Immortal Paladin

I felt faint. The air was thick and heavy with incense and the smell of sweat. My limbs ached like rusted joints trying to move after decades of stillness. Healing that many people had cost me dearly. But what weighed on me most wasn’t just the strain on my body. It was the gnawing realization that I had willingly given up fragments of my lifespan, seconds and minutes that would never return.

Yet still, I told myself, “It’s worth it.”

I sat against a wooden pillar when I felt a tug on my sleeve. I looked down. Yuen Fu, now cleared of all signs of sickness, knelt beside me, his face pale and drawn, but his eyes sharp with urgency.

“There is something you must hear,” he whispered, his voice no longer hoarse but shaken. “The existence who took the Empire… he… he is not human.” His hands trembled as he clutched tighter. “He gave an ultimatum. He said he will have your head by the end of the year. There’s a bounty in your name now, and it’s not a small one. Why is this thing targeting you so specifically?”

My gaze drifted past him to the makeshift ward filled with the recently healed, now resting. Beyond them, Wen Yuhan leaned casually against a rickety wall, arms folded, pretending not to listen. But I knew better. Her golden eyes were calculating something, and I had a sinking feeling she already had an idea who—or what—this entity might be.

“We will work it out,” I told Yuen Fu, offering a weak smile. “For now, focus on your healing.”

“But I am healed,” he said, almost helplessly. “We all are.”

I didn’t respond. The looks they gave me, those eyes filled with gratitude, reverence, and something dangerously close to worship. It made my skin itch. This wasn’t what I wanted. I never wanted to be seen as some savior. But I had no choice. The sickness had to be stopped before it spread further. The least I could do was carry the burden of being the cure.

“You are going to kill yourself,” came a whisper in my head, cold and familiar. Jue Bu. Of course, he would choose now to chime in, as cryptic as ever. 

“I can’t hear you.”

“You know what I mean,” added Jue Bu, “There is no need to pretend otherwise, but if it offers you comfort being the fool. Then fine.”

I ignored him.

That day became known as the Day of Healing.

It didn’t take long for word to spread. At first, it was a trickle, desperate villagers from nearby hamlets, carrying the sick in rickety wagons, pleading for the saint’s touch. Then came the wounded, the broken, the old, and the dying. Rumors did what even magic could not. They reached ears I would rather have stayed deaf.

The Willow Village, once a sleepy backwater hidden in the cradle of quiet hills, began to swell with people. Hunters became guards. Farmers became builders. The wooden palisades were torn down and replaced with stone and mortar. Roads formed from countless footfalls. Tents and wagons became homes. A council was formed, led not by any lord, but by elders, healers, warriors… and me, despite how much I resisted it.

They called it a sanctuary. They called it a miracle. I tried not to listen.

By the end of the year, Willow Village was no longer a village. It was a burgeoning town of over four thousand souls, a patchwork society sewn together from the fragments of fallen provinces. They named it New Willow.

But even now, I couldn’t forget what Yuen Fu had told me.

Some being, some inhuman existence had taken the Empire, set a bounty on my head, and declared a deadline.

The end of the year.

I stared at the cold winter sky, the stars hidden behind a sheet of pale clouds, their light smothered into silence. The wind bit through my cloak and whistled past the walls of New Willow. Snow fell in lazy spirals, dusting the earth in soft white silence. I didn’t know if I would make it to the next snowfall. Some days, the weight on my chest felt too heavy to bear, as if each breath I took cost something more precious than air.

“Oh, you will do just fine,” said Wen Yuhan beside me. She stood unnaturally still, clad in light clothing as if the cold were merely a suggestion rather than a fact. Her arms were folded loosely, her expression unreadable.

I scoffed, tightening the collar of my fur-lined cloak. “What are you now? A mind reader?”

Her only reply was a thin smile, more knowing than amused.

