A single bell note rang.
Low. Distant. Clear enough to cut the breath out of every chest.
The jade pillars around the platform froze in mid-drift. The dim, smoky sun hanging over the sixth world flared, its hazy glow sharpening into a cold, bloodless radiance that carved every crack in the stone into stark relief.
For one heartbeat, the world held its breath.
Then a man stepped out of the light.
He didn't appear with thunder or crackling law. No formation circles blazed, no divine phantoms roared.
The sunlight simply thickened in midair three feet above the platform, took the outline of shoulders and limbs, and solidified into a figure that landed without the slightest sound.
He wore armor that was half ceremonial, half scarred by use. Sun-emblems and ancient witch-runes glowed faintly across its surface, laid out in an archaic battle array that belonged to the era when the Southern Wilderness had still been a Divine Kingdom. Faint sword-marks crossed those runes in several places—old strikes that the Divine Kingdom's blacksmiths had never polished away, as if the scars themselves were part of the legend.
His hair was bound back, his features handsome in the distant, untouchable way of people painted on ancestral tablets.
When his eyes opened, they glowed a pale, steady gold.
Na Shui's breath caught in her throat.
"…Celestial Envoy," Na Yi whispered.
Her tribe's stories had painted this man a hundred times beside the old campfire. The Sorcerer King's shadow. The Divine Kingdom's spear. The one who had once stood at Master's side and had been entrusted to test the worth of future kings.
The Envoy let his gaze sweep the platform.
The sixth world's stage was simple: a circular platform of old stone floating in a void of dull gray, the air heavy with furnace heat that came from nowhere and everywhere. Around its edges, the jade pillars that had carried them here hung motionless, each one engraved with smelting patterns from the previous five trials—Hell, Hungry Ghosts, Beasts, Witch Slaves, Mortals.
Now those engravings glowed faintly, reacting to his presence, as if reporting their verdict to him.
His eyes passed over Ren once.
It should have been nothing—a casual skim over a "martial artist junior" with a lazy posture and a half-smile.
For the barest instant, the golden pupils tightened.
An itch, like a buried blade in the dark.
Then the Envoy moved on, as if that sensation were beneath notice or simply beyond his concern, and his gaze settled fully on the sisters in front of him.
"Two Body Transformation juniors," he said.
His voice was calm. Not loud, but it carried across the platform without effort, sinking into bone.
"One at Altering Muscle peak. One half a step behind. Bloodline… Na tribe. Witch-blood."
His gaze, colder than the sun above, softened by a hair.
"As it should be," he murmured.
Na Yi's fingers curled slowly into fists.
The bone key at her throat lay hot and heavy against her skin, as if it, too, remembered every story. The Na tribe had once been favored by the Divine Kingdom—witch-blood guardians loved by the old Sorcerer King. Then the kingdom fell. The Southern Wilderness rotted into swamp. The road to the pagoda broke.
The road was broken.
They had walked the shattered pieces anyway.
"The road was broken," she said, voice low but steady. "We came to mend it."
The Envoy's eyes rested on her for a heartbeat, weighing something. The old stories said he had once examined princes and generals with that same gaze and sent them away with three words: "Qualified." "Not yet." "Never."
Whatever verdict he reached here, he did not speak it aloud.
His attention shifted to Na Shui.
"And you?" he asked.
Na Shui swallowed. Her mouth was dry, tongue thick as cotton.
Hell's blood river tugging at her ankles. Hungry Ghosts pulling at her soul with starving hands. Beast fangs closing on her throat. The Witch Slave's iron fists. The disciplined, merciless strikes of mortal soldiers in the fifth world.
Her sister's back, in front of her, every time.
Her fingers tightened around her bone knife's hilt until her knuckles ached.
"I… don't want to be prey anymore," she said, every word dragged up from her dantian. "If this world is a furnace… then I'll go in, and come out as steel."
A tiny silence.
The Envoy's lips moved—the faintest hint of a smile, gone as soon as it appeared.
"Good."
His aura changed.
It didn't roar. It didn't explode in blinding light.
It settled.
