The snow was deep, a pristine, suffocating blanket that swallowed sound and slowed the world to a crawl. Two rough-looking men from the caravan trudged ahead, their breath puffing out in white clouds that were instantly snatched away by the biting wind. They led Jiang Dao through the drifts, their faces masked by layers of cloth and an eagerness to be done with this task.
Half a mile out, the endless white broke. A convoy of dozens huddled together against the elements—ox carts groaning under the weight of piled goods, flanked by nervous guards whose hands never strayed far from their hilts. Amidst the rough-hewn transport, several black-canopied carriages stood out, their windows sealed tight against the cold and prying eyes, hinting at passengers of significant pedigree.
The man in charge, Zhuge Dan, was a short, stout figure wrapped in so many furs he looked more like a bear than a merchant. He stood by the lead cart, blowing into his cupped hands, his eyes darting anxiously across the horizon. When he saw his scouts, Guo Feng and Pan Long, return with a stranger in tow, his posture stiffened.
"Guo Feng! Pan Long!" Zhuge Dan's voice cracked like a whip in the frigid air. "What in the hells are you doing bringing a stray here?"
The two scouts didn't cower. Instead, they grinned, practically dragging Jiang Dao forward. Guo Feng scurried up to the merchant, leaning in to whisper, his eyes wide with a mixture of fear and adrenaline.
"You have to hear this," Guo Feng hissed, glancing back at Jiang Dao as if checking to see if the man was still real. "We saw him move. A thousand meters in the blink of an eye. He's not just a wanderer, boss. He's a monster."
Zhuge Dan recoiled, his face draining of color. A thousand meters in a heartbeat?
Panic flared in his chest. In this wretched world, things that moved that fast were rarely human. Guo Feng and Pan Long were fools; they might have just led a demon straight to the slaughterhouse. Zhuge Dan didn't hesitate. He spun on his heel and scurried toward the black carriages at the rear of the formation.
He stopped before the darkest one, bowing low enough that his nose nearly brushed the snow.
"Masters," he quavered. "Another has arrived. He seeks passage. I… I cannot tell if he is truly a man. If he harbors malice, I beg you to intervene."
Inside the carriage, the air was warm, heated by a small, intricate stove. Two elderly men sat opposite each other. One wore a simple green robe, the other a black padded jacket. They looked frail, shrunken by time, yet their eyes held a terrifying clarity. They had been discussing matters of the spirit when the merchant's voice intruded.
The elder in green lifted the heavy curtain with a delicate finger. He looked out across the snow, locking eyes with Jiang Dao, who was approaching with a casual, almost predatory grace.
The old man froze. A ripple of genuine shock crossed his weathered face.
"What is it?" his companion in black asked, leaning forward. He peered out, and his expression mirrored the first.
"The vitality..." the man in black whispered. "It's deafening."
"I have never seen a human with such a roaring fire of life force," the green-robed elder murmured. "It is like staring into a furnace."
Zhuge Dan, shivering outside, pressed for an answer. "Masters… is it a monster?"
The green-robed elder dropped the curtain, his voice calm but heavy with implication. "Rest easy, Zhuge. He is human. Neither monster nor Spirit Remover could possess such pure, scorching Yang energy. A monster would burn to ash from the inside out."
Zhuge Dan let out a breath he didn't know he was holding. Human. That was all that mattered.
The White Spirit Prefecture had been a slaughterhouse lately. Bodies found torn apart, spirits vanishing, the nights growing longer and colder. He had begun to see threats in every shadow. But a human who could move like the wind? That was a shield he could use.
"May I… may I invite him to stay?"
"If you wish," the voice from the carriage replied.
Armed with their permission, Zhuge Dan's fear evaporated, replaced by the oily charm of a seasoned merchant. He hurried back to Jiang Dao, bowing with practiced fluidity.
"I am Zhuge Dan of the Wanfu Merchant Association," he beamed. "And whom do I have the honor of addressing?"
"Jiang Liu," Jiang Dao replied, using a pseudonym that rolled easily off his tongue. He offered a perfunctory salute.
"Hero Jiang," Zhuge Dan said, upgrading the title immediately. "Your strength is evident. We would be honored to have you, though I fear our accommodations are humble. The carriages are cramped."
"I require only a space to rest my legs," Jiang Dao said, his voice level. "I am in no position to make demands."
As he followed the merchant toward the rear, Jiang Dao's gaze drifted to the black carriage. He felt a prickle on his skin—a resonance. Spirit Removers? He unconsciously brushed his hand over his chest, feeling the outline of the Purple God Flower hidden beneath his tunic.
