Starting With an SSS-Rank Goddess Summon!

Rèn rose through the Blood Demon Sect like a clean blade sliding through soaked hemp.

The elders thought they had bred a hound to guard their corpse-vaults, an iron-marrowed weapon to be thrown at border garrisons until her veins cracked under the strain however they did not understand that blood was not merely an alchemical reagent to be distilled in bronze cauldrons.

To a Primordial Blood Root, blood was a living current that connected every breathing throat under heaven.

...By sixteen, she did not need to see an adversary drawing steel in the dark.

If a man stood within thirty paces of her boots, she could feel the thick pulse surging through his carotid artery.

She could gauge the depth of his breath by the air burning in his lungs, track his terror by the sudden pounding against his ribs, and measure his cultivation realm by the density of the spirit-marrow humming in his femoral channel.

...By twenty, Rèn did not merely listen to the current as before... rather she reached into it.

If an outer disciple stepped into her path with an unsheathed saber, she would not bother drawing her blade.

She would look him dead in the eyes, her dark crimson irises contracting by a fraction of an inch, and seize the blood inside his ventricles with her core.

His knees would buckle.

His face would swell purple as the vital fluid in his chest stopped dead, curdling into thick immovable sludge that backed up into his throat until he choked on his own tongue.

...The sect elders took notice, and with notice came appetite.

They sent her into the eastern mountain passes to raid righteous supply convoys, intentionally withholding reinforcements so she would perish against orthodox formation arrays.

They assigned her to cleanse vermin nests with broken weapons, hoping to harvest her refined blood-core from the wreckage and Rèn always returned alone.

The elders who issued those commands, however, never came back from their subsequent inspection tours.

Some were found face-down in shallow mountain gullies, drained until their skin hung loose and translucent over dry bone.

Others simply vanished into the limestone ravines with their storage rings emptied and their life-tablets shattering upon the sect’s ancestral altar with sharp brittle cracks.

...Nobody dared investigate. In the underground halls of Mount Xueha, strength was the solitary currency, and the skinny girl from the cattle pens had accumulated an unpayable debt.

Through all those bloody years, she never studied the sect’s secret manuals.

She did not touch the Nine Hells Nether Scripture, she threw the Blood-Coagulating Bone-Melting Palm into the latrine pits, and she refused the demonic curved scythes offered by the weapon masters.

She carried the mountain-ash wooden sword her Master had carved for her eighth birthday, wrapped in layers of oiled pigskin to keep the wood from rotting in the damp cavern air and she refined that solitary basic form a hundred thousand times.

Step... Guard... Cut!

She practiced it until every redundant micro-shift in her weight was burned away.

Rèn practiced it until her feet found perfect purchase on wet slate, frozen mud, loose river gravel, and polished bone.

She stripped the technique of flair, of theatrical flourishing, and of wasted breath, until the three movements compressed into a single seamless instant of violence.

...Yet, beneath the thickening layers of dried gore and iron callouses, the scrawny stray from Mount Cangmu refused to die completely.

After every execution, after every severed throat and shattered formation, she walked down the winding dirt road below Mount Xueha to Lao Ma’s roadside tavern.

It was a crooked drafty wooden shack with grease-stained paper lanterns, perched beside an ancient willow tree whose roots drank the runoff from the slaughterhouse drainage ditches.

Lao Ma was a fat half-blind old man with flour permanently ground into his apron, serving sour, cloudy grain wine that tasted of iron shavings and bitter persimmons.

He never asked where she got the crimson stains on her cuffs, and he never asked why the red-robed patrols avoided his porch whenever her tall, black-clad frame sat in the corner.

She would slide three heavy silver taels across the stained pine counter, exactly three times the cost of the jug, drink the sour wine in slow swallows, and wipe the bowl clean with her sleeve.

Once, when a young recruiter from the sect’s lower pens dragged a thirteen-year-old farm girl down the road by her braided hair, intending to throw her into the blood-cattle pens, Rèn stepped out from beneath the tavern awning.

She caught the recruiter by the throat, dragged him behind the rain barrel, and broke both of his arms in five separate places with deliberate leverage.

CRACK! CRUNCH!

She shoved a silver coin into the trembling girl’s palm, pointed her toward the western border highway, and told her to run until her shoes fell apart.

...And on rainy afternoons, when the mountain mist rolled down through the bamboo and the roof of the tavern began to leak into empty clay jugs, Rèn would sit on the lowest wooden step.

She would pull the rough red ribbon from her hair, letting the wild, untamed black waves tumble across her broad shoulders.

She would lift her hands, her fingers calloused and stiff from gripping hilts, trying desperately to weave the strands into the neat tight braids Qiu Ling used to make, however she couldn’t do it.

Her fingers were too thick now, the knuckles swollen from combat, the coordination built for severing tendons rather than delicate ribbon-knots.

The braid always turned out crooked, frayed, and loose strands falling into her eyes in untamed bunches.

Rèn would sit there in the cold mountain rain, staring down at the muddy dirt between her boots with her hands trembling around the unraveled hair.

’She would have scolded me...’ Rèn thought, her dark crimson eyes burning behind her bangs. ’She would have called me a wild badger and redone it from the roots...’

Inside her spatial ring, resting beside her oil-cloth-wrapped wooden sword, she kept a single scroll of coarse paper.

Written upon it, in thick dried crimson ink drawn from her own wrists, was a ledger of names.

Every single elder of the Heavenly Sword Court who had stood in the Quiet Pine courtyard that autumn night was inscribed upon the fiber.

Beside them was Senior Brother Wei Heng, recorded with the exact price of thirty silver taels he had accepted for her flesh.

Below them were the names of every Blood Demon elder who had weighed the bronze bowls in the lower pens...

