Blood light swallowed him whole.
For a brief heartbeat, there was only the taste of iron on his tongue, the distant echo of screams, the muffled roar of Polaris Tower grinding against the sky.
Then even that was gone.
...
Ren opened his eyes on a road that shouldn't exist.
A single plank, ten feet wide, stretched through an endless dark. There was no wind, no ground, no heavens—just a boundless void, silent and dry, like the world had been emptied out and forgotten.
At measured intervals along the plank, clusters of lights floated in the air, hanging above obsidian statues carved from night itself.
Those statues weren't random.
Young men with blades resting across their knees, eyes closed in meditation.
Horned giants in war-armor, hands folded behind their backs, gazes proud and unyielding.
Slender Fey women whose spears pointed toward some unseen horizon.
Humans in simple robes whose fingers curled as if still wrapped around invisible swords.
Demons in jagged armor, cloaks frozen mid-snap, killing intent carved into their smiles.
Each one was captured in the instant before a battle that had changed their era.
The lights above them pulsed slowly. Thump. Thump. Like heartbeats.
"Road of Emperor, huh," Ren said, amused.
His voice went nowhere. It slipped out of his mouth and disappeared—no echo, no return. The void around him simply took it and stayed quiet.
Then the pressure came.
It didn't rise from the plank. It didn't leak from the statues. It fell from the lights.
Every light contained a will—a shard of battle intent that had once shaken continents. Those wills pressed down together, stacking one atop another, mountain upon mountain, until the entire Road weighed on his soul.
Ren's Spiritual Sea stirred.
Deep inside, the Immortal Soul Bone flickered like a buried star, luminous runes sliding across its surface. His Spiritual Sea didn't quake; it expanded and contracted with the incoming pressure, breathing with it, like lungs drawing in a storm.
"…Not bad," he murmured softly. "If you don't know better."
He took his first step.
The plank didn't creak.
The darkness didn't move.
But the lights woke.
The first cluster flared as he drew near.
The statue beneath it was of a young man seated with his sword planted before him, hands resting on the hilt, lips set in stubborn resolve. The light above his head flashed once, then poured downward.
It condensed into a translucent figure that stepped out onto the plank.
Ancient armor wrapped his body. His sword hummed with killing intent, edge sharp enough that even the void seemed reluctant to touch it.
Ren looked him over.
The phantom's eyes were closed.
They opened.
A tide of will crashed forward—years of slaughter, countless victories, an unyielding Dao Heart that had once believed itself destined to stand at the peak.
Ren lifted his hand.
He didn't call Fire, or Thunder, or Space. No Time distortions, no Asura suppression.
A single thread of soul force slid out from his fingertips.
Pure soul, compressed until it was thinner than a hair, sharper than a needle.
The phantom's momentum froze.
The Emperor will that had brewed for tens of thousands of years, the pride that had once borne the title "Emperor grade genius"… stopped like wax in a sudden frost. Sword mid-swing, eyes burning, aura surging—and unable to move even a finger.
Ren's soul needle pierced between the phantom's brows.
The entire Emperor light shattered.
It didn't explode violently. It came apart like glass in water, fragments of light drifting around him in a slow spiral. They sank into his Spiritual Sea one by one, dissolving into a cool drizzle.
Ren watched the rain fall inside his soul.
A faint outline stirred within his Spiritual Sea—an embryonic shape, no more than a blur, the first hint of something that could one day step beyond life and death.
Battle spirit.
"This Road…" Ren narrowed his eyes, feeling the delicate textures of the collapsing will. "It remembers everyone who walked it. After they die, it uses the marks they left to temper whoever comes next."
Empyrean Primordius had really gone all in.
A weapon against heaven's rules. A ladder for monsters. A graveyard and trial built from the souls of the dead.
Ren took another step.
He didn't slow.
...
The lights came faster.
Every hundred feet another cluster bloomed. New phantoms stepped out from the statues—each one carrying the weight of an era.
A Giant Demon with twin halberds that split the void, each swing dragging invisible tides behind it.
A Fey woman whose eyes were like cold moons, spear-soul swallowing the road ahead until even light seemed hesitant to cross.
A human in coarse robes, bare hands clenched into fists that carried the feeling of collapsing mountains.
Some roared battle cries that had once stirred millions.
Some were silent, their wills like drawn blades that needed no words.
