The Daoist’s patience had run out.

  With a surge of anger, he released his Stellar Realm aura, letting its full force blanket the area.

  The pressure of Stellar Realm cultivator’s qi transformed the landscape itself. It looked as though a hurricane had run through the place – grass bent low, trees creaked under the strain, and the surface of the lake violently churned.

  The environment wasn’t the only thing to feel the effects.

  Liu Yue was unlucky to be standing directly beside Heiyu.

  A crushing weight pressed down onto her chest, making it difficult for her to breathe, each breath came out as a desperate struggle and her vision began to blur.

  “V-ven…” was all she managed to force out before her legs gave out.

  As her consciousness faded, she saw something impossible – the hooded figure stood perfectly stood, completely immune to pressure that could instantly kill a mortal.

  “Wha—” Daoist Heiyu began to speak, but his words died in his throat when the figure slowly turned to face him.

  Beneath the darkness of the hood, blood-red eyes stared him down.

  Yet, it wasn’t the eyes that ran his blood cold. No, it was the face that the red light illuminated.

  The skin was a mess of burns and scars, twisted into patterns that slithered under the light.

  But what truly made the Daoist’s knees go weak was the aura rolling off the figure.

  The only way he could describe it was standing before an abyss that had somehow caught fire. Wave after wave of pure malevolence struck him, each carrying echoes of screams that had never quite faded.

  This kind of power…, it was the type of power that even other demonic cultivators feared, power he had felt before from the highest elders of the Blood Moon Sect.

  Had they finally found him?

  “No,” Heiyu cried, stumbling backwards. “No, please, I never revealed any sect secrets, please!”

  The figure didn’t reply, or maybe the burning eyes that seemed to see right through him was its reply.

  “I’ll do anything!” Heiyu begged, dropping to his knees and slamming his forehead into the ground. “I’ll pay any price you want me to! Just please, don’t ki—"

  “You don’t know what it means to be a true demonic cultivator,” the figure interrupted with a cold whisper.

  Heiyu’s head snapped up at the insult that targeted his greatest insecurity, his pride at who he truly was.

  “Don’t know what it means to be a true demonic cultivator?” he repeated. “I was an elder of the Blood Moon Sect! I’ve performed countless rituals that would make even other demonic culti—”

  “You’re only playing with darkness while pretending to be the light,” the figure’s burning eyes flickered briefly to Liu Yue’s unconscious form.

  Then with a gesture that was jarringly gentle compared to its terrifying presence, it pulled out a small jade risk from its robes. The disk floated through the air before it rested above the girl’s still body, there it expanded into a translucent dome of protective energy.

  Bands of qi wrapped around the dome, carefully lifting it and carrying it back towards the Sun family compound. It was only when the protective barrier was out of sight did those evil eyes turn back to focus on Heiyu causing the fake Daoist to scramble backward.

  “You’re nothing but a common thief wearing stolen robes,” the figure continued. “Too weak to even own your true nature.”

  The words struck deeper than any immortal blade. How many years had he dedicated to carefully crafting out his false persona? What, only for this ‘senior’ of his to assume it was easy to transition between righteous elder at one moment to demonic cultivator at the next?

  Well, there was no way he was going to be able to escape, he might as well fight maybe, and who knows, he might even make the figure regret those words. After all, it was for moments like this that the string of talismans hung around his neck.

  They were his trump cards, artefacts stolen from the vault of the Blood Moon Sect itself. Each one contained enough power to level a city, and now he would the treasures of the elder’s own sect to kill him!

  “Stay back!” he commanded, channeling Stellar Realm qi into the first talisman.

  Bolts of crimson lightning shot out, and these bolts weren’t just electricity – they were condensed destruction energy that could vaporise anything that they touched.

  The hooded figure’s response was simple, it merely swept its hand up meeting the attack head on.

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  The collision between the crimson lightning qi and the stranger’s shadowy qi sent shockwaves across the lake’s surface and even blew Heiyu back a few steps.

  Yet that didn’t deter him, he immediately activated the second talisman.

  A wall of black ice erupted from the ground, creating an expanding zone of crystallised void energy that could freeze the very essence of things.

  The figure’s burning eyes flared, forming a wave of dark flame to meet the advancing ice.

  For a moment the two forces seemed to be equally matched, but then the steam hissed and glowed with unnatural colors, burning holes in the ground wherever it fell.

  “Third Gate: Endless Abyss!” Heiyu gritted his teeth, activating the third talisman.

  A black gate appeared before him, opening to release dozens of writhing tentacles of pure darkness. These tentacles were not simple. Each one could drain the lifeforce of anything they touched, and right now, they were racing forward, trying to encircle the figure they sought to devour.

  It was then the figure decided to demonstrate masterful footwork, it danced between the tentacles, and even when the shadows did manage to touch its cloak, they slid off like water from oil.

  But Heiyu noticed something strange. The figure’s movements weren’t quite as smooth as they appeared to be. There was a slight tremor between steps - a small moment of barely perceptible hesitation.

  A smirk appeared on Heiyu’s face. His opponent was powerful, yes, but not invincible. It seemed like he was going to survive an encounter with a Grand Elder of the Blood Moon Sect – a feat none in the Stellar Realm had ever achieved.

