was the culmination of his great venture into Vermithys, the bloody testament to his success. It was the key to the Legendary Cosmic Path Foundation Establishment, the reason he had walked through hell. And within it, he could feel it—the stolen half of his Life Providence, the very essence the ghost had torn from him. It pulsed with a faint, tantalizing warmth, a promise of life held just out of reach.
The legendary Cosmic Path had eluded him. The Sword of Red Run was lost. But this… this might yet preserve a flicker of his existence. With a groan that was pure effort, he forced one foot forward. Then the other. Each step was a monumental trial, his joints protesting, his muscles screaming. He moved with the sluggish, pained gait of an ancient elder on the brink of the grave, his eyes locked on the jade slip, a complex storm of triumph for the victory and a profound, weary sorrow for the cost churning within his hollowed chest. The first moment in the sword master's entire life, he was reaching not for power, but for the simple, desperate chance to see another dawn.
The world had narrowed to the space between his trembling hand and the cool, luminous jade. Each shuffling step was a victory over the void gnawing at his core. Triumph, however bitter, was inches away.
But the air screamed wild suddenly.
It was a vicious, screeching wind that carried not dust, but the promise of death itself, its chill biting deep into his already frozen meridians. A stealth attack, launched from the shadows he had been too weary to watch.
The instincts of a legend, honed over dozen thousand battles, flared. Krogh's mind commanded his hand to form a sword seal, to summon a sliver of aura to parry, to turn and face his end like the master he was.
But his body, ravaged and aged beyond its time, was no longer his to command.
He just felt it then—a sickening, internal snap. A final thread of connection between his will and his physical form, severed. It was not a bone, but something deeper, the last conduit of his power, breaking. His fingers, which had once conjured storms of sword aura, twitched and refused to obey. They hung in the air, limp and useless, as he watched the lethal force descend upon him.
There was no grand counter, no final, defiant stand. There was only the impact.
A brutal, concussive force, laden with the venom of the Bone Eroding Fist Art, took him in the back. It lifted his frail, weightless form and sent him crashing through the air like a discarded puppet. He smashed into the scattered rubble of the Ancestral Shrine, the collision a sickening crunch of old bones against stone and splintered wood. He lay there, sprawled amidst the ruins he had fought so hard to protect, the breath driven from his lungs, his vision swimming.
From the swirling dust and shadows, a tall figure emerged. His aura was a tempest of raw, newly forged Foundation Stage power, crackling with unchecked violence. His face was a storm of killing intent and grim purpose.
Donovan Valdez.
The Mister First Dominator had arrived too late for the great battle, but in perfect time for the execution. He had witnessed the apocalyptic clash, a spectacle of power that dwarfed any Earth Path Dao Pillar Foundation Stage expert or even Core Formation Stage legend overlords he had ever known. He had seen two titans tear at the fabric of reality, and he had seen the victor, Krogh Hanz, reduced to a dying, shuffling wreck.
The legend's reckless valor had left him vulnerable, a king dethroned and bleeding. And Donovan, seeing his chance for vengeance for his squad brothers, had seized it without hesitation. His fist was not just a weapon; it was a harbinger of retribution, now aimed at the heart of the arrogant motherfucker who had brought ruin to his squad brothers.
"Where are Zoe Wright and the others?" Donovan's voice was a lash of winter wind, cold and unyielding. He held back the killing strike that trembled in his fist, his entire being a tightly coiled spring of hatred and a wary, residual fear of the titan who had just felled an extreme powerful evil ghost. His eyes, burning with a fire stoked by grief and desperate, demanded the truth.
Krogh Hanz did not even grant him the dignity of a full glance. His response was a single word, carved from ice and edged with a dismissive arrogance that seemed to draw strength from his very proximity to death.
"Dead."
The word fell into the space between them not as a confession, but as a verdict, a blade of brutal finality that slid between Donovan's ribs and settled in his chest with the weight of a tombstone.
"Dead? Are you fucking with me?!" Donovan roared, the words tearing from his throat. But his furious expression slowly froze, solidifying into a mask of horrified certainty as he searched Krogh's face. He found no mockery there, only the profound, bone-deep weariness of a man who had long since passed beyond the petty concerns of lies and taunts. It was the disdain of a dying king for a squabbling peasant, and in that disdain, Donovan found the crushing, undeniable truth. The hope he had clung to, the reason he had rushed into this apocalypse, was extinguished. The confirmation was a seismic shock, collapsing the dam within him and unleashing a torrent of pure, unadulterated rage.
Grief and fury became one, a cataclysm that demanded an outlet. With a wordless scream that was ripped from his soul, Donovan unleashed his power. The Bone-Eroding Fist Art, now amplified to a terrifying degree by the full, untamed force of his Foundation Stage spirit essence, became a cataclysm of its own. It was not a single punch, but a maelstrom of obliteration. Shadows of fists piled upon one another like towering, crushing mountains; they surged forward like a roiling, furious sea, a tidal wave of force that roared toward the broken swordsman. The very air shook, compressed and screaming before the onslaught, a crumbling wall of absolute destruction meant to grind Krogh Hanz and the very stone beneath him into nothingness.
Yet, Krogh's expression did not change. Even as another wet, rattling cough wracked his frame, spraying dark blood and clots of vital essence onto the ground, his gaze remained unsettlingly calm. With a deliberateness that defied his frailty, a trembling, pointer finger rose, pointing not in defense, but in condemnation.
At his finger tip, a dozen frail, wisp-like Sword Aura Shards flickered to life. They were insubstantial as moonlight, delicate as a dying breath, yet they hummed with a precision that spoke of a truth that transcended physical power. They leaped into the heart of the storm of fists not with brute force, but with an ethereal, inevitable grace.