Each one believed, once, that they would stand at the peak of this world.
Every single one froze.
Ren let them attack. He let their wills touch him for a heartbeat, burn against his Spiritual Sea, show him the paths they'd carved.
His soul force surged like a tide in reply.
He didn't just crush them.
He took them apart.
The Immortal Soul Bone lit up deep within him, its runes unfolding inward and outward at once. Every strand of Emperor will, every twist of their intent, every tiny shift in their soul force—it all laid itself bare under that bone's light.
He tasted their martial paths in an instant.
A spear that had never retreated, even once.
A saber that cut cause and effect as much as flesh.
A fist that existed to protect a single promise.
He stripped away the unnecessary.
Thin needles of soul force. Broad, descending hammers. Spirals that drilled straight through the center of their will. Quiet waves that washed personalities away and left only bare battle intent drifting like sand.
One step. One Emperor.
Another step. Another will devoured.
Ten lights shattered.
Twenty.
Thirty.
The mist in his Spiritual Sea grew thick and rich, like wine. With every Emperor will crushed, more strands of soul power seeped into it, swirling, layering, condensing.
Shadows flickered within that mist—swords, spears, sabers, halberds. Elemental forms rose and faded: fire licking along phantom blades, wind whispering in the shape of arcs, thunder boiling like a coiled serpent, darkness spreading like ink.
He watched them all.
He let them gather.
He accepted none.
"Too narrow," he murmured as a sword-shaped intention tried to coalesce.
It broke apart.
These ancient Emperors had built terrifying battle spirits. Their wills were sharp, cruel, vast. But every last one was tethered to the path of the one who'd walked it.
And Ren had no intention of borrowing another man's peak.
...
He didn't know how much time passed.
He didn't care.
The first half of the Road of Emperor was said to test nothing but will. Most geniuses crawled through it. After twelve days, many collapsed somewhere along the plank, lying half-conscious as the accumulated pressure of eras pressed against their souls.
Ren walked as though strolling down a quiet street.
A hundred Emperor lights later, his Spiritual Sea changed.
The mist contracted suddenly, drawn toward a single point. The "sky" of his inner world rippled. At its center, a small, slender object took shape—a line of multi-hued light, thin as a chopstick, half a foot long.
Its shaft was translucent, filled with compressed bands of color.
Violet thunder arcs coiled along a molten red-gold core.
A faint wind halo flowed around its length, invisible until it cut across the mist and left currents swirling in its wake.
At its tip, the light curved into a needle point so sharp it seemed to vanish, like the world refused to admit there was something that sharp in it.
Heaven-Piercing.
Not the martial intent he already wielded in battle, but the battle spirit that answered to it—a spear of will, forged from his own Dao, not stolen from anyone else.
The tiny needle floated over his Spiritual Sea, quiet and utterly terrifying. Wherever it drifted, the mist condensed, as if reality itself had been handed a single direction and could no longer pretend to be formless.
Ren's mouth curved.
"Mm. That's more like it."
He kept moving.
The Emperor lights did not stop.
His battle spirit drank them. It evolved in a unique way that no other martial cultivator could replicate.
From half a foot it grew denser instead of longer, its colors deepening from faint glow to molten brilliance. Fine markings appeared along its shaft—runic lines that weren't words, but laws crushed to their limit: Fire's burning edges, Thunder's violent leap, Wind's ruthless efficiency, Space's shortest path, Time's silent cut, Annihilation's red shadow.
Every time an Emperor will attacked, the Heaven-Piercing Battle Spirit moved.
No flashy techniques. No showy arcs.
It simply pierced.
The world of the Road of Emperor shook faintly in rhythm with its thrusts.
One stab. One will. One shatter.
Behind him, if anyone could have observed, the Road would have looked like a path of dead stars—cluster after cluster going dark, their statues returning to cold stillness as their attached will fragments were devoured without mercy.
Unlike other cultivators, Ren didn't just "temper" his will with each clash.
He consumed them completely, letting even their leftovers refine his Heaven-Piercing Battle Spirit.
...
At some point, the darkness ahead shifted.
The endless plank, stretching forward without end, split.
Two roads branched out from the point before him.
One continued as a plank lined with lights—the path steeped in pure will, more clusters flickering like stars awaiting their turn to fall.
