Chapter 369: Fractured Mind and Bleeding Eyes

Clank! Whirr——!

His boots froze as if welded to the floor.

The ancient hex dug into his mental sea like iron barbs, twisting with cruel, parasitic hunger.

His thoughts fragmented into chaotic static, his peripheral vision darkening into a tunnel of blinding agony.

Below him, the spiked obsidian ring swept forward with terrifying speed, its Nether-Soul Steel fangs whistling through the air, aimed straight at his paralyzed shins to sever bone and sinew in a single rotation.

‘Move, damn you!’

The command raged in his mind, but his mortal nervous system refused to obey.

‘Impudent dead things!’

Shen Yu clamped down violently on the inside of his cheek, tearing flesh until hot, metallic blood flooded his tongue and choked his throat.

The brutal physical agony pierced through the mental haze like a burning spear.

He possessed no soul-tempering arts for a Foundation Establishment shell, no ethereal barriers to deflect ancient curses, and no divine talismans to ward off the encroaching dark.

What he carried was something far more terrifying, the unyielding, blood-drenched Dao Heart of a demonic grandmaster who had severed a hundred thousand lives and carved his throne out of a mountain of severed heads.

If his spirit lacked armor, he would forge his unadulterated malice into an executioner’s blade.

‘Ignite!’

Shen Yu forcibly detonated the outer perimeter of his Sea of Consciousness.

It was a desperate, suicidal gambit, but in the face of absolute severance, survival demanded madness.

The dormant slaughter intent buried within his reincarnated soul erupted like a subterranean volcano of liquid obsidian.

He viciously compressed centuries of accumulated carnage, torture, and sovereign wrath into a jagged, blood-black spike of pure killing will, driving it outward with the fury of a collapsing star.

BOOM——!

The psychic detonation exploded behind his temples like a heavenly tribulation thunderclap.

The backlash was catastrophic.

The fragile walls of his mortal mental sea splintered open, tearing dozens of spiritual fissures across his soul foundation.

Shen Yu’s physical frame seized violently as thick, viscous black blood erupted in torrents from his nose, his eyes, and his ruptured eardrums, painting his pale face in horrific crimson streaks.

The soul trauma was deep and irreparable without soul medicine, medicine he simply did not possess.

His calm, calculative mind fractured.

The cold, meticulous strategist was burned away in the psychic furnace, and in its place, the deepest, most primordial demonic nature of his past life clawed its way to the surface.

His pupils dilated into abyssal voids ringed by feral, glowing crimson.

Reason evaporated, only pure, unbridled malice and instinct remained.

Across from him, the three Asura Bone Phantoms were completely annihilated.

The tyrannical weight of his slaughter intent tore through their spectral forms like a scythe through rotting straw, obliterating them into a swirling cloud of pale-blue soul embers.

Gasping wet, ragged breaths through teeth drenched in black blood, Shen Yu lunged forward with the ravenous hunger of a starving ghoul, tearing his jaws open to greedily swallow the drifting fragments.

The cold soul-essence did not heal the catastrophic fractures in his mind, it merely acted as crude, numbing ice packed into an open wound, fueling the roaring demonic madness that now controlled his limbs.

Tear—!

The spiked obsidian disc swept forward, its Nether-Soul Steel fangs slicing through his boots and carving deep trenches into his heels.

Shen Yu didn’t even blink.

He couldn’t feel the lacerations.

Stripped of caution, he let out a low, guttural snarl that sounded more beast than man.

“Wrahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh”

Step. Step. Step.

He tore across the spiked middle ring with reckless, terrifying momentum.

Nether-Soul spikes repeatedly punctured his soles, grinding against bone in wet squelches

Blood splashed across the magnetic floor, but the feral circulation of the Asura Blood-Forging Sutra dragged the ambient magnetic charge straight into the open wounds, brutally searing the mangled flesh shut with blackened scar tissue as he charged forward.

By the twentieth pace, he crashed into the innermost ring.

The space warped into a screaming vortex of vacuum blades, shredding his dark robes to ribbons and carving crisscrossing bloody gouges across his chest, neck, and face.

Simultaneously, the magnetic gravity slammed down with the crushing weight of five collapsing mountains.

THUD!

The concussive downward force drove Shen Yu’s left knee straight into the rotating obsidian disc.

Crack! Crunch!

His kneecap fractured instantly into jagged shards.

His ribs bowed inward against his lungs, and capillaries ruptured across his entire body, enveloping him in a fine, vaporized mist of blood.

Under such agony, an ordinary mind would have shattered into unconsciousness.

But Shen Yu was no longer thinking.

The manic demonic consciousness piloting his broken shell felt the crushing gravity not as a threat, but as an insult.

‘A pile of dead stones dares press against ME?!’

A high-pitched, unhinged cackle tore past the black blood pooling in his throat.

