Starting With an SSS-Rank Goddess Summon!

The petrified bone shattered his nose and cheekbone into bloody pulp, breaking his spiritual focus in an instant.

Bai Wujian stumbled backward, spitting blood and teeth, but Rèn followed him like a shadow.

Her notched iron blade swept downward, cleaving through the tendon behind his right knee, then his left.

The righteous patriarch crashed to his knees upon the blue slate.

Rèn gripped the collar of his white silk robes with her bare left hand, hauling him off the dais, dragging his limp body across the broken sandalwood threshold, down the corridors, and out into the gray light of the central courtyard.

...She hurled him onto the flagstones.

He landed heavily on his knees with his trembling hands bracing against the cold stone, coughing scarlet foam onto the jade.

Rèn stood before him, the wind rustling her wild black hair and her notched iron sword resting against her thigh.

”Mm?”

She looked down at the exact spot where he knelt.

It was twenty paces from the third pillar of the eastern walkway and it was the exact spot where an old man with swollen knuckles had fallen on his knees twenty-three years ago, begging for the lives of eleven orphans before his head was taken like a weed in the dirt...

Bai Wujian lifted his bloody, mangled face, glaring up at her with fading bitter arrogance.

”Demon...” Bai Wujian spat, his voice wet and rattling. ”The righteous path... will hunt you to the ends of heaven...”

Rèn leaned down, her crimson eyes burning into his failing pupils, her voice dropping to a whisper that barely traveled across the stone.

”He begged you to let the children walk down the steps.”

Bai Wujian’s pupils contracted, a microscopic flicker of memory finally breaking through his pride however Rèn did not wait for his answer.

Step... Guard... Cut...!

SHHK!

The notched iron blade took his head in a single clean horizontal stroke.

The patriarch’s body toppled sideways onto the stones with his blood pooling across the same ground that had drunk the Master’s life all those years ago.

Rèn stood in the red courtyard with the wind whipping her black bangs across her eyes.

She waited for the release... She waited for the sky to clear, for the phantom voices of the heart demons to fall silent, for the tightness in her throat to loosen however nothing changed.

The silence remained thick.

She took out the yellowed parchment scroll from her spatial ring, uncapped her brush, and drew a thick crimson line through Bai Wujian’s name then she turned her boots toward the gate and set the palace on fire.

For three years, the eastern provinces burned.

Rèn walked from mountain range to mountain range, following the ledger of names.

She burned the Seven Star Pavilion, slaughtered the elders of the Verdant Cloud Clan, cleaved through the grand gates of the Iron Sword Sect, and left the ancestral halls of eighteen righteous factions reduced to smoking blackened timbers.

Behind her, trailing through the valleys like a plague of locusts, followed the Red Heaven.

The cult had swelled to tens of thousands of raving fanatics, broken wanderers, and feral demonic renegades.

They wore rags dyed in dried gore, smeared blood over their foreheads in the shape of her black horns, and butchered entire farming communes and trade outposts in her name, screaming her title into the burning skies.

”Red Heaven! Heavenly Demon of Slaughter! Cleanse the earth in blood!”

Rèn never looked back at them.

She walked alone at the vanguard, her notched blade dull with constant butchery, her boots caked with layers of gray ash and dried marrow and somewhere in the middle of the second year, while standing amidst the burning ruins of a mountain shrine in the northern crags, Rèn stopped.

She looked down at the coarse paper in her hands.

The names were all crossed out... Every elder, every trader, every recruit master, and every patriarch had been erased in thick crimson strokes.

She tried to remember why she was holding the paper... She stared at the characters for ’Quiet Pine.’ however she could not picture the courtyard.

Rèn could not picture the water barrel, she could not hear the rain dripping into the cracked bowls, and she could not remember the smell of the pine needles along the steps.

The unraveled braid on the kitchen floor was gone... the gentle voice that had told her fairy tales of flying sword immortals had dissolved into flat meaningless gray fog.