Like a great boulder dropping into place at the heart of a mountain, forcing everything around it to acknowledge its weight. The silent platform suddenly felt like a battlefield that had seen ten days and ten nights of continuous war, its stones soaked in killing intent and victory songs both.
Na Shui's knees nearly buckled.
Houtian.
The realm above them. Where mortal flesh truly began to step away from the dust, prenatal energy circulating freely, every breath drawing in heaven and earth. Below Xiantian, one was still a mortal. Below Houtian, one's flesh had not yet been completely reforged.
They were still at Body Transformation.
Every instinct screamed at Na Shui to step back. To hide behind Ren. To curl up and cover her head the way she once had in a bloody courtyard.
She did not move.
Beside her, Na Yi's stance shifted without conscious thought. One foot slid half a step forward, the other half a step back. Her spine straightened. She drew heaven and earth into her lungs in a slow, heavy breath and pulled it through meridians that no longer followed the crude, cramped patterns of backwater manuals, but the broader, harsher loops Ren had carved into them.
The Modified Chaotic Virtues Combat Meridians glowed faintly in her flesh, every breath turning into a slow hammer blow on her bones.
She exhaled.
"Shui," she said quietly.
Her sister looked at her, eyes wide and black.
"Left," Na Yi said. "You cut. I anchor."
Na Shui's hammering heart steadied by a fraction.
"…Right," she answered.
Ren's eyes warmed.
He stood a short distance behind them, hands tucked into his sleeves, posture loose. A man in plain robes, watching an ancient Divine Kingdom's ultimate test with the same relaxed ease he might watch a street performance.
"Remember," he said, tone light, utterly at odds with the pressure weighing on the platform. "You're not trying to overpower a Houtian. That's silly."
The sisters didn't look back, but their shoulders eased the tiniest bit.
"You're using better tools," Ren continued.
He flicked his fingers lazily, as if counting pieces in an invisible workshop.
"Body art is your hammer. Heretical God Force is your anvil. Fire Law is your forge. Martial Intent…"
He smiled, the curve of his mouth easy, the light in his eyes sharp.
"…is the shape of the blade. Now go forge something."
The Envoy drew his weapon.
It was not a pure saber, not a pure spear. A long, slightly curved blade with a thick spine, somewhere between the two. Its edge gleamed with condensed true essence, quiet and razor-keen. Along the back, old witch-runes burned in a slow, sun-gold light—array lines, seals, refining patterns.
This would have been called a king's weapon.
In the Divine Kingdom's time, it had opened battle lines and crowned emperors.
"Begin," the Envoy said simply.
He moved.
To Na Shui, it was like watching the world split.
One moment, the Envoy stood twenty paces away, weight apparently loose, aura quiet.
The next, he was in front of her.
No gradual acceleration. No obvious shift in stance. Presence and blade appeared together, as if space had folded to accommodate him.
The descending cut was not fancy. No unnecessary flourish. No feint.
Just the kind of simple, perfect stroke that had once opened armies and left corpses in neat rows.
Her new body moved before her mind could finish panicking.
Chaotic Virtues' circulation pattern had been carved into her muscles over and over by Ren's hands, by his casual taps and corrections in the swamp, by the endless drills under fungus light.
Her front foot slid in half a step, heel digging into stone along an angle Ren had forced her to walk a thousand times. Her hip turned. Her shoulder dropped.
Her knife rose—not to clash head-on with the falling blade, but to nudge.
Steel kissed steel.
The contact was light, almost gentle. Her knife slid along the side of the Envoy's weapon, changing its line by a finger's width.
To spectators, it was nothing.
To Na Shui, the impact sent a shock screaming up her arm, her bones ringing like temple bells. The Envoy's true essence weighed as much as a mountain compared to her own.
The cut grazed past her shoulder instead of cleaving through it, true essence skimming off her Touki-like protective force and burning a shallow line along her skin.
Before the pain even fully registered, Na Yi was there.
Her fist crashed in toward the Envoy's ribs.
Flesh that had gone through Strength Training until every fiber remembered force. Bone that had been pounded by Beast and Witch Slave trials, tempered again under Ren's casual, brutal smelting. Heretical God Force's first layer spun like a ring inside her, taking the rebound from Shui's deflected clash and routing it, spiraled and compressed, into her punch.
