Chapter 828: Summoned By The Heavens?

The plateau changed around them.

Every blade of grass stiffened and turned to steel, ringing faintly in the wind... Every gust became an edge that left thin red lines along Rèn’s cheeks and the air itself filled with ten thousand invisible swords, humming in perfect unison with every single one of them pointed at her heart.

SHIIIING!

Rèn tilted her head and listened to them sing then she laughed and opened her own.

’Domain: Red Heaven of Slaughter!’

The sky above the plateau split open like a fresh wound and bled.

The bruised purple clouds turned a deep, wet crimson from one horizon to the other.

...Every drop of blood spilled across the battlefield, from her wounds, from his, and from the tens of thousands of fallen cultists, tore itself out of the mud and rose into the air at once, hanging above them like a red sea turned upside down.

VWOOM!

The two domains slammed into each other above the clay.

KRAAAANG!

Ten thousand invisible swords plunged into the red sea, and the red sea swallowed them.

The blood hardened around each blade like amber closing over an insect, freezing them in place by the hundreds.

"Wuuu..."

Lu Tianxing flicked two fingers, and a hundred more swords tore loose from the amber and screamed back toward her throat.

Rèn clenched her fist, and the blood sea clenched with her, crushing them into glittering steel dust.

CRUNCH!

Where the two worlds met, the air shrieked like metal dragged across stone... The ground split along the seam between them with a crack racing from one end of the plateau to the other.

KRRRRAK!

For thirty breaths, neither world gave an inch.

Inside his half of the plateau, everything was a blade.

Falling ash sliced the air into ribbons, and the pebbles at his feet hummed with killing intent... however inside hers, the air was wet and warm, the ground pulsed like a living heartbeat, and every breath tasted of copper.

Along the seam where the two worlds ground against each other, swords and blood tore each other apart over and over, endlessly, in a storm of red mist and silver sparks.

SKREEEEE!

Then Rèn reached deeper.

Inside her domain, all blood belonged to her, and that included the blood still inside him... She grabbed for it, every drop pumping through the Sword Saint’s heart, and pulled.

Lu Tianxing’s whole body jerked as blood burst from his nose.

His knuckles split open on their own and sprayed red into the air, drawn upward toward her crimson sky in thin, twisting threads.

SPLRT!

His gray eyes narrowed, and his sword intent surged through his veins like ice water, slamming her grip back out of his body.

"Your domain is a slaughterhouse," he said quietly, wiping his nose with the back of his hand. "Mine is a sword. Let’s see which one cuts."

He raised his blade and cut the sky.

SHHHK!

A single white line opened across her crimson heaven as the red clouds peeled apart along it like split silk, and pale blue daylight stabbed through the gap.

Half the blood sea collapsed, crashing down onto the plateau in a hot heavy downpour.

SPLASH!

Rèn was already moving through the falling red rain.

Step!

Her boot sank into the red clay, and the distance between them disappeared.

Guard!

Her notched blade caught his return cut at a crooked angle, and the force behind it bent her elbow backward until the joint screamed.

CLANG!

Cut!

She went for his wrist.

He turned the edge aside with a twist so small she barely saw it, and his own blade slid along hers and opened her side from hip to ribs.

SHHK!

She laughed, and her domain poured the falling rain straight back into the wound... The flesh knit shut before the blood could even reach the ground.

They clashed fifty times in fifty breaths.

CLANG!

He severed the tendon in her left shoulder, and she grew it back while she was still mid-swing.

CLANG!

She cracked two of his ribs with a palm strike driven by the Son of Fate’s stolen luck, a blow that should have missed by a finger’s width and somehow landed dead center.

CRACK!

He carved a furrow across her cheek but she bit through his sleeve and tore a strip of flesh off his forearm with her teeth.

"What a Mad dog..." Lu Tianxing breathed.

"Woof~" Rèn grinned with blood running down her chin.

Around them, the Red Heaven cultists died by the thousands, cut to ribbons by the stray edges of his domain and drowned in the falling blood of hers, and neither fighter spared them a single glance.

After fifty exchanges, Lu Tianxing understood.

Every wound he gave her healed... She didn’t tire, she didn’t fear death, and her single basic sword form had been refined past the boundaries of mortal logic...

His blade alone couldn’t put out this fire before his own lifespan frayed.

He stepped back ten paces and planted his iron sword point-down in the red clay.

THUNK!

He raised his left hand to the highest heavens.

"By the mandate of the primeval stars... By the blood of the righteous ancestors... Awake, Crucible of the Heavens!"

CRACKLE!

The clouds tore wide open, revealing a vast circle of blinding azure fire, and from it descended the ancient divine artifact the righteous sects had guarded for ten thousand years.

Nine chains of primeval star-gold, etched with binding seals, shot down from the sky like screaming meteors.

FWOOOOSH!

Rèn swung her sword at them, and the chains passed straight through the steel as if it weren’t there.

THUMP!

THUMP!

THUMP!

They plunged through her skin and pierced her spiritual body.

One shattered her dantian... One coiled around her heart... Two went through her shoulders, two pinned her thighs, two locked her wrists, and the last drove through the base of her skull as the seals flared azure.

Her crimson sky went out like a snuffed candle and the blood sea fell... Her Primordial Blood Root froze solid, her stolen fortune choked under the star-gold, and her legs gave out as she crashed to her knees in the mud.

Lu Tianxing let out a long, tired breath.

"It’s over, Heavenly Demon," he said softly. "The Crucible locks the soul... Not even an immortal can draw a breath of qi once the star-chains take root. Your slaughter ends today."