The result was not a collision, but a dissection. The mountainous fist shadows, for all their overwhelming power, shattered like brittle parchment against the effortless, razor-edge of the Sword Intent. The shards sliced through the maelstrom without losing momentum, their trajectory unerring as they slashed toward Donovan's heart with serene, lethal intent.
The! Fuck!
The curse was a silent detonation in Donovan's mind, his face contorting in pure, uncomprehending shock. How could this be? How could a man who was more mortal corpse than cultivator, whose body was a map of utter ruin, still command a power so refined, so utterly terrifying?
It was a brutal, mocking testament to the unparalleled might of the Cosmic Path Dao Pillar—the very legendary dao path he himself had just forsaken for the quicker, safer power of the Human Path. The choice now felt like a cruel jest, leaving him facing the curse of the supremacy he had surrendered.
At the very last conceivable moment, survival instinct took over. Donovan's newly awakened Spirit Essence flared, shoving his body aside with a desperate, mental command that screamed through every fiber of his being. He felt the wind of death pass by him, a sensation colder than any ice. A single, wisp-thin Sword Aura Shard grazed past his arm, not even touching him, yet its passage carved a deep, smoking ravine into the solid mountain rock behind him. A moment later, with a sound like a sigh, clear, cold mountain spring water began to seep from the fresh wound in the earth, welling up like the silent, weeping tears of the hill itself for the tragedy unfolding upon its scarred surface.
A wet, rattling cough tore itself from Krogh's chest, a harsh and terminal sound that shattered the brief stillness following the storm of their clash. A torrent of crimson, thick with dark, clotted matter, spilled from his lips in a gruesome cascade, painting his chin with the stark evidence of his mortal injury. In the brief moment before the pain fully claimed him, his eyes—once sharp enough to perceive the flaws in a falling raindrop—flashed with a complex, fleeting light: the sharp sting of surprise, yes, but beneath it, a deeper, more profound regret for a lifetime of honed skill rendered futile in a single, decisive instant.
It had been too long, an age by any measure, since he had experienced the humiliating failure of a missed sword stroke. His sword, an extension of his own will, had always found its mark with the inevitability of sunset, a truth he had come to wear as comfortably as his own skin. Had he not been so utterly drained, his spirit essence drained and his focus fractured by the earlier death battle, that single, perfect strike would have cleaved Donovan in two without question or ceremony, leaving no more than a crimson mist and a settled debate in its wake. The reality of his miss was a poison more potent than any wound.
His gaze, growing dimmer by the heartbeat, drifted from his fallen opponent to the jade slip lying discarded on the churned earth. The faint, ethereal glow that had once pulsed within its depths like a captive star was now completely extinguished, leaving it as dull and lifeless as a common river stone. With its destruction, the other half of the Life Providence it contained was lost to him forever. The very trophy prize he had fought so desperately to possess had become the anchor that dragged him into the abyss, the promise of greater power now mocking him with its absence.
A single, devastating realization echoed in the void of his fading consciousness, so absolute it snuffed out all other thought and plunged his mind into a moment of perfect, silent blackness. "I lost..." a voice, cold and final, whispered from the depths of his soul, "...completely." It was not merely a defeat in battle; it was the utter and irreversible collapse of his ambitions, his legacy, and the very path he had walked for centuries.
Yet, from that abyss of failure, a strange and stoic acceptance emerged. This was the end foretold for many who walked the razor's edge of the martial path, and the sword master, even as his lifeblood seeped into the soil, showed no trace of the panic or fear that consumes lesser men. Instead, a calm resignation settled upon his features, a quiet dignity that seemed to form a silent, impervious bubble against the chaotic aftermath of their duel, defying the very reality of his impending demise.
"Did you..." Krogh parted his blood-flecked lips, another welling surge of dark vitae spilling forth with the effort, "...trick my Sword of Red Run into fleeing away?" the swordsman asked, his voice unnervingly steady, still carrying the unyielding weight of his pride.
Donovan, his own heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird from the sheer, hair's-breadth escape from the fatal strike, frowned in genuine confusion at the sudden question. It was the inquiry of a man who lived in a world of pure sword and battle, a world Donovan had no time for. He quickly dismissed its irrelevance in the face of his singular, brutal objective: survival.
"I never went back to the sword," Mister First Dominator replied curtly, his voice as cold and resolute as glacial ice. There was no time for discourse. In a sudden, explosive motion, he raised his fist, gathering killing intent once more to throw a final, lethal blow at the dying swordsman.
Fuck this monster! The thought was a silent scream in Donovan's mind, a raw feedback loop of adrenaline and terror. This swordsman, Krogh Hanz, was far more dangerous than any intelligence or battle experience could have possibly predicted, and that miscalculation was itself a lethal variable. To show mercy, to allow this man even a single, ragged breath, could in the next instant spell his own instantaneous and utter doom.
Just fucking kick him while he's down! The primal instinct for self-preservation screamed at him, overriding any nascent flicker of honor or pity. This was not a dueling ring; it was a fucking haunted slaughterhouse.
Otherwise, who knew who would be the one to die when this old motherfucker caught his breath again? The image of Krogh, rallying even a fraction of his impossible strength, was a nightmare vision that propelled Donovan's attack forward with desperate, ruthless force.
Seeing the incoming fist aura—a brutal force that condensed the strength of a torrential downpour into a single, shattering point of impact, certain to claim his failing life—Krogh did not dodge. He lacked the strength, and perhaps the will, to contest the inevitable any longer. He simply braced for the final, annihilating impact.
Yet, just as the killing force was about to land, the space between them twisted. A shadowy figure materialized from nothingness, a phantom given form, its arrival silent and instantaneous. It interposed itself squarely before the dying swordsman, a living shield intercepting Donovan's lethal blow with an aura of impenetrable, ancient power.