She remembered only the names, and she remembered only the cut.

Rèn looked up at the burning temple rafters, and a sound tore out of her throat.

”Heh...”

It was a raspy dry chuckle that rattled behind her teeth then she laughed louder, her head tilting back as the laughter clawed through her vocal cords, echoing off the burning beams in wild peals.

”Hahaha! HAHAHAHA!”

She couldn’t stop... The laughter shook her ribs, tore at her dry lips, and spilled into the smoke.

Killing was the only thing that made the numbness retreat... the spray of hot blood against her forearms was the only sensation that proved she was still breathing under the sun.

That night, alone on a scorched hillside above the ruins, the heart demons came for her again, the way they had every night since the Son of Fate died.

’Butcher,’ they hissed in the dark. ’Demon... Monster... You’ll die in the dirt, unmourned and unburied...’

For two years, she had clenched her teeth against them but this time, Rèn tilted her head back against the burned stone, looked up at the stars, and smiled.

’Yes,’ she answered them. ’I am.’

The whispering faltered.

’I’m the butcher,’ Rèn thought, and the laugh came bubbling up from her chest again, low and warm. ’I’m the demon. I’m the slaughter. I’m every single thing you say I am... so what are you going to do about it?’

The heart demons had nothing left to accuse her of... One by one, they fell silent, because there was no longer any difference between them and her.

Rèn slept soundly that night for the first time in years so she kept swinging.

She slaughtered the reinforcements sent by the southern border forts, she cleaved the beast-tamers of the western plains, and every time her blade bit through bone, she laughed until her sides ached and her crimson eyes burning with feverish madness.

The righteous sects of Jiuxiao Xing finally broke.

Faced with the total extermination of their ancestral domains, the surviving patriarchs set aside five thousand years of clan feuds, boundary disputes, and territorial wars.

They gathered at the foot of Mount Taixuan, the highest peak in the known world, and knelt in the snow for seven days and seven nights, begging the solitary master of the clouds to descend.

Sword Saint Lu Tianxing opened his eyes.

He was the undisputed peak of the mortal realm, a man who had spent four hundred years in secluded meditation at the roof of the world, untethered to any sect, clan, or worldly ambition.

...He did not know Rèn’s name, he had never met the disciples of Quiet Pine, and he held no hatred for the demonic path.

Sword Saint Lu Tianxing simply picked up his plain wooden scabbard simply because the world had asked him to end the slaughter.

He found her three days later.

The battlefield was a vast desolate plateau of scorched red clay and shattered granite, surrounded by the smoking remnants of five fallen sects.

The Red Heaven was gathered in their tens of thousands, a screaming writhing sea of red-painted fanatics brandishing spears and rusted cleavers, chanting their unholy litany into the bruised purple clouds and in the center of the corpses stood Rèn.

Her black clothes were shredded, clinging to her skin with dried gore, her wild hair whipping around her black horns, her notched iron sword resting in her hand while her shoulders shook with continuous manic laughter.

From the southern ridge, a lone figure walked out of the mist.

Lu Tianxing wore a simple unadorned gray hemp robe, his silver hair tied with a strip of rough rawhide, carrying a lusterless iron blade in his left hand.

He did not issue a righteous proclamation, and he did not condemn her sins, instead he took a single forward step.

HUMMM!

A boundless pure wall of sword intent erupted from his frame, soaring into the heavens like an invisible pillar of absolute starlight.

The sheer pressure of his aura blew the mist away and parted the purple storm clouds across a hundred leagues, cleaving the sky in a clean, straight line that revealed the cold blue ether above.

Across the plateau, three thousand Red Heaven cultists who stood within two hundred paces of his path simply collapsed with their spirit roots shattered into powder by the ambient weight of his will before they could raise their spears.

Rèn’s laughter cut off.

Her dark crimson eyes narrowed, locking onto the gray-robed figure walking across the clay.

