Later that day, the mountains changed.
The mist that had veiled the lower slopes all morning had burned away, leaving the Great Zhou range carved cleanly against a pale blue sky. The waterfall where Zhu Yan had fallen was a distant smear of white now, its thunder reduced to a dull murmur that lived only in the bones of the mountain and the memory of those who had watched him lose.
Ren walked higher.
He did not hurry.
His steps were steady, hands tucked loosely into his sleeves, the plain sword at his waist nothing but a strip of cheap iron in a world that judged worth by glitter and rank. To the disciples he passed on narrow paths—boys and girls in Seven Profound Martial House uniforms, sweating as they carried medicine baskets or stumbled through basic stances—he was just another wandering youth.
His clothes were ordinary. His aura was… vague. Not weak, not strong, just there, as unremarkable as a stone by the roadside.
Inside, his Dao ran like a buried river.
The first three stages of the Heretical God Force—Strength, Flesh, Viscera—were already fused into his bones and blood. Muscles and tendons had been tempered to the point that a casual step could crack stone if he allowed it. Skin that looked pale and human was a living shield. Organs beat with furnace-like rhythm, Burning Heat coiled around them in obedient threads, ready to flare with a thought.
To this lower realm, he looked like a youth walking up a mountain.
To himself, he was a cultivator wandering through someone else's dream.
He let the world flow past him.
The distant hum of the Seven Profound Martial House's protective formations; the faint traces of beasts that had come close to human territory and wisely turned away; the messy, unfocused true essence of body transformation disciples trying to "leap" in their meridians without understanding how their own bodies worked. He tasted all of it in passing and kept walking.
He wasn't looking for prey.
He was looking for someone closer to this sky's current peak.
A faint scent brushed his senses.
Not air. Not stone. Not real blood.
Iron and ash.
Ren stopped.
He lifted his head and let his perception slide sideways—not spreading outward like a net, but settling, like a stone sinking to the bottom of a lake.
The "scent" deepened.
It wasn't fresh killing intent. No one had died here today, or even yesterday. This was older—engraved into the stone itself, burned in by countless thrusts, by a will that had stabbed the air again and again with the belief that every strike should be able to take a life.
The taste of it rose around him, thin but sharp.
Ashura.
Ren's lips curved.
"Found you," he murmured.
He followed it.
...
The path narrowed into a rocky ledge where the mountain dropped away on one side like the edge of a world. Then it widened again, spilling out onto a high platform carved directly into the cliff face. No guardrails. No formations. Just stone, wind, and sky.
A man stood at the edge of that sky.
He was tall and lean, his robes tied close to his body for ease of movement. A long spear rested in his hands, the dark shaft worn smooth where fingers had gripped it thousands of times.
The spearpoint cut the air in steady arcs.
No flourish. No unnecessary spin. Just simple, direct thrusts that drove forward, stopped, drew back, repeated.
Each thrust was honest.
The true essence running along that spear was not rich by higher-realm standards, but it was clean. It did not leak from the shaft in gaudy bursts; it hugged the weapon, condensed as tightly as this world's laws allowed. Every time the tip shot forward, the killing intent that followed behind it felt like a line drawn across a battlefield—either you lived beyond that line, or you didn't.
A faint blood-colored halo clung to the spear.
Not real blood. Not true origin energy. It was the shadow of countless imagined deaths—of a young man who had never stood atop seas of corpses, but had pictured it so many times the idea had begun to leave marks on reality.
Ling Sen.
Heavenly Abode disciple of the Seven Profound Martial House. Peak of the fifth stage of Body Transformation—Bone Forging. Ranked first on the Ranking Stone. The only one in the Martial House's younger generation to have comprehended a martial intent: Ashura.
Ren watched him finish a sequence.
He studied the straight back, the steady breath, the tiny shifts in stance that told him this wasn't a boy trying to show off—this was a man who had spent years carving himself down to the core.
Interesting.
With his senses open, Ren could feel the rough outlines of the auras within Seven Profound Martial House, the way some disciples gravitated toward heavy swords to compensate for flimsy foundations. Ling Sen's aura wasn't like that. Spear and man were aligned; if someone had put a heavy sword in those hands, it would have been a waste.
