The triumphant, sorrowful cry of the Zephyr-Tide Roc King echoed across the desolate, ashen caldera, a sound that was both a declaration of victory and a funeral dirge. He stood upon the cooling, broken corpse of the Molten Heart Colossus, his magnificent iridescent feathers spattered with black, oily blood, his great body heaving with the sheer, overwhelming release of three centuries of bottled-up emotion. The hunt was over. The first part of his vengeance was complete.
From their vantage point in the sky, Li Yu and his other retainers watched the scene in silence, each ancient being processing the raw, primal display through the lens of their own long and bloody histories.
Kui, in his colossal Behemoth Turtle-Snake form, let out a long, slow sigh, a plume of steam venting from his draconic nostrils. He watched Fengliu's cathartic, yet still pained, release, and a memory from a forgotten age surfaced in his ancient mind. He remembered a time, long before he had met the Wise Host, when he was just another powerful beast fighting for territory in the primordial wilderness.
He remembered a rival, a vicious Deep-Sea Tyrant Serpent that had ambushed his nest and killed a close friend of his, a loss that had sent him into a black, murderous rage. He had hunted that serpent for a full decade, a relentless, obsessive quest that had ended in a cataclysmic battle that had permanently altered the topography of the sea floor.
He remembered the moment of victory, the feeling of his fangs sinking into the serpent's throat, the exultant, fiery satisfaction of a debt of blood being paid in full. It had felt wonderful. It had felt like the lifting of a mountain from his soul. And then, he remembered the emptiness that had followed. The hollowing, aching silence. His revenge was complete, but his children were not brought back. The wrong had been punished, but it had not been undone.
'A necessary act, but never a joyful one,' Kui thought, his ancient eyes full of a weary wisdom. 'Revenge does not heal the wound; it only cauterizes it, leaving a scar to mark the pain.' He looked at Fengliu, his new, grief-stricken colleague, with a newfound sympathy.
He was happy for the Roc King. This act, this brutal, bloody release, was a necessary step. It was better than letting the poison of unfulfilled vengeance fester for another three hundred years. The world was a brutal place; the strong preyed upon the weak. It was the law of all life. But Kui, in his heart, had always preferred when the violence had a reason, a justification.
A battle for resources, a defense of one's home, or even a righteous, terrible revenge like this one—these things had a grim sense of order. It was the wanton, meaningless cruelty, the killing for sport that Fengliu had described, that the old turtle truly despised. This, at least, was a cycle of violence that had come to a just, if bloody, conclusion.
Xylia, in her true form as a Glacial Matriarch, watched the scene with a far simpler, more primal understanding. Her great, white-furred head was tilted, her eyes holding not sympathy, but a kind of professional, detached respect. To her, what she had just witnessed was the most natural thing in the world.
Fengliu's family was attacked and killed. Now, Fengliu had attacked and killed the perpetrator. The equation was perfectly balanced. It was the law of the claw and the fang, the only law that had ever truly mattered in her long, solitary existence on the frozen peaks.
She thought of the countless beasts she had slain in her own life. The great ice-horn rams she had hunted for food, the rival snow-leopards she had killed for territory, the ancient frost-wyrms she had battled to prove her own strength and become the undisputed sovereign of her domain. Had they had families? Mates? Young? Almost certainly. Had she ever paused to consider their grief? The thought was absurd.
'You do not weigh the feelings of your food,' she thought, her mind a landscape of cold, hard pragmatism. 'You do not mourn the pack of the wolf that comes to steal your cubs. You simply kill it.' To hesitate, to be weighed down by the imagined sorrow of your enemy, was a weakness that the wilderness would punish with a swift and merciless death. If a beast came to kill you, you killed it first.
You did not ask about its family, because if you did, you would be the one to die, and your own kin would be the ones left to mourn. Vengeance was not a complex, emotional journey. It was a right. A right earned by the survivor. Fengliu had survived. Therefore, he had the right to his revenge. It was as simple and as clean as the winter wind.
Spine, the ancient Sea-Dragon, observed the scene from his silent, hovering position, his own thoughts as deep and cold as the abyssal trench he had once called home. He had seen this play out a thousand times, in a thousand different forms, over his long and bloody life.
