Ren didn't make them wait.
The moment the last echo of his words—small chore—fell away, he rose to his feet in one smooth, unhurried motion.
The cheap room suddenly felt too small to hold the three of them.
Rough timber walls. Stained table. A single paper lantern swaying faintly overhead. Outside, the Fog Mansion Inn creaked and muttered in its sleep—drunken laughs, clatter of bowls, the distant bark of someone giving an order.
Inside, the air tightened.
"Armor up," Ren said lightly.
There was no armor, of course.
Just two bodies that had been reforged in dragon fire and witch trials, meridians re-cut by alien arts, True Essence that now moved like a living thing inside them. Modified Heretical God Force coiled quietly in their channels, an unseen governor that shaped every surge into refining spirals instead of wild blasts. Modified Chaotic Virtues had turned bone and tendon into memory, every strike storing itself as a nascent Dao Fruit in flesh.
Na Yi and Na Shui exchanged a look.
They had watched tribes burn. They had smelled people roasting in iron cages. They had listened to ghosts scream in hell pagodas until their throats went raw.
And still—this moment felt different.
This was the thing they had walked toward ever since the night their tribe died: the day they turned around and walked back.
Na Yi's fingers brushed the jade slip hanging at her waist, the Sorcerer's inheritance warm against her skin. Na Shui's hand tightened around the new sword hilt at her side, calluses catching on the leather.
They nodded together.
"Good," Ren said.
He opened his hand.
A red-gold rune-wheel, the size of a basin, spun itself into existence above his palm. It wasn't metal. It wasn't anything so crude. It was condensed law, lines of Fire Martial Intent and third-level Fire Law braided into one another, turning like a miniature sun. Every spoke shone with Dao lines—creation flame, annihilation flame, the quiet glow of embers.
The air in the room warmed.
Na Yi and Na Shui felt the heat—but under that heat was a pull, a resonance that caught at the sparks in their own dantians, at the tiny wheels of Fire Martial Intent they had only just begun to turn. Azure True Dragon Infinity Seeds coiled around those flames inside them, dragon shadows around sun-wheels, responding to a king's call.
"Let it run," Ren said. "Don't fight it. This is what you trained for."
They closed their eyes.
Fire laws stirred within them—rudimentary compared to Ren's, but true. True Essence surged, then immediately folded back into spirals as the inner governors of Modified Heretical God Force caught the rise, ground off the edges, and turned brute power into tempered strength. Bones thrummed with Chaotic Virtues' lingering impressions; every twitch of muscle resonated with a hundred perfect strikes they'd done in silence under fungus-lit caverns.
When the sisters opened their eyes again, a faint red-gold ring burned around each pupil.
Ren's mouth crooked into a small, satisfied smile.
"That's better," he murmured. "Let's go say hello."
...
Fog Mansion Inn hadn't changed.
Same sagging beams. Same greasy lantern smoke. Same sour wine and cracked bowls on the tables where Fire Worm warriors had eaten their morning meat.
But when Ren stepped out into the corridor with the sisters behind him, the entire inn… tilted.
Heat gathered.
Not the damp, clinging warmth of Fog Valley's climate, but a dry, clean, blade-sharp heat. It slid down the walls and seeped out of the floorboards. The faint fire element from every stove, every lantern, every ember in the building was dragged toward a single point:
Ren's slowly turning fire wheel.
He walked like a man heading out for an evening stroll. Hands folded in his sleeves. Shoulders loose. Smile easy.
Behind him, Na Yi and Na Shui followed in silence, breaths matching without thinking.
On the floor below, a Fire Worm warrior shoved a servant girl aside, laughing as she stumbled and nearly dropped a tray. Another gnawed on a lump of roasted meat, the charred flesh still bleeding at the center. The smell of blood and wine mixed in the air—thick, heavy, greasy.
The laughing man never finished his bite.
The lantern above his table flared.
The lazy yellow flame compressed into a red-gold point, then detonated—not outward, but inward.
Fire turned into a spear of pure Martial Intent and shot straight down, piercing his chest. For an instant, a dragon's shadow coiled through the flame.
The warrior's grin froze. The meat slipped from his slack fingers. He toppled backward, eyes blank, a thin thread of smoke curling up from the hole in his sternum.
