Deacon Shen didn't scream. He couldn't. His spirit-gate had seized, his throat constricting into a dry, jagged knot as he stared at the crimson altar that used to be his wife. The organs, still faintly steaming in the mountain air, looked like a profane arrangement of flesh woven from his own arrogance.
Dver took a slow, deliberate sip of the tea. He didn't look at the corpses. He looked at Shen.
Those dead, black-hole eyes were fixed on the Deacon's face, tracing the way the man's skin turned a waxy, sickly yellow. Dver wasn't just watching him; he was harvesting the terror. Every shiver, every choked sob from the broken man was a spiritual delicacy to the Void God pulsing beneath Dver's ribs.
"You... you monster..." Shen finally managed to wheeze, his knees hitting the stone with a dull, sickening thud. "The Sect will uproot your Origin-Core and shred your Primordial Spirit into a thousand screaming fragments. They will erase your name from the Book of Life, leaving not even a shadow for the cycle of rebirth to claim."
Dver took a slow, deliberate sip of the tea. He didn't look at the corpses. The sound of the spirit-glaze hitting the stone was like a thunderclap in the silent courtyard.
"The Sect won't hunt me, Master Shen," Dver said, his voice as smooth and cold as a frozen lake. "Because you are going to tell them exactly what happened. And you are going to be very, very convincing."
Dver stood up. He walked toward the trembling man. Shen tried to scramble backward, his hands slipping in his wife's cooling blood, but his legs were like water. Dver reached down, grabbing the Deacon by the front of his expensive silk robes and hauling him up until their faces were inches apart.
"Your wife and daughters," Dver whispered, his breath smelling faintly of the expensive mountain tea. "They were so loud. Even without tongues, they made such... interesting sounds. Do you want to hear them, Shen? I can stitch those echoes into your soul. I can make you live every second of their unravelling for the next hundred years of your meditation."
"No... please... no..." Shen wept, his Dao-heart completely shattering. The high-level cultivation he had spent fifty years building was now nothing but a cage for his fear.
"Listen well, Master. This is the False Chronicle you will offer the Inquisition: Last night, an Abyssal Shadow from the Black Heaven Pavilion breached your Ancestral Arrays. They sought to strike at the Grand Elder's shadow—at you."
Dver's grip tightened, the expensive silk of the Deacon's robes screaming under the pressure.
"Your lineage was reaped before your eyes. You fought with the desperation of a dying beast, burning your very Life-Essence to repel the shade. You failed to save them, Shen. Your Spirit-Gate is cracked, and your heart is a hollow ruin."
Dver's smile was a thin, bloodless line. It didn't reach his black-hole eyes.
"The Black Heaven Pavilion has something I desire," Dver whispered, the truth trailing like a venomous snake. "And the Blood Lotus Sect is going to go to war to get it for me. You are the spark, Shen. You are the Tragic Martyr who will demand their heads on a silver platter."
Dver leaned in closer, his eyes expanding until Shen could see nothing but the infinite, swirling blackness within them. It was like looking into the mouth of a cosmic predator that had already swallowed the stars.
"And I? I am the loyal, witless slave who hid in the Spirit-Cellar. I am the witness who saw the shadow flee toward the Western Peaks. You protected me. You are a hero, Shen. A tragic, broken hero."
"I... I can't... the Elders will divine the truth... their soul-eyes..."
"The Elders see what fits their politics," Dver countered. "And if you fail to play your part? If you slip? If you even think about pointing a finger at me?"
Dver reached out with his free hand and touched the Deacon's chest, right over his heart. A microscopic thread of the Void—a splinter of pure non-existence—seeped through the fabric and into Shen's skin.
Shen shrieked as he felt a coldness beyond death wrap around his heart. It felt like a thousand tiny void-parasites were nesting in his valves, ready to bite.
"That is a Void Seed," Dver explained calmly. "That Seed is a shard of my own Primordial Will. Should the Pulse of resonance of your Soul-Core with the foul intent of betrayal... it shall Bloom. It will not grant you the mercy of a swift end. Instead, it will fester, transmuting your blood into Black-Bile Acid and your marrow into Crystalline Glass."
Dver's eyes expanded, consuming the last of the morning light.
"You will become a Living Monument of Desecration, a prisoner within a calcified shell of your own meat. Your soul will remain tethered to the rot, screaming into the silent Void for a thousand years after your last breath is forgotten."
Dver let go of the Deacon's robes. Shen collapsed into a heap, gasping, clutching his chest as if trying to hold his soul together.
"Now," Dver said, dusting off his stolen white silks with a terrifying casualness. "Incinerate the husks," Dver commanded, his voice a freezing draft. "Brand these walls with your Lightning-Qi—make it look like a violent collision of high-tier Arts. I am returning to the Spirit-Vault to 'cower.' Summon the Hall-Sentinels in an hour."
He paused at the heavy stone trapdoor, the morning light making his pale skin look like deathly marble.
"And Master? Make it hurt. If they don't see your soul bleeding, they might start looking at mine."
One Hour Later
The alarm bells of the Discipline Hall rang out across the Inner Sect, a frantic, bronze tolling that signaled the death of an elite bloodline.
The Hall-Sentinels swarmed the Shen compound. They found the Deacon sitting in the middle of a blackened, scorched courtyard, his lightning-Qi still crackling weakly in the air. He was clutching the charred remains of his wife's robes, bellowing in a soul-shattering lament so jagged and ruinous that it froze the Spirit-Veins of every Sentinel present.
Dver was found cowering in the Spirit-Cellar, "shaking" and "sobbing," clutching a wooden spoon as his only weapon. He played the part of the traumatized cur with such perfection that the Enforcers didn't even bother to scan him for Qi. Why would they? He was just a dog who had seen a wolf.
The Sect-inquisition was swift. The evidence of a Void-type assassin—the scorched earth, the missing essence, and the Deacon's own shattered testimony—pointed directly toward a high-level strike from a rival power. The Blood Lotus Sect wanted a war, and Dver had just given them a reason.
The Grand Elder himself arrived, his presence like a mountain of spiritual pressure. He stood over the sobbing Shen, placing a hand on the Deacon's shoulder.
"Be at peace, Shen," the Grand Elder rumbled, his voice thick with a dangerous, quiet fury. "Let the Heavens witness this transgression," the Grand Elder roared, the sky above the compound turning a bruised, violent purple. "I will shiver the foundations of the Black Heaven and grind their Origin-Cores into dust. By the time my wrath is spent, their sect will be nothing but a nameless scar upon the earth."
Standing in the corner, head bowed, Dver watched as the most powerful men in the sect were led around by the nose by a broken man who was terrified of his own shadow.
"The Master has been unmade," the Void God chuckled within the darkness of Dver's skull. "And his agony produces a shroud of absolute dissonance. The Elders see only the smoke of his shattered heart—they are blind to the fire we have set beneath their feet."
"He has to perform," Dver thought, the cold wind of the Void whistling through the hollows of his mind. "He is the only witness to the true depth of my famine. He is the only one who knows that his 'protection' is merely a leash I have handed him."
Dver's gaze shifted to the Grand Elder's throat, where the man's life-pulse beat with a rhythmic, arrogant power.
"Tonight, the Grand Elder will slumber in his Inner Sanctum, confident in his wards and his wisdom. He does not realize he has invited a Living Nullity to share his roof. I am the End of the Path he walks