He had been Fengliu, the righteous avenger, hunting down those who had wronged his Legion. He had been the Colossus, the powerful beast cut down by a stronger predator. And he had been the prey, the one who had fled and survived.
He had enacted his own vengeances, and he had had others, with equal justification in their hearts, seek vengeance upon him. He had killed beasts, and he had killed humans. He had seen righteous sects commit acts of utter depravity in the name of justice, and he had seen demonic clans display moments of profound, unexpected honor.
To him, it was all just the endless, churning tide of the cultivation world. The strong ruled, the weak died, and the survivors told the story. Today, Fengliu was the strong one, his victory enabled by an even greater power. Tomorrow, another, stronger predator might come for him. Or for his new masters. Or even for Spine himself.
It did not matter. When that day came, one would be strong enough to survive, and the other would not. That was the only truth that had ever mattered. Righteousness, vengeance, grief—they were just the pretty names that living creatures gave to the simple, brutal mechanics of power.
Khaos, having witnessed the entire event through his connection to his host, let out a silent, mental snort of contempt. The emotional display was utterly tiresome to him, he himself forgetting how quick he is to emotion as well.
The outcome was the only thing of consequence: the weaker beast had been destroyed by the stronger. The motivations, the grief, the shrieking and crying—it was all just meaningless, inefficient noise. He had fulfilled his part of the bargain. He returned his full attention to the far more interesting and productive task of refining the Void Core, the emotional drama already forgotten.
Li Yu, sitting calmly on Spine's back, was one of the ones that felt the full, complex weight of the moment. He watched Fengliu's cathartic, yet incomplete, release, and he felt a profound, almost painful, empathy for the Roc King.
He remembered his own childhood. He remembered the terror of the Beast Tide, the screams of his parents as they were swallowed by a wave of monstrous flesh and fury. He remembered the burning, helpless, all-consuming desire for revenge that had been his only companion in the lonely, terrifying years that followed. It had been a sharp, hard thing in his heart, a promise he had made to their ghosts.
As he had grown, as he had taken his first steps on the path of cultivation, that desire had grown with him, becoming a driving force. But it had always been a vague, unfocused hatred. He did not know which beasts had delivered the killing blow. A Thousand-Clawed Centipede? A Raging Earth Bear? He did not know. They were a faceless, nameless part of a horde.
And then came the next Beast Tide, the one where he had been a defender, not a victim. He thought of the hours he had spent on the battlements of the mountain pass, a god of war in the eyes of his peers. How many beasts had he killed that day? Hundreds? Thousands? He could not count. He had simply stood his ground, his abyss-black energy a river of death, and he had annihilated everything that had come at him. How many of those beasts had mates? How many had young waiting for them in a den somewhere? How many families had he, in his own righteous defense, destroyed?
The thought, which he did not think too deeply about and had pushed away for so long, settled on him now with a new, sober weight. But it did not bring guilt. It brought understanding.
He could not let that question weigh him down. To do so would be to be crushed by the sheer, overwhelming scale of the world's pain. The beasts of the tide had come to kill him, to destroy his home, his friends, his sect. Their motives, whether they were driven by instinct, by a command, or by their own form of righteous fury, did not matter in that moment. They were a threat, and he had responded. It was the same for Fengliu. It was the same for Xylia. It was the same for everyone in this brutal, beautiful world.
'It is all a matter of perspective,' he thought, his gaze clear, his conscience, surprisingly, at peace. He was not a hero. He was not a savior who would bring an age of universal peace and understanding. Such a thing was a child's dream, a fool's errand. The world would always be a place of conflict, of the strong preying on the weak.
'My path is not to change the nature of the river,' he concluded, a profound sense of self-awareness settling over him. 'It is simply to go with the flow and protect the things that are important to me.'
He would protect his friends. He would defend his home. He would expand his businesses. And any threat to those things, any threat to the peace he so carefully cultivated, he would meet with the same absolute, overwhelming force he had just witnessed. His conscience was clear because his goal was not conquest; it was tranquility. And in this world, tranquility had to be protected by a wall of terrifying, unbreachable power.
He let Fengliu have his moment, letting the ancient sovereign work through the first stage of his centuries-old grief.