The sky had yet to close.
The violet fissures remained embedded in the air like incurable scars of reality, oozing diluted mana that dripped onto the dead plains with the steady rhythm of something dying very slowly.
Tian Cang knelt amidst the ashes, his hands pressed against the ground, his chest heaving with heavy, staggered breaths. Blood continued to flow from his old wounds, but he remained frozen in that position, his eyes fixed on the spot where the rift had just sealed.
Behind that spatial crack, something had just vanished. A dense mass of darkness had shrouded a human-shaped entity seated upon a throne of reality shards. Tian Cang had felt its gaze—a pair of eyes that peeled back layers of flesh and soul to observe him, like a collector examining an intriguing specimen under a magnifying glass.
For the first time since stepping onto the path of life and death, Tian Cang's hands trembled.
He sat rigid, motionless among the ruins.
"If it wanted to kill me..."
The thought flickered and died halfway. He understood the reality as clearly as daylight: before such an existence, all resistance was a meaningless farce. The power over life and death rested entirely in another's hands.
A breath of silence stretched into a suffocating eternity.
Then, a final voice resonated directly into his brain like a brutal, cold wave of intent, making Tian Cang's entire body convulse:
"Not yet."
His lips parted to utter a question, but a dry crack echoed across the battlefield before he could speak. The space above twisted and snapped shut ruthlessly. The rift vanished completely, returning the sky to the murky grey of the Middle Firmament.
As if nothing had ever existed.
The wind returned, whistling past his ears with a sudden chill. Tian Cang took a deep breath, feeling as though he had just returned from the underworld. That entity had spared him, or worse, it had stamped an invisible mark upon his destiny that he was not yet strong enough to comprehend.
He struggled to his feet, using his notched sword as a crutch to steady his center of gravity.
SHLIK!
A streak of white light tore through the air.
Tian Cang reacted on pure instinct; his body lunged to the right before his brain could process the command. The strike grazed his left shoulder—but only partially. The first sensation was numbness, followed by a horrific void. A large chunk of flesh on his shoulder vanished, the wound perfectly flat as if cut by glass, blood geysering out.
He gritted his teeth and stepped back. His dark crimson pupils contracted, rapidly scanning the battlefield.
Atop a pile of ruins dozens of meters away, a figure stood silently.
Amidst this plain defiled by blood and ash, the newcomer appeared bizarrely out of place. He wore a pristine white cloak, so clean it looked freshly laundered, as if the surrounding death dared not touch him. The emblem on his chest shimmered under the residual violet light lingering from the sky.
The Holy Kingdom of Lumina.
The figure stepped down. Each step was as light as a feather touching water, yet Tian Cang felt the ground beneath his feet being compressed by tens of thousands of tons of pressure. The space around the white-cloaked man warped slightly, purifying every impurity of mana like an organism purging toxins.
"Target confirmed," the man's voice was so calm it bordered on soulless, like a judge reading a sentence to an ant crawling beneath his feet. "Individual showing signs of unstable Blood Firmament. Soul contamination detected."
His gaze fell upon Tian Cang. It was the look of a blacksmith inspecting a defective blade—cold and analytical.
"Eliminate."
BOOM!
The ground beneath Tian Cang's feet exploded. He leaped back instinctively, his intuition screaming that his previous position had become a dead zone. A pillar of pure white light impaled the spot where he had just stood. The light erased every bit of matter it touched, leaving a smooth crater in the stone as if that space had never existed.
Before his feet could even touch the ground, the white-cloaked man appeared directly in front of him.
Such speed was beyond anything he had witnessed at the Soul or Battle Firmament.
A punch was thrown, aimed straight at his chest.
BANG!
It was heavy pressure—a colossal mass of air compressed in the moment of impact, exploding right against his flesh. Tian Cang's ribs shattered; the dry crack was unmistakably clear. His body was smashed into the ground, sinking deep into the rubble as if crushed by a collapsing building.
He coughed up large mouthfuls of blood. His vision blurred.
"The gap... is too wide," he realized with absolute, bitter lucidity.
This opponent fought entirely differently from the Outworlders. He was ruthlessly precise; every strike was like a verdict planned before the match even began. The force was exactly enough to break, the stance perfectly ready for the next move, the opening for a counterattack calculated and closed before it could even open.
"Battle Firmament? Perhaps even higher..."
The white-cloaked man slowly raised his hand to the sky. A golden magic circle appeared, spinning with glowing holy runes.
[Skill: Judgment — Gravity Lock]
The space around Tian Cang immediately froze. He tried to stand, but his entire body felt as if it were shackled in thousands of pounds of lead. Gravity in the area distorted, pinning every fiber of his muscle to the earth.
"Individual possessing overloaded Blood Firmament. Risk of high-level mutation: 98%," the man stepped closer, his palm glowing brilliantly. "Verdict: Purify."
Tian Cang suddenly burst out laughing.
The laughter was laced with the blood bubbling from the corners of his mouth—dark and chilling amidst the dying plains. It was the laughter of someone who had just seen something so absurd they couldn't help themselves.
"Purify...?" He coughed up more blood and laughed again. "You want to purify me?"
He dug his fingers deep into the hardened earth.
The sound of finger bones cracking echoed. He gripped tighter, using the ground as a fulcrum to resist the ton of gravity crushing his muscles. Blood from his broken fingers soaked into the layer of ash below.
"Do you think... I am still human?"