The last thrust halted an inch before the cliff's edge.
Wind screamed past the spearpoint, tearing downward into the abyss.
Ling Sen relaxed his stance and let the butt of the spear tap lightly against the stone.
He didn't turn around.
"Who are you?" he asked, voice calm.
Ren chuckled softly.
"You noticed me faster than your juniors down below," he said, stepping off the path and onto the platform. His boots rang against stone with a quiet, clear sound. "That's good."
Ling Sen turned.
Up close, his features weren't especially handsome. His cheekbones were a bit too sharp, his mouth set in a line that rarely smiled. But his eyes were steady and deep, like a blade that had been ground again and again without ever being drawn for show.
There was no arrogance in his gaze.
Only sharpness.
"I felt a gaze from behind," Ling Sen said. "It weighed my spear."
His eyes dropped, just for a breath, to the cheap sword at Ren's waist.
They rose again, lingering on the relaxed curve of Ren's shoulders, the way his weight sank into the mountain. His true sense brushed against Ren's qi and… slid off, like a pebble thrown into a well with no echo.
"You are not from the Seven Profound Martial House," Ling Sen said.
"Disappointed?" Ren asked, smiling.
"Not necessarily."
Ling Sen's fingers shifted slightly on the spear shaft.
"I have seen many guests," he went on. "Inscription masters. Envoys from other sects. Royal guards. They do not smell like… this."
He didn't explain what "this" was.
He didn't have to.
Ren's smile widened.
"You're looking for a fight," he said.
"There are few things I am looking for," Ling Sen answered, as if reciting something he'd already written in his heart. "A higher realm. A more complete Ashura. And opponents who can force me closer to both."
The spear lifted half an inch.
"When someone like you appears in front of me," Ling Sen finished, "I do not like to let them leave."
"You make it sound like I'm prey," Ren said, amused.
Ling Sen watched him for a heartbeat.
Then the corner of his mouth moved, just barely.
"On this platform," he said, raising his spear, "everyone is prey."
He didn't ask Ren's cultivation.
He didn't ask his origin.
He simply chose to fight.
Good, Ren thought, warmth curling through his chest. Simple men are easier to talk to—with steel.
He stepped onto the center of the platform.
The wind up here was sharper, honest. Sky Fortune City was a distant smudge of roofs and walls below, Seven Profound Martial House's halls a cluster of order pressed against the wildness of the Great Zhou Mountains.
"Ren," he said. "Just Ren."
He rolled his shoulders, letting his cloak of neutral chaos draw tighter around his core, muting the weight of his true cultivation until he sat comfortably inside the skin of a mere body transformation genius.
"I heard there was a man in Seven Profound Martial House who'd talked with the Ashura of the battlefield," he continued. "I got curious."
Ling Sen's eyes sharpened.
Curiosity could get a man killed in this world. Coming up here to test him without background, without guarantees… it was either arrogance, madness, or something beyond those two.
"Curiosity can kill," Ling Sen said quietly.
Ren's hand slipped to his sword hilt.
"Then show me what yours looks like," he replied, tone light. "I've walked through a few different hells. I want to see how your Ashura compares."
...
They didn't waste time on ceremony.
Ling Sen moved first.
The spear thrust toward Ren's throat, straight and fast. No warning shout, no opening feint. It was the kind of attack that assumed death if it landed—and had been thrown a thousand times inside his mind before it ever touched air.
True essence condensed along the spear like a slender river, no splash, no leakage.
Ren's sword cleared its sheath with a soft whisper.
Steel rang.
He shifted his wrist and let the spearpoint slide past his neck by half an inch. The wind from the thrust brushed his skin like a cold fingertip.
His body didn't sway.
Bones and muscles, tempered by the Heretical God Force's first three stages, absorbed the force easily. The Burning Heat nestled around his organs didn't flare; it simply gave his tendons that extra thread of responsiveness that let him do exactly enough—no more.
Ling Sen's eyes narrowed.