We stood atop the north-facing wall, looking out into the quiet wild. What had once been forest and meadow was now a scarred expanse of cleared brush and perimeter stakes. The village… no, the town… had grown teeth. Barricades, lookout towers, and palisades had turned New Willow into a bulwark, and still I felt it wasn’t enough.

A crunch of boots against packed snow interrupted the quiet. Chief Wan Peng approached, his large frame wrapped in a bear pelt and a thin sheen of frost clinging to his beard. Or rather, former Hunter Chief Wan Peng, now the Head Council of New Willow.

“Little Wei!” he greeted heartily, raising a hand in salute.

I sighed. “Why do I have to say it again and again? I’m not little Wei anymore.”

He raised an eyebrow and feigned a thoughtful nod. “So… Chief Warrior Da, then?”

I groaned and pouted at the same time. “Now that’s just too formal.”

“Little Wei it is,” he said with a grin, clearly pleased with himself.

A lot had happened in the past year. After my feat of felling that monstrous demonic boar—three meters tall, two meters wide, a creature of muscle, rage, and pure turbulent qi—I had been formally granted the title Chief Warrior by the Council. I didn’t want it. I argued that Ding Shan was better suited, being the former captain of the 112th Bronze Unit, but no one listened. I was the one who split the boar’s skull in two. I was the one they looked to when monsters arrived at our gates.

“Is there a problem?” I asked, noting the rare furrow in Wan Peng’s brow.

He exhaled a warm mist into the air. “I don’t know… Before the tumultuous era began, demonic beasts were rare sightings, something that occurred once in a blue moon. But after the fall of the Empire and the rise of chaos, their numbers surged. Now, just these past few weeks, we’ve been seeing less and less of them. At first, I thought it was the cold, but the pattern feels… off.”

He scratched his chin thoughtfully. “I might be overthinking it. Maybe they’re just hibernating. We know too little about demonic beasts. All I know is, neither I nor any of the seasoned hunters here have seen this pattern before. That’s why I came, hoping to seek Strategist Wen Yuhan’s wisdom.”

Wen Yuhan, who had been silently listening, allowed herself a small smile. “It’s just as you say. The beasts are hibernating. They respond to turbulent qi in their surroundings, and during the colder months, qi settles and stagnates. So their madness sleeps, too… for now.”

The term demonic beast had many meanings depending on where you stood in the cosmos. In the Hollowed World, it meant a beast that had cultivated the wicked path, often marked by malevolence, ambition, and cunning. But here, in this fractured, qi-deprived False Earth, the term had changed. It referred to creatures that had absorbed too much turbulent qi, twisted energy born of death, suffering, and chaos. That qi poisoned their minds, made them rabid and bloodthirsty, slaves to instinct and hunger. Some, if lucky, retained enough of themselves to cultivate. But such cases were rare. In this world, even humans struggled to awaken, let alone monsters.

Wan Peng gave a slow nod. “I see, I see… So there’s no need for me to worry too much about it then.”

“Yes, there is no need to worry,” Wen Yuhan affirmed, her tone calm but decisive.

Wan Peng nodded, though he didn’t look entirely convinced. “Still, winter came too early this year,” he muttered, rubbing his gloved hands together. “That’s ominous enough in itself. But thankfully, Strategist Wen advised us to stockpile dried food and salt meat. The stores will hold, and we should have enough to last through spring thaw, provided the next migration wave doesn’t hit us too hard.” He turned, tightening the straps of his pelt cloak. “I’ll see to my duties now. Take care, Da Wei, Wen Yuhan.”

“Same goes to you…” I replied softly, watching him walk off into the snowy dusk, his figure fading behind gusts of wind.

Once he was gone, Wen Yuhan leaned against the rampart beside me, her breath curling in the cold air. “Tomorrow is the Day of Healing,” she said without looking at me. “What are your plans?”

I blinked. “What do you mean?”

She scoffed. “You know what I mean, Da Wei. The people are expecting to see you work your miracles again… especially tomorrow.”

