Immortal Paladin

[POV: Jia Yun]

“There might still be hope…” Jia Yun whispered, her voice barely audible above the growing blizzard. She pressed trembling fingers against the bracelet on her wrist, activating the healing spell imbued within. Pale light surged up her arm, knitting torn skin and broken vessels. Her breath fogged in front of her face as she gritted her teeth against the numbing cold.

“What do you mean?” asked the boy before her. He was barely past childhood, no taller than her shoulder, yet he stood in the eye of this catastrophe as if fated to bear its weight. It was the same “baby boy” Da Ji had once wept over, clutching as if her soul depended on it. And perhaps it did.

“What is your name, boy?” Jia Yun asked, even as another gust of wind howled past them, sharp with shards of ice.

“Chen Wei,” he said quietly. Even his voice trembled, not from fear but confusion, lost in the enormity of what now surrounded them.

The wind screamed louder, a shriek of agony and rage. The monstrous fox loomed overhead, its fur silver and white, now stained with a sheen of blackened frost. Her tails whipped violently… three, then four, then five, each one manifesting in succession with a surge of unnatural energy. Every tail intensified the storm, and every tail drew the beast further away from reason.

Jia Yun’s breath became a struggle, her lungs resisting the motion. A creeping numbness spread up her legs, then her ribs. The frost wasn’t merely natural; it was directed, focused on her as if the beast could feel her intent and sought to extinguish it.

“Chen Wei, listen to me very carefully,” she said, forcing strength into her voice. Her eyes narrowed as the chill spread across her limbs, bones beginning to ache with each word spoken. The beast had become a force of calamity, but its source, Jia Yun believed, was more intimate than blind destruction.

“I don’t trust you,” she admitted, voice cracking from the cold, “but I am willing to trust in the ‘humanity’ within you.”

Her fingers twitched as she reached toward her other bracelet. She hadn’t intended to use both spells so quickly, but time and strength were luxuries she could no longer afford. A second surge of healing light coursed through her, slowing the frost’s invasion just enough to speak.

“The Cloud Mist Sect may appear to be a Sect that communes with the world, but in truth, we were guardians of a sacred lineage. The Nine-Tailed Fox.” Jia Yun’s voice faltered but did not break. “To say we were her descendants would be to dilute her story.”

Chen Wei looked overwhelmed, gaze darting between her and the monstrous form overhead.

“You must calm the beast—” Jia Yun gasped, clutching her chest as ice threaded into her lungs.

“How?” Chen Wei cried. “How do I do that?”

Jia Yun steadied herself, not through force, but through surrender. “In the north back home… an old tale is told of the silver fox. She lived peacefully in the mountains, far from men. One day, she was caught in a hunter’s trap. Instead of killing her, the man freed her. The fox repaid him not with death or trickery, but love. She took human form to walk beside him. They shared seasons together.”

Chen Wei shifted, his hands tightening into fists. “What does that have to do with now? The city will crumble if we don’t stop this.”

“She loved that man through lifetimes,” Jia Yun continued. “But in every iteration, he would die. Sometimes by sword, sometimes by betrayal, sometimes by age. Yet still, she found him again and again. Rebirth after rebirth, she loved him anew… and watched him die.”

She struggled to hold on. Her healing spell waned. Her fingers were pale blue now.

“But in all the stories, all the cycles, there was one thing never mentioned before. You.” Her gaze bore into him, not with judgment, but hope. “You, the child. You, who exist because love endured beyond tragedy.”

Chen Wei froze. The blackness that clawed at the edges of his soul seemed to falter, cracking like glass under warmth.

“This is our last gamble,” Jia Yun said. “Hope is fragile, but real. If she sees you… if she hears you… if she knows her child still loves her…”

Her hand rose and landed gently on his shoulder. The last warmth she could give.

“Talk to her,” she whispered, her breath white and thinning. “That’s what you need to do.”

…

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[POV: Chen Wei]

Chen Wei didn’t realize he’d been holding his breath until Jia Yun’s hand touched his chest. Her warmth seeped through his frozen tunic like a memory from before the snow, before the pain. Her words echoed inside him, not as commands, but as reminders. You are loved. The void gnawing at his chest shrank just slightly, as if retreating from the light of that truth.