Two-tenths of his full strength, guided by Bone Forging–level control, poured into that first thrust. Enough to punch through three layers of fine iron armor and crack stone beneath. Enough to send most Viscera Training disciples coughing blood across the platform.
Ren had brushed it aside with a cheap sword as if greeting an acquaintance.
"Again," Ren said.
Ling Sen obliged.
Spearlight flashed.
He stepped forward, footwork precise, waist and shoulders driving the weapon in smooth, interlocking rhythms. Spear shadows multiplied—throat, heart, lower abdomen, knees. His lungs worked like bellows, breath and true essence unified, every motion squeezing the reins of his meridians to wring out a little more power.
A Heavenly Abode genius of Seven Profound Martial House, at peak Bone Forging, fighting at the absolute limit of what this realm could express.
Ren met him with that same relaxed blade.
He kept his true essence compressed deep within his meridians, letting only what a Viscera Training martial artist "should" have leak to the surface. Heretical God Force flowed quietly through his body, turning flesh into coiled springs. Burning Heat threaded through his muscles, giving his simple swings a solidity no one in this kingdom's body transformation realm could match.
His sword traced short, clean lines.
A twist of the wrist to knock a thrust off angle. A half-step to let a sweep whistle past his ribs. A tiny shift in center of gravity to steal the force from a downward smash and bleed it into the stone.
Steel clashed again and again.
Sparks scattered like brief, dying stars between them.
From the rocky slope below, a pair of outer court disciples on herb-collecting duty paused, looking up. To them, the platform was only a distant line on the cliff face, but the echo of steel carried down with the wind, sharp and crisp.
Ling Sen's expression stayed calm, but pressure coiled in his chest.
This "Viscera Training" opponent never stepped back. Never met him head-on, either. Every time he added a little more strength, a little more speed, Ren's blade was already there, in exactly the wrong place for him and exactly the right place for itself, diffusing the thrust without giving ground.
He's learning, Ling Sen realized.
That was the sensation—that with every clash, the man in front of him wasn't simply blocking. He was reading. Tracing the path of each spear thrust, memorizing it, folding it into some invisible scroll in his heart.
Like throwing stones into a lake.
And watching someone on the shore calmly count every ripple.
Ren's own blood burned pleasantly.
Ling Sen's spearwork was utterly different from Bai Jingyun's elegant swordplay. No decorative flourishes. No feints for their own sake. Even his "fake" moves contained killing power. Each thrust carried a straight line of will from dantian to spearpoint.
He's honest, Ren thought. I like that.
His Spirit Sense pulsed, tracing every micro-movement—how Ling Sen's shoulder dipped by a fraction before one particular thrust, how his grip shifted for sweeps, how his left foot angled in for lunges that preferred the heart.
The pattern of the spearwork unfolded layer by layer, like a diagram made of motion.
The clash intensified.
Ling Sen poured more true essence into his spear.
Spearlight thickened, shadows stacking atop shadows until it seemed like a storm of silver needles was trying to nail Ren to the stone. The air trembled with each impact; shallow cracks began to spiderweb across the platform, dust rising in tiny puffs under their feet.
Ren let the Heretical God Force stir a little deeper.
Burning Heat coiled tighter around heart and lungs, feeding his muscles with heat that should have scalded them but instead made them softer, more elastic. His movements grew even smaller—wrist-length cuts, fingertip-level adjustments. Each block required just enough force, no more.
He still hadn't been touched.
Ling Sen's shoulder joints began to ache.
His palms stung where spear shaft met sword. The fine bones in his forearms hummed with the constant shock of impact.
He broke away with a single long step, spearpoint lowering—but only to draw it back.
"Your body…" Ling Sen said slowly, chest rising and falling a little harder now. "You are not Viscera Training."
Ren tilted his head, amused.
"On this road," he said, "labels only slow you down."
Ling Sen's jaw clenched.
"Very well," he replied. "Then I will stop thinking about them."
He exhaled.
The air changed.
A faint blood-colored light seeped from Ling Sen's pores.
Not true essence. Not physical qi.
Intent.
Killing intent, condensed to the point it could be mistaken for energy. The echo of countless battles he had imagined, of wars he had never seen but replayed in his mind until they took on weight.
