The room was a cage of illusions, and Jiang Dao was losing his patience.
His eyes, dark pools of simmering violence, swept over his surroundings. A heavy, suffocating irritation clawed at his chest. He was done watching this play.
"What is this chaotic garbage?" he growled, his voice a low rumble that vibrated against the walls. "Show yourself! Get out of here and let me beat you to death. Or, hell, come out and beat me to death. Just show your face!"
Boom!
He didn't wait for an answer. Jiang Dao lifted a foot and brought it down with cataclysmic force.
The impact was immediate. Terrifying currents of Blazing Sun True Qi erupted from his sole like magma breaching a volcano's crust. The energy swept outward in a majestic, devastating wave, seeking to incinerate the reality around him.
But the world refused to break.
Just like before, the scenery rippled like a reflection in a disturbed pond. The walls twisted, the floor warped, but as the energy dissipated, everything snapped back into place, perfectly intact. It was as if the sheer kinetic force of his stomp had been funneled into a void, swallowed whole by the nothingness.
Then, the scene shifted. The room dissolved, replaced by the sensory overload of a torrential storm.
It was a pitch-black night, torn apart by jagged streaks of lightning. Thunder rolled like war drums, and the rain fell in sheets, creating a deafening, watery cacophony.
Through the deluge, a tragic tableau unfolded. A lame midwife, struggling against the mud, hobbled forward. On her back, she carried a young girl with paralyzed legs. In the midwife's arms, shielded poorly from the freezing rain, a newborn infant wailed. The baby's cry was a thin, piercing sound, struggling to compete with the roar of the thunder.
The camera of Jiang Dao's vision panned upward to a massive, two-story pavilion nearby. It was warm, dry, and filled with the raucous sounds of men who had forgotten their humanity.
A thin man, his face flushed crimson with alcohol, was gambling with a group of burly, rough-looking thugs. The air inside was thick with smoke and vice. After a string of losses, a round-faced man paused, cocking his head.
"Big Brother," he muttered, tugging at the thin man's sleeve. "Listen. Is that… a baby crying?"
The thin man slammed his cup down. "Bullshit. With rain this heavy? What kid would be running around in this hell?"
"No, really. Listen carefully!"
"Strange… I hear it too," another thug chimed in, squinting toward the window. "It sounds like an infant."
Realization dawned on the thin man's face. He scrambled up, stumbling to the second-story window. Just as he looked out, a bolt of lightning illuminated the world in stark white and black.
There they were: the limping midwife, the paralyzed girl, the crying bundle.
"That slut!" The thin man's face twisted into a mask of rage. "That slut dares to run!"
His eyes turned bloodshot. He didn't just run; he moved with the frantic energy of a madman, charging down the stairs. The other men, infected by his fury and the promise of violence, followed close behind.
Outside, the darkness was absolute, save for the flashes of the storm. The midwife seemed to sense the change in the air, the malice radiating from the house behind her. She tried to quicken her pace, her lame leg dragging through the muck, but she was racing against predators.
They caught her in moments.
"You ungrateful bitch!" the thin man screamed, his voice cracking over the wind. "I fed you! I housed you! It's bad enough you didn't give me a son, but you dare to try to escape? I'll teach you to run!"
The violence that followed was sickeningly rhythmic.
Thud. Crunch. Thud.
Amidst hysterical, animalistic roars, the thin man and his gang stomped on the women. They didn't stop. They stomped until the mud turned red. The infant had rolled to the side early on, landing face down in the slush. Its wails grew fainter, choked off by the mud and the rain, until there was only silence.
The beating continued for what felt like an eternity—hundreds of heavy, hateful blows.
When they finally stopped, panting steam into the cold air, the thin man grabbed the paralyzed girl by her hair. "Well?" he sneered, lifting her face. "Are you going to run again?"
Lightning flashed. The girl's eyes were wide, fixed on nothing. Blood leaked from all seven orifices. She had been dead for a long time.
The sight of her frozen, terrified face startled even the thugs. They recoiled instinctively.
"Big Brother," the round-faced man called out, lifting the small bundle from the mud. "The baby… It's not breathing either."
The thin man's shock vanished, replaced by a cold, venomous sneer. He spat on the ground. "Good. Let them die. It's better if they all die. Fuck them. Always thinking about running… once they're rotting, I'll just go kidnap another one. Women aren't scarce in the city. Next time, I'll grab one who can actually give me a son."
With calloused indifference, the men gathered the bodies—the barely breathing midwife, the broken girl, the dead infant—and hauled them to the back of the mountain. They tossed them into the abyss like garbage.
The perspective shifted again, plummeting down the cliffside.
Jiang Dao stood at the bottom of the ravine. Here, the air was thick enough to chew—a miasma of concentrated resentment and Yin energy.
Before him lay a graveyard of sins. Hundreds of skeletons were piled in a dense, tangled heap. They were all female. Some were stark white bone; others were fresh, the flesh not yet surrendered to rot. The malice rising from this pit was palpable, a towering wave of hate intertwining with the storm.