At the very top of the scroll, written in massive, jagged strokes that tore through the paper, was the overlord of the demonic path... the three-thousand-year-old Heavenly Demon.

Directly below him was the second name... Patriarch Bai Wujian.

She knew her limits with agonizing clarity.

Her blood root was potent, but it was young. Against the ancient monsters who commanded the peaks of Jiuxiao Xing, cultivators who had spent two millennia condensing domain fields and refining celestial swords, her marrow would be pulverized into paste before her blade could cross their defensive wards.

She needed a foundation so terrifying, and so vast that the laws of heaven would buckle beneath its weight.

The answer walked into her path when she was twenty-six, in the border markets of the northern plains.

...Bai Chen.

The grandson of Patriarch Bai Wujian.

He was barely thirty, and he was known across the four continents as the Son of Fate.

From the day of his birth, the Heavenly Dao had cradled him in its golden palm.

When he walked through barren mountain ranges, ancient spirit herbs would unearth themselves before his boots.

When he fell into chasms of the abyss, he landed upon the forgotten inheritance vaults of ancient immortals.

If an assassin leveled an arrow at his spine, a sudden gust of mountain wind would deflect the iron shaft... If a beast lunged for his throat, its back leg would slip upon loose gravel at the exact microsecond of impact.

He was the living darling of destiny, three complete cultivation realms above her on paper, wielding a celestial-grade flying sword forged from pure white sun-iron.

...Rèn marked him.

She stalked him through thirty provinces, across frozen tundras, limestone valleys, and crowded market cities, learning the precise suffocating horror of hunting a man whom the heavens refused to let die.

Nine times she cornered him and nine times the universe intervened with reality-bending insolence.

...The first time was in a narrow gorge outside the White Jade Pass.

Rèn dropped from an overhanging cliff face with her sword angled downward in a silent perpendicular thrust that aimed dead center for the gap between his neck and his shoulder guard.

Her blade had descended thirty inches from his collarbone.

RUMBLE!

Without a breath of seismic warning, the entire granite wall of the canyon fractured along a dormant fault line.

A catastrophic rockslide of five-ton boulders detonated between them, burying the road in a roar of choking dust, hurling Rèn backward across the chasm while Bai Chen stepped onto a lucky air-pocket and drifted safely down to the opposite bank.

The second time was inside a bustling tea pavilion in the capital.

Rèn stepped through the paper screen disguised as a tea maid with her fingers drawing a concealed iron needle coated in concentrated coagulant qi.

Her strike swept through the air at the exact height of his throat.

At that precise instant, Bai Chen dropped his jade pendant onto the woven straw mat.

He bent his waist to pick it up with his hair fluttering as her needle passed through the empty air a hair’s breadth above his ear, burying itself harmlessly into a wooden pillar.

Before she could reset her stance, three high-tier city constables burst through the front entrance responding to an unrelated robbery down the street, forcing her to dissolve into the shadows.

The third time was in the bamboo groves of Mount Yun.

She had him trapped.

...She had cut his escape routes, severed his horse’s tendons, and backed him against an ancient stone altar with her blade already whistling toward his exposed windpipe.

From the clouds above, a wandering itinerant sword immortal who had not left his seclusion cave in three hundred years suddenly dropped out of the sky.

The old man claimed he had been drawn by the scent of wild plums, intervened on pure moral impulse, parried Rèn’s strike with an ancient whisk, and scolded her for attacking a promising youth before carrying Bai Chen away on a cloud of white mist.

...Nine attempts and nine miracles.

Rèn stood in the rain outside the bamboo grove after the ninth failure, her hands shaking around the hilt of her sword, her dark crimson eyes blazing with an unholy fury that scorched her inner meridians.

The heavens were laughing at her.

The great Dao of this world looked down upon the slaughtered orphans of Quiet Pine and declared that their murderer’s grandson was an untouchable celestial prince who deserved to walk through life bathed in gold and luck.

’You want to protect him...?’ Rèn thought, her teeth grinding together until blood seeped from her gums. ’You want to bend the world to keep him breathing...? Fine then I will strip the world away from him until there is nothing left for you to bend.’

She stopped hunting Bai Chen directly and she began hunting everything that touched his life.

Over six grueling merciless years, Rèn became a ghost of systematic ruin that trailed behind the Son of Fate like a lingering funeral shroud.

The three sword protectors whom Patriarch Bai Wujian had assigned to guard his grandson’s travels were ambushed one by one in the narrow mountain passes.

Rèn drowned the first in his own blood while he slept in a roadside inn, severed the hamstring tendons of the second during a rainstorm, and ripped the throat from the third before he could ignite his distress talisman.

She tracked down the wandering itinerant sword immortal who had saved him in the bamboo grove.

She spent sixteen days wearing down the old man’s defensive wards, finally severing his wrists and pinning him to his own altar stone before cutting off his head.

...Whenever Bai Chen secured an ancient celestial treasure, Rèn arrived three nights later to burn the vault to the ground.

When a prestigious women’s sect in the southern valleys offered him shelter, medicinal pills, and their daughters’ affections, Rèn breached their mountain gates at midnight, slaughtering the elders who sheltered him and setting fire to their ancestral herb gardens until the sect abandoned him as an omen of death.

She hunted the merchant caravans that funded his travel.

She butchered the sworn martial brothers who attempted to smuggle him across the provincial borders, leaving their severed hands nailed to the boundary posts along the highway.

She stripped away his money, his allies, his guards, his medicine, and his pride.

By the end of the sixth year, the golden darling of the Heavenly Dao was no longer smiling.

He was a hollow-eyed starving fugitive in stained silk, running barefoot through the eastern wilderness with an unsheathed sword, jumping at the sound of falling pinecones, knowing that somewhere in the rain behind him, the demon with the crimson eyes was steadily closing the distance.