"F—fire attack!"
"Enemy—"
The inn's main hall exploded into chaos.
Every lantern, every candle, every glowing coal betrayed its owner. Flames leapt from wicks and braziers, not as wild tongues, but as precise, needle-fine blades. They cut throats, severed tendons, stabbed through hearts. Fire that had once warmed hands and cooked meat became a quiet, efficient butcher.
A brazier at the corner flared; the coal's dull glow compressed into a sliver of sun that shot sideways, neatly severing a man's spine at the waist.
A candle on a shrine guttered, then spat out a thread of flame that slashed across the room, taking three men in the eyes in a single, burning line.
Screams began. Most of them ended halfway through a word.
At the top of the stairs, Ren walked down with his hands still tucked in his sleeves.
The rune-wheel turned lazily above his head.
Within its field, any flame—True Essence fire, blood vitality heat, even the spark of a martial artist's will—was compressed, purified, and forced to burn at a higher order, obeying a rule that was not of this world. He had simply given the flames new instructions: only hunt the worms.
Behind him, Na Yi and Na Shui moved in step.
"Take whoever reaches us," Ren said, voice mild. "No need to be polite."
The first Fire Worm warrior to charge up the stairs never reached the third step.
Na Yi moved.
Her sword—slightly curved, narrow, nothing fancy—slipped from its sheath with a whisper. True Essence surged down her meridians, thick and full, but the moment it left, the Azure True Dragon Infinity Seed spun beneath her dantian. Essence poured back in, smooth and steady, like water returning to fill a carved channel.
She made a simple, straight cut.
No flourish. No extra motion.
The man's head flew from his shoulders in a clean arc, a line of red-gold flame tracing the path of her blade. The heat cauterized the wound as it passed; hardly any blood spilled.
He fell like a puppet whose strings had been cut.
Na Yi inhaled once. True Essence rushed back into her blade arm, smooth and immediate—her dragon seed at work, refilling what she'd spent almost before she noticed the loss.
She did not waste the sensation on surprise.
This is the foundation he gave us, she thought. Use it well.
The second man roared, swinging a heavy machete in a brutish overhead chop meant to split skulls like melons.
Na Shui met him.
Her sword was uglier than Na Yi's—thicker spine, heavier edge—but in her hands it moved like a predator just woken up hungry. True Essence surged; muscles swelled as Modified Chaotic Virtues Combat Meridians made every strand of flesh remember force. Each step carried the echo of a perfect strike she'd done in training, now replayed in reality.
Steel met steel.
The Fire Worm warrior's machete shattered with a shriek, broken into glittering shards.
The remaining half of Na Shui's swing continued down unimpeded, slamming into his shoulder. Bone cracked like kiln-fired clay. Flame erupted from the point of impact, racing along his meridians—dragon-tinted fire that turned his internal organs into a furnace for one brief, screaming heartbeat.
Then he wasn't screaming anymore.
Na Shui exhaled harshly, eyes bright.
So this is Middle Houtian… She felt the solidity in her limbs, the surging True Essence that refused to thin even after two heavy strikes. No… this is beyond the 'Middle Houtian' those men boasted about. This is our road.
Below, more warriors tried to rush the stairs.
More flames betrayed them.
Some had their legs sliced out from under them by cutting winds of heat that sheared through knee joints as if they were candle wax. Others found their True Essence reversing in their meridians, their own fire turning inward to burn their hearts. One man's battle shout turned into a gurgle as smoke poured from his mouth, his lungs igniting from the inside.
Ren didn't spare them a full glance.
He was already reaching farther.
Through every flame, through the fire essence in every cooking pot and forge, he let his Fire Martial Intent spread across Fog Valley. Every blaze became an eye. Every coal became an ear. Ashes whispered. Sparks remembered.
The entire Fire Worm settlement unfolded in his mind.
He saw an overseer in the valley square, kicking a kneeling man while laughing with his subordinates, the crack of bone under boot echoing in the heat.
He saw young warriors extorting grain from thin-faced women, fingers hooked in braids as they dragged them to the side.
He saw a cellar where human bones were stacked like firewood, marrow long chewed out, some skulls still carrying faint nail marks from when they'd been clawed.
