The silence in the chamber was thick, choked with dust and the echoes of violence. The Heartstone pulsed in Kaelen's grip, a steady, terrifying rhythm that now beat in time with his own heart. The power within it was not a reservoir to be tapped, but a living current that flowed into him, demanding direction. Without the obsessive discipline of the Demon Manual, it would have unraveled him on the spot.
"Master… your eyes," Lan breathed, her sword trembling slightly.
Kaelen blinked, forcing the swirling threads of crimson and shadow in his vision to recede. The world snapped back into a more familiar, solid state, but it felt… thin. Like a painting over a raging fire. He could still feel the underlying tensions, the potential for deconstruction in every stone, every breath of air.
"We need another way out," he said, his voice sounding strange to his own ears—hollow, layered with a subtle harmonic. "Rin, find it."
The scout, shaking off her awe, nodded and darted to the chamber walls, her hands skimming the glassy surface, feeling for drafts, echoes, anything.
Goran leaned heavily on his axe, the wounds on his chest already darkening with a strange, frostbitten necrosis. "They'll dig through. Or find another way in."
"Then we won't be here," Kaelen said. He looked at the Heartstone. Show me. He didn't push the thought, but simply held it in his mind. The crystal's internal light shifted, the threads aligning and pointing, not at a door, but at a section of the seemingly solid wall opposite the entrance.
Kaelen walked to it. He didn't strike. He placed his palm against the black glass and, tentatively, allowed a wisp of the Heartstone's power to seep from his fingers. He focused not on destruction, but on asking. He visualized the stone's memory of being shaped, of the path its makers used.
The wall remembered. A seam appeared, then widened with a soundless sigh, revealing a narrow, descending tunnel. Not a construction, but a path of least resistance that had been sealed millennia ago by a thought.
"Here," Kaelen said, the effort leaving him momentarily lightheaded. The artifact's power was limitless, but his mind and soul were the bottleneck. Every use was a gamble against his own coherence.
The descent was a journey through the mountain's arteries. The air grew warmer still, smelling of minerals and a deep, earthy rot. The tug of the Heartstone was gone; now it was a constant pressure within him, reshaping his qi circulation. His core wasn't just expanding; it was becoming more complex, its pathways multiplying and reorganizing in real-time, optimizing for adaptive flow. He was cultivating at a rate that would shatter any orthodox disciple, but with every cycle, he felt a piece of his old, simple understanding of himself fade, unmade to be rebuilt… differently.
After what felt like hours, they saw light—not the blue of their moss-torches, but the grey-white of filtered daylight. The tunnel opened onto a sheer cliff face, a hidden exit two thousand feet above a frozen, mist-shrouded gorge. A howling wind ripped at them.
And below, clinging to a narrow icy ledge that wound its way down, were three more Glacier Lake Sect disciples. They had found the back door.
There was no time for strategy. They were seen.
The orthodox disciples moved with the practiced synergy of a small hunting unit. One raised a hand, and a wave of piercing cold shot up the cliff face, sheathing the rock in instant, slick ice. Another drew a bow of glowing blue energy, nocking an arrow of condensed frost. The third began a chant, their qi weaving into a binding pattern meant to lock the very air around them.
In the past, Kaelen would have analyzed, adapted, and engaged. Now, with the Heartstone's torrent screaming in his veins and the desperate need to protect his wounded disciples, he reacted with pure, unfiltered instinct.
He saw the frost archer not as a man, but as a nexus of intent (kill) and energy pattern (coagulated cold qi). He saw the binding chant as a net of interlocking conceptual threads.
He raised his spear, not to throw it, but as a focus. He didn't have the control for precision. He let the Heartstone's power flow, giving it the crude, overwhelming directive: Unmake the attack.
He didn't target the disciples.
He targeted the cohesion of their techniques.
The wave of frost dispersed halfway up the cliff, becoming a harmless gust of chilly air. The nocked ice-arrow dissolved in the bow, the released energy backfiring in a shower of harmless, tinkling shards that threw the archer off balance. The binding chant's net of energy unraveled mid-weave, causing the chanting disciple to gasp as his own qi rebounded, stunning him.
It wasn't an attack. It was a negation. A localized, temporary repeal of the laws that allowed those specific martial techniques to exist.
The effect lasted only three heartbeats. But in that silence, that vacuum of nullified power, Kaelen moved. He was a blur, not of speed, but of devastating economy. His spear took the stunned chanter in the throat. A flung dagger from Rin found the archer's eye. Lan and Goran, seizing the moment of shock, overwhelmed the remaining disciple.
It was over in a breath.
Kaelen sagged against the cliff face, blood now flowing freely from both nostrils, a sharp, metallic pain stabbing behind his eyes. The world swam. He could feel the edges of his own memories—Fen's face, the taste of his first kill, the feel of the northern wind when he was just a starving boy—flicker and grow indistinct, as if being filed away to make room for something vast and inhuman.
"Master!" Lan was at his side, her face etched with fear.
"I'm… here," he gritted out, clinging to the words, to the concern in her eyes. These were his anchors. His disciples. His sect. This would not be unmade.
They made the perilous descent, half-carrying Goran, Kaelen fighting a silent, internal war with every step. The Heartstone was a double-edged sword of cosmic sharpness; it offered the power to deconstruct reality, but threatened to deconstruct the wielder first.
When they finally stumbled out of the foothills and within sight of the plateau, they saw the smoke.
Not the thin column of a cooking fire, but great, dirty plumes rising from multiple points. The sounds of distant battle—the crash of siege weapons, the collective shout of formations, the distinct crack-hiss of orthodox artillery qi—rolled across the tundra.
The Purifying Frost Campaign had not waited. The main assault had begun in his absence.
Kaelen stopped, his breath frosting in the air. The exhaustion, the psychic bleeding, the disorienting weight of the artifact—it all coalesced into a single, cold point in his chest.
They had come to wipe his legacy from the earth. They had come while he was claiming a far older, far more dangerous one.
He looked at the Heartstone, now dull and quiet against his palm, its light turned inward. Then he looked at the besieged plateau, at the home he had built from frost and will.
A grim, terrible smile touched his blood-stained lips.
They wanted a war of annihilation.
He would give them a lesson in unmaking.