But then a sticky, unfamiliar sensation curled against his neck. He flinched. The cold hadn’t reached there, yet something slick and vile clung to his skin. A sinister voice tickled his ear like cobwebs on bare flesh.

“This isn’t just you,” it breathed. “This woman… she’s just manipulating you. She’s guiding you to throw yourself into the fire, hoping the two of you devour each other in the name of reconciliation.”

He clenched his jaw. No. He wouldn’t be played.

Yet his hand moved on its own. In a blink, he pierced Jia Yun’s chest and pulled out her heart. The organ pulsed once, then melted into inky sludge between his fingers. Black ichor splattered across the snow like desecration.

His breath hitched. He stared at his bloodied hand, unmoving.

“You wanted it,” the voice said, calm and matter-of-fact. “That’s why it happened.”

The hollow inside him returned. Hungrier than ever, and darker than before. His knees threatened to buckle, but Jia Yun didn’t fall away. She leaned on him, the last of her strength pressing gently onto his shoulder. Her face betrayed no anger. There was only tenderness.

“G-go to her… This isn’t you...” she whispered, raising a trembling hand toward the fox whose monstrous form loomed beyond the blizzard’s veil. A sixth tail had begun to unfurl behind it like a banner of calamity.

He caught Jia Yun before she fell, gently laying her down in the snow. He didn’t speak… What was there to say? Her story had already been passed to him. Her last breath had offered him a choice. And now, he had made it.

Chen Wei stood and ran.

The snow deepened with every step, but he didn’t feel it. The cold bit everything else, turned people into ice sculptures mid-step, but left him untouched. Hail battered rooftops and shattered stone, but not a single shard grazed his skin. A tempest roared around him, but the winds parted at his path as if they, too, believed in his cause.

“This isn’t you,” the sinister voice insisted. “Accept me. Your parent is inconsequential. I can give you everything.”

He ignored it.

“Surrender.”

“You will only find despair.”

Chen Wei’s steps never slowed. His fingers were turning red, his breath came out in foggy bursts, but no part of him yielded. By the time he reached the foot of the enormous beast, he was no longer the same boy Jia Yun had spoken to. He had grown, not just in body, but in heart. There was no longer uncertainty in his eyes.

“I don’t care,” he shouted into the storm, his voice cracking with emotion. “You don’t know that!”

If despair was the price for love, then let it be so. He didn’t want peace without her. He didn’t want silence if it meant forgetting.

He stepped onto the beast’s fur and began to climb.

…

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[POV: Jue Bu]

There was not a darn day that wouldn’t be exciting with David involved. That much, Jue Bu knew as certainty. Even now, as the world above twisted in the blizzard’s vice grip, Jue Bu found himself grinning like a madman, feet firmly planted on a battlefield that was already cooling in the aftermath of their assault.

The sky boiled with snow. The wind howled like a starving ghost. A fox-shaped presence blotted out the clouds, each tail birthing unnatural weather. The qi pressure above them belonged to something of at least the Seventh Realm. Jue Bu squinted up at it, shading his eyes with a lazy hand. “Would you look at that. A bit overkill, don’t you think?”

He felt his own cultivation, steady and immovable at the Fifth Realm. He couldn’t push through yet. He’d tried. Still, the forces that had dared challenge them from the Heavenly Alliance were already retreating in miserable waves. Ice was devouring the sky, and so was their morale. Their lines had broken.

The so-called invincible camp wasn’t prepared for a trio like this.

Jue Bu cleaned his blade with a flick, flicking off blood that wasn’t even his. On either side of him stood Lu Gao and the new kid Yuen Fu.

“Well?” Lu Gao asked, stretching out his shoulders like he was only warming up. “What’s next?”

“I’m not your master,” Jue Bu replied, flipping his sword lazily. “I just have his face. Stop looking at me like I know what I’m doing.”

Yuen Fu still wore his usual haunted look, though less so than before. “We need to go back,” he said, voice taut. “New Willow’s in danger.”