It was a sanctuary of evil. A gateway for demons.
"Tell me," a voice whispered.
Silently, a figure shrouded in black mist materialized behind Jiang Dao. It was formless, a silhouette of pure gloom, but its laughter was distinct and grating.
"Tell me, shouldn't the people of this village all die?"
"Tell me, shouldn't I turn these dead women into Evil Spirits?"
"Hehehe… isn't living in a world like this simply despairing?"
Jiang Dao didn't speak. His reaction was kinetic.
Without a telegraph, his body launched backward like a reverse meteor. He executed an 'Iron Back Bash,' a move designed to shatter sieges. He tore through the air with a sonic whistle, slamming into the space behind him with the force of a freight train.
But he hit nothing but mist. His body passed through the shadow and collided with the cliff face.
CRACK!
The solid rock detonated. Jiang Dao's back smashed a crater into the stone, sending a spiderweb of cracks shooting up the cliff. Gravel rained down like shrapnel.
Jiang Dao pulled himself out of the stone, his expression darkening. Another illusion?
"I don't care who you are," Jiang Dao said, his voice cold and hard. "And I don't care if you want justice for these women. But you made a mistake. You killed my men. You tried to infiltrate my Raging Flame Gang."
Boom!
He let the leash on his power slip.
His body began to inflate, a grotesque and awe-inspiring transformation. Massive, hideous muscles coiled and snapped into place, squeezing out from under his skin. Thick veins pulsed like serpents. With a sound like tearing canvas, he expanded, towering over the clearing at a terrifying five meters in height.
His skin glowed with the heat of burning charcoal. He was a furnace of Blazing Sun energy.
The black shadow reappeared, floating effortlessly in mid-air. It ignored Jiang Dao's transformation, a slit opening in the mist to reveal a mocking smile.
Suddenly, the shadow inhaled.
It was a vacuum of spiritual energy. All the resentment, the Yin energy, the sorrow of the hundreds of corpses in the valley surged toward its mouth. The entity twisted, its form destabilizing as it absorbed the collective trauma. Faces began to push out from its skin—hundreds of women's faces, all weeping tears of blood. Its back sprouted a dense, undulating carpet of black hair.
"The men of this world should all die!" the amalgamation screamed, the voice a chorus of hundreds.
Whoosh!
It vanished. In the space of a heartbeat, a pitch-black claw, dripping with frost and rot, materialized inches from Jiang Dao's chest.
"Die!" Jiang Dao roared.
He didn't dodge. He stomped forward, the ground shaking, and thrust his palm out. His hand, now a massive slab of muscle and fire, met the attack head-on.
Boom!
The impact was cataclysmic. The Evil Spirit's claw raked across Jiang Dao's chest, carving a bloody trench through his iron-hard skin. A terrible cold invaded his system, trying to freeze his blood.
But Jiang Dao's Fire Demon God-Tearing Hand had found its mark. His fingers plunged into the spirit's face—or rather, the collection of faces. The surface caved in with a wet squelch, spraying black ichor everywhere.
The spirit shrieked, a sound that scraped against the soul. Ignoring the damage, its hands blurred, slashing wildly at Jiang Dao with frantic, hate-filled speed.
Jiang Dao hardened his muscles to the density of steel, weathering the storm of claws while delivering a barrage of his own. But it wasn't enough.
"More," he growled.
His body convulsed. Muscles grew upon muscles, expanding horizontally. Bone spurs erupted from his joints, piercing his skin. Golden flames ignited within his pores. In seconds, he grew from five meters to a titan of eight meters—a towering monstrosity of heat and violence.
"GET LOST!"
Jiang Dao's hands, now the size of dustpans, clamped onto the Evil Spirit's head. With a brutal crunch, he compressed the skull, flattening it.
But the spirit was fluid. It didn't die. Instead, the ocean of black hair on its back exploded outward. Like a tidal wave of ink, the hair surged, wrapping around Jiang Dao's limbs, binding his massive frame.
It was everywhere. The hair slithered into his ears, his nose, his eyes, trying to suffocate him from the inside out.
"Blazing Sun Domain… OPEN!"
WHOOSH!
A solar ring ignited around him. The cliff bottom was bathed in blinding white light. The Yang fire burned with the intensity of a star, turning the encroaching hair to ash.
But the hair kept coming, infinite and undying. And from within the tangled mess, pale white hands emerged—hundreds of them—grabbing, tearing, clawing at his flesh.
The cold was numbing. This was a Dragon Level threat—a being that defied the laws of mortality.
"Burn!" Jiang Dao bellowed, his voice shaking the valley. He grabbed armfuls of the hair, channeling the divine fire directly into the strands, tracing the heat back to the source.
He didn't retreat. He charged.
Like a mountain given sentience, Jiang Dao slammed his body forward, crushing the Evil Spirit against the cliff face.
SLAM!
