The air on Shuanggui Peak isn't just cold; it is divided.
On one side, Ren Jiang's domain manifests. The world warps into the crushing, silent depths of an abyssal trench. Phantom pillars of coral rise around him, and the very light bends, dim and aqueous. Gravity increases tenfold, a suffocating pressure meant to crush bones and stagnate spirit.
Within it, Ren Jiang moves with the slow inevitability of the deep sea. Each swing of his blade drags vortices behind it, spirals of pressure that could plane mountains into silt.
On the other, Liu Xue's domain unfolds.
The air locks in place, glittering with ice so fine it hangs like frozen breath, beautiful and merciless. Nothing flows here. Nothing escapes. Time itself feels hesitant, as if afraid to move without permission.
Liu Xue is no longer a swordsman but the heart of the glacier itself, his glacial rapier is an extension of himself, a cold that sought not just to freeze, but to stop molecular motion, to enact perfect stillness.
When their domains collide, the peak shudders.
Water crashes against ice, pressure grinding against stillness. The ground splits and quivers, unable to endure the strain of two powers that refuse to give way.
Dark water surges upward, twisting into massive serpents that rush Liu Xue with open jaws and fangs like spears.
He steps onto their bodies as if they were solid ground, moving with calm precision as his blade flashes. Wherever it passes, the water stiffens, turns white, and collapses under its own weight, frozen pressure shattering stone beneath his feet.
Ren Jiang attacks without restraint, every strike driven by desperation and fury, but none of it reaches its mark. Each technique is met, slowed, sealed away before it can breathe.
Liu Xue's voice cuts through the chaos, measured and clear. "The great Queen, Ren Lifen…"
Ren Jiang's footing falters at the sound of his mother's name.
"Her mighty head was severed before the masses." Liu Xue continues evenly. "Her dignity dragged through the mire. Her name buried beneath filth."
"Shut up." Ren Jiang grits, his expression darkening, though the words carry little force.
"Everyone spits on her grave." Liu Xue says, meeting his eyes without flinching. "They whisper of forbidden arts used upon her husband. Of poison slipped into the First Queen Consort's cup."
He exhales slowly, the faintest tremor slipping into his voice.
"They speak of the massacre of my family." he adds. "They say she deserved a death far more horrific than the one she received."
Ren Jiang stiffens.
"But tell me." Liu Xue presses, his tone sharpening, "Why does she continue to bear such insults long after her death?"
The question lands deeper than any blade.
"All because of you."
Hatred finally bleeds into Liu Xue's voice as a whip of compressed water snaps toward him, only to freeze solid in midair and explode into shards before it can reach him.
"You poison everything around you." Liu Xue says coldly. "Those who trust you. Those foolish enough to love you."
Ice creeps over Ren Jiang's techniques, slowing them, strangling them until they die in his hands.
"Your wife." Liu Xue adds after a pause. "She is dead as well, isn't she?"
Ren Jiang roars as a slash from Liu Xue's rapier, faster than sight, grazes his ribs. Not a deep cut, but a touch of the rapier's point. Instantly, a bloom of crystalline frost spiderwebbed from the wound, crawling over his skin, seizing his muscles, leaching the heat and vitality from his core.
"You should have eviscerated your own guts for the shame you have brought upon your bloodline and our realm." Liu Xue relentlessly provokes. "It would have spared everyone else."
Pain rips through Ren Jiang, sharp and blinding, tangled with grief, rage, and shame so dense it threatens to crush him outright. Yet beneath it all—beneath pain itself—something stirs.
Slow and vast, it is watching.
"My hatred for you has consumed me entirely." Liu Xue snarls, the last of his composure fracturing. "It has burned my existence for as long as I can remember. That hatred is all I have left."
Another cut opens, then another, blood freezing before it can fall.
"This hatred tears me apart from the inside and—" Liu Xue continues, relentless. "I can no longer endure it."
Wounds blossom across Ren Jiang's body from head to toe, yet Liu Xue's fury does not waver.
"Only your death will grant me salvation."
"Die."
Ren Jiang does not understand the sensation that grips him. He only knows he cannot endure another word, another breath beneath that crushing weight. Desperation surges through him, so profound it tears a gasp from his throat.
"Die!"
He isn't summoning this power; he seems to be falling back onto it, like a man falling onto a throne he never knew was there.
A gold-and-white radiance, searing in its clarity, erupts through Ren Jiang's water techniques. The pressurized whip of Yangtze water meant to deflect the blow doesn't just move—it transmutes.