It wrapped around him like a cloak, fluttering in a wind only he could feel.
Ashura Martial Intent.
The world tilted.
The stone platform sank into another sky.
The clear blue overhead dimmed into a washed-out grey, like a morning after too many deaths. The wind carried phantom cries—men, beasts, steel scraping on steel. The faint smell of blood and burnt iron laced the air.
The edge of the cliff no longer fell into a simple abyss.
For a breath, it opened onto a churn of corpses and broken weapons, piled high enough to eclipse horizons.
The Ashura Battlefield.
Ling Sen stood at its center.
His spear rose.
Every motion now dragged threads of that bloody light from the air, weaving them into a domain. Within that domain, his speed ticked higher; his instincts sharpened. The tiniest twitch in Ren's fingers, the smallest shift in his feet, was caught and fed into that instinct—converted instantly into attack lines.
He vanished.
No—he simply moved so fast that his afterimages blurred into each other.
Spearlight stabbed for Ren's heart. At the same time, another shadow swept in for his throat. A third slammed down as if to split his skull. Each was real enough to kill; each also carried a layer of pressure from the Ashura domain itself.
Ren laughed.
The sound cut clean through the pressure, clean through the phantom cries, clear as a bell.
His Dao Heart did not "resist" the killing intent.
It accepted it, acknowledged it, and let it pass—like waves breaking against a cliff that had existed before this sea and would exist long after it dried.
He stepped in.
Heretical God Force roared through his body—not wildly, but with focus. Strength, Flesh, Viscera—three layers of tempered flesh flexed in unison. Burning Heat surged along his muscles in razor-thin lines, compressing strength until it became something that could explode out at a thought.
His sword moved in tiny, precise arcs.
He drew a small circle, catching one spear shadow and tilting it so it shaved past his chest instead of piercing his heart. His left foot slid half a step, letting another thrust skim across his ribs like a cold brush instead of cracking them. He dipped his head, feeling the overhead smash peel the air past his hair, the wind from it tugging at a few errant strands.
The spear never touched him.
But every time it missed, he felt another piece of its rhythm lock into place in his understanding.
Like listening to a song and beginning to hear the rhythm behind the melody, the drum buried under the flute.
Ling Sen's Ashura domain pressed closer.
The battlefield illusions thickened—corpses jostling peaceably at the edge of Ren's vision, smoke crawling along the ground, blood collecting in the cracks of the stone.
For a heartbeat, Ren's vision blurred.
Then it cleared.
Ah.
So that's your hell.
He did not push the battlefield away.
He let it in.
Just enough.
The Immortal Soul Bone hummed.
The Ashura domain appeared to his inner sight as a spiraling pattern of will and killing intent, a whirlpool carved into the air by countless spear thrusts, each one adding a tiny groove to the flow.
Ren's Dao rose to meet it.
Not as slaughter.
But as something that contained slaughter—used it, acknowledged it, and then walked past it.
The road where killing was not the destination, only a toll gate.
Heat flared in his dantian.
Not just from Heretical God Force.
The Burning Heat law he had grasped quivered, resonating with the honest destruction pulsing in Ling Sen's every move. Fire wasn't only warmth. It wasn't only pain.
Pushed far enough, fire erased form.
It burned not just to cook or harden, but to reduce everything to nothing—heat and ash.
Flame, he realized, is another kind of Ashura.
The thought clicked into place.
Something inside him shifted.
...
Crack.
It wasn't bone.
It was potential.
Ren's flesh tightened, then loosened, then tightened again in a new pattern. Muscle fibers reoriented, slipping into more efficient paths. Tendons re-routed like river channels cut deeper into better soil. Tiny restrictions in fascia, unnoticed until now, loosened as if an invisible hand had smoothed them out.
Heretical God Force sank into those newly opened paths with greedy enthusiasm, binding itself more intimately to his flesh.
Fourth stage of Body Transformation—Altering Muscle.
His body's structure changed.
Not the rough, brute enhancement of the first three stages, but a refinement. Strength flowed from foot to leg to waist to shoulders to wrist with less loss—like water traveling through a widened canal instead of spilling into rice fields along the way.