Ren's smile cooled.
The lazy amusement faded from his eyes, replaced by something flat and deep.
"Girls," he said quietly. "Down."
Na Yi and Na Shui stepped aside automatically.
Ren took a single step forward.
The rune-wheel above his head spun once.
Every fire source in Fog Valley trembled.
For a breath, every flame stood straight, as if listening.
Then they moved.
Not as a spreading blaze, but as red-gold spear-lights that left no smoke and no char—only burnt-out flesh and ash where Fire Worm warriors had stood a moment before.
A drunk guard at a watchtower raised his cup and froze as the torch in front of him crawled up the shaft like a live thing, then shot through his eye.
A patrol marching between huts felt a wave of heat pass through them. Their armor did not blacken. Their clothes did not catch fire. Only their blood boiled, turning to steam inside their veins. They collapsed in unison, eyes bursting red.
Screams rose across the valley.
They cut off just as quickly.
In less than the time it took for a stick of incense to burn an inch, every Fire Worm warrior in Fog Valley below a certain threshold simply… ceased to exist.
Only those with stronger True Essence—middle-level officers with Altering Muscle bodies and thicker blood vitality, half-melted by the first sweep—managed to survive. They staggered, charred, terrified.
Na Yi and Na Shui reached them.
To the witches, these were not faceless enemies. These were the men who had swaggered through other tribes with blood on their boots, who had laughed about eating "pagan meat," who had worn bone necklaces made from Na tribe dead.
Their blades did not hesitate.
In the square, a scarred officer tried to beg, words spilling over broken teeth. Na Yi's eyes were calm as winter water as she cut his throat. Her sword's trail left a line of clean, white bone where flesh had been, the wound cauterized to nothing.
In an alleyway, another tried to flee.
Na Shui caught him halfway through turning his back. Her sword pinned him to a mud wall, then tore free amid a burst of flame that consumed his scream.
By the time the three of them stood again at the valley's main gate, the Fire Worm presence in Fog Valley was gone.
Only ash remained—drifting in the warm wind, smudging the ground where men had once walked.
Ren let the rune-wheel fade.
The air cooled. The flames in cooking pits and lanterns returned to their normal, small, human scale—cooking food, lighting rooms, not murdering armies.
He tilted his head slightly, as if listening to something far away.
"…One more nest," he murmured.
Na Yi looked at him, cheeks still faintly flushed from battle, chest rising and falling with controlled breaths.
"Chi Guda?" she asked.
His eyes turned distant, focused on something beyond mountains and mist.
"There's a half-step Houtian aura not far from here," he said. "True Essence pattern matches what we just burned out. And the smell of your tribe's blood is… thick around it."
His tone was casual.
The weight behind it was not.
Na Shui's hands clenched around her sword hilt until her knuckles whitened.
"Then…" Her voice was low, trembling somewhere between rage and anticipation. "Then let's go."
Ren's smile returned—soft, almost indulgent.
"As you wish."
The rune-wheel flared back into existence, this time much larger.
It unfolded above them like a red-gold sun. Along its spokes, laws of fire and space interwove, Dao lines of creation-flame braiding with transportation patterns cribbed from other worlds. The air around them thickened, then thinned, the world's skin pulling taut.
Ren reached out and laid a hand on each sister's shoulder.
"Don't fight the pull," he said. "Just ride it."
Then the world turned to light.
...
Heat. Smoke. The wet stink of blood.
They stepped out into a camp.
Crude tents ringed a trampled clearing. Bone totems stood jammed into the earth—skulls stacked atop one another, carved with crawling witch glyphs, strips of dried flesh hanging like banners. Flies buzzed thick around them, drunk on rot.
Nearby, bound men and women knelt in a line, hands tied behind their backs, faces swollen and purple from beatings. Most stared at nothing. A few flinched at every shout.
Dozens of Fire Worm warriors spun toward the sudden flare of red-gold light.
At the camp's center, a man in heavy leather armor slowly rose to his feet.
He was tall, shoulders broad, exposed forearms roped with muscle and old scars. A high-grade human-step sword hung at his hip, its blade etched with earth patterns that tugged faintly at the surrounding qi. His face was harsh—the kind of coarse brutality that had grown fat on slaughter and never once paid for it.