Jue Bu glanced at the distant city floating in the veil of snow and storm. The name New Willow rang out like a warning bell now. It wasn’t just a city anymore. It was a storm cradle. He looked again, slower this time.

“Back there?” he said, scratching his chin. “For what? So we can get thoroughly annihilated by a fox-god throwing a tantrum?”

He wasn’t that reckless.

Jue Bu turned away, about to brush it off, when something clicked. A flicker of memory. A half-formed thought. He paused. He had spent a long time inside David. Longer than he’d preferred. David had once called him a parasite, but in truth, they’d shaped one another. Jue Bu knew how David thought.

And now, realization set in like the final piece of a shattered puzzle reassembled in the wrong place.

“Son of a bitch…” Jue Bu muttered, eyes wide. “He really wants to throw hands with the fucking Void, doesn’t he?”

He didn’t mean the local one. He meant the big one. The real deal. The Supreme Void. The enemy beyond all enemies.

More accurately… David at least wanted to try. And that? That brought Jue Bu a thrill he hadn’t felt since the day he realized revenge was still possible.

“Lu Gao,” Jue Bu barked suddenly. “Yuen Fu.”

Both turned to him.

“We’re going,” he said, pointing at the city of snow and chaos.

Lu Gao arched a brow. “To New Willow?”

Yuen Fu helpfully added, “But how?”

Jue Bu ignored him entirely. He raised his hand, focusing qi through his palm, and roared, “Immortal Art: Reversal of Heaven and Earth!”

A surge of force erupted beneath them, bending the laws of nature into a vortex of rising winds and warped gravity. The trio launched upward, carving a path through storm clouds and snow toward the heart of the chaos.

Because that was where David would be.

And where David was, the world broke, bent, or burned.

…

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[POV: Ru Qiu]

The silence was nearly sacred. Shattered buildings stood like hollow bones against the wind, their once-proud banners burned into ash. Craters smoldered where grand halls had stood. Not a single soldier of the Heavenly Alliance stirred in the aftermath; their bodies lay scattered like broken dolls, crimson mixing with the black soot of fire and ash.

Ru Qiu stood at the heart of it all, alone in victory.

The scorched earth before him still smoked, wide and blackened, like a brand upon the land. That was where the Void Disciple had fallen, devoured by the backlash of his own failed power. The ground itself had been cracked open by their duel, revealing molten veins underneath. The scent of charred flesh and ruptured qi lingered.

But it had been close. Too close.

Ru Qiu’s left arm was gone entirely, torn from the socket during the disciple’s final struggle. A third of his torso had been erased by a technique empowered by a Supreme Being’s will, seared down to bone and muscle, still glowing faintly with cursed divine residue. His face twitched as wind grazed the exposed nerve along his jaw. His left cheek had been peeled away by a storm of blades. It now hung loosely, and every movement threatened to unmake what remained of it.

He had held on regardless.

“Hmph,” Ru Qiu breathed, forcing the air deep into his injured core. “Coward didn’t even finish his descent.”

The eclipse he had summoned, the black halo that once veiled the sky, had long since disappeared. The Immortal Art had drained more than it should’ve. Every heartbeat now felt like stepping through glass. But he still stood. And that mattered. Because Ru Qiu was the Heavenly Demon. No title granted, no lineage handed down. He had clawed that name into the bones of history through torment and blood. Victory was always his. Even now, at the brink of collapse, he dared to smirk.

He leaned on the hilt of his sword, eyes drawn southeast.

There, across the horizon, clouds swirled in violent dance. A blizzard. Thick, rolling, and unnatural. Even from this distance, he could feel the convergence of energies, like a wound tearing open in the very heavens. Snow didn’t fall like that on its own, not in the Sacred Groves.

“That’s Da Wei,” Ru Qiu muttered, instantly piecing it together. “Or someone reacting to him. Probably both.”

He clicked his tongue. This was what he hated about being in the game as a pawn, a piece moved rather than the hand that moved others. His rise had been monumental, and his fall equally humiliating. But he refused to remain a piece forever. No matter who sat on the board, they would all kneel before him in the end.