Fire followed.
A thin thread of red-gold runes wrapped her fist—the embryonic pattern of Fire Martial Intent that Ren had allowed her to trace in the Hungry Ghost world. There, she had seen fire as devouring soul-flame.
Here, it manifested as compressed heat and will riding her knuckles.
The Envoy shifted his weight by a hair, blade tilting.
He didn't even swing.
He simply caught Na Yi's fist on the flat of his weapon, letting the force disperse along his arm and into the platform.
Stone cracked beneath his feet.
Even so, his eyes flickered.
"…Not bad," he said.
His voice was as calm as before, but a faint glimmer of interest lit the gold.
He stepped back, body flowing around their follow-up strikes like water around rocks. A cut toward Na Yi's thigh that would have severed tendons. A thrust toward Na Shui's ribs that would have pierced lung. A pommel strike aimed at Na Yi's jaw that could have broken her neck if it landed clean.
Each move was still simple.
No wasted motion.
But each one came from an angle where "ordinary" defense was meaningless. Block wrong and your bones would shatter. Dodge in panic and you would step into the next strike.
Na Yi's world narrowed.
Feet.
Hips.
Shoulders.
The angle of the Envoy's blade as it shifted through the air. The way his center of gravity changed a breath before his weapon moved. The subtle timing of his inhalation and exhalation with every cut.
Heretical God Force turned quietly within her, an inner governor keeping her from tearing herself apart, catching the backlash of each blow she blocked or endured and compressing it into small, dense Dao Fruits within her bones.
Every sting of pain. Every shudder in her joints. Every tiny instability.
Remembered.
Polished.
Stored.
Fire.
It was there, too.
Not just the fire on the Envoy's blade, where sun-law burned in a steady, oppressive glow. Not just the heat building in her own blood as muscles strained.
But in every impact.
In the way steel met bone and sparks leaped invisibly between them. In the way true essence and body force touched, collided, and became something else in the instant of contact.
Her Fire Martial Intent, shallow and rough, brushed those patterns and shivered.
Turn.
Refine.
Burn.
The Envoy's blade rose again, descending straight toward her head.
Na Yi stepped into it.
It was madness.
Any witch elder watching might have screamed.
But she had already walked into Hell's blood river and let demons chew at her flesh. She had stood in the Hungry Ghost world and let soul-fire lick her mind. She had learned there that some flames could not be dodged.
You passed through them, or you never passed at all.
Her front foot planted hard. Her knees bent a fraction deeper than Ren had ever let her in normal stance, lowering her center of gravity until it felt rooted in the platform itself. Instead of raising her arms high to meet the strike, she moved them just enough.
Her knuckles met steel.
The world flashed white.
Pain speared up her arms, sharp and clean. Her bones screamed. Flesh threatened to tear.
Fire flared.
Fire was temperature. Fire was destruction. Fire was rebirth.
In that instant, with her flesh screaming and her bones groaning, she saw a fourth meaning.
Fire was the line where two forces met and changed.
The Envoy's strike carried sun-law—burning, overbearing, made to crush armies. Her body carried the smelting power of the pagoda's previous trials and the rough pattern of the Modified Chaotic Virtues art.
At the place where her knuckles and his blade met, those two forces collided.
For a heartbeat, a third thing appeared.
Something that was neither his law nor her strength alone. A collision spark, a new pattern born from both.
Her mind caught it.
The first layer of Fire Law—Burning Heat—shifted in her understanding. Temperature was not just speed of particles. It was structured vibration. If you aligned those vibrations, you could make an impact not just hurt, but refine.
Red-gold runes exploded along her arm.
Fire Martial Intent surged, leaping from early first level into mid-stage in a single breath.
The Envoy's blade shuddered.
He had expected her to be flung away, arms broken, body tumbling across the platform.
Instead, she did skid backward, feet carving twin scars into the stone. Her knuckles split, blood welled.
But her bones held.
The force he had poured into that stroke met the new pattern in her bones, twisted, melted, and sent a portion of its backlash up his own limb.