The other diverged into a line flanked by tall, dark stone tablets, each tablet carved densely with diagrams and flowing lines—secret arts, cultivation methods, essence marks of laws carved so deep they almost became holes in reality.
A faint divide in aura opened between the two.
One side pressed on his soul—will stacked upon will, the oppression of countless battle spirits.
The other side radiated heavy spiritual and cultivation pressure—techniques, merit laws, a library of killings arts turned into stones.
Ren stepped up to the fork.
He stopped.
His gaze moved once along the stone tablets. Even at a glance, he could feel what lived in them—Remnants of Empyrean Primordius' techniques, fragments of arrays, divine demon methods that would make sect masters of the lower realms cough blood if they knew what he was casually ignoring.
"It's tempting," he said quietly. "But…"
He looked to the plank.
The will road pulsed.
"The other one… next time, maybe."
He didn't hesitate after that.
His foot landed on the plank that led deeper into the world of Emperor lights.
The road of stone tablets rippled, dimmed, and vanished as if it had never existed.
The pressure changed.
Everything so far had been an appetizer.
From here on, every light represented not just an Emperor powerhouse, but an Emperor whose will had already condensed into a true battle spirit.
Some had bronze battle spirits—harsh, solid, hammered out through ten thousand battles.
Some had silver—refined, piercing, bearing subtler laws.
Some had gold—radiating a majesty that had once commanded armies and flattened sects.
The first True Emperor light flared.
A tall man in ancient demonic armor strode out, spear in hand. Behind him, his battle spirit manifested as a bronze halberd, its edge radiating an aura that had once split seas and torn armies apart.
His presence alone made the Road of Emperor rumble.
If any ordinary peerless genius had stood here, just looking at him would have made their knees shake.
Ren's gaze slid over him once.
"Bronze, huh."
His battle spirit moved.
The Heaven-Piercing Battle Spirit in his Spiritual Sea vibrated and shot forward. In the world of the Road of Emperor, a streak of multi-colored light pierced the void.
It stabbed straight through the center of that Emperor's will, targeting the most core point with unerring cruelty.
The True Emperor light shattered.
The phantom's roar died mid-syllable. Hundreds of thousands of years of pride unraveled in an instant, dissolving into a flood of soul energy that slammed into Ren's Spiritual Sea like a broken dam.
The bronze halberd shadow detonate and was drawn into the Heaven-Piercing Battle Spirit, its form devoured and turned into fuel.
The Heaven-Piercing Battle Spirit's brilliance intensified.
Tiny storm vortices of law spun along its length, each one a compressed hurricane of Fire, Thunder, Wind, Space, Time, and the faint red-killing of Annihilation.
"That's one," Ren said.
He walked.
True Emperor lights came like a storm.
Some fought with sabers that tore apart the abyss, opening gashes in darkness that showed faint, screaming worlds beyond.
Some wielded bows whose arrows crossed the plank in a single instant, their trajectories folding through multiple layers of space.
Some didn't manifest weapons at all.
Their battle spirits took the shape of beasts made entirely of will—a dragon formed of pure killing intent, a phoenix woven from flame law, a river that flowed backward through time, dragging anything it touched into their past.
Some tried to drag Ren into illusions—ancient wars, broken heavens, paths they had walked to reach their peaks. They tried to drown his will in their stories, make him forget himself in their glory.
Ren barely slowed.
The Heaven-Piercing Battle Spirit had been born in a Spiritual Sea that already housed Time at Genesis and Space at Spatial Genesis, with Annihilation gnawing quietly at the edges. Every illusion that tried to bind him became fog he could cut simply by deciding it wasn't real.
Illusory battlefields?
Time around him slowed to a crawl, while for his enemies it sped up and burned through their own illusions. Their attacks decayed into disjointed frames he walked through with lazy steps.
Will beasts with jaws like entire worlds?
Space folded into skewed angles. Their maws slammed shut on empty air, their bodies turning to exposed surfaces that his spear of will pierced from impossible directions.
Soul prisons?
Annihilation's dark-red runes flickered along the Heaven-Piercing Battle Spirit. Shackles of will corroded, turning to dust before they could fully close, their remains pulled into his Spiritual Sea as nutrient.
The Road of Emperor had been built to grind geniuses for hundreds of days, even years.
Duanmu Qun had once needed two hundred days just to condense a battle spirit here.