Ren exhaled.
His breath came out a little hotter than before, steaming faintly in the Ashura battlefield's chill.
"There it is," he murmured.
He hadn't planned to break through here.
But this pressure was good. Honest. Clean.
His eyes glittered.
"Thanks, man," he said softly.
Ling Sen didn't catch the words, but his instincts screamed.
Danger.
His Ashura domain howled in concert, blood-colored light flaring, battlefield illusions tightening.
He thrust.
All at once, without holding anything back.
This was his strongest attack.
The Ashura Killing Spear.
All his will, all his intent, all the long nights he'd stood on this platform and stabbed the sky until his fingers bled, compressed into a single line of force. The battlefield behind him surged; corpses seemed to rise, not as individuals, but as a wave, pushing the spearpoint forward.
Ren stepped into it.
And this time, he didn't just defend.
His own will stretched outward.
He let the Ashura domain wash over him, seep into his skin. He did not resist; he received it, then wrapped it in his own Dao.
In his inner vision, the battlefield changed.
The corpses did not vanish.
They stood.
They turned their faces toward him.
The grey sky overhead split, revealing a higher, cleaner blue beyond it. The blood-soaked earth cracked, and from the fissures, fire rose—not mad, devouring everything, but burning away what had to go and leaving space for new things to grow.
The killing intent gathered.
Then obeyed.
A faint crimson light flickered around Ren's shoulders.
It was darker than Ling Sen's, steadier—less smoke, more steel. An Ashura that knew more kinds of hell than this world could show, and had come out the other side with its eyes clear.
His own Ashura Martial Intent.
Born in an instant, rooted in a Dao that had walked through higher worlds.
Their domains collided.
To Ling Sen, it felt as if an endless number of invisible blades sliced through his martial intent, carving away the frayed edges, exposing raw core. His Ashura battlefield trembled; the phantom cries shuddered into silence, replaced by a weight that towered over him.
This… this is…!
Ren's sword moved.
No flashy sword aura. No named technique.
He simply traced the exact path Ling Sen's spear had just taken—but smoother, more natural, with a subtle twist at the end that pulled the surrounding killing intent into its wake instead of opposing it.
Steel met steel.
Ling Sen's spear jerked.
The force along its shaft turned back on itself. His fingers, already numb from the prolonged clash, couldn't hold. The spear ripped from his hands, spinning into the air.
In the same instant, Ren's left hand rose.
Two fingers extended, straight as a spearpoint.
They tapped lightly against Ling Sen's chest.
A thread of Ashura killing intent shot into Ling Sen's meridians, racing toward his heart like cold iron.
His heart stuttered.
For a tiny sliver of time, he stood on the divide between life and death, body poised to simply… stop.
Then a cool, gentle power followed, chasing the killing intent. It wrapped around that wild strand, compressed it, refined it, squeezing out the useless frenzy and leaving behind a thin, controlled core.
That refined strand sank into Ling Sen's dantian instead of detonating.
Ling Sen gasped and dropped to one knee.
His Ashura domain shattered. The battlefield dissolved. Corpses and smoke vanished. The sky cleared to reveal the real blue of Sky Spill Continent.
The spear clattered to the stone and slid to the edge of the platform, ringing once before coming to rest.
Ren inhaled and exhaled.
The faint crimson halo around him dimmed and tucked itself away into the corner of his comprehension, like a new blade set gently in its sheath.
His Burning Heat law, which had been simmering near the edge of something for days, shifted also. In the moment of collision, he had seen not just how fire burned, but how it annihilated—how, at its extremes, it could reduce anything to nothing.
The second level of Fire Laws—Annihilation—did not fall into his hand. That would have been too cheap, even for him.
But the threshold moved closer.
Like heat shimmer just above stone, close enough to touch if he leaned.
Inside the Magic Cube tucked away in his Inner Void, Mo Eversnow's soul consciousness trembled.
…He used a lower-realm martial intent as a ladder to step toward Fire's second boundary?