He lowered his gaze to his trembling fingers, covered in soot, dried blood, and what remained of his qi lines. Most of his meridians were damaged. Regeneration wouldn’t be enough. Not this time.

He raised two fingers to his temple and pressed firmly.

“Let’s make it hurt less,” he whispered.

With a slow exhale, Ru Qiu forced his soul’s innermost core open, his quintessence. It flared like a second sun in his dantian, burning fast, wild, and unsustainable. But it was pure. It gave. It healed. And that was enough.

His left side bubbled with spiritual light. Flesh returned where it had been scorched, though faintly wrong in color. Bones regrew, but not without creaking like old wood. The pain nearly knocked him unconscious, but he endured it. Always. Then, with a grunt, he let his sword fall. It hovered in the air, then spun flat like a platform. Ru Qiu stepped onto the flat of the blade with perfect balance, ignoring the fresh blood oozing from his side. His heel clicked once.

The sword shot forward in a burst of shadow-light, turning the ruined city into a blur behind him.

“I’m coming,” Ru Qiu murmured toward the blizzard, voice dry as gravel. “And this time, I want everything.”

…

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[POV: Nu Wa]

The earth trembled faintly beneath the shedding scales. A low, wet slither echoed across the dead grass as a serpent’s long body writhed in anguish. Mottled with ash and ancient runes, it convulsed like a dying dream, but it was not dying. It was becoming.

And from that glistening husk, a figure slowly emerged.

She rose from her own skin, not in grace, but in agony. Her flesh was raw and pink, tender like that of a creature just born. No blood marked the process, only a thin steam that hissed as her skin touched the cursed ground. The remnants of the snake collapsed, its life now funneled into the woman who knelt among scattered bones and frost-bitten soil.

She coughed a deep, ragged sound, and clenched at the earth beneath her fingers. Her fingernails hadn’t yet hardened, her muscles trembled, but her rage was already whole.

“I lived,” she whispered, voice cracking from disuse, “because I prepared. Because I knew I’d be betrayed.”

Her back arched violently, a spasm running through her as power coursed into her newly formed body. Her contingency had worked, barely. Had she not bound her essence into the serpent, had she not carved that snake into a game piece under her name, she would have joined the rest of her fellow prisoners in oblivion.

She fell forward, biting into her own wrist to silence her scream. Her mind felt like it was being torn in half, or perhaps split across time. Memories surged in and out, some hers, some not. Too much pain. Too many visions. She could feel the old seals trying to rewrite her again.

But she resisted.

She clenched her teeth, pupils shrinking to slits as she pressed her forehead into the dirt.

“My name is Nu Wa,” she hissed through her teeth. “My name is Nu Wa. My name is Nu Wa—”

She repeated the phrase like a prayer. No, like a lifeline. A rope thrown into a storm of amnesia and madness. Her voice cracked on the last repetition, and she dug her fingers into the ground, trying to anchor herself.

Then she looked up, and the sky loomed vast above her.

“I hate you,” she said.

Her breath steamed in the humid air. Her bare skin glowed faintly with the last remnants of her transformation.

“I abhor you!” she spat upward, the heavens reflecting nothing back.

The Supreme Beings. She remembered now, not how they remade her, or why she was thrown into this reality, but what they did to her soul. How they reached into her, twisted her truths, erased her continuity, then remade her mind to serve their designs. That was the price of the ‘Ancient Soul’ she awakened, an origin forever out of reach, truths she could no longer name.

Her scream ripped from her throat, raw and furious, echoing across the barren landscape like a siren’s curse.

“RYAAAAAAAAAAGH—!”

It was not a battle cry. It was grief turned savage, a lament with no funeral. Her voice cracked mountains far beyond her, scattering nearby birds and toppling fragile wards left from some forgotten skirmish. Her bones ached with the sound, threatening to collapse under its weight.

She heaved breath after breath, tears falling without permission. Her hands trembled as she reached into the depths of her eye.