The System was silent. The familiar interface had vanished. Only one thing erupted from within—something accumulated through every battle, every wound, every time his body was pushed beyond its limits and forced to find a new one. It was a pure madness that had no name in any hierarchy of the Firmament Realm.
Every pore on Tian Cang's body suddenly sprayed tiny mists of blood under the immense pressure. The red of the Blood Firmament shifted into an ink-like black—viscous and pungent. His muscles convulsed so violently that his joints were forced out of alignment, creating a series of pops like firecrackers.
A roar tore from his throat. The sound began as human and ended as something else entirely—the howl of a creature that had just escaped its darkest prison, long and harrowing enough to make the remaining boulders tremble.
[Warning: Blood Firmament — Overload / Risk of Mutation]
Under the pressure of Gravity Lock, Tian Cang slowly stood up.
Slowly. Heavily. Threatening in a way that speed or technique could never replicate—the threat of something determined to exist despite all logic. For every centimeter he rose, the ground beneath his feet cracked from the counter-pressure.
For the first time since the fight began, a flicker of hesitation appeared in the white-cloaked man's soulless eyes. He narrowed his gaze, his hand tightening.
"...Recorded. Unpredicted evolution."
SWISH!
Tian Cang vanished, this time using raw force to bend the space right where he stood.
He appeared directly in front of the judge. A punch was unleashed, carrying all the hatred and black mana burning within him.
BOOM!!!
The man from the Holy Kingdom was forced back half a step. A footprint was stamped deep into the hard stone. A streak of fresh crimson blood trickled from the corner of the white-cloaked man's lip—for the first time in the battle.
The man looked down at the drop of blood on the back of his hand, silent for a beat.
"Evolving mid-combat..." His voice had gained a new quality—something akin to acknowledgement, but far colder. "You are indeed a dangerous seed."
The man swept his hand through the air.
[Skill: Judgment — Severance]
A thin, nearly invisible line of light slashed across. Tian Cang tried to dodge, but his body had long since overloaded. His reflexes were half a second slower than his will.
His right arm fell.
At the cut, space was cleanly erased, leaving a void of darkness between his shoulder and the severed arm as it fell—perfectly dry, like a page cut with scissors.
Tian Cang looked at the shoulder where his arm used to be. For two seconds, the expression on his face was one of complete calm—the calm of someone who had seen so many terrible things that new horrors were merely data.
Then he smiled. A smile that had entirely lost its humanity.
He lunged forward, using his full body weight and his remaining arm to strike directly at the opponent's face.
BOOM!!!
Both were sent flying in opposite directions, smashing into ruined stone pillars. Dust billowed up, obscuring the battlefield for several long seconds.
The smoke cleared slowly.
Tian Cang lay prostrate on the ground. His body began to disintegrate; patches of flesh were turning into black ash, starting from his fingertips and spreading toward his wrists. The Blood Firmament had exceeded the soul's endurance and was now digesting its master.
The white-cloaked man stood up. His cloak was torn along the shoulder, and his elegant face had been slashed across the cheek, blood running down his neck. His gaze was now filled with genuine killing intent—the look of one who had decided that something needed to vanish from this world immediately.
"This thorn cannot be kept."
He raised his hand, preparing for the final purification strike. The golden magic circle appeared once more, twice as large this time, holy runes spinning at a dizzying speed.
Tian Cang looked at the light and thought of very little.
THOOM!!!
The ground in the distance exploded. A surge of aura—so black and heavy that the surrounding air was compressed into an invisible wall—hurtled forward like a falling star crashing into the earth.
A long, pitch-black spear impaled the stone floor between Tian Cang and the judge. The ground around the spear spider-webbed outward from the point of impact, and the air trembled violently as if something invisible had just been ripped apart.
The white-cloaked man stepped back. One step. Cautious and deliberate.
"Lumina..." A deep, powerful voice resonated from the smoke, carrying a heavy, grounded authority like rock and stone—entirely different from the ethereal power of the entity in the sky.
"Since when did you dare to openly hunt a member of the Blood Flame on this land?"
A tall figure stepped out from the smoke. A suit of dark red heavy armor, the color of dried blood, covered him from shoulder to calf. His hand gripped the shaft of the spear. The pressure radiating from the newcomer was of a different nature—pressing down like an entire sky collapsing, the weight of a mountain rather than light.
The judge stood still, his gaze moving from the spear in the ground to the newcomer, then down to the emblem on the shoulder plate.
Blood Flame.
"This situation will be recorded," the judge's voice remained calm, but something within it had shifted—a cold calculation running behind the words. "Lumina withdraws as the objective has changed."
He turned and walked away, his white cloak trailing behind him, still inexplicably clean.
Tian Cang struggled to look up at the man in red armor.
His consciousness had long since faded; the images around him blurred together, and sounds reached him from afar like voices at the bottom of a well. But he managed to see the burning emblem on the stranger's shoulder plate once more, clearer than before.
Blood Flame.
He had never met anyone from that organization. He only knew the name from scraps of information gathered during years of wandering the battlefields—a power that stood outside the system of the High and Lower Realms, playing by its own rules, recruiting those with unstable Blood Firmaments.
And now, one of them stood before him.
Why...
The question dissolved before it could fully form. Darkness surged in, swallowing Tian Cang's last bit of lucidity. He collapsed into the ash, feeling the coldness of the earth against his cheek as the distant sound of clashing metal began to ring—vibrant and stirring—as if the world continued to turn without the need for his witness.