Destiny in Cinders

An Jing had never planned to hide his identity since he arrived at the northern frontier. Though, he would only reveal it when he was in the public eye rather than when he met a single Grand Chen official or martialist. Faced with Xu Tai’s respectful questions, An Jing told him his identity and objective directly.

He ignored the chattering crowd and continued to observe the fiendspawn in his hands. This one had once been a deer. However, its sensory organs, or rather, the whole central area around the head, had disappeared completely, seemingly having collapsed inward into a spacetime abyss. Its gray-yellow fur had also lost its luster, turning into a hard-to-describe pale color that carried hints of corruption.

”The fiendspawn looks quite different from the kind that I’m familiar with. Fiendspawns of our era were covered in a complete, pitch-black substance that swallowed up everything of the original organism,” Yvelbane said. ”Hmm... No, it’s not really pitch black. Rather, it’s a color that’s beyond description. A pigment of corruption. It just happens to coincide with the hue which we call black. It looks like this is one of the most common ones, a corrosion fiend. They only appear in areas dense with fiend qi. Most of the time, they come from organisms that end up succumbing to corruption. The holes in their heads are the fiends’ true bodies which lead straight to the netherworld. Destroying the abyssal holes will cause fiendspawns to disintegrate.”

”Huh, so the hole is the true body.” An Jing curiously watched as the hole disintegrated until it revealed the head of a normal deer. ”How odd. What’s the principle behind it?”

Yvelbane tried to recall it and was glad that it still had memories relating to it. Confidently, it said, ”Heavenly fiends aren’t really true living organisms. Instead, they’re something like... How do I describe this? Aberrant phenomena.

”You’re also aware that heavenly fiends descended in ancient times, spreading heartfiends into the world that cut off the legacies of the time, right? Most heavenly fiends of that era were formless beings. They were nothing more than hollow thoughtforms that don’t have stable existences and can’t persist for long in the corporeal world. However, they blend well with people’s wills and intent and can reshape personalities completely. The afflicted would turn into completely different people all of a sudden. That’s the very first form taken by the great ancient heavenly fiends, supreme heartfiends.

”We didn’t even realize that heavenly fiends existed back then. The many sects were all too caught up in fighting each other, thinking that all that conflict was just part of the natural workings of fate and tribulation. It was only after the ten continents’ battles spiraled more and more out of control until more people went insane and lost control, falling down skewed paths of the dao, that the elites of each sect realized that the karmic cycle alone couldn’t account for all this chaos. That was when they first discovered the shadows of heartfiends, or inner demons.”

Yvelbane’s tone was solemn. ”Those times were most terrifying indeed. Nobody knew whether one another person had fallen to fiend influence, nor did they know how or why it happened. They didn’t even know how heavenly fiends were able to exist among them, let alone do something about it. It was only until a great monk sacrificed himself to bring the soul of a fiend-corrupted cultivator back into the cycle of rebirth that we discovered the presence of heartfiends.

”Heartfiends typically fuse with the original souls of the corrupted or devour them fully to produce a heartfiend seed. Once the seed germinates, it opens up an incredibly deep pathway through the void in the purple mansion that’s situated within the sea of consciousness, allowing the power of heavenly fiends to come through.

”Should the host of the heartfiend seed die, whether by natural causes or not, the seed would fall back to the nether and open up a pathway there, creating an abyssal hollow. The power of the boundless void would begin to gather in the nether as a result and amass over time. Due to the chaos that resulted in the deaths of many such cultivators, far too many heartfiend seeds had sprouted in the nether by the time we discovered this. It was far too late.”

”I see...” An Jing listened intently. ”If we use humans as an analogy, our bodies represent the corporeal world, while our psyches represent the netherworld. The heavenly fiends first corrupt the souls of lifeforms in that world and hitch a ride on those souls upon death to invade the netherworld. That’s how they manage to retain control over the whole body and distort the Heavenly Dao. In a way, it’s as if the world itself has been infected by a heartfiend! What about the immortal heavens? What role do they play?”

”They correspond to the soul. Good job!” Yvelbane praised. ”An Jing, your comprehension is truly stunning. You were able to identify the means of transport that the heavenly fiends used and even the core differences of the three worlds’ qualities! But back then, we didn’t have any information like that. The moment we discovered that the nether had changed, fiend qi was already surging out from the cycle of rebirth that connected the nether to the corporeal world.

”Abyssal hollows form on lifeforms that were corrupted by the fiend qi from the nether. Those abyssal hollows are connected to the mass of void and fiend qi in the nether, the Gapless Abyss, and draw their power from there. In other words, the abyssal hollows are the true forms of the heavenly fiends. These pathways can’t be destroyed by typical slashes or damage to the physical structure. Instead, it can only be excised by pure vitality, sharp psychic intent or specific spells designed to counter them. Only then can the heavenly fiends be killed and these pathways be severed.

”This discovery resulted in the golden age of the way of the sword. Sword intent naturally severs all, and the abyssal hollows of heavenly fiends are no exception. It’s also possible to comprehend it relatively early, allowing even typical cultivators to slay fiendspawns.” Yvelbane reminisced about the past with a hint of yearning.

”My sword wielder and countless other immortals and divine beings followed our Dao Warden’s instructions and completely reshaped the Celestial Moat of Void Embrace, thus cutting off the route that the supreme heartfiends had used to descend to our world. However, the Gapless Abyss in the netherworld had already formed. Heavenly fiends can still use that to enter our world, and the only thing we could do about it was to seal it. Since then... What has happened since then?” Yvelbane clammed up. There was clearly a gap in that part of its memory.

Seriously though, was Yvelbane the sword wielder or the sword itself? An Jing thought. Apart from that, he had other doubts. Yvelbane had mentioned that the Dao Court had already fallen during its era, yet it just said that a Dao Warden existed during the era of its sword wielder.

Then again, perhaps it wasn’t that unexpected, since Yvelbane was speaking as the soul of the sword. Perhaps it had had many wielders before. Maybe the history of Yvelbane the sword stretched much further back than anyone could imagine, and that the wielder that Yvelbane just brought up was from the era when the Dao Court still reigned. The fiendslaying immortal that An Jing saw in a vision was probably a different wielder that lived after the fall of the Dao Court.

But if that’s the case... An Jing put the details together and sensed a scary hidden implication in those events. How many fiend calamities have taken place in Void Embrace?

The oldest one was the calamity of supreme heartfiends, which took place during the reign of the Dao Court. Countless cultivators fell during the worldwide conflict, resulting in grave losses for all. While the Dao Court survived it, it probably eventually collapsed from the aftermath that followed just like how it happened in Skysource.

There had to be more fiend calamities following the first one. In fact, it probably didn’t just happen in a single world. Perhaps Skysource and the other worlds where Yvelbane’s fragments were located experienced similar fiend calamities too. The most recent one was that which ended the immortal path of qi cultivation in Void Embrace, utterly destroying the ancient ways of the immortals and divine beings and resulting in the creation of the formation-based martial path of lifearcs. No other fiend calamity seemed to come after that one as far as he was aware.

Even so, the martial path would not be stable for eternity. It had been five whole eras since the previous fiend calamity, a time so long that even historical records ceased to be believable. Yvelbane did remember some of it, but only small fragments, so there was no way for them to see the full picture.