Chapter 823: Eating The World’s Blessing
Chapter 823: Eating The World’s Blessing
The final hunt ended on a nameless muddy hillside in the desolate borderlands between the eastern plains and the dead marshes.
It was late autumn.
The sky above the slope was an unnatural, bruised sheet of purple-gray clouds that churned with suffocating celestial tension.
Cold stinging rain lashed across the tall switchgrass, flattening the weeds against the slick red clay.
Bai Chen stood near the crest of the hill with his back braced against a jagged outcrop of dark basalt.
He was breathing in wheezing gasps, his golden-embroidered white robes torn to filthy tatters around his knees, his face pale and smeared with mud yet, despite his starvation, his spiritual aura was terrifyingly vast.
His core sat three whole cultivation tiers above hers, radiating the fierce blinding white radiance of the late Core Formation realm, and in his right hand, he clutched the Sun-Cleaving Celestial Blade.
The sword hummed with the blinding golden favor of the Heavenly Dao with the blade shining so brightly through the downpour that the falling raindrops vaporized into steam before touching the steel.
At the bottom of the slope, twenty paces away, Rèn walked up through the mud.
She wore a simple tailored tunic of coarse black linen, soaked through by the storm, clinging tightly to her tall, muscular, five-foot-ten frame.
Her jet-black hair hung in wild drenched ropes down her back, plastered across her pale cheeks, framing two dark crimson eyes that held the cold empty stillness of a freshly dug grave.
In her right hand, she carried an ordinary iron broadsword, its edge notched from a hundred battles and its dull gray surface streaked with rainwater.
Bai Chen looked down at her, his jaw trembling with a mixture of hysterical rage and lingering aristocratic arrogance.
“You mad, demonic wretch!” Bai Chen screamed, his voice cracking against the thunder rolling overhead. “You think you can drag me down into your filthy gutter?! Look at the sky! The Heavenly Dao chose me before I drew my first breath…! I am the Son of Fate! The heavens will strike you into ash before your foot touches this ridge!”
“And look at you!” he howled, spittle flying from his split lips. “How old are you, demon? Thirty? You’ve thrown your whole youth into the mud crawling after me! You could have married! You could have had children, a roof, a garden, a life! Instead you spent your best years gnawing on corpses in the dark! Whatever power you have, you stole it by devouring people! It’s cursed! Every single drop of it is cursed!”
Rèn did not answer.
’Oh… he knows I ate people…?’
She took a forward step, her soaked leather boots sinking two inches into the slick red clay and her center of gravity settling low and wide.
RUMBLE!
Without a whisper of lightning from the clouds, a blinding spear of celestial thunder dropped straight out of the purple sky, striking directly toward the crown of Rèn’s head.
The air smelled of scorched ozone half a second before the blast.
Rèn did not look up.
She felt the sudden displacement of air-pressure against the fine hairs on her neck, shifted her left heel four inches to the side, and allowed her torso to pivot along her hip-joint.
CRACK!
The celestial lightning struck the mud where her left foot had been planted half a heartbeat prior, detonating the clay in a violent shower of boiling steam and scorched earth.
The concussive shockwave ripped past her collar, but her balance did not waver by a single millimeter as she stepped through the smoke, closing the distance to fifteen paces.
Rèn took another step.
CRACKLE!
Beneath her right boot, the soaked hillside gave way.
A jagged, five-foot chasm tore through the bedrock beneath the grass, threatening to swallow her leg and snap her femur like a dry twig.
Rèn did not leap away.
She drove her heel directly into the descending lip of the fracture, using the sudden drop of the rock as an angled launching wedge, kicking off the falling stone with explosive bone-shattering force.
She cleared ten paces in a single, horizontal blur of black linen and Bai Chen’s eyes bulged in pure panic.
He raised the Sun-Cleaving Celestial Blade with both hands, channeling the entirety of his Core Formation spiritual qi into the edge.
The sword detonated into a blinding sun of golden light, capable of cleanly bisecting high-tier armor and sundering mortal steel upon contact.
He drove a vicious two-handed diagonal cleave toward her neck.
SWOOSH!
Rèn knew the limits of mortal iron… The instant her dull gray edge met that heavenly steel, her weapon would shatter into powder.
Instead, Rèn altered the distance.
She dropped beneath the arc of the golden light, her knees brushing the wet grass, sliding under his reach.
Her left hand shot upward like an uncoiling iron spring with her open palm bypassing the glowing blade entirely to strike the inside of Bai Chen’s right wrist.
SLAP!
The concussive impact deflected the golden cleave three inches above her head with the heat singeing the tips of her black bangs as the blade tore through empty rain.
Before Bai Chen could recover his center of balance, Rèn’s crimson core detonated behind her ribs.
She locked her gaze onto the swollen arteries pulsing in his right shoulder.
’Blood-Stalling Lock!’
She reached into his vitality with her Primordial Blood Root, seizing the fluid racing through his brachial artery and yanking it backward against the natural pumping of his heart.
The effect inside Bai Chen’s body was immediate and catastrophic.
The blood in his right arm thickened into frozen boiling lead in an instant.
The muscles in his forearm seized in violent screaming cramps as the oxygen was violently choked from his tissue as his fingers involuntarily locked open, and the golden radiance humming along the Sun-Cleaving Celestial Blade flickered and died like a snuffed candle.