A faint numbness crept into his wrist.
His grin flashed, sudden and fierce.
"That's it," he said quietly. "Show me what Master's pagoda can still make."
Na Shui's eyes widened.
"Sister—"
"Don't look at me," Na Yi snapped, breath ragged but eyes blazing. "Look at him."
Na Shui forced her gaze forward.
The Envoy stepped again, this time targeting her.
To her, his movements seemed slower now.
Not because he had weakened.
Because she had changed.
Heretical God Force pulsed in her veins, opening her senses a fraction more. The faint comprehension of Fire Law she had gained in the Hungry Ghost world—the way flame could burn fear and refine will—stirred, resonating with what Na Yi had just done.
Her sister had turned a losing position into an anvil.
Na Shui's hand tightened around her knife.
The Envoy's blade thrust toward her stomach—a straight, ruthless strike that had killed countless "promising talents" in old wars before they had time to scream.
Na Shui exhaled.
Her body moved along a line Ren had drilled into her until her muscles remembered it better than her own name: weight shift, hip turn, shoulder drop.
This time, she added something new.
A thin thread of Fire Law comprehension traced itself along her meridians.
Her knife did not try to stop the thrust.
It kissed it.
Steel slid along steel with a high, clear note. Visible sparks flew, scattering across their faces.
Underneath that obvious clash, something else happened.
Her intent twisted the space of impact. The thrust's line bent. The Envoy's blade, meant to pierce her core, veered just enough that it grazed.
Cold steel ripped across her side, tearing cloth and flesh, but missing organs.
Hot pain blossomed.
Her Fire Martial Intent screamed in delight.
Yes.
That.
Burn it.
Refine it.
Heretical God Force seized the pain, spun it, and threw it into the furnace of her will. Fire Law structures crawled along her meridians, weaving together the tiny insight from the Hungry Ghost world with this new understanding of collision sparks.
Her Martial Intent leapt with every clash.
Mid-stage. Late-stage. Each block and each wound added fuel.
Na Yi felt it.
Their martial intents were not identical, but the sisters' wills had walked side-by-side through too much. Their Fire resonated. When Na Yi punched now, the air around her fist rippled, that red-gold hue deepening, lines of law inside the light becoming more complex.
The Envoy's gaze flicked between them.
"Borrowing the pagoda's furnace for your own intent," he said, laughing softly. "Good."
He stopped playing.
His aura swelled.
Houtian true essence roared through his meridians, gathering around his blade like a small sun. For a moment, the entire sixth world was painted in gold and scarlet, the platform's stones glowing as if they were being smelted again from the inside.
"Come," he said. "If you want to surpass a realm… then break this."
He cut.
A simple downward slash.
No supplementary techniques. No deception.
But the instant it fell, Na Yi's skin prickled. The fine hairs on her arms stood on end.
It wasn't just the strength.
It was the completeness.
The Envoy's understanding of his path—sun that judged all equally, that burned traitor and hero alike if they stood in its way—had been driven into a single line.
If they met it head-on, they would be crushed.
Na Yi inhaled.
Fire Martial Intent spun. It called up everything they had passed through so far: Hell's blood river that boiled flesh, Hungry Ghosts' soul-eating chill, Beast flesh smelted under a savage sky, Witch Slaves' crushing fists, Mortals' iron discipline.
Those trials weren't just scars.
They were fuel.
The runes in her soul flared, new lines locking into place.
Fire was not only temperature, destruction, rebirth, collision.
It was the choice to burn everything that was not the core.
Na Yi saw the shape of her path in that instant.
Witch-blood sorcery and martial body cultivation, not opposed, but fused in furnace heat. Duty and hatred, obligation and personal desire, thrown together until only the essence remained.
Protecting one person.
Burning a world if necessary.
Her Fire Martial Intent roared, and her Fire Laws stepped into peak first level in a single bound.
Na Shui felt the surge like a second heartbeat inside her chest. Their intents, tied by blood and shared trials, resonated. Fear that had kept her small for years ignited into a fierce, hungry will.
Na Yi's front foot landed with a thud that sounded like a drum.