Shen Yu violently dug his fingers directly into the shattered meat of his left knee, gripping the broken bone fragments with feral strength.

He did not execute the kata with refined elegance, he violently forced his distorted meridians to obey through pure, psychotic willpower, driving the Asura Blood-Forging Sutra to devour the crushing gravity like starving vermin.

BZZZZT— BOOM!

A monstrous, blood-red Asura glyph tore through his shredded skin, blazing across his back with blinding intensity.

The foundational bottleneck was forcibly crushed to powder, his comprehension erupting from 12% straight to 25% of the First Layer!

His entire skeleton chimed like an ancient bronze bell.

His marrow liquefied into boiling, crimson ichor, fusing his fractured bones into a dense, iron-hard lattice.

With a feral, throat-shredding roar, Shen Yu wrenched his broken leg off the stone and stood fully upright against the five-mountain weight, his towering frame radiating thick, suffocating waves of raw bloodlust.

Twenty-eight.

The vacuum blades shattered against his newly tempered skin with dull metallic clinks.

Twenty-nine.

His blood-soaked boots left smoking, crimson craters in the ancient stone.

Thirty!

BANG!

He hurled his body across the final boundary, slamming both boots onto the solid marble exit dais.

The grinding mechanism instantly froze.

The vacuum storm vanished, and the chamber plummeted into absolute, ringing silence.

Shen Yu stood tall, drenched head-to-toe in black and red gore.

His chest heaved with ragged, shallow gasps, exhaling long pillars of burning crimson steam into the cold air.

His bleeding eyes darted wildly, devoid of calculation, blazing only with the primal, manic hunger of an unleashed demon.

Before him, resting on a blood-veined stone altar, lay the jade gourd of Tier-4 Asura Marrow-Cleansing Salve, pulsing with restorative light.

Shen Yu snatched the gourd with a bloodied, trembling claw, shoving it into his spatial ring with zero regard for its value.

He didn’t stop to bind his wounds, nor did he meditate to stabilize his fractured Sea of Consciousness.

Driven entirely by feral momentum, he bared his blood-stained teeth in a vicious, unhinged sneer and turned his crazed crimson gaze toward the swirling yin-yang mist of the River of Seven Desires ahead.

The air in the tunnel ahead did not smell of stone or ash.

It carried the faint, sickly sweet scent of blooming lotus blossoms mixed with the copper tang of stagnant water.

Shen Yu plunged into the mist with reckless, heavy strides.

His black boots left smoldering crimson prints on the smooth marble, his fractured Sea of Consciousness throbbing like an exposed nerve behind his bloodshot eyes.

Every breath rasped through his lungs like ground glass, yet his lips remained stretched in that same jagged, feral sneer.

The tunnel opened into a subterranean gorge so vast its ceiling was lost in the gloom.

Below him ran the River of Seven Desires.

It was not water that flowed through the chasm.

The river was split down the middle into two interlocking, coiled currents of spiritual energy.

On the left swirled a river of Absolute Yin, frigid, pitch-black water that swallowed all light, emitting a frost so profound it froze the ambient spiritual Qi into drifting crystalline dust.

On the right roared a torrent of Supreme Yang, a blinding, white-gold current of liquid fire that churned with explosive, searing vitality.

Where the two currents met and twisted around each other, thick banks of pale, iridescent mist rose into the air, swirling with the chaotic colors of human emotion, the lurid pink of lust, the sickly yellow of greed, the bruised purple of jealousy, and the blinding scarlet of unbridled wrath.

Spanning the gorge was no bridge, but a single, razor-thin thread of Yin-Yang Balancing Silk, no wider than a finger, stretching over a hundred paces across the boiling, freezing void.

The moment Shen Yu’s boots touched the edge of the gorge, the mist reacted.

Hiss—

The iridescent vapors lunged toward him like starving wraiths, plunging through his torn flesh and burrowing straight into the raw, fractured wounds of his damaged Sea of Consciousness.

An ordinary cultivator would have treaded this trial with trembling caution, holding their breath, circulating heart-clearing sutras, and maintaining an absolute void in their mind to prevent the river’s illusions from dragging them into madness.

Shen Yu did none of that.

He didn’t erect a single mental barrier

In his current state of manic, unhinged demonic instinct, the concept of defense had ceased to exist.

He inhaled the poisonous mist in deep, ravenous gulps, letting the illusions flood into his shattered mind.

VZZZT—!

The world around him shattered into a chaotic kaleidoscope of phantom visions.

First came the pink mist of Lust.

Shimmering phantoms of jade-skinned fairy maidens and celestial consorts materialized from the fog, their silk robes slipping from their shoulders as they cooed intoxicating promises into his ears, their cold, soft hands caressing his torn chest and bloody throat.

“Trash,” Shen Yu snarled, not even breaking his stride.