True Essence surged from his dantian, thick and coarse, already half-condensed into a stable reservoir instead of merely swimming in his meridians—a Pulse Condensation expert with one foot stepped into Houtian, half-step into the next world.
His aura pressed down like a collapsing hill, earth attribute weighing the air.
"Who dares—"
His gaze fell on Na Yi and Na Shui.
Recognition struck like lightning.
"You two…" His lips peeled back, exposing yellowed teeth. Delight twisted his expression into something uglier. "Na tribe little witches. Still alive?"
Na Shui's breath hitched.
Her vision tunneled.
For an instant, she saw not the man in front of her, but the one from that night—standing over her mother's broken body. The taste of smoke and blood in the back of her throat. Her father's voice, chanting even as his ribs showed through torn flesh. Her own scream, hoarse and small and useless.
True Essence roared in response.
Fire surged up her meridians, threatening to explode in a chaotic flood that would burn her from the inside out.
A hand landed lightly on her shoulder.
Ren's.
"Easy," he said quietly. "Don't let him drag you back to that night. You brought your tribe's future with you. Let that speak."
His voice was relaxed, almost lazy, but there was steel beneath it—the easy confidence of someone who had watched worlds burn and refused to bow to any of them.
Na Shui sucked in a breath.
The dragon seed in her dantian tightened, its steady rotation smoothing the wild spike of energy. Modified Heretical God Force caught the flood and reshaped it into a spiral, tempering it as it rose. Her vision cleared.
Chi Guda came back into focus—not as an invincible nightmare, but as a target.
Na Yi stepped forward.
Her eyes were calm.
"Chi Guda," she said.
She didn't spit the name. She didn't scream it. She spoke it like a ritual, like closing a circle left open too long.
The Great General laughed, throwing his head back.
"You little rats have grown," he said. "You even dare to come to me on your own feet. Good. Saves me the trouble of hunting you down again later."
He drew his sword.
Earth-attribute True Essence surged around him, thick and heavy. The ground beneath his boots cracked as he stepped, power pouring into the soil. His aura swelled, pressing down like a mountain that had suddenly remembered it could fall.
"Half-step Houtian!" one of the bound men choked out, face white with despair.
"This is bad…" another whispered hoarsely. "We'll all die…"
Ren's smile didn't change.
His Fire Martial Intent spread out, invisible, forming a domain that settled over the camp like a second sky. Within its scope, the Fire Worm warriors' blood heat, the campfires, even the faint ember buried in Chi Guda's core, were all under his casual notice.
"This one is yours," he told the sisters. "I'll keep the rats off your back."
Na Yi and Na Shui traded a glance.
No more words were needed.
They stepped forward together.
Chi Guda's eyes narrowed.
"Two Altering Muscle girls think they can kill me?" he sneered. "Your parents begged harder than this. Witch brats."
Na Yi's jaw tightened once.
That was the last ripple on her surface.
Then it smoothed.
"The dead don't need your words," she said quietly. "They only need your life."
She moved.
True Essence surged around her slim figure, clear and dense, feeling nothing like the coarse, brute circulation of Fire Worm arts. Her steps were light but grounded, body guided by a foundation that had been reforged from the inside out—bones tempered, muscles altered, dragon blood threaded through flesh.
Her sword thrust out like a line of cold lightning.
Chi Guda snarled.
"EARTH PROTECTION!"
True Essence slammed into the ground. A thick earthen wall burst from the soil between them, hard as iron, container for his martial skill's protective pattern. His sword followed a heartbeat later, swinging in a brutal horizontal arc—Earth Splitter—strong enough to carve a trench through stone.
Na Yi didn't contest the wall head-on.
Her blade dipped.
Her wrist turned.
The thrust adjusted mid-flight, striking not the center of the wall, but a point where the earth pattern was weakest—a tiny flaw that her fire-etched senses laid bare. Fire Law's understanding of heat flow showed her the place where energy gathered least; Sorcerer inheritance layered symbols over it, outlining the crack in the structure.
The sword pierced through.
Red-gold flame exploded along its length, eating through the martial skill's structure like quiet rot. The earthen wall held for one heartbeat, then crumbled, collapsing in on itself.