Ren walked through it as if taking a leisurely stroll.
Other cultivators would struggle to advance their Battle Spirits. Rend had no trouble, as his Heaven-Piercing Battle Spirit devoured the Emperor's Lights. With each True Emperor he devoured, the plank beneath his feet shook a little harder. The lights behind him went dark one by one, the statues beneath them returning to empty stone. If anyone could have watched from afar, the Road would have looked like someone drawing a line of ruin across the heavens—one era after another extinguished and folded into a single man's will.
Bronze.
Silver.
Gold.
Blue.
If someone familiar with battle spirit ranks had been here, they would have gone numb as they watched.
Heaven-Piercing Battle Spirit didn't move from bronze to silver, gold, then blue.
It stepped over the entire hierarchy.
By the time Ren sensed the last wave of True Emperor lights, his battle spirit had reached a level where those ranks became jokes.
The Heaven-Piercing Battle Spirit didn't just glow.
It bent his Spiritual Sea around it.
Wherever it floated, soul power circulated like stars pulled by a central sun. Its presence changed the "physics" of his inner world—time stretched and compressed around it, laws nudged themselves aside to make room.
Ahead, three lights blazed.
They made every other Emperor statue along the Road seem like background actors.
The first statue wore heavy demonic robes, horns sweeping back like hooked blades. A towering presence that had once made the Holy Demon Continent bow its head.
The second carried an aura of aloof divinity, eyes carved with a gaze that seemed to judge all existence from above.
The third was different.
A throne of obsidian sat there, its seated figure long since crumbled, only faint faint lines tracing where a slender body had once been.
The first two lights surged at once.
Demon Emperor.
Divine Lord.
Titans of their eras, even among Emperors.
Their will lights roared out, battle spirits manifesting as a golden armor that sealed heaven and earth, and a divine sword that severed cause and effect itself.
For the first time, the Road of Emperor trembled like a living thing.
Ren didn't stop.
He didn't even tilt his chin up.
His battle spirit moved like a sigh.
The Heaven-Piercing Battle Spirit streaked forward, multiplied by countless afterimages—each afterimage anchored in a different fold of space, a different sliver of time, a different angle of law.
In less than a blink, the Heaven-Piercing Battle Spirit stood before both Emperor wills at once.
Its tip carried a compressed knot of Annihilation and Asura's cruelty, wrapped in Fire, Wind, and Thunder condensed to the absolute limit, all of it threaded through with Grand Dao sharpness that wanted nothing more than to pierce.
The golden armor cracked.
The divine sword shattered.
Both True Emperor lights exploded without fanfare.
The Demon Emperor's towering shadow and the Divine Lord's sea-like supremacy didn't even finish manifesting. Their pressure turned into thick rain, pouring into Ren's Spiritual Sea, heavy and intoxicating.
The Heaven-Piercing Battle Spirit drank.
Ren's eyes barely shifted.
Will that had already faded for tens of thousands, even a hundred thousand years, couldn't stir his fighting spirit.
His gaze moved past their dying light.
The Road of Emperor itself shook.
Far ahead, a final light began to glow.
It was small.
Compared to the Demon Emperor's mountain-sized shadow and the Divine Lord's vast ocean, this light was no larger than a hand. It flickered weakly, its aura tattered and suppressed by some vast, invisible weight.
But as it drifted closer, the entire Road… knelt.
Every Emperor light dimmed.
The void itself seemed to hold its breath.
A woman's figure appeared.
She wore simple azure robes. Her hair was tied back with a plain cord. In this remnant, her face was blurred—only the faint outline of soft eyes and a quiet mouth remained.
Behind her, a Blue Soul battle spirit spread out like the projection of a world.
Endless azure skies.
White clouds drifting lazily.
Birds of light wheeling in patterns too elegant for any mortal painter.
Seas reflecting the heavens in still, bottomless blue.
The last True Emperor light.
Heavenly Empress Xuanqing.
Even damaged, even dormant for a hundred thousand years, her will radiated a purity that made all the previous Emperors feel crude.
Ren stood very still.
He looked at the flickering Empress.
For the first time on this path, his smile softened into something almost gentle.
"Interesting," he said quietly. "Would've been something to talk to you while you were alive."
The Blue Soul world trembled faintly, as if it heard him.