Her fist rose, wrapped in red-gold light that traced the lines of her tendons like molten metal.
"Shui!" she shouted.
"I know!"
Na Shui's smaller frame blurred, darting to the side. Her knife was low, blade almost hidden in the grass-like cracks of the platform. Flame traced its edge—not real fire, but martial intent sharpening steel and focusing killing will.
The Envoy's sun-blade fell.
Na Yi met it.
This time, she didn't throw bare knuckles against the edge.
Her fist smashed into the air a hand-width above the blade, at the exact point where the stroke's momentum was thickest.
Heretical God Force spun like a wheel. Chaotic Virtues meridians aligned. Fire Martial Intent bit into the incoming energy like one gear catching another.
Thunder rolled across the sixth world.
Sun-law and smelting-fire law collided. For a moment, the impact zone turned pure white, the lines of the platform blotting out.
Na Shui moved inside that flash.
To her, the world slowed.
Ren's voice from the swamp murmured at the back of her mind.
"Joints. Tendons. Behind the skull. You don't have brute power yet. So you break what matters."
She slipped through the Envoy's blind spot, blade low.
She stabbed.
Her knife punched into the Envoy's left knee, right at the joint. Fire Martial Intent flared along the blade—not trying to burn his whole body, but focusing on one thing: unraveling the structural lines that let him bear weight.
The Envoy's body trembled.
The little sun around his blade flickered.
Na Yi's fist drove his stroke down.
His knee buckled.
The Houtian Envoy dropped to one knee on the platform. His blade slammed into the stone, a ringing crash echoing across the void as cracks spiderwebbed outward from the impact.
He caught himself with his free hand, palm planted firmly on the stone, breath harsh for the first time. His body was made of condensed trial law, not flesh, but the wounds glowed red-gold, the sisters' martial intent burned into him.
He stared at them, eyes wide.
Shock, then fierce joy.
"…You actually… crossed it," he breathed.
Na Yi's lungs burned. Her forearms throbbed. Her knuckles were raw meat over bone. Fire still crackled faintly along her tendons, eager to bite again.
Na Shui's side burned where she'd been cut. Blood trickled down her waist, soaking her belt. Her knife hand shook.
But their eyes were bright.
They did not hesitate.
Half a breath. No more.
In that sliver of time before a Houtian expert's instincts snapped back into place, they moved.
Na Yi's second punch crashed into his shoulder, targeting the joint, Fire Intent drilling into ligaments, refining them to ash in the shape of law.
Na Shui's knife stabbed into his other leg, then twisted, the intent-line slicing through tendons like a steel wire pulled red-hot.
The Envoy roared.
His blade flared one last time with pure sun-law, a reflexive explosion of strength that turned the platform's cracks incandescent.
But the sisters' Fire had already wrapped around his momentum, turning it, drinking part of it, sending the rest back into his body in warped currents.
His arms buckled.
His body slammed onto his back.
The platform shuddered.
Silence fell.
The sun overhead dimmed, its light gentling from cutting white to soft gold.
The Envoy lay there, staring up at the sky, chest heaving. The wounds they had inflicted—a pair of ruined knees, a crushed shoulder, martial intent etched into his law-body—glowed like red-gold brands.
Then he laughed.
Breathless, genuine.
"Good," he said hoarsely. "Good. If this world still had kings like you… Master would not have needed to leave."
His outline began to dissolve.
Particles of light flaked away from his armor, drifting upward like dandelion seeds in a wind only he could feel.
Before his face vanished entirely, he turned his head again.
This time, he looked straight at Ren.
Ren had not moved from his spot. He had watched the entire battle with arms loose at his sides, eyes half-lidded, like a man watching water flow where he had already dug the riverbed.
"You chose well," the Envoy said quietly.
Ren's lazy smile deepened by a shade.
"I only nudged the river a little," he replied. "They were the ones who jumped."
The Envoy's eyes crinkled.
"That's the only kind of help that doesn't rot the bones," he murmured.
Then he was gone.
The sun above flickered.
Light folded in on itself. The sixth world shattered like glass, the platform, the pillars, the void all breaking into countless motes that rushed inward, through the sisters' bodies, through Ren's, through the bell-note that had started it all.
