In a forgotten, desolate corner of the Twin Peak Hill, where the very air felt thick with the residue of forgotten prayers and ancient sorrow, Donovan Valdez stirred. The shadows here were not mere absences of light; they were clinging, viscous spectres that seemed to drink the warmth from the crumbling, cracking stone upon which he sat. His eyes snapped open, and in their depths glinted a hard, cold light of newfound power—a power that felt less like an achievement and more like a pact made in a desperate hour. His aura surged around him, not with a brilliant radiance, but with a deep, fathomless darkness, a personal abyss that seemed to swallow the already dim moonlight and leech the vitality from the few stubborn weeds pushing through the cracks.
The world he had left behind was gone. The surrounding scene had been utterly transformed into a landscape of profound ruin. The once-luxury mountain lodges and delicate hill houses were now little more than skeletal remains, their walls cracked and crumbled as if crushed by a giant's fist. The very land was scarred with deep, jagged fissures that wept a faint, phosphorescent mist, and the mountain woods were a graveyard of splintered trees, their branches clawing at the oppressive sky in a final, silent agony. A heavy, bruised blanket of cloud smotered the entire mountain range, yet a single, spooky shaft of silver light—cold, unworldly, and utterly devoid of comfort—pierced through the blackness directly above the summit of the Twin Peak Hill. From that terrifying apex radiated an overwhelming killing intent, a lethal psychic pressure so dense and malicious it sent a wave of primal, scary death-feeling washing over him, a chilling reminder that even his newly ascended Foundation Stage strength was a fragile candle against a hurricane of pure evil.
His Foundation Establishment, achieved in a desperate, reckless rush, bore the unmistakable marks of his prodigious talent and unyielding resolve, yet the haste had exacted a terrible price. The formidable power within him did not flow like a steady river but churned like a storm-ravaged sea; his qi flickered unsteadily, a guttering flame threatening to be snuffed out by the slightest adversity. His foundation, the very core of his future strength, teetered on the edge of instability, a masterpiece of potential sculpted from cracked and flawed stone. The ghost of a better, purer path he might have taken haunted the edges of his consciousness, a constant, whispering critique of the choice that now defined his entire Dao.
Still, he had crossed the monumental threshold. Foundation Stage was a legendary leap in this brutal world, a testament to a marvellous cultivation potential that even his reckless methods could not completely obscure, and it filled him with a grim, hollow satisfaction. This feeling, however, was instantly tempered and poisoned by a gnawing, all-consuming regret. He had chosen to ascend via the Human Path, a brutal, grinding road of raw endurance and stolen power, a path of blood and compromise that was infinitely more difficult and far less glorious than the celestial promise of the legendary Cosmic Path. The Cosmic Path was a tale told to cultivation family's core heirs and dreamers—a way of harmony with the heavens, of pristine power and boundless future potential. His path was one of clawing his way through the mud, and the bitterness of that comparison was a vile taste in his mouth, a constant ache that made his hard-won power feel cheap and tainted.
Suppressing the corrosive bitterness that threatened to unravel his fragile focus, the Mister First Dominator rose to his full height. His gaze, sharp and cold as a freshly honed blade bleeding in the moonlight, swept his surroundings with a predatory, calculating intent. His triumph was meaningless alone.
His squad brothers and sisters—Zoe Wright and the others, whose voices now echoed in his memory with a painful clarity—were still trapped somewhere in the heart of this haunted estate's unfolding horrors, ensnared and tormented by the Ju-On's bottomless malice. His personal anguish was a luxury he could not afford. It was time to act.
With a flicker of his form that seemed to borrow from the oppressive darkness itself, he vanished from the spot. His body became a blur, a streak of shadow against deeper shadow, moving with a speed that was less like running and more like a desperate, crazed dash toward the epicenter of the nightmare. He sped toward the brooding, monstrous silhouette of the Ancestral Shrine, a place that now pulsed with the malevolent heartbeat of the entire mountain itself, driven by a fierce, desperate determination to reclaim the few kin his lonely path had ever granted him.
——
Atop the Left Peak, the Ancestral Shrine was a skeletal prove to devastation, its hallowed grounds utterly desecrated by two overwhelming forces of cataclysmic fury. The once-majestic complex lay in ruins, not merely broken but seemingly unmade, its sacred expanse split asunder by a blow that felt less like an impact and more like a divine rejection.
The air itsel thrummed with a sickening, residual energy, the palpable aftermath of two colossal Sword Intents meeting in a conflict that had transcended mere physicality. The very earth bore the scars of their hatred; the dirt and stones of the entire mountain peak had been raked, cracked, and shattered, as if the land itself had been flayed alive by the claws of battling gods.
The shockwave from the cataclysmic clash had rippled outwards not like sound, but like a silent, expanding sphere of pure annihilation—a star being born and dying in the same instant. It had blown every standing hall, every sacred archway, into nothing but fine splinters and atomized dust. A crazy, vicious wind had exploded from the mountaintop, a hurricane of pure malice that scoured the stone clean and reached down the slopes to tear hundreds of entire ancient trees from the mid-mountain soil, sending them spinning like dried twigs into the churning, blackened air. This unnatural gale tore at the fabric of the sky itself, shredding the starless, heavy blanket of black cloud that had smothered the world, and in a single, terrifying breath, revealed the heavens—dominated by a vicious, shining blood moon that cast a lurid, hellish glow upon the ruin below.
