The moment they crossed the threshold of the inner compound and the heavy bronze array-doors sealed shut with a resonant hum, the spiritual pressure in the air thickened. The Enforcers were dismissed to the outer courtyards. The inner compound was smothered in absolute, suffocating silence.
"To the center of the courtyard, dog," Madam Shen commanded, ascending the steps to her elevated jade terrace. "Ran, Mei—retrieve your spiritual implements. I want to extract a different frequency of scream tonight."
Dver stood in the center of the moonlit grass.
He didn't kneel.
Slowly, accompanied by a terrifying, rhythmic snapping of bone and tendon, Dver stood up straight. His spine elongated. His shoulders broadened, locking into place with heavy, wet thuds. The "clumsy," hollow-chested slouch vanished entirely, replaced by the predatory, supernatural density of a true Asura physique.
"What are you doing?" Ran snapped, her jade-encrusted whip uncoiling with a crack of lightning-Qi. "I said kneel in the dirt!"
Dver didn't look at her. He reached up to his neck. His fingers—now steady, thick, and radiating an unnatural cold—gripped the iron Soul-Binding Shackle.
CRUNCH.
With a single, effortless squeeze, the enchanted black iron shattered like brittle clay. The crimson runes flared once and died, violently extinguished by the absolute, Abyssal pressure that suddenly detonated from Dver's core.
The temperature in the courtyard didn't just drop; it died. The ambient Qi in the air stagnated. The expensive Silk-Blood lotuses in the garden instantly turned black, crumbling into fine grey ash before they even hit the soil.
"The Soul-Binding..." Madam Shen gasped, her jade wine cup shattering in her trembling hand. She stood up, her Foundation Establishment Qi flaring in sudden, visceral panic. "How?! Guards! GUARDS!"
"They cannot hear you," Dver whispered.
His voice was no longer a stuttering reed. It was a terrifying, dual-toned resonance—his own cold cadence layered over the grinding, shuddering resonance of the Void God beneath his ribs. It felt less like sound and more like an earthquake vibrating through their marrow.
He turned his head. Those dead, black-hole eyes locked onto Madam Shen.
He moved. He didn't run; he simply erased the distance.
One moment he was twenty feet away in the grass. The next, his heavy hand was clamped shut around Madam Shen's throat, lifting her entirely off the jade terrace. Her Foundation Establishment Qi—the power that made her a god to mortals—felt like a flickering candle violently smothered by a hurricane.
"M-Mother!" Mei shrieked, ripping her spirit-sword from her spatial ring.
Dver didn't even look at her. He merely backhanded the empty air.
A crushing wave of concentrated Void-gravity slammed into Mei. The impact sounded like a heavy mallet striking a Soul-Jade tablet. Every bone in her arms and ribs shattered simultaneously, launching her backward to pin her against the stone wall of the inner compound like a broken, bleeding doll.
Dver slowly turned his attention back to the mother hanging from his grip. She was frantically clawing at his forearm, her eyes bulging, her perfectly powdered face turning a mottled purple.
"You said I had a sturdy frame," Dver murmured, his voice as smooth and cold as glass. "Let us see how much Abyssal weight your spine can endure before it unravels."
He didn't kill her quickly. That would be a waste of raw material.
With surgical, terrifying precision, Dver reached his free hand toward her mouth. He didn't use a flaying knife. He channeled the Void into his fingertips, reaching past her teeth. He literally unthreaded her tongue from the back of her throat, pulling it out along with the connecting vocal tissues, pulling it as smoothly as a gardener ripping a corrupted root from the soil.
She couldn't even scream. Her mouth was reduced to a hollow, silent cavern of welling gore.
Then, Dver went to work on the rest of the cracked cauldron.
Dawn.
The morning sun began to bleed over the jagged peaks of the Blood Lotus Mountain.
Deacon Shen walked through his front gates, humming a light tune, his head still pleasantly buzzing from a night of high-grade spirit-wine and Elder praise. He was ready to leash his new dog and head to the Spirit-Springs.
"Dver! Crawl out here, you useless—"
Shen froze.
The smell hit him first. It wasn't just the metallic tang of blood; it was the heavy, suffocating stench of a slaughterhouse organized by a madman, mixed with the bitter, sulfurous musk of incinerated meridians and rotting Qi."
Hanging from the carved eaves of the jade terrace were his two daughters. They weren't dead—not yet. They had been impaled through the shoulders with their own swords, pinning them to the wood. Their eyelids had been cleanly sliced off, forcing them to stare unblinkingly down at the center of the courtyard.
In the middle of the dead, ash-covered grass, a wooden post had been erected.
Tied to it was Madam Shen. Or what was left of her.
Her torso had been opened with the precision of a master butcher. Her internal organs hadn't simply been removed; they had been brutally, artistically rearranged. Her intestines were draped elegantly over her shoulders like the crimson silk shawl she loved to wear. Her lungs had been pulled outward and pinned to her collarbones like grotesque, blooming lotuses.
She had been hollowed out, her ribcage cracked open to turn her into a literal, grotesque human practice-dummy—a perfect, silent training dummy.
And in her cold, dead hands, perfectly folded in her lap, rested her own severed tongue.
Sitting on the steps of the jade terrace, calmly sipping mountain tea from an exquisite cup, was Dver.
He was wearing a spotless, white silk robe he had taken from the Deacon's personal wardrobe. There wasn't a single drop of blood on the pristine fabric.
He looked up as the Deacon's knees buckled, the powerful Cultivator vomiting pure bile onto his own expensive boots.
Dver's eyes were still dead. Still empty. But as he looked at the shattered, sobbing man before him, a tiny, chilling spark of profound amusement flickered in the blackness.
"Good morning, Master," Dver said smoothly, his voice echoing in the dead silence of the courtyard. "The floors are clean. Shall I prepare your carriage?"