Her Primordial Blood Root screamed within her chest, warning her that the man before her was a living breathing mountain of pure, unblemished sword mastery that had transcended the laws of heaven and earth but she did not retreat.

A wide grin split her lips, showing teeth stained with iron.

”FINALLY!” she roared, her voice tearing through the wind.

BOOM!

The earth beneath their boots detonated simultaneously as the two figures collided in the center of the plateau with the concussive shattering force of two colliding stars.

The shockwave tore outward in a circular horizontal wave of compressed atmospheric pressure, instantly disintegrating the corpses, the shattered weapons, and five thousand screaming cultists into fine red mist.

...The plateau fractured along four fault lines with the sheer rock faces tumbling into the ravines, while the northern river buckled in its bed and its waters reversing their flow to surge violently backward into the hills.

CLANG!

Their swords met.

Lu Tianxing’s strike was perfect... four hundred years of continuous, uninterrupted refinement that possessed no wasted angle, no unnecessary weight, and zero hesitation while Rèn met it with the solitary form she had practiced a hundred thousand times.

Step... Guard... Cut!

Her notched iron blade caught his edge at a sixty-degree deflection with her left foot sliding into the red mud, redirecting the full weight of his divine sword-force into the bedrock beneath her heel.

The granite beneath her shattered into powdery sand, but her spine held like an iron pillar.

”Good form,” Lu Tianxing murmured, his voice calm and unhurried as his gray eyes assessed her stance.

His blade shifted with terrifying fluidness, disengaging from the bind, carving an impossible figure-eight arc aimed at her inner collarbone, her right elbow, and her left hip in a single second.

SWOOSH!

The Heavenly Demon did not try to match his speed.

She altered the distance... She stepped straight into his guard, allowing his tip to slice cleanly through the meat of her ribs, driving her left shoulder into his chest while her notched blade chopped downward for his wrist.

SHHK!

Her edge bit into the fabric of his gray sleeve, drawing a thin line of red from his forearm.

Lu Tianxing’s brow furrowed by a fraction of a millimeter.

...It was the first time in two hundred years that another blade had touched his flesh.

Rèn’s Primordial Blood Root detonated behind her ribs, locking onto that fresh drop of crimson.

’Inner Blood Rend!’

She reached into his body through the scratch, attempting to seize the blood pumping through his heart, to freeze his channels, to boil his arteries into liquid flame.

Lu Tianxing’s core flared with pure immaculate white sword-qi.

His body was an impenetrable fortress of refined spirit marrow.

The moment her demonic will entered his channels, his sword intent crushed her intrusive grip like an iron boot stepping on a dry beetle.

”Your root is miraculous, demon,” Lu Tianxing said, stepping back half a pace to deliver a brutal, two-handed vertical cleave that split the air like thunder. ”Thirty-five years old from what I heard... At your age, I hadn’t even left my master’s mountain. You could have become anything... and instead you ate your way to this height. Every inch of your power was torn out of someone else’s body. It’s the most cursed path there is, and it’s left you hollow... You fight like a starved dog.”

’Why do they all keep on saying this...?’

”Then come and put the dog down, old man,” Rèn grinned through bloody teeth.

CLANG!

The impact drove Rèn to one knee, her iron sword groaning under the strain and the notched steel developing a spiderweb of micro-fractures along the spine.

She kicked upward from the dirt, driving her right heel into his groin, forcing him to disengage, leaping back to her feet with a wild snarl.

They clashed thirty times in thirty breaths.

Every exchange was a clinic of brutality...

Lu Tianxing severed the tendon in her left shoulder... Rèn gouged his thigh with her elbow... Lu Tianxing carved a six-inch furrow across her cheek and Rèn shattered two of his ribs with a point-blank palm strike driven by the Son of Fate’s stolen luck.

...Then Lu Tianxing’s patience ran out.

He planted his feet in the red clay and let his sword intent unfold.

”Sword Domain: Ten Thousand Swords Return to the Source!”