In a distant corner of the ravaged mountain estate, Garrick Blackthorn and his group of ghost-enthralled sect comrades froze mid-step, their puppet-like march arrested by a sudden, seismic tremor through the bonds that controlled them. A sliver of their own consciousness, long buried and suppressed, returned—a shard of ice plunged into the boiling sea of their subsumed minds.
For a single, agonizing heartbeat, they were themselves again. Their souls, laid utterly bare, registered the pure, unadulterated horror of their predicament: the feeling of another's will moving their limbs, the silent audience within their own skulls as they were forced to enact atrocities. It was a moment of clarity so profound and terrible it was a torture in itself, a silent, internal scream that echoed in the void where their free will had once resided.
It was a reprieve that lasted less than a breath. With a sudden, vicious psychic tug from the distant entity that held their strings, the Ju-On ruthlessly reclaimed its puppets. The fleeting spark of terrified awareness in their eyes was instantly snuffed out, replaced by the flat, dull sheen of perfect oblivion. A profound gloom settled back over them, deeper and more absolute than before, as if the brief taste of freedom had only made their subsequent imprisonment more crushing.
A low, grinding murmur then filled the oppressive air, a sound like ancient stone grinding on dry bone. It was the Ju-On, its shadowy form a shifting nexus of pain and malevolence, whispering a ceaseless litany of ancient curses and freshly harvested resentments. The Threads of Fate that sutured its incorporeal body—glimmering, silken wires thrumming with stolen lifeforce—shivered and stirred as it focused its will.
Then, the threads pulled taut against the group of human cultivators with a terrible purpose.
It began with Zoe Wright. The intricate, stunning tattoos that laced her face and arms, once a testament to her unique strength and vibrant spirit, now seemed to writhe like trapped serpents beneath her skin, distorting into ugly, unrecognizable patterns. Her face twitched in a grotesque parody of human expression, muscles pulling and spasming in directions nature never intended, as if an invisible sculptor was brutally remolding her features from the inside out.
The pressure built behind her eyes, a terrible, internal force mounting with relentless intensity. Her eyes, wide and unseeing, bulged outward against their sockets, the whites flooding with ruptured blood vessels, until the delicate orbs could contain the strain no longer. They ruptured with a soft, wet, sickening pop, and a clear, viscous fluid streamed down her cheeks in thick tears. This was followed instantly by a thicker, darker seepage—a torrent of blood and liquefied brain matter that oozed from the vacant, ruined sockets, painting her face in a grotesque mask of tragic demise.
Her fingers jerked and twitched uncontrollably, the bones within cracking audibly as they contorted into unnatural, claw-like hooks, the skin stretching and then pulling tight like desiccated leather under a sudden, immense vacuum. A dreadful, wet groaning emanated from her core, not a scream, but the wrenching, visceral sound of matter and spirit collapsing in on themselves.
She was being gradually, utterly unmade. An invisible, colossal pressure was crushing her, compressing and sucking the very substance from her form. Her head distorted violently, the skull audibly cracking and sinking inwards as if a great, unseen hand were squeezing it with unimaginable force. Her torso followed suit, the abdominal cavity contracting in a violent spasm, ribs splintering and folding into the sudden, horrifying void within. The once-proud and powerful cultivator was reduced to a shuddering, collapsing marionette, her physical form crumpling inward in a manner so fundamentally wrong and unnatural that it defied all reason, a horrifying implosion of flesh, bone, and spirit. All that remained was a twitching, broken thing suspended and bound by glistening, predatory threads.
All around her, the other enthralled cultivators met the same fate in a grotesque, simultaneous cascade. Their flesh melted away like wax under a blowtorch, their vitality and cultivation base ripped from their bodies in screaming torrents of energy, flowing along the thrumming threads of Fate like rivers of light draining into the waiting void of the Ju-On's ghost form.
In an instant, the evil ghost's spectral wounds sealed over without a trace. The countless cursing, tormented dead faces that writhed across its body blazed anew with a malevolent, hungry light, their silent screams now glowing with stolen power, their anguish amplified as the Ju-On's form solidified, its horrific presence swelling with the life force of its devoured puppets.
Though the ghastly wound upon its form had knitted shut, leaving no more trace than a ripple fading on stagnant water, a cold and alien dread began to crystallize in the deepest core of the malevolent entity. This was not the simple, biological fear of cessation that plagued mortals—a concept as meaningless to it as color is to the blind—but something far more profound: the chilling realization of absolute finitude. Its desperate, brutal act of life reclamation had consumed the final dregs of its hoarded spiritual capital; it had devoured the screaming essence of every last one of its human puppets, leaving no vessels remaining in its thrall, no more wellsprings of vitality to fuel a future resurrection. It now stood upon a terrifying cliff, its power momentarily restored to a blazing peak, yet its means of replenishment were utterly exhausted, leaving it a starved evil facing an eternity of dimming embers.