  Heiyu conveniently ignored how he was using his own abilities during the battle but powerful, stolen artefacts.

  Regardless of how he won, he would win, and it was now time to finish this battle.

  With that thought, he reached for his ultimate weapon – a small golden bell covered in bloody runes.

  “Soul Severance Chime!” he laughed, ringing it like a madman.

  Reality itself seemed to crack as the voices of a thousand tortured spirts cried out. The sound wave warped the fabric of space as it reached for the figure’s soul.

  For a moment, the figure faltered and its blood red eyes widened as its outline blurred. It was as though the bell’s resonance was pulling apart the very essence of its being. But then then those burning eyes narrowed, blazing brighter, and a terrible black appeared in its raised hand.

  The flame started off tiny, no larger than the flicker of a candlelight. But there was something fundamentally wrong with it – it seemed to bend light around itself, as though it was bruning something more essential than mere matter.

  With a casual flick of the figure’s wrist, the flame expanded explosively, devouring the black ice before withering away the shadowy tentacles.

  Heiyu refused to give up now, he poured more power into the bell, the soul-rending sound rose to a fever pitch. But the black flame simply ate the sound itself, leaving behind a silence that was deeper than the absence of noise.

  “No, no, no!” Heiyu turned, trying to run, yet his legs, they just wouldn’t respond.

  The black flame wrapped around him, but what it was burning wasn’t his flesh, it was consuming his spiritual energy, his cultivation base, his inner world, everything he had spent thousands of years building!

  “P-please,” he whispered one final time, but even those words were consumed by the hungry darkness.

  The last thing he ever saw was those burning red eyes looking down at him with what seemed to be pity, or was it disgust?

  Heiyu would never know.

  Daoist Heiyu – thief, murderer, and pretender – was no more.

  In the aftermath of the battle, the hooded figure stood motionless. But that peace only lasted a moment before it began swaying dangerously to one side like a tree in a storm. A hand shot out to steady itself against empty air before slowing, painfully straightening back to its full height.

  It rose into the air, and like a wounded bird struggling to stay aloft, it flew through the night sky.

  Not far from the Wei family compound, the figure’s strength finally gave out. Unlike the graceful landing that was typical of cultivators, it plummeted into a small clearing, crashing hard and tumbling across the ground before finally coming to rest in a heap of tangled robes.

  For a few minutes, it simply lay there, perfectly sill except for the ragged rise and fall of its chest. When it finally did try to push itself up, its arms trembled violently before giving way, it wasn’t even strong enough to support its own weight.

  A wet hacking cough shook its frame, splattering the ground beneath its hidden face with dark sticky liquid.

  “My love…” a pained voice broke the silence of the clearing.

  A middle-aged woman steeped out from behind a nearby tree with tears in her eyes - it was Wei Ting.

  She rushed forward, dropping to her knees beside the fallen figure. And with gentle hands, she helped it into a sitting position, supporting most of its weight against her shoulder.

  “Dear, what happened?” she asked softly.

  “Had to…take out…the trash,” the figure rasped. Another cough wracked its frame, more blood staining the ground. “He didn't understand... the true demonic dao isn't about indulging base desires or wearing masks of righteousness. It's about... accepting the fundamental darkness of existence... understanding that creation requires destruction... that true power comes from embracing the void itself..." A shuddering breath. "But he was just a thief... playing at being both light and dark... understanding neither..."

  “You’re not a part of that world anymore,” Wei Ting whispered.

  “No,” the figure agreed, its burning red eyes dimming slightly. “I let go of that path…for you…for my boys…for our family.”

  With a sad smile, Wei Ting’s trembled, reaching out for the scarred face hidden beneath the hood. The figure turned away sharply, but it couldn’t hide its twisted flesh. “This power is killing you,” her voice breaking as she kissed his cheek. “Your body cant handle that kind of power anymore, why would you use it again?”

  “Better me than our family,” the figure growled, though the effect was somewhat ruined by another violent cough. “The Sun family’s pet cultivator won’t be threatening anyone ever again.”

  With fingers that looked more like claws, the figure reached beneath its robes and pulled out a white pendant that seemed to be made out of pure moonlight, the silver glow illuminated the clearing around them.

  The figure’s body turned rigid as streams of dark energy were dragged out from its flesh and swallowed by the pendant.

  The transformation that followed was both beautiful and terrible to witness.

  Like clay being reshaped by invisible hands, twisted scar tissue began to smooth out and heal while the features rearranged themselves. The demonic red eyes dimmed and changed into a mesmerizing emerald green color.

  Within moments, where the horror had been sitting, now Wei Ye sat – but this wasn’t the composed patriarch who commanded respect with just his presence.

  No.

  This Wei Ye was stickly-looking, pale faced with dark circles beneath his eyes – a man on the brink of death.

  “The boy,” he managed to force out through bloodless lips, ”healing…”

  Those few words seemed to sap the last of his strength, his eyes rolled back, and he collapsed forward, his eight suddenly too much for his wife to support.

  Wei Ting managed to break his fall somewhat, but he still hit the ground hard, the white pendant falling from his limp fingers to land in the blood-spattered grass.

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