Even among Divine Realm heaven's chosen, comprehension at this speed was monstrous.
Her gaze on him grew colder, sharper—not with rejection, but with the focused attention a swordsmith gave a piece of divine iron: something rare enough to be worth the trouble of forging properly.
...
Ling Sen struggled back to his feet.
The world wavered at the edges of his vision.
His meridians burned. His muscles felt as if someone had taken them apart and reassembled them slightly out of order. He tasted blood, but when he swallowed, nothing came up.
"You…"
His voice was hoarse.
Ren slid his sword back into its scabbard.
"You're good," he said frankly. "Very good."
Ling Sen stared at him.
"You toyed with me," he said, not accusatory, simply stating what he thought. "From the beginning."
Ren shook his head.
"I learned from you," he corrected. "You helped me break through."
Ling Sen's fingers clenched at his sides.
"And this is called 'learning'…?"
"If I wanted to toy with you," Ren said mildly, "you wouldn't be standing."
The words were quiet.
They cut deeper than any spear.
Ling Sen's breath hitched.
He had gone all out—Ashura intent fully unleashed, spear pushed to the limit. The platform that had seen his blood and sweat for years, the sky that he'd stabbed thousands of times, had just become the backdrop for his defeat.
This man had not only blocked everything without being touched.
He had copied his martial intent, refined it, turned it back on him, nearly killed him, and then… given a piece of it back as a seed in his dantian.
Ren let the silence sit between them.
Then he stepped forward and placed a hand on Ling Sen's shoulder.
The grip was light.
The weight behind it wasn't.
"Killing intent isn't just about drowning yourself in blood," Ren said quietly. "It's about walking forward anyway."
His eyes, usually half-lidded and amused, were calm and serious.
"Your Ashura is honest," he went on. "But it's wrapped too tightly around death. If you don't widen it, you'll be trapped on this platform forever."
Ling Sen's fingers trembled.
"What…"
His throat felt dry.
"What should I widen it with?"
Ren's smile turned softer, faintly teasing.
"That's not something you should ask another man," he said. "If I hand you an answer, it won't belong to you. And a borrowed Ashura will never carry you to the true peak."
He squeezed Ling Sen's shoulder once, firmly.
"But I can promise you this," he added. "Your bones are good. Your will is better. If you keep walking, if you keep pushing that spear through whatever stands in your path, we'll see each other again."
He turned away, cloak stirring in the mountain wind.
"When we do," he said over his shoulder, "I expect your spear to be sharper. Don't make me bored."
Ling Sen stared at his back.
The image burned into his heart.
A man with a cheap sword walking away as if from a minor skirmish, after casually stepping past the limit he had believed in.
Don't make me bored.
Ling Sen slowly sank to one knee again—not from weakness this time, but to press his palm flat against the cold stone of the platform.
His Ashura intent flickered in his dantian, the refined thread Ren had forced into him humming faintly.
He knew, with a clarity that made his chest ache, that he would remember this back until the end of his road.
...
Time slipped by.
Not much, if measured by the position of the sun—a few hours, no more.
But for Ren, every breath was full.
He left Ling Sen's platform and walked.
Sometimes he crossed paths with Seven Profound Martial House disciples.
An outer court youth practicing basic saber forms in a valley, sweat running down his face, movements stiff but earnest. Ren paused, watched, and with a single correction—"Shift your weight here, not there"—changed how that boy would swing a blade for the rest of his life.
He didn't give his name.
Sometimes he ran into small squads returning from the Ten Thousand Killing Array, faces pale, uniforms torn, the stink of fear still clinging to them. He brushed past their auras, let a whisper of Ashura intent leak from his gaze, just enough to press them, not enough to crush them.
Their spines straightened without knowing why.
Sometimes beasts padded out of the treeline.
A rank one iron-furred wolf, hackles raised, teeth bared, lunged for his throat.
Ren flicked his wrist.
A single thread of Ashura intent coiled into his eyes.
The beast froze mid-leap, legs locking as its instincts screamed. For a heartbeat, its animal mind saw what Ling Sen's illusions had tried to show him—a battlefield of corpses, a man walking calmly through, blade dripping.