The cliff shuddered. The spirit was pinned, flattened into the rock. Jiang Dao wrapped his arms around the entity in a bear hug and squeezed.
Crack. Snap. Pop.
He could hear the spirit's bones—if it had them—pulverizing. But as he squeezed, the icy toxicity of the spirit seeped into him. It was like hugging a glacier.
Suddenly, his instincts screamed.
A distinct cluster of hair, sharper and more sentient than the rest, whipped toward his neck, aiming to decapitate him. Jiang Dao released his grip, catching the hair with one hand while protecting his throat with the other.
"Get out of here!"
He yanked. With the leverage of a titan, he swung the spirit by its hair, smashing it into the ground.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
It was a display of primal savagery. Jiang Dao smashed the spirit against the rocky floor thousands of times, turning the ravine into a cratered wasteland. He didn't stop until the entity in his hand detonated with a wet pop, leaving nothing but a clump of slippery, cold black hair in his grip.
He stood panting, his breath steaming in the damp air.
It's still not ash, he realized, staring at the hair. Dragon Level indeed.
A prickle on his neck made him spin around. Golden light flickered deep in his eyes.
The black shadow—the narrator of this nightmare—was back. It hovered nearby, untouched, watching him with that same mocking smile. It brought its hands together in a seal.
The hair in Jiang Dao's hand ignited.
Flash.
It turned to green smoke, but Jiang Dao couldn't drop it fast enough. The smoke didn't drift away; it drove into his palm.
Infection.
His hand turned black. The corruption raced up his arm, spreading across his chest, his neck, his face. In the blink of an eye, thick, coarse black fur erupted from every inch of his skin.
Jiang Dao roared, but it wasn't a human sound. It was the call of a beast. His vision swam with red. A distinct, alien consciousness flooded his mind—a desire to kill, to rend, to destroy everything that moved. He was becoming a Great Ape, a creature of pure slaughter.
No.
Clinging to the last shred of his humanity, Jiang Dao closed his eyes.
Heavenly Demon Visualization Diagram.
In the theater of his mind, a defense was mounted. A towering, hazy black shadow manifested—the concept of the Supreme Giant Demon. It possessed only two dark red pupils, looking down on the chaos of the curse with supreme indifference.
The demon's gaze quelled the fire of madness. The killing intent was suppressed, beaten back into submission by a superior will.
Jiang Dao opened his eyes. The golden divine light burned steadily once more.
He looked down at himself. He was still covered in the thick, black fur. He looked like a monster. But beneath the fur, power surged—raw, unadulterated strength.
"Three times stronger," he murmured, his voice deeper, raspy. "Ugly... but strong."
He looked at the shadow. "A curse? If this is what a curse feels like... I'll take it."
The shadow's smile faltered. "You... you are unexpected. But that butcher state is unstable. Can you truly hold the leash?"
Jiang Dao didn't answer with words. He vanished.
Moving three times faster than before, he appeared in front of the shadow instantly, his claw ripping through the mist.
Shatter.
The world broke apart like a dropped mirror.
The rain, the cliff, the darkness—it all fragmented and blew away.
Jiang Dao blinked. He was back in the pavilion. Or what was left of it. The building was a burnt-out ruin, smelling of ash and old death.
The black shadow was gone.
He leaped out of the debris, landing in the village square. It was desolate. Walls had collapsed; the earth was scorched. His allies, Daoist Linghu and the masters of the Raging Flame Gang, were scattered on the ground, unconscious but alive.
It had all been a trap. An illusion woven over reality.
Jiang Dao stood alone in the silence, a hulking beast covered in black fur. He checked his internal interface. Modification Points: 2.
He had killed something. The resentment was real. But the shadow remained.
"Playing games," Jiang Dao whispered, his anger cold and sharp. "Come out!"
He began to rampage, kicking down walls, pulverizing the remaining structures, baiting the entity. But nothing responded.
Finally, he stopped. He looked at the thick fur on his chest. A wave of disgust and curiosity hit him. He grabbed a handful of the fur and ripped.
Schlk.
Skin tore. Blood flowed. Pain flared. But as he watched, new black hairs sprouted from the bloody wound, knitting together instantly. He ripped again. And again. The result was the same. The curse was a part of him now.
"Damn it."
He exhaled, willing his body to compress. His bones ground together as he shrank from eight meters back to five.
As soon as he hit five meters, the fur vanished. His skin returned to normal.
Jiang Dao frowned. "It's tied to the Extreme Yang Divine Fire Body?"
He tested it immediately, expanding back to eight meters. The fur exploded out of his skin instantly, and the red haze of bloodlust crept back into the corners of his mind.
"Just as I thought," he grunted, flexing a hand that could crush boulders. "Only in my max form."
He looked at his palm, feeling the intoxicating thrum of the cursed energy mixing with his own.
"It makes me lose my mind... but it grants me power," Jiang Dao mused, his golden eyes narrowing. "A fair trade."