I didn’t answer right away. Jue Bu had been nagging me for days now, speaking in riddles and half-warnings, and I didn’t need her piling on.

Wen Yuhan tilted her head, giving me that sly expression that meant trouble. “Should I tell your sister you’ve been stalling again?”

“Fucking snitch,” I muttered, more to myself than to her. Then louder, I said, “I have a plan…”

Her scoff this time was louder. “Let me guess. You’re planning to run to the Yama King’s embrace and challenge him to a one-on-one duel? That’s your idea of a solution?”

I smirked. “So I can’t steal his cultivation?”

She closed her eyes and took a long, slow breath. “I gave your intelligence more credit than I realized,” she finally said, her voice dangerously calm. “It’s utter foolishness. You’re going to use a third-rate demonic art—one that even the Bone Cult abandoned centuries ago!—to try and steal the cultivation of a transcendent being?”

I shrugged. “It’s not like I’m diving in blind. I’ve done the research. I know the risks.”

Her eyes sharpened. “You didn’t even last two moves in the simulation,” she snapped. “If you truly intend to contend with the likes of him, you’ll need to manifest an Immortal Art, not play around with outlaw techniques that will burn your lifespan for a fleeting advantage.”

“I’ve been working on it—”

“No, you’ve been obsessing over your tech uplift idea,” she interrupted, throwing her hand toward the distant lights of the village below. “I don’t even know what ‘tech uplift’ meant until you showed me! Building weird machinery, organizing factories, teaching villagers how to build water wheels, and forging parts for weird stuff. You’ve spent the last year indulging in every form of distraction except cultivation.”

I held her gaze. “I have a plan.”

She pressed her lips into a line, then said, “While I can’t pass on my Immortal Art to you—believe me, I would if I could!—that old fossil perched in your sea of consciousness can. And he should, especially since you’ve finally fulfilled the requirements.”

Jue Bu groaned inside my head, his voice echoing with dramatic offense. “The lass has a point, but did she really have to call me an old fossil? Bet she’s older than me!”

Since she couldn’t hear him, I decided to help him out. “The old fossil says you’re an old hag.”

Wen Yuhan didn’t so much as blink. “Tell the fossil he’s too senile to recognize beauty when he sees it.”

I smirked, but the banter faded quickly. My mind returned to the strange Immortal Art that Jue Bu had possessed… the Reversal of Heaven and Earth. A technique that inverted life and death, yin and yang, even gender and self. It was powerful, yes… but disgusting in application. I hadn’t forgotten the story of my life; that was how Jue Bu ended inside me.

“The Reversal sounds awesome on paper,” I muttered, “but it’s hard to get excited about a technique that genderbends people as a side effect.”

“You could do worse,” she said dryly.

“Still,” I continued, “I have no regrets about how I used my time. Even if I haven’t learned an Immortal Art, I’ve helped people. That matters to me. More than some mystical flame I’ll never be talented enough to wield. You’ve seen how slow I progress.”

Wen Yuhan’s expression changed. Her posture shifted subtly, like someone seeing a puzzle piece slot into place. “Wait,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “That’s your plan?”

“You are kind of slow, compared to a certain friend of mine…”

To be fair, Wen Yuhan seemed to only be at the Spirit Mystery Realm.

Nongmin would definitely be faster than her in terms of digesting information. His cultivation allows him to process and interpret at speeds Wen Yuhan couldn’t replicate. That’s why there were ‘lags’ in her Eyes whenever she tried to perceive certain outcomes. It’s not the technique. Instead, it’s the fundamental limit of the vessel.

She stared at me for a long moment, then sighed, rubbing her temples. “I never imagined I’d have to sacrifice my body to you…”

“Don’t make it weird,” I muttered.

Jue Bu groaned again. “Your lifespan is going to suffer. I just knew it. Well, nice knowing you, Da Wei…”

The bell rang.