The Destiny Seeking Eyes glimmered into form, and with them, the Seven Gazes ignited across her irises, spiraling in a golden web of insight and warping time itself around her. A thousand threads danced before her mind’s eye. The multiverse unveiled itself briefly, but she cared only for one thread, the one that connected her to the thing that betrayed her.

And there it was.

Among scattered fragments of fate, she saw a cluster of strange souls. Guardians. Mortals who defied patterns. One of them bore Da Wei’s scent. From them, she learned how to hurt those who had used her. What had discarded her.

Her lips pulled back slowly, her breath turning shallow.

A grin. Wide. Sharp. Wrong.

“I will hurt you,” she said, laughing now. “I will hurt you.”

Her gaze snapped to the north. There, a blizzard gathered in the Sacred Groves’ territory, unnatural and wild. Power swirled in its heart. Something important. Something that mattered to the one she hated.

“I. Will. Hurt. You.” Nu Wa whispered, licking the blood from her wrist. Her grin widened.

Then space around her folded inward with a sickening crunch, reality twisting like fabric caught in fire. Her naked form flickered once, then vanished.

Only the shed skin of a serpent remained, forever forgotten.

…

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[POV: Chen Wei]

Chen Wei’s fingers dug into the thick fur, his knuckles white with desperation as he climbed the fox’s leg like a child scaling a mountainside. Every breath scraped his lungs raw. Each heartbeat came slower than the last. As he ascended, his limbs grew thinner, his joints stiffer. Time peeled away his youth with each inch. By the time he reached the fox’s massive shoulder, he had aged into a stooped and shaking old man. Yet still, he climbed, because this was the only path left.

A mournful howl rolled through the air, shaking the sky. The grieving fox turned its head slightly, an earthquake to the frail man clinging to it. Mist cloaked everything in a shroud of white, stretching endlessly in all directions. The city below was gone, swallowed by a storm. Chen Wei’s voice cracked from the strain, but he screamed anyway, “Mother! Mother! It’s me!”

There was no response. The fox’s sorrow drowned out his words. Again, she howled, her voice steeped in pain. The gust that followed nearly pried him free. His fingers slipped, and he flew into the air, arcing helplessly, before landing on the soft, wet snout.

The fox’s eye shifted and locked onto him.

“Mom,” Chen Wei said again, softer this time. His body trembled not from cold but from hope. “It’s me.”

Something flickered in the fox’s eye. Her howls stopped. The blizzard overhead thinned. The clouded sky cracked open. The storm dispersed in a widening spiral, revealing a strange and lonely cosmos above, black as ink, with only a handful of stars burning weakly. Gravity lightened, and Chen Wei’s weight lifted. He began to float, clinging tightly to the fur to avoid being taken by the current of wind.

And then the fox floated too. It peeled away from the island-like city below, ascending with the grace of a drifting cloud. Her mourning had untethered her.

But the silence didn’t last.

A sudden burst of heat arrived like a spear to the gut. Chen Wei squinted upward.

Descending from above was a humanoid silhouette made of flame, burning as bright and merciless as the sun itself. Its radiance hurt to look at, casting sharp shadows across the fur of the fox. The blizzard’s remnants hissed into steam before the being’s presence. Facing it was another figure: a golden outline of a man, his aura radiating justice and defiance. The two clashed in midair, their blows creating ripples through reality itself.

And then, from the opposite direction, something moved.

The fog parted like curtains, unveiling a colossus of stone, a woman-shaped titan taller than any mountain. Her body was carved in the likeness of a goddess, and frost clung to every inch of her. Mist coiled at her feet. Her eyes glowed blue, as ancient as glaciers.

The battlefield was growing crowded. The sky, once cold and empty, now held titans.

And Chen Wei was in the very heart of it all.

…

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[POV: Da Ji]

The nine-tailed fox floated in the empty vastness of space, her fur slick with blood and ash, tails curling and uncurling in restless silence. At last, the voices had gone quiet. The curse buried deep in her blood had stopped howling for now.

Golden eyes narrowed toward the horizon. The sky split open, fire blooming in the shape of a man.

Da Ji blinked once, ears twitching.

“…What in the world is that idiot brother of mine doing, fighting the sun?”