This will was broken. Incomplete. It had slept for a hundred thousand years, trapped in this unfinished samsara road, unable to reincarnate, unable to return home.
The Demon Emperor's road had tried to build a path to true samsara on the backs of battle spirits like hers.
It had failed.
The Road of Emperor judged success in simple terms:
Crush, or be crushed.
This last light had to fall.
Heavenly Empress Xuanqing's Blue Soul stirred.
Winds whispered across endless azure skies. Seas rose, not violently, but with the inevitability of a tide. Infinite birds of light took wing, each one a thread of will and law.
They didn't rise to attack.
They simply existed.
Every motion carried the weight of a woman who had watched over a world, who had bled for it, who had chosen to stand beside a demon that defied the heavens.
Her world unfolded toward Ren.
His Heaven-Piercing battle spirit met it.
Blue Soul light touched the Heaven-Piercing Battle Spirit.
Where they brushed, something deep and subtle slipped across.
Ren narrowed his eyes.
Behind the Blue Soul world, behind the cycles of samsara, behind the gentle, boundless love that had once turned toward Empyrean Primordius… there was another power.
Gray.
Thick.
Heavy.
Grandmist.
The source before any law. The haze before any heaven. The nameless substance from which Dao, life, and soul were carved—and to which they could all return.
Ren's lips curled, slow. "Found you."
The Road judged that as the beginning of the fight.
The Blue Soul world flared.
Threads of blue light condensed into spears, swords, palms—a rain of manifestations that descended like a guardian's final stand. Every one of them carried a world-protecting intent, the will of a woman who had stood between her people and annihilation.
Her world surged toward Ren's battle spirit, not as random techniques, but as a complete Dao—perfect from start to finish.
Ren didn't dodge.
He didn't raise an arm in defense.
His Heaven-Piercing Battle Spirit went straight forward.
Every Blue Soul technique that tried to stop it, it pierced through. Every illusion of heaven, every scene of reincarnating souls, it split cleanly.
His battle spirit overwhelmed her Blue Soul with terrifying ease.
The world behind her cracked like porcelain struck by a hammer.
Azure skies shattered into streams of light.
Seas of blue parted into rivers of fragments.
Birds of light burst into motes that flowed with the rest.
For the first time, the Empress's blurred face came into sharp focus.
Gentle eyes looked at him through the collapsing will—no hatred, no unwillingness. Only a faint warmth and deep, bone-deep tiredness.
Ren's Heaven-Piercing Battle Spirit slowed as it reached her brow.
He extended one finger from the Heaven-Piercing Battle Spirit needle's tip and touched her gently between the eyes.
Annihilation pulsed.
The Blue Soul world scattered into pure light.
Heavenly Empress Xuanqing's last battle spirit fragment broke apart—not with contempt, but with a clean, decisive mercy, finally allowed to return to the source it had been denied.
Light rained down into the void.
The Road of Emperor shivered.
Ren closed his eyes.
The moment Xuanqing's Blue Soul dissolved, something else woke.
It rose from the deepest layer of the Road of Emperor, beneath the shattered echoes of ten thousand Emperors' wills.
Older than the Demon Emperor's array.
Older than this incomplete samsara road.
An imprint left behind by the one who had used this place as a stepping stone to peer into the beginning of all things.
A lotus bud.
It descended in the shape of absence.
Ren watched it from the center of his Spiritual Sea.
The Heaven-Piercing Battle Spirit, which had been carving paths of light through his inner sky, paused.
The lotus' petals were not made of light or shadow.
Inside the bud, there was no Fire, no Thunder, no Wind, no Time, no Space.
There was only a slow, heavy stillness.
The lotus shadow drifted down and sank into his Spiritual Sea.
At the same time, a vast, indifferent force pressed against his consciousness.
It felt like the moment before a universe's first breath, when all possibilities were packed into a single grain of nothing and waiting.
Ren exhaled.
"…Prime Emperor, huh," he murmured.
His voice was calm. His Dao Heart didn't ripple.
He sat down right there on the plank.
Legs folded beneath him, back straight, one hand resting loosely on his knee, the other hanging relaxed.
In the boundless darkness, the statues of ancient Emperors loomed around him, obsidian faces frozen in their last moments of pride and madness.
Above each statue, the lights had gone dark.
All that remained shining was the small lotus of absence hovering over his head.