Its echo was deep, harsh, metallic. That bell was welded from salvaged bronze and steel. It was our early warning system, and it hadn’t tolled in months. The people of New Willow stirred. Lanterns were doused, children gathered, weapons armed, and the tension that had been building quietly through the winter finally exploded into action.

I didn’t move right away. Instead, I stood there beside Wen Yuhan, watching the snowy fog stir on the horizon.

“So,” I asked, my voice low but steady, “what’s the truth then? Back when Wan Peng asked you about demonic beasts, you lied, right?”

She didn’t deny it. She simply nodded, her eyes not leaving the horizon. “Yes… Your senses are sharp as ever.”

They were. My Divine Sense had grown sharper in the past year, honed not through meditation or cultivation techniques, but through constant pressure from fighting sickness, famine, and the crushing weight of expectation.

She continued, voice calm in the face of what we both knew was coming. “I lied. But there was no point in worrying him. What good would panic do the village?”

I sighed, not out of disappointment, but out of familiarity. “Let me guess. They ended up in the Yama King’s army?”

She didn’t respond. She didn’t have to.

The answer came for her. From the snow-masked horizon, the silhouettes emerged, first as shadows, then forms, then unmistakable monstrosities. Bears taller than siege towers, wolves with bone-white hides, serpents slithering with ribs exposed, and boars with empty sockets that burned with violet fire. There were even big cats, lithe and silent, walking like phantoms through the flurry.

This level of reanimation… It was beyond crude necromancy. It wasn’t like the wild Jiangshi of the Hollowed World. No, this was controlled and directed. Almost respectful in how perfectly preserved the beasts were despite their death.

Wen Yuhan voiced what I had already suspected. “The Yama King is known for his mastery over death. His Jiangshi don’t stumble like mindless corpses. They retain fragments of will, their martial arts, even parts of their former selves. He doesn’t reanimate. He recruits.”

She stepped forward and folded her arms. “Even beasts, once touched by his power, can be bound. Demonic beasts included. It doesn’t matter how much turbulent qi they’ve absorbed. If he wills it, they will kneel. And his touch… one graze from him can decay the soul.”

Her voice softened. “Da Wei, you have no chance of beating him. I told you this before. You will suffer your first loss here… and then you will come with me.”

I smiled.

“Do you know,” I said, turning my gaze back to the fog where more of the army emerged with each breath, “I have a habit of proving seers and prophets wrong?”

She chuckled, soft and sharp like snow crunching underfoot. “We’ll see. That’s what makes the future so exciting, isn’t it? The uncertainty. The thrill.”

I shook my head. “What are you talking about? There’s nothing thrilling or uncertain about the future, except that it will come. Always. I’m not excited. I don’t celebrate the inevitable.”

A pause.

“What’s there to be excited about in facing death? That’s what scares me. That’s what always scared me. But it’s only one possibility among many.”

Wen Yuhan’s expression warmed, and her voice followed. “So fearless.”

I shook my head again, slower this time. “Not fearless. Just done being scared.”

Then I raised my voice, not through shouting, but through technique. Lion’s Roar thundered from my lungs, empowered by my qi, reaching every corner of the wall, every watchtower, every soul within New Willow.

“To your battle stations!”

The effect was immediate. Riflemen lined up on the battlements with their bolt-actions, each weapon carefully refurbished or replicated from scavenged designs I recovered in the back of my head. They came from a combination of Nongmin’s research and a little recollection I have of Earth. Below, the cannoneers prepared, lighting the powder and checking the barrels. The walls that were once wooden were now reinforced with steel plating and dense stone. It shuddered as emplacements were secured.

The people didn’t hesitate. They trusted me.

I turned to Wen Yuhan, lowering my voice to a murmur. “Let me show you why they called me the God of War in the Hollowed World.”

She smiled, not mockingly, but with a flicker of something like respect. “Then show me.”

And so I did.