On the other side, Chi Guda staggered, eyes widening as the tip of Na Yi's sword nicked his shoulder instead of his heart.
Blood sprayed in a thin line.
It burned.
He slapped a hand over the wound instinctively, channeling True Essence to heal. Flesh knit with practiced speed—his body had been honed by countless battles—but the burning did not vanish. It sank into his meridians, a dragon-flame line hissing under his skin.
"What—"
He didn't get to finish.
Na Shui was already there.
If Na Yi was the cutting wind, Na Shui was the crashing wave.
Her heavier sword came down in an overhead chop that made the air howl. Muscles bunched under her skin, bones singing with dragon blood's reinforcement. Modified Chaotic Virtues had taught every fiber of her body to remember force; every swing now carried the weight of all the perfect strikes she'd drilled in silence.
Like a mountain falling.
Chi Guda roared.
"EARTH SPLITTER!"
He brought his own sword up to meet hers, earth-attribute True Essence pouring into the blade in a violent torrent. Ground qi surged, trying to anchor his strike.
Steel collided.
For an instant, the clash held.
Then the red-gold fire along Na Shui's blade flared.
Within the contact point, Fire Martial Intent compressed the heat into a razor edge, slicing through the coarse earth energy, forcing it to burn at a higher order than it was meant to. Chi Guda's True Essence sputtered; portions of it turned to useless light.
Cracks raced down his sword.
Na Shui gritted her teeth and pushed.
The high-grade human-step treasure sword—the proud weapon of a Great General—shattered with a jagged scream. Shards whirled away, glowing red at the edges.
The remaining weight of her blow slammed into Chi Guda's chest.
Ribs snapped.
He flew backward, smashing through two bone totems before cratering into the packed earth. The bone stacks collapsed atop him, skulls rolling wildly.
Silence rippled across the camp.
Every Fire Worm warrior stared, stunned.
A half-step Houtian general, struck down in a head-on clash… by an "Altering Muscle" girl.
Chi Guda coughed, spitting a mouthful of blood and tooth fragments.
He pushed himself up, eyes wild, True Essence surging desperately to reassert dominance.
"Impossible," he rasped. "You—what monster gave you that strength—"
Na Yi's answer was a sword thrust.
She was already upon him, movement clean and precise, body barely wasting a single step. Her blade pierced the earth next to his hand as he tried to push himself upright, pinning it through flesh and dirt. Flame raced down the steel, searing nerve and bone.
He howled.
"They're simply hardworking," Ren said lazily from behind, as a Fire Worm officer tried to sneak toward the captives.
The man ignited.
No external flame touched him. His own blood heat simply… turned against him. Inside his body, warmth compressed, ignited, and burned his True Essence into smoke. He fell, shrieking, then lay still—a shell with nothing left inside.
The other warriors froze.
Terror snapped their spines straight.
Ren smiled mildly.
"I'd stay put if I were you," he advised.
The camp obeyed.
Na Shui stepped to Chi Guda's other side.
He glared up at her, hatred twisting his features into a mask.
"Little meat," he spat. "Your mother screamed for two days before she stopped making sounds. I ate her heart myself. You think—"
Na Shui's sword slid into his thigh.
Not deep enough to kill.
Deep enough to hurt.
Red-gold flame followed the steel, treating his bone marrow like dry tinder. The fire ran down the length of his femur, into his hip, chewing on the nerves that let a man stand.
Chi Guda's words broke into a ragged, animal howl.
Na Shui's eyes were bright, but there were no tears now. Her voice, when she spoke, was low and steady.
"I remember my mother's voice," she said. "I don't need you to tell me what she sounded like when she died."
She twisted the blade once, then pulled it free.
Blood hissed as it hit the dirt, bursting into smoke before it could pool.
Na Yi pulled her sword from his ruined hand and stepped around to face him fully.
"Chi Guda," she said again. "Do you remember my father?"
He snarled, chest heaving.
"He was still chanting like an idiot when I cut him down. What of it?"
Na Yi nodded slowly.
"I thought so," she murmured. "He wouldn't stop, even at the end."
She lifted her sword.
"For that," she said softly, "you'll die under the road he walked."
True Essence surged.