Rèn knelt in the mud and looked down at the nine glowing chains burning through her ribs.

The plateau was silent for three seconds.

"Heh..."

Her shoulders twitched.

"Hehehe... HAHAHAHA!"

She threw her head back and laughed until her voice cracked, wild and hysterical as the hair on the back of Lu Tianxing’s neck stood up.

She reached for the chain around her heart with her bare hands and the star-gold seared her palms to the bone.

The smell of burning flesh rose into the cold air but her grip didn’t loosen by a hair.

SSSSSS!

’Blood-Core Detonation!’

She commanded her own heart to pump backward, turning every drop of blood in her chest into a boiling battering ram, and used her own agony as fuel.

She braced her boots in the mud and tore backward.

CRACK!

The first chain shattered into glowing azure fragments.

"Impossible...!" Lu Tianxing’s composure cracked for the first time. "That’s primeval star-gold! It binds the soul itself!"

"THEN BREAK THE SOUL!" Rèn roared.

CRACK! CRACK!

She ripped the chains out of her shoulders with wet, tearing heaves, chunks of her own flesh flying into the mud.

She tore them from her thighs and her wrists, and finally grabbed the last one at the base of her skull and wrenched it forward until the link snapped with a ring that shook the mountains.

CRAAACK!

The moment the last chain broke, her domain came roaring back.

VWOOOOM!

The sky bled crimson again, deeper and darker than before, and the blood of the whole battlefield rose with it, howling.

It twisted into a thousand thin red serpents that lashed around Lu Tianxing’s arms and legs and dragged at his sword, and for the first time in four hundred years, the Sword Saint’s feet slid backward across the clay.

SKRRRT!

Rèn dropped her sword and lunged.

She closed ten paces before Lu Tianxing could lift his blade, and tackled the strongest man in the world into the mud.

THOOM!

He drove his sword through her stomach and the steel burst out of her lower back.

SHLUNK!

She didn’t even pause... She pinned his wrists to the clay, lowered her head, and drove her black horns down through his eyes.

CRUNCH!

Lu Tianxing twitched once as his sword intent shattered across the sky like thin glass.

TSHIIING!

Rèn stood up, pulled his blade out of her stomach and tossed it aside.

She stood on his corpse in the middle of the burning plateau, drenched in blood from head to toe, nine broken chain fragments hanging from her flesh like glowing ribbons... Ten thousand cultists lay dead around her as the mountains were shattered, and there was nothing left to kill.

She threw her head back at the bleeding sky and howled with laughter.

"IS THIS ALL YOU HAVE?!" she screamed, her voice rolling across the continent. "SEND ME SOMETHING STRONGER! SEND ME A GOD!"

PING!

A crisp mechanical chime sounded directly in front of her face, and a glowing blue tab snapped into existence three inches from her nose.

[You have been summoned to be a Hero for a Lord.]

[Y / N]

Rèn stared at it through blood-soaked bangs.

She didn’t know what a Lord was or what a Hero meant... To her shattered mind, it was the Heavenly Dao’s final trick, a talisman sent down from the clouds to drag her before the judgment halls of the ancestors.

"THEN COME AND TAKE ME!" she screamed.

She cocked her fist back and drove her blood-stained knuckles straight through the glowing [Y].

HUMMM!

The tab shattered, and a second, much longer wall of blue text erupted in front of her eyes, cascading past at blinding speed.

She didn’t read a single word of it... She stood there laughing into the smoke with her fists raised at the sky until the last line flashed with burning clarity.

[You have accepted. Initiating translocation and resetting cultivation.]

VWOOM!

A pillar of radiant gold exploded from her chest and swallowed the plateau, the corpses and the bleeding sky.

In the last half-second between worlds, Rèn’s gaze dropped to her left hip.

The old mountain-ash wooden sword was still tucked into her frayed belt, chipped along the edges and dark with twenty-seven years of grease and weather with its sharkskin wrap worn smooth by sweat.

It was the only thing she’d carried through the pens, the pit, the sects and the burning provinces.

She tried to remember who had carved it... She tried to remember the voice that taught her to step and cut, and the old man who’d nodded at her from the gate but nothing came.

’Who... gave this to me...?’

The thought slipped through her fingers like dry sand, and the light took her.

At the Dawnspire Gateway in Blessed Land, the blood-streaked golden pillar expanded with an earth-shaking roar.

BOOM!

The marble rattled under Silas’s boots as the crimson clouds above the valley spun into a vortex then the pillar collapsed inward with a sharp pop.

Standing on the white platform was a tall breathtaking woman, nearly five-foot-ten, toned and heavily curved beneath shredded tatters of black linen.

She was soaked in blood from head to toe, and nine jagged fragments of glowing azure chains hung from her chest, thighs and shoulders.

Two sharp black horns etched with glowing red runes curved back through her wild jet-black hair.

The warm summoning light washed over her... Her lacerations sealed, her bones realigned, her scorched skin healed into flawless pale porcelain, and her depleted meridians settled into a clean reset foundation.

She stood tall in the steam with a notched iron sword in her white-knuckled right hand, and lifted her head.

Her crimson eyes, still burning with the feral madness of a predator that had just butchered the strongest man in her world, locked onto Silas Graves.

The Heavenly Demon didn’t ask where she was nor did she spare a glance at the girls behind him.

Her heels kicked off the marble.

BANG!

Her horns lowered, the leftover blood on the flagstones ripped upward into a crescent of crimson spears, and her blade came down in a blinding cleave.

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

SHIIING!