Ren shifted his weight.
The wolf landed harmlessly to the side, collapsing in a trembling heap.
He left it alive.
It would remember that fear, and next time choose a different path.
He used all of them.
Not as targets.
As whetstones.
Ashura intent wasn't just a cloak of killing aura to throw around for intimidation. He threaded it through his gaze, wrapped it lightly around his sword arm, let it skim the surface of his killing intent without hardening into something that would break minds.
At the same time, he deepened his Burning Heat.
He stood at the edge of a cliff as the sun slanted westward, stretching his hand toward the sinking light.
Fire origin energy moved through the air, subtle but omnipresent—the warmth on stone, the heat stored in bark, the way light itself thickened near the horizon. He watched a hunting party's campfire from a distance, eyes half-lidded, tracing the way each flame devoured wood, licked ash, guttered, and reformed.
Annihilation wasn't just an explosion.
It was the quiet moment when form stopped being form.
He stretched his senses thin, letting the Immortal Soul Bone help him break down what he saw into patterns—how heat crawled, how temperature gradients formed and collapsed, how even cooled embers held the memory of combustion.
Inside the Magic Cube, Mo Eversnow watched.
Her soul sense skimmed over his meridians, his altered muscles, the way the Heretical God Force interacted with this lower realm's crude laws. She felt his body adjust to the new Altering Muscle pathways, his blood and true essence harmonizing around the change at a speed that would have driven most geniuses insane.
He refined the Ashura intent he'd taken from Ling Sen.
He did not simply copy it.
He peeled away the pieces that were Ling Sen's obsession—the rigid fixations, the narrowness of a man whose world had been one martial house and one mountain—and kept the underlying structure: a battlefield domain that sharpened instinct and compressed killing will.
Into that frame, he poured his own Dao.
Not a path obsessed with endless killing, but one that saw slaughter as a tool. His Ashura intent cooled, clarified. It became less about blood and more about resolve.
By the time the sun kissed the mountain peaks and the sky bled orange, his Ashura Martial Intent had stabilized at a foundation that, in this world's language, hovered just under "small success."
Burning Heat sat at the threshold of the second level, the line to Annihilation so close he could feel its breath on his fingers.
Mo Eversnow's soul rippled.
…In a single day in this lower realm, he used a Body Transformation–level battle to temper a new martial intent and brush against a second-level Law…
If this boy had been born in the Divine Realm…
She exhaled silently.
Perhaps it was fortunate that he wasn't.
Men like him warped worlds.
...
When the light finally fled the mountain tops, Ren stopped walking.
He stood alone on a nameless peak, the wind tugging at his clothes, the Great Zhou range spreading beneath him like a sleeping dragon. Far below, Sky Fortune City glowed faintly—lanterns like scattered stars, the shadow of the palace, the little river-snake of traffic moving in and out of the Seven Profound Martial House's gates.
"Good enough for a first visit," he murmured.
His Dao Heart beat, steady and full.
He could stay longer.
He would, later.
This world was full of good seeds—and sky cages. Geniuses pressed against lids they couldn't even see, sects straining under rules laid down by men too small to hold them. He had already found one spearpoint trying to pierce through.
There would be others.
But.
He closed his eyes.
Heaven moved.
His inner Heaven unfolded above his soul—vast, star-strewn, a sky that did not belong to Sky Spill Continent, or the Divine Realm, or any single universe. Pathways anchored themselves within that sky like constellations.
One burned with the flavor of Martial World—the scent of herbs and iron, of hot blood and cold spears, of a boy named Lin Ming who, in another timeline, would have walked this road.
Another thrummed with a different rhythm—a universe where devils and angels argued under a rigid System, where dragons slept uneasily and gods watched a single small island nation with too much interest.
Ren reached for those paths with the calm ease of a man slipping hands into familiar pockets.
He stepped sideways.
The nameless peak, the Great Zhou Mountains, the training valleys and Ashura-scarred platform, Sky Fortune City's distant lights—all of it blurred into a single long, bright line in his perception.
Then receded.
The mountain wind whipped once around the empty peak and howled on into the night.