Fire and witch power intertwined along her blade, the latter drawn from the Sorcerer's inheritance she'd only just begun to truly comprehend. Symbols flickered along the steel—tiny, intricate lines of law, reflections of the frescoes in the Sorcerer's world, of the lives she'd lived and died in samsara.
For a heartbeat, Chi Guda saw more than a sword.
He saw a procession of worlds. A girl kneeling in prayer before a burning temple. A tribe clinging to a dying land. An old king sitting alone on a throne of bones.
Then the blade descended.
He tried to move.
He couldn't.
The sword pierced his chest.
There was no spray of blood.
The red-gold flame around the blade devoured his heart the instant it touched, then raced along his True Essence network, using his own channels as fuel. For a brief, terrible moment, Chi Guda's body glowed faintly from within, like a paper lantern with too-bright light crammed inside.
Then he crumbled.
Ash scattered across the broken ground where he had fallen, mingling with the bone dust of the totems he had toppled.
Behind him, the carved skulls split and toppled, their glyphs burning out like dying fireflies.
Silence held.
Then, slowly, the bound captives began to sob.
Na Yi let out a long breath she hadn't even realized she'd been holding.
Her knees tried to buckle once. She forced them steady.
Na Shui stared at the pile of ash that had been Chi Guda. Her chest heaved. Hands shook around her sword hilt as everything surged at once—rage, relief, grief, a wild, fierce joy that made it hard to breathe.
Ren walked up between them.
He didn't say well done. He didn't say it's over.
He simply lifted a hand and placed it gently on each of their shoulders.
"Your father and mother," he said quietly, "would be satisfied with this."
Na Yi's composure cracked.
A sob tore itself out of her chest before she could swallow it. She clapped a hand over her mouth, shoulders shaking.
Na Shui's eyes flooded. She didn't cover her face. She let the tears spill, falling hot onto the ash at their feet.
They cried—for the tribe that had died, for the girl and boy they had been, for the road that had brought them here and the one that still waited ahead.
Ren stood with them until the worst of it passed.
He didn't offer empty sayings about vengeance. He didn't turn this into a tidy lesson about Dao Hearts.
He just… stayed.
Behind them, the remaining Fire Worm warriors trembled, too terrified to move.
Ren finally lifted his head.
His smile was gone.
What replaced it was something utterly flat—a cold indifference to anything he had already decided to erase.
"Die," he said.
The Fire Martial Intent wheel rose again.
This time there was no finesse.
Flames erupted from within every Fire Worm warrior's body—joints, mouths, eyes, the pores of their skin. Dragon-infused fire devoured them from the inside, burning away flesh, True Essence, and the foul, greasy stink of their lives. Some didn't even have time to scream before they collapsed into heaps of ash in armor-shaped piles.
They fell in silence, one after another.
When the last one dropped, a wind swept through the clearing, scattering the ash into the trees, into the sky, into nothing.
Ren opened his hand.
Rings, pouches, weapons, and treasures rose from the dust, stripped clean of ownership by the authority of his Dao. They shimmered through the air like a school of fish, then turned into streaks of light and dove into the unseen depths of his Inner Heaven.
Only then did he turn back to the captives.
"You're free," he said simply. "Go back to your tribes. Tell them Fog Valley isn't paying tribute to the Fire Worms anymore."
They stared at him as if a god had just stepped down from a fresco.
He didn't correct them.
The first man to move was middle-aged, hair more gray than black, face cut with old scars. He bowed so low his forehead hit the ground.
"Thank you," he choked. "Thank you, honored one… honored cultivator…"
Ren flicked his fingers, as if brushing off dust.
He turned back to the sisters.
Na Yi had wiped her face, but her eyes were still red at the edges. Na Shui sniffed once, then squared her shoulders, expression fierce and strangely light—like a bow that had finally loosed its arrow.
"Let's find somewhere that doesn't smell like roasted cannibal," Ren said gently. "You two earned a better bed for the night."
Na Shui made a strangled sound that might have been a laugh. Na Yi shook her head, the corner of her mouth twitching despite the tear tracks.
Ren's smile turned a little softer.
He lifted his hand.
The red-gold sun-wheel spun once more.
Light swallowed them.