They landed on their feet.
The new space was a gray chamber that smelled faintly of ash and nothing else. No wind. No heat. Just a flat, featureless floor stretching into mist.
The interstice between worlds.
Na Yi exhaled sharply. Her knees finally threatened to give out, now that the Envoy's pressure was gone. Her arms, held up by will alone, trembled like over-drawn bowstrings.
Na Shui clutched her side, hissing as the cut there throbbed in time with her heartbeat. Her fingers were still locked around her knife.
Ren was already in front of them.
He hadn't seemed to move, but one moment he was a few paces away, and the next his hands were on their shoulders.
Warm. Steady.
Fire Martial Intent still lingered in their bones. He could feel it clearly—the shape of a red-gold wheel in each of them, spinning at peak first level, sharp and clean. His own Dao essence flowed around it in a thin, invisible sheath, making sure it didn't chew on foundations it had no business touching yet.
"Arms up," he said gently.
They obeyed without thinking.
Na Yi raised her battered forearms. Na Shui eased her knife away from her side so he could see the wound.
Ren ran a thin thread of Dao along their bones. Not brute force. Just a quiet, probing touch, like water seeped into cracks.
Every hairline fracture showed itself. Every place where tendons had been stretched too far. Every joint that had taken more than its share of impact.
Heretical God Force had done its work well. The inner governor he had added had turned what should have been catastrophic damage into tempering instead. The places that should have shattered were only marked, the kind of "wounds" a smith liked to see in good steel.
Na Shui flinched when his Dao brushed her side.
"Ah—"
He placed two fingers lightly over the cut.
Fire Law, several levels beyond theirs, tapped the injury. Not to burn. To smooth. The torn flesh knit cleanly, ugly edges refining into neat lines. The pain ebbed from sharp to dull ache.
"Congratulations," he said, straightening.
His gaze swept over them like a craftsman inspecting two new blades fresh from the furnace.
"You just beat a Houtian-level projection," he said. "While still at Body Transformation."
Na Shui stared at him.
Her chest rose and fell, each breath still thick with the echo of sun-law and smelting fire.
"…We… we actually did it," she whispered.
Na Yi's lashes trembled.
She looked inward.
Her blood felt like molten metal flowing through carved channels. Every breath drank heaven and earth in and out in a loop that no longer felt like an outsider's method learned from stolen manuals, but like something written into her bones.
Her Fire Martial Intent sat in her soul like a small, bright sun-wheel, its structure far more detailed than the rough ring she'd first glimpsed in the Hungry Ghost world.
"…We did," she said softly.
Ren's smile curved, pride warm but not boastful.
"Hold onto that feeling," he said. "Not the victory. The moment when you stepped in instead of running."
His eyes softened, the lazy warmth in them tempered with something old and sharp.
"That's where your path changes."
Na Shui's eyes stung.
She swallowed.
"…Ren," she said quietly.
He hummed. "Mm?"
"Don't… call it just a 'little nudge,'" she muttered. "If you hadn't rebuilt us, we'd have been dust three trials ago."
He chuckled, low and easy.
"Maybe," he said. "But I've seen people waste good foundations before. You didn't. That part is yours."
Na Shui flushed, looking down, fingers flexing as if she didn't know what to do with her hands.
Na Yi's lips curved, the dry edge in her humor returning now that her heart had stopped pounding quite so hard.
"Ren," she said. "If you don't want us to 'rot at the bones,' perhaps you should accept our gratitude properly instead of dancing away from it like a corrupt wolf from thundergrass."
He blinked once.
Then laughed outright.
"…Fair," he admitted.
He lifted his hands again—not to check wounds this time, but to rest them lightly on their heads.
His fingers slid through Na Yi's hair, then Na Shui's, mussing it deliberately, a comforting warmth rippling down through scalp and spine and into the lingering Fire in their bones.
They both stiffened for half a breath.
Then relaxed.
"Then," he said, looking them straight in the eyes, "I accept. Na Yi. Na Shui."
His smile tilted, half teasing, half wolfish.
"Let's go steal the last world."