The Verdant Sword Valley was dying.
Liang Chen stood on a shattered outcrop of rock, a place that had once been a quiet meditation spot overlooking the Misty Springs. There were no springs now. Only craters. The air, once thin and clean with high-altitude qi, was thick with the stench of burning pine, blood, and spent lightning.
He had arrived not with a boom, but with the silence of a settling shadow. He had chosen to observe first. A god's curiosity.
His serene mountain home of memory was a butcher's yard. The elegant arched bridges were smashed. The ancient Bell of Cleansing chimes lay cracked in the mud. Disciples in torn green robes fought in shrinking pockets, their backs to cliffs or burning buildings. Their faces were streaked with soot and despair, but their swords still moved. A desperate, dying pride.
A pang, sharp and unexpected, twisted behind Liang Chen's ribs. It wasn't the devastation of a strategic asset. It was the violation of a memory. The quiet anger that came was cold, clearer than any emotion he'd felt in the heavenly court.
His gaze swept across the chaos, analytical, detached. The besiegers—the 'Alliance of Three Peaks'—fought with the brutal efficiency of looters. They weren't just conquering; they were erasing. Grinding a thousand years of history into the dirt.
Then, his eyes found the core of the resistance. The main training plaza, where he himself had once been knocked flat a hundred times by his seniors.
A half-circle of Verdant Sword elders, maybe a dozen left, stood guard before the scorched doors of the Grand Hall. Their robes were tattered, their auras flickering like guttering candles. At their center was the current Sect Master, an old man Liang Chen didn't recognize, swaying on his feet, a deep gash across his chest.
And in front of them all, holding the line, was a boy.
He looked sixteen, maybe seventeen. His inner disciple robes were dark with sweat and grime, one sleeve torn. He fought not with the wild rage of a cornered animal, but with a focused, terrifying calm. His sword was a blur of emerald light.
Liang Chen's eyes narrowed. The style… it was the Verdant Zenith Foundation Sword. The basic, entry-level sword art every disciple learned. But this boy wasn't just performing it. He was breathing it. He had stripped it down to its absolute essence—efficiency, angle, flow—and then rebuilt it with an intuitive grace that bordered on genius. A subtle shift in footwork here, a more direct line of thrust there. It was… better. It was his style, seen through the lens of a once-in-a-millennium talent.
The boy—Liang Jian—wasn't trying to kill the swarming Alliance cultivators. He was creating space. With every parry, every controlled riposte, he was herding the attackers, buying seconds for a wounded junior to be dragged back behind the elder's line. He fought for the people behind him, not for himself.
A brutish Alliance cultivator, sensing an opening, lunged. Liang Jian pivoted, letting the spear-tip graze his arm, opening a shallow cut. He didn't flinch. He used the momentum of the dodge to disarm the man with a sharp twist of his wrist, then shoved him back with a blast of qi from his palm. He was tiring. His breaths came in ragged clouds in the cold air.
A laugh cut through the din.
An Alliance General, a man in ornate black armor with a Core Formation aura that pulsed like a rotten heart, pushed through the ranks. He held a serrated dao blade that drank the light.
"Enough play, little seedling!" the General boomed. "You have spirit. I'll mount your head on my gate as a trophy!"
He moved. Fast for a mortal. The dao blade became a crescent of murderous intent, aimed to cleave Liang Jian from shoulder to hip. The boy was exhausted, off-balance. He raised his sword, but the angle was wrong. It was a block that would shatter his weapon and his arms.
The elders cried out. The Sect Master tried to step forward but collapsed.
Liang Jian's eyes met the descending blade. There was no fear in them. Only a fierce, blazing defiance. A stubborn refusal to look away.
That look, Liang Chen thought, the cold anger in his chest crystallizing into something precise.
He didn't will himself to move. He simply decided to be elsewhere.
One moment, the killing arc of the dao was a finger's width from Liang Jian's uplifted sword.
The next, a man in white and gold robes stood between them.
He had not landed. He had not appeared in a flash. He was just there, as if he had always been part of the scene. He stood with his back to Liang Jian, facing the General.
The world froze.
The roar of battle, the screams, the crackle of fire—it all melted into a thick, muffled silence. The very air in the plaza turned heavy, like syrup. Alliance cultivators mid-charge found their limbs locked. A thrown spear hung motionless in the air. The flames on a nearby building seemed to stop dancing, becoming still paintings of light.
The only sound was the ragged, shocked gasp from Liang Jian behind him.
The Alliance General's face, a split-second ago twisted in cruel victory, was now a mask of incomprehensible terror. His mighty dao blade was not stopped by a barrier or a hand. It simply stopped existing the moment it entered the space immediately around the man in white. The edge of the blade had dissolved into harmless golden dust that now drifted to the blood-soaked ground.
Liang Chen looked at the General. He didn't glare. He didn't summon power. He just looked.
The pressure was not an attack. It was a fact. The weight of a mountain, of a ocean, of a sky. It was the unbearable truth of existence pressing down on one insignificant soul.
The General's knees hit the stone plaza with twin, sickening cracks. Then his hands. Then his face pressed into the dirt, unable to even twitch. A wet, dark stain spread across the front of his fine armor.
Liang Chen finally spoke. His voice was quiet, calm, and it cut through the supernatural silence like a scalpel.
"You," he said, glancing at the prostrate, trembling man, "are in my way."
He lifted his gaze from the General to the hundreds of frozen Alliance cultivators in the plaza, in the streets, on the walls. His twilight eyes held no rage. Only a final, quiet verdict.
"All of you are."