He was given a spot in the last carriage. It was stuffed with crates of dry goods and smelled of spices and burlap, but there was enough room to sit. Zhuge Dan, eager to please, ordered incense lit and wine served before bowing out.
The wheels groaned, and the caravan lurched forward, the rhythmic thump-thump of the journey resuming.
Alone in the dim light of the carriage, Jiang Dao finally let his guard down. He exhaled, and the breath didn't mist—it was hot, almost scorching.
His body was a cage containing a raging star. The drop of blood he had consumed earlier had forced a breakthrough in his physical cultivation, but the cost was a terrifying surplus of Yang energy. He felt as though he were cooking from the inside out. His veins pulsed with liquid fire. It was the reason he had sought a ride; running at full speed might trigger a combustion he couldn't control.
I need balance, he thought, closing his eyes.
He pulled up his internal interface, the spectral text hovering in his mind's eye. He poured his focus into the Health Preserving Art, the only thing keeping the fire at bay. Light flashed in his vision as he pushed the skill forward, year by simulated year.
Finally, the text shifted.
[Health Preserving Art: 2,000 Years - Pinnacle Reached]
Jiang Dao frowned, a bead of sweat sizzling as it rolled down his neck. Maxed out?
The technique had hit its ceiling, yet the fire in his blood still roared. The art harmonized the energies, yes, but his Yang was simply too overwhelming. It was like trying to put out a forest fire with a garden hose.
"I cannot delay this any longer," he whispered to the dark carriage. "Once I reach the city, I must find a Yin-attribute manual. If I don't, I'm going to burn to death."
Seven days passed in a blur of white snow and biting wind.
The journey through the White Spirit Prefecture had been surprisingly uneventful, a calm that Jiang Dao found unsettling. But just as the border of the prefecture appeared on the horizon, the world shifted.
It didn't happen with a sound, but with a feeling. A sudden, sickening drop in pressure.
Ahead of them, the air simply died. A wave of oppressive Yin energy—cold, necrotic, and heavy—erupted from the landscape. It was high noon, yet the sky turned a bruised purple, then a slate grey, and finally a suffocating black. The sun didn't set; it was strangled.
Inside the carriage, Jiang Dao's eyes snapped open. The fire in his blood flared in response to the sudden chill.
Up ahead, the two elders burst from their carriage, their faces masks of horror.
"Stop! Stop the carts!"
Chaos erupted. Horses screamed—a high, terrified sound that grated on the nerves. The guards drew weapons against an enemy they couldn't see. Zhuge Dan was running in circles, hyperventilating.
"Masters!" he shrieked, grabbing the green-robed elder's sleeve. "What is this? Are they bandits? Demons?"
The old men ignored him, staring into the encroaching darkness. The grey fog wasn't just moving; it was consuming the world, erasing trees, rocks, and light.
"Retreat!" the black-jacketed elder screamed, his voice cracking. "It's a Dead Domain! It's spreading!"
A Dead Domain.
The words hit the crowd like a physical blow. In the Great Yu Celestial Dynasty, children were raised on stories of these places—pockets of reality where the laws of life were suspended, where the dead walked, and the living were fuel.
"Turn around! Move, damn you!"
The convoy disintegrated into panic. Men whipped their horses, but the beasts were paralyzed. The animals stood trembling, legs locked, staring into the abyss with rolling, terrified eyes.
"The cargo!" Zhuge Dan wailed, seeing his fortune about to be swallowed. "Take the gold cart! Leave the grain! Just take the gold!"
Guards scrambled to push the heavy treasure cart, shouting and heaving, but in their panic, they shoved it off the beaten track. The heavy iron-rimmed wheel smashed through a patch of ice and sank deep into a frozen mud pit. It wouldn't budge.
The grey wall of death was closing in.
"Forget it! Run!" the black-jacketed elder commanded, abandoning his dignity as he scrambled away.
Zhuge Dan looked at his life's work stuck in the mud, let out a howl of pure misery, and then turned to flee.
Then, the ground shook.
BOOM.
A figure exploded from the rear carriage. Jiang Dao landed in the snow, steam rising from his shoulders. He didn't run away. He ran toward the stuck cart.
He grabbed the rim of the sunken wheel. His muscles swelled, tearing through the fabric of his tunic. With a roar that drowned out the wind, he didn't just lift the wheel—he ripped the entire carriage, horse and all, out of the earth.
He didn't stop. He hoisted the carriage as if it were made of balsa wood, his body glowing with a terrifying, furnace-like heat that melted the snow around his feet.