Mid-air, the stream becomes a lash of solidified sunlight, a bar of heavy, brilliant amber that meets Liu Xue's glacial rapier not with a clash, but with a sound like a gong of verdict.
Liu Xue's eyes, pale and certain a moment before, shatter into confusion.
His perfect ice, which had turned Ren Jiang's element against him, does not fracture under impact. Under this new, terrible light, it sublimates.
It simply ceases to be solid, vanishing into a useless, dissipating mist, its fundamental nature denied.
The force of the blocked blow doesn't push him back; it weighs him down.
It is the weight of judgment.
It is the gravity of a sentence being passed.
Ren Jiang stares, bewildered, at his own hands. The familiar cool, fluid sensation of his water attribute is gone. In its place is a terrifying, dry authority.
A crazed laugh tears from his chest, raw and unrestrained.
He feels like a conduit for a gaze that sees all things and commands them without question. The power is ancient, solar, and final.
However, he is unaware that this power isn't his.
That it belongs to the Descendant of Sun.
That it belongs to Lord Enma.
"The assimilation is complete…" Zhang Xiyu murmurs, standing alone across the river.
Liu Xue gasps and drops to one knee, not from pain, but from profound spiritual condemnation. His icy domain, once smothering the peak, recoils like a living thing scorched by something it cannot endure.
The intricate, beautiful structures of his power are stripped bare beneath the radiance, every flaw exposed, their elegance revealed as brittle arrogance before the almighty!
"What… what heresy is this?" Liu Xue spits, blood—now a startling red against his pale skin—trickling from his lip. His voice holds no sneer, only a tremor of primal fear.
This isn't being overpowered; This is being invalidated.
Ren Jiang has no answer. He only knows the power is answering a call deeper than his own will.
He raises his sword. The jade blade is no longer jade, but a shard of captured daylight, concentrated and humming with a silent, judicial frequency.
And this pressure is openly pointed towards his brother.
"Keep my mother's name out of your filthy mouth." he says, voice dripping with disdain. "What right does a mistress's son have to speak to me like this?"
A thick beam of pure sunlight gushes out from his blade and flows towards Liu Xue. Above this blinding ray, Ren Jiang stands glowering with pride.
"I should slash my own guts?" He scoffs loudly. "Such cowardice does not befit me."
He steps forward, light pulsing outward in waves of annihilating clarity, ready to scour Liu Xue from existence.
"If you miss your mother so much," Ren Jiang continues coldly, "why didn't you join her?"
Liu Xue's eyes widen as these merciless words hit him.
"Like a silent lamb, you should have obediently let my men kill you." Ren Jiang's grin widens. "Just as they killed Liu Xiulan!"
It was then a pillar of silent, violet Ghostfire erupts from the shadows of a remaining ice spire. It does not burn with heat, but with a biting, soul-deep cold. Yutao lands beside the kneeling Liu Xue, his face a mask of grim focus.
"Stop using your qi to produce." Yutao hisses, understanding that the tables have turned. Before it was Ren Jiang's power that obeyed Zhang Xiyu's and now…
"Call upon this planet's elements. Your domain of cold hell will not go against him."
"It obeys that power now."
His Ghostfire flares, not against the light, but to create shadow. Deep, concealing pools of twilight where the harsh, revealing radiance could not penetrate.
"Where is this strength coming from?" Liu Xue demands.
Within those engineered pockets of night, his ice shudders, then regrows—not in its former pristine clarity, but as something darker and denser, an amalgam reinforced by the ghostfire's essence.
He does not question Yutao's motives, nor how he knows what he knows. He recognizes the adverse situation he's in and accepts the alliance without hesitation.
Ren Jiang swings his sunlit blade.
A wave of clarifying force tears across the peak, stripping illusion from substance. Yutao's ghostfire is laid bare, its mystic chill reduced to a pale, sorrowful fog, while Liu Xue's reforged ice trembles on the brink of instant dissolution.
Yet Ren Jiang falters.
He is untrained and his opponents can see that.
The power he wields—the stolen, slumbering core of Enma, Hell-King and Son of the Sun, whose gaze is final judgment—is vast and untamed. He grips a sovereign's sceptre with a soldier's hand, strong enough to swing it, but ignorant of its law.
"Hah…" Yutao exhales, a crooked, self-aware smile tugging at his lips. He replies. "You wouldn't believe it."
