The world was a cage of jagged, frozen crystal.
On the planet of Aetheleon, the sky did not offer light; it offered only the suffocating embrace of a perpetual blizzard. The mountain ranges looked like the teeth of a starving beast, biting into the gray firmament. Yet, the pristine whiteness of the snow was a lie. Beneath the falling flakes, the valley floor was a canvas of absolute slaughter.
The snow didn't just melt; it hissed as it touched the rivers of gore. This wasn't human blood. It was a rhythmic, sickening soup of neon green, obsidian black, and royal purple—the ichor of high-level cultivators and demonic beasts alike. The corpses were piled so high they formed new hills, their frozen eyes staring at the heavens in silent accusation.
Through this charnel house, a lone figure moved.
He was a ghost in the red mist. White hair, long and unkept, whipped behind him like a battle standard. His robes, once pristine, were now so saturated with blood they looked like they had been dipped in a vat of crimson wine. In his right hand, he gripped a blade that defied the laws of the world. It was a jian of translucent bone, wreathed in Crimson Thunder—arcs of lightning that smelled of ozone and scorched flesh.
A thousand elite warriors had surrounded him. They were the "Immortals" of the sect, men who could level cities with a flick of their fingers. To Yaowang Ming, they were merely meat.
He moved. It wasn't a walk; it was a blur of spatial displacement.
Rip. Tear. Shatter.
The sound of the battlefield was the sound of a butcher's shop at dawn. Yaowang Ming did not merely kill; he erased. With a single horizontal sweep of his blade, thirty men were bifurcated at the waist. Their upper torsos slid off their legs in slow motion, intestines spilling onto the ice like steaming snakes. He grabbed a commander by the throat, the Crimson Thunder vaporizing the man's head into a fine red mist before the body could even twitch.
"Die, "You called yourselves my equals… look at you now." Ming roared, his voice a tectonic plate grinding against another. "You want my divinity? Come and take it from the depths of hell!"
Ten minutes. That was all it took for a thousand "gods" to become a thousand piles of offal.
Exhausted, his dantians screaming with the agony of overexertion, Yaowang Ming slumped onto the massive, shattered branch of a Black-Iron Spirit Tree, felled by his own shockwaves. He breathed heavily, each exhale a cloud of bloody vapor.
From the shadows of a nearby jagged peak, a scavenger—a cultivator who had hidden during the massacre—saw his chance. The coward crept forward, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. The Sovereign is weak! His Qi is depleted! If I take his head, I will be king!
The scavenger leaped, his dagger aimed at the back of Ming's neck.
Shuck.
The scavenger didn't even feel the steel. He was still in mid-air when he realized his perspective had shifted. He saw his own headless body, still pumping blood from the neck stump, falling toward the snow. Yaowang Ming hadn't even looked back. He had simply flicked a finger, a thread of sword-intent severing the space between the man's vertebrae.
"Trashing dog," Ming spat.
But then, the air turned cold—colder than the ice mountains. The space around the tree branch buckled.
SHING!
A blade of pure void-energy erupted through Yaowang Ming's chest from behind. He gasped, golden blood spraying from his lips. Before he could turn, a flash of azure light blinded him. A man with hair the color of the deep ocean appeared, his hand moving in a blurred arc.
Squelch.
Yaowang Ming's left arm flew into the air, spinning like a discarded toy, trailing a ribbon of glowing blood. He fell to his knees, the impact cracking the frozen earth for miles.
He looked up, his vision swimming. Surrounding him were six figures. His generals. His "brothers." The people he had shared wine and war with for centuries.
"Why?" Ming hissed, the word tasting like copper and bile. "Why this betrayal, you bastards?"
The man in the center, sporting hair of spun gold and eyes full of false piety, stepped forward. This was Zhao Tian, the Golden Emperor. "Because you are a god among insects, Ming. And insects eventually tire of being stepped on. You are too strong. Your existence makes us irrelevant."
Ming turned his gaze to a woman shrouded in black silk, her face hidden behind a veil. His heart, more than his body, shattered. "Even you, Yue'er? After all I gave you?"
The woman's voice was a cold dagger. "You gave me everything, yes. But you forgot to give me freedom. I don't want to be the Sovereign's consort. I want to be the Sovereign. Sorry, dear. You have to die."
The six of them didn't wait. They knew how dangerous a cornered tiger was.
"I, YAOWANG MING..." He coughed, a massive glob of golden essence staining the snow. He forced himself to stand on one leg, his eyes burning with a light that made the six 'Exalted Ones' flinch. "...NEVER DESERVED TO KNEEL BEFORE MERE ANTS LIKE YOU! YOU DARE BETRAY THE HEAVENS THEMSELVES?"
The sky turned black. The ice mountains groaned as a violent, suffocating wind stripped the valley bare.
"I WILL HAVE MY REVENGE!" he screamed, a sound so primal it shattered the eardrums of the weaker cultivators miles away. "I will massacre your lineages! I will pull your ancestors from their graves and burn their souls! When I return, the rivers will run red with the blood of your kin! I CURSE YOU! I CURSE YOUR SECTS! I CURSE YOUR BLOODLINES TO THE NINTH GENERATION!"
Knowing his physical shell was finished, Ming performed the ultimate taboo. He bit his tongue, using the Forbidden Soul-Splitting Art. He forced his memories, his rage, and his very essence into a microscopic seed of light—a duplicate soul will.
The woman in black moved. Her blade, dark as a moonless night, swung in a perfect arc.
Yaowang Ming's head left his shoulders. His body remained kneeling, a defiant statue of meat and bone, even as his soul-seed vanished into the void of the reincarnation cycle.
"And then—he vanished from the world."
Five Thousand Years Later…
The Cave of Whispers was damp and smelled of earth and iron.
A woman, her face pale and drenched in sweat, let out a final, harrowing cry that echoed against the stalactites. She had hair as black as a raven's wing and eyes that flashed with a desperate, fiery red.
In her arms, she held a newborn. The infant didn't cry. He watched her with eyes that were far too old—eyes of burning crimson that seemed to count the very atoms in the air.
"Rayn..." she whispered, her voice trembling. "My little Rayn."
Outside the mouth of the cave, the rhythmic thud of armored boots echoed like the beating of a war drum.
She looked at her husband. He was a man who stood like a god of slaughter, his aura so dense it felt as if he had just walked out of a mountain of corpses. His eyes were cold, reflecting the steel of the blade he gripped, looking like a man who would kill every living soul in existence just to keep his child for himself.
As he stepped toward the exit, preparing to pave a path of red, Her voice broke the heavy silence. "Dear... please, make sure you live a good life. Keep him safe. Wait for the wheel of fate to turn; when the time comes, find me. We will take our revenge together and burn their world to ashes."
The husband didn't look back, but his shoulders tensed with a silent vow. He stepped into the light, and the screaming began. He moved like a whirlwind of death, his sword reaping the lives of the outsiders until the snow was stained a deep, permanent crimson. While the carnage unfolded, She used the last of her strength to trigger a concealment array, her form flickering before she disappeared into the depths of the cave, vanishing like a ghost.
Having slaughtered every threat in his path, the husband clutched the infant Rayn to his chest. With a roar of exertion, two massive, powerful wings erupted from his back, shattering his silken robes. With a single, violent flap that sent a shockwave through the valley, he took to the sky, fleeing into the clouds before the enemy reinforcements could even glimpse his shadow.