As he sprinted past the fleeing Zhuge Dan, Jiang Dao reached out with a hand the size of a shovel, grabbed the merchant by the collar, and tossed him into the moving carriage like a sack of potatoes.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
Jiang Dao was a locomotive of flesh and fire. He plowed through the snow, scooping up straggling guards and tossing them into the cart as he ran.
Behind him, the darkness was howling.
It wasn't the wind. It was a chorus of whispers—millions of them. It sounded like prayers, like curses, like the murmuring of the insane.
Jiang Dao risked a glance back, and his blood ran cold.
Looming in the grey mist was a shadow. It was titanic, at least a hundred feet tall, wading through the Dead Domain like a man wading through a pond.
As the fog thinned slightly, the entity became visible. It wore tattered, ancient robes of water-green, stained with eons of dried blood. A golden Buddhist crown sat askew on its head. In one hand, it held a broken umbrella; in the other, the crushed carcass of a silver rat.
Its face was a mask of tragedy—eyes wide and weeping black ichor, mouth open in a scream that made no sound.
Jiang Dao's mind reeled. The Heavenly King of the North?
It looked like the deity from the myths of his previous life, Dritarastra, the guardian of the world. But this… this was a corpse. A rotting, hateful mockery of a god, trapped in the grey, struggling against invisible chains.
The giant thrashed, silently roaring at the sky, its resentment washing over them like a tidal wave.
Jiang Dao gritted his teeth, activating the Extreme Yang Tyrant Body. He grew larger, his skin turning the color of bronze, the heat radiating from him scorching the air. He ran faster than he ever had, dragging the cart, the people, and his own sanity away from the edge of the abyss.
Finally, the grey tide slowed.
The Dead Domain had reached its limit. The mist swirled and stopped, forming a perfect, unnatural wall. Inside, the giant deity stared out at them with eyes full of ancient hate before slowly dissolving into the fog, crumbling like a sandcastle in the tide.
Jiang Dao dropped the carriage. He stood in the snow, steam billowing from his body in thick clouds, his chest heaving. Slowly, his muscles compressed, his size returning to normal, though the heat lingering in his eyes was still terrifying.
Silence returned to the snowfield.
"Cough... cough..."
Zhuge Dan crawled out from a pile of boxes, his face pale as death. He looked at Jiang Dao not with gratitude, but with absolute terror.
He had seen the man transform. He had seen a human pull a ton of wood and iron through deep snow faster than a galloping horse.
Nearby, the two Spirit Removers lay in the snow, coughing up black blood. The Yin energy had touched them, corrupting their internal organs.
Jiang Dao walked over to them. The snow hissed where his boots touched it.
"Masters," Jiang Dao said, his voice raspy. "That thing… inside the mist. What was it?"
The green-robed elder wiped blood from his chin, staring at the grey wall in the distance. "That," he wheezed, "was a Death God."
"A Death God?" Jiang Dao frowned. "It looked like a deity. A guardian."
"It was," the elder said, a bitter smile twisting his lips. "Long ago."
"Why are they called Death Gods?"
"Because where they walk, life ends," the elder rasped. "The ancient texts say they are gods abandoned by sentient beings. They were forgotten, starved of prayer, and cast aside. Now, they are trapped in the Dead Domains, immortal and insane, fueled only by hatred for the world that discarded them."
Abandoned gods.
The concept chilled Jiang Dao more than the snow ever could. He had thought this world was merely dangerous, filled with ghosts and monsters. But this? This was a world where divinity had rotted.
"Why is it here?" Jiang Dao asked.
"Who knows?" the elder sighed, looking up at the bleak sky. "The underworld is closed. The City Gods are gone. We are living in the twilight of humanity, young friend. Sentient beings are just ants now, scurrying beneath the boots of things we can no longer understand."
Ants.
Jiang Dao hated that word.
He looked at the grey wall of the Dead Domain, feeling the heat in his chest pulse—not painfully this time, but defiantly.
He turned to the shivering merchant. "Zhuge Dan. My clothes are ruined. Do you have a coat?"
"Yes! Yes, at once!" Zhuge Dan scrambled into the wreckage of his cart, emerging with a fine fox-fur coat. He offered it with trembling hands.
Jiang Dao draped it over his shoulders, tucking the purple flower into the lining.
"Thank you," Jiang Dao said. "If we meet again, dinner is on me."
"I wouldn't dare," Zhuge Dan squeaked.
Jiang Dao turned his back on them, facing the Dead Domain once more. The wind howled, but the fire inside him burned hotter.
A world where gods rot, and humans are cattle.
He clenched his fist, the knuckles cracking. If this were the truth of the world, then he wouldn't just survive in it. He would shatter it, piece by piece, until he found something worth saving.