The stalemate is reborn—no longer crude, but elevated into something far more terrifying.
The peak once again becomes a fractured world.
One half is drowned in the unbearable radiance of a divine judge, light so absolute it strips meaning from resistance. The other is a clinging, defensive dominion of shadow and obscured frost, desperate but enduring.
Between them, trembling on the knife's edge, is Ren Jiang, feeling its devastating weight but unable to comprehend its inscription.
Like a child holding a loaded gun, one can only hope that the child never figures out a way to pull the trigger.
One such hopeful person is Zhang Xiyu.
He stands in silence, gazing at the mountain, its slopes carpeted with millions of half-dead demon bodies. Above them, the sky is choked with crows. The birds clutch demons in their beaks, dropping them unceremoniously into the valleys below.
When their numbers finally seem sufficient, Zhang Xiyu bites off the inner flesh off his right palm, blood welling instantly.
Using his dripping blood as ink, his clenched fist drags crimson lines across the earth. A star polygon takes shape beneath his hands, each stroke fed by pain and intent. He does not stop until the pattern is complete and his blood pools in its grooves.
This is the Yantra of the ritual.
Sitting at its centre, Zhang Xiyu lifts his gaze to the stone bench nearby, the place where the spoils of his and Yutao's brief evening rendezvous still rest.
"Are you truly no different from the rest of them?"
Recalling those words, a short, bitter laugh escapes him. "And who is to be blamed for that?"
A cheerless smile tugs at his lips as he draws his sword and places it upright before him. The ritual always begins the same way: the blade must be vested first. It must cease to be a weapon and become a vessel.
This sword will be the manifestation of Kalaratri—the dark night of annihilation.
And so, comes the next component, Mantra.
"Deadly sword, bearer of the sharp blade." Zhang Xiyu recites softly, eyes closed as fissures begin to crawl across the ground around him. "Hard to approach. Containing both welfare and victory."
"Honour to thee, O guardian of the law"
"Om Jayanti Mangala Kali Bhadrakali Kapalini—"
Back in the temple, monks chant in rapid unison, pouring water into a consecrated fire. Their voices rise and fall in disciplined harmony. Angels pour out their holy power to strengthen the mantras as the yagna unfolds under the supervision of the Blue Lotus.
This yagna is different from ritual headed by Zhang Xiyu.
It is meant to appease the Mahavidya, to soothe their anger before it spills beyond restraint.
"Durga Kshama Shiva Dhatri Swaha Swadha Namo Stute—"
The monks' breathing quickens as the chants grow louder, sharper, piercing the air. The flames surge higher, while the blood-drawn star polygon at Zhang Xiyu's feet begins to glow, its crimson lines pulsing brighter with every syllable spoken.
But this is not enough.
The tolling bells grow louder, their rhythm swallowed by the deafening ulu cries. Dust surges into the sky as the mountains near the river begin to sink, inch by inch, dragged downward by something unseen.
Both Zhang Xiyu and the Blue Lotus frown deeply as they watch the trio battle to death on the precipice of calamity.
Whether in hell or on earth, desperation has taken hold.
And beneath it all, the sound of anklets grows closer.
The next stage of the ritual can no longer be delayed.
The mountains begin crashing down. Stone crashes down like an asteroid shower, pulverizing forests, shattering ground. The earth gives way beneath the impact, and there is nowhere left to fall but inward.
A vast abyss yawns open.
This cruel and endless abyss does not spare the forests nor the river. The river splits apart, its roaring waters torn in half and swallowed whole as they pour into the abyss's gullet. Forests vanish in the blink of an eye.
This chasm burrows endlessly into the earth, restrained only by the array Yutao set at the beginning. Without it, the destruction would already be spreading across nations.
Yet its hunger remains unchanged.
Because they are here.
This is the final stage of the ritual – Bali.
Yutao stares down at the massive cavity and feels horror seize his chest. He knew what was coming. He prepared for it. And still, the reality of it strips the strength from his legs.
This is no simple hole in the ground.
From above, its true form is unmistakable.
This is a mouth.
Vast lips stretch open in silence, and deep within, a red tongue stirs slowly, tasting the air. Yutao's head bows to it without his consent, his body screaming at him to flee.
Above the opening, millions of half-dead demon bodies are forced into the air by Zhang Xiyu's qi. Yutao knows with chilling certainty that if he hesitates, he will join them.
Their insolence, their sins, their flesh, and soul.
The mouth will devour it all.