In the dead of night, beneath a black sky and a bloodless moon, Ma Ying Jie stumbled forward—chained, defeated, and dragged like livestock.
Around him, the few survivors of the Ma Tribe limped in silence, broken by battle.
Behind them, the battlefield stretched far into the distance.
Corpses littered the land like discarded tools. No one had been buried. No one had been mourned.
Ma Ying Jie's voice tore through the silence.
"Hei Lou Lan, you bastard!" he shouted, throat raw.
"How dare you do this to our people!"
"You won't even allow them a proper burial!"
"Is there any humanity in you?"
At the front of the line, a broad-shouldered man atop a dragon horse turned his head. Armor gleamed in the moonlight. His eyes, small and sharp, glittered with scorn.
Hei Lou Lan scoffed.
"Humanity?" He let the word hang like a curse.
"Tell me, Ma Ying Jie… how many have you killed without mercy?"
"Did you bury your enemies? Did you offer incense to their corpses?"
Silence.
Ma Ying Jie trembled—not from the cold, but from the truth in the words.
He wanted to rage. He wanted to scream.
But the chains bit into his skin, and every Gu worm he once commanded had been stripped from his body like flesh from bone.
And in that silence, the weight of his own history crushed him.
He had done this before. To the Fei Tribe. To the Huo Tribe. To dozens of nameless clans wiped from the map under orders he'd given.
He had laughed, celebrated, and moved on.
Now... it was his turn.
"Unless one survives a calamity," he thought bitterly, "they will never understand its weight."
The old idiom played over and over in his mind, like the echoes of a guillotine falling again and again.
His eyes drifted across the few survivors from his tribe. Faces he once commanded now stared at the ground, eyes hollow.
He thought of the boy—his servant. Quiet, loyal, sharp for his age. A rare seed.
A sigh left his lips, barely audible.
"Looks like that child… is gone too."
"At least… he was a good servant."
...
"Hehehe… Hehehe… Hehehe…"
The eerie laughter slithered out from the forest like a ghost crawling through the trees.
The sound was quiet, yet carried weight—inhuman, unsettling, wrong.
From the edge of the battlefield—where shadows swallowed the trees and silence clung to the corpses—Fang Yuan emerged.
His gaze swept the wasteland before him.
Blood. Broken limbs. Mangled faces.
"Come."
The word left his lips like a whisper of command, low and absolute.
From within his second aperture, a Gu beast appeared, limbs creaking like splintering bone.
It stood a meter tall, three meters wide—a grotesque fusion of predator and plague.
Spider legs stabbed into the dirt, its shell gleamed like a cracked tortoise carapace, and from that abomination's face—a burnt woman's visage, twisted and blistered—two glowing red eyes pulsed with hunger. Her serpentine tongue lolled from her mouth, slick and twitching.
Fang Yuan didn't flinch. He merely gestured.
"Eat."
The abomination lurched forward, cackling lowly. She skittered across the battlefield, plunging into corpses with gleeful precision.
Flesh tore. Bones cracked. Blood gushed.
Chomp.
Swirl.
Chomp.
Swirl.
One by one, the dead were drained, emptied, hollowed.
Fang Yuan stood still as stone, his eyes scanning the sky intermittently.
Time passed. The stars shifted.
After an hour, the creature returned—belly bloated, breath heavy. Her tongue slithered out and, with grotesque affection, licked Fang Yuan's boots, smearing blood across polished leather.
He didn't recoil.
He merely placed a hand atop her grotesque head and murmured: "Not enough."
His gaze turned inward—to his first aperture, where his current cultivation is only at Rank One, Initial Stage.
"I need more."
Without a flicker of emotion, he waved his hand. The abomination entered his second aperture, vanishing from the place.
Then, with a thought, he activated the Fixed Immortal Travel Gu and vanished.
Only silence—and the echo of consumed corpses—remained.
...
⚜️ Central Continent
⚖️ Heavenly Court – Council Hall
"Is this information… accurate?"
A voice, old and cold, echoed through the vast, dimly-lit hall. The sound was gentle, but it carried weight—like a guillotine slowly descending.
A middle-aged man, robed in white and kneeling at the center of the hall, didn't dare lift his head.
"Yes, it is true," he answered solemnly.
A pause. Then the voice turned sharp.
"So the closure of Treasure Yellow Heaven months ago… was no mere malfunction."
"Correct," he confirmed again.
"Someone has inherited Treasure Yellow Heaven," the old woman's voice turned sour, each word dropping like poison into the silence. Her expression twisted.
"Defy…" She spat the word like venom.
"What is that organization plotting now?" Her tone was filled with bitter suspicion.
"For years they've lurked in the shadows, always silent, always hidden. And now they come forward—bearing this kind of news?"
Defy.
The mysterious organization, whose name was whispered in secret and feared in silence.
And now… they were coming out of shadows?
It was unthinkable.
A few days prior, a member of Defy had reached out—boldly contacting someone from Heavenly Court.
The message was simple, yet earth-shaking: A new master of Treasure Yellow Heaven had emerged.
For centuries, Heavenly Court had tried everything to breach the Treasure Yellow Heaven.
They had methods—ancient, obscure, costly—but even at their best, all they could do was slip a single Gu Immortal through a fleeting crack in its defenses.
But every time, the treasure spirit would fight back. And every time, that lone Gu Immortal would face a brutal resistance—one Gu Immortal against an army of Immortal Gu.
Few survived.
And the location of treasure yellow heaven?
Still unknown.
Force was never an option.
If pushed too far, the treasure spirit might self-destruct.
And the cost of that... unthinkable.
That was why they had waited. Watched. Calculated.
But now—someone had inherited it. And the worst part?
They heard it not from their own spies or their divination, but from the mouth of Defy.
That was the real insult.
That was the true danger.
The one who sat in silence now was not just any elder.
She was Granny Sha, matriarch of the Heaven Overseeing Tower, and wife of its Lord.
Her gaze was cold, her aura suffocating.
"We are," she murmured, her voice like ice cracking, "being controlled."