“GAH!” Bai Chen wheezed with his face draining of all color as his right arm went completely numb.
He stumbled backward through the red mud, frantically trying to channel his spiritual qi to purge the blockage.
Rèn was already there.
She rose from the grass with smooth, mechanical leverage. Her iron sword shifted into the high guard with the blunt crossguard locked level before her breastbone.
Step… Guard… Cut….!
She took a forward step, closing the half-pace gap.
Her blade swept downward, ignoring his armored chest entirely and tracking the exposed tendon running along the back of his left knee.
SHHK!
The iron edge bit deep through cloth, flesh, and gristle, cleanly severing the hamstring tendon and Bai Chen let out a strangled shriek as his left leg gave out entirely, collapsing onto his knee in the mud.
He swung his left fist in wild desperation with a burst of raw spiritual qi crackling around his knuckles, aiming for her temple.
Rèn tilted her chin half an inch, letting the fist whistle past her ear.
Her left elbow drove horizontally into the side of his jaw with the concussive force of a falling portcullis.
CRACK!
Three of his molars tore free, spitting blood and saliva into the rain as his head snapped violently to the side.
Bai Chen reeled back, and the heavens tried one last time.
The white jade pendant at his throat, the same one he’d once bent down to pick up in a tea pavilion, cracked down the middle on its own as a dome of blinding golden light burst out of it and slammed shut around him, humming with the last of the Dao’s protection.
WHUMM!
“Heaven’s Last Mandate…” Bai Chen sobbed, clutching the broken pendant to his chest. “It’s still with me… it’s still with me…”
Rèn looked at the shining barrier for one heartbeat then she reached straight through it with her Blood Root.
The golden light could stop steel, lightning and fire, but it had been made to protect him from the outside… It had never been made to protect him from his own blood.
’Crimson Thread!’
Every drop of blood in Bai Chen’s left arm snapped taut inside his veins like a fishing line yanked from the deep.
His own arm wrenched upward against his will, and his own knuckles smashed into his own face.
CRACK!
The golden dome flickered, sputtered and went out.
Bai Chen fell onto his back in the soaked switchgrass, his right arm paralyzed with his left leg useless, his chest heaving as the mud swallowed his white silk robes.
He looked up at the sky, his hands clawing at the dirt, screaming at the purple clouds with raw, hysterical broken despair.
“SAVE ME!” he wailed, his voice echoing off the desolate hills. “HEAVENS! DAO OF THE ANCESTORS! I AM THE SON OF FATE! STRIKE HER DOWN! STRIKE HER—”
Rèn stepped over his hips with her heavy leather boots planting into the mud on either side of his ribs, pinning him to the earth like an insect on a mounting board.
She stood tall above him, the rain streaming down her pale, sculpted jawline with her iron sword hanging loosely by her right thigh and its tip dripping red onto his chest.
She looked up at the churning purple clouds.
’Hm?’
…No lightning fell… No rockslides moved… No wandering immortals dropped from the mist to offer tea and righteous wisdom…
The clouds merely drifted across the sky, indifferent and silent, having exhausted every single miracle the laws of fate could muster to shield a spoiled prince who had run out of road.
Rèn slowly lowered her gaze, her dark crimson eyes staring down into his weeping terrified face with freezing detachment.
“The heavens should have picked a better son,” Rèn whispered softly and she knelt.
She did not kill him with a clean, merciful strike to the throat.
Rèn set her iron sword aside into the wet grass.
She placed both of her bare, calloused hands flat against his chest, right over his violently hammering heart, and drove her Primordial Blood Root deep into his meridians.
The slaughter was slow and quiet as she began draining him.
Bai Chen’s body arched off the mud, his throat opening in a silent, paralyzed scream as every drop of his refined golden-tier vitality, his marrow, and his cultivated essence was drawn upward through his skin.
…It was ugly work.
His skin sank inward as she pulled, tightening over his cheekbones and ribs like wet paper drying over a frame.
His eyes clouded over and shrank back into his skull.
His golden blood came up through his pores in thick, glittering beads that soaked into her palms, and the stench of it rose off the hillside through the rain, sweet and rotten at the same time, like honey poured over a carcass.
Rèn’s stomach heaved however she swallowed the bile back down and kept going.
She took far more than his blood.
Bound to the deep golden currents of his life force was the tangible, shimmering favor of the Heavenly Dao itself… the accumulated luck, the celestial destiny, and the golden fate that had wrapped around his soul since birth.
Rèn’s Primordial Blood Root swallowed it all however swallowing it was only the beginning.
Stolen fate didn’t want to belong to her.
It thrashed inside her channels like a living thing, golden and furious, trying to claw its way back out through her skin so Rèn dragged it down into the core behind her navel and refined it the only way she knew how.
She ground it… Her blood root turned around it like a millstone, crushing the Dao’s favor between layers of her own boiling blood, burning away everything that still remembered Bai Chen, his pride, his name and the shape of his face, until all that was left was raw ownerless fortune then she sealed it into her blood.
She vomited twice before it was over and the sludge that came up was black, and it smoked in the rain.
Her meridians roared like dry riverbeds struck by an alpine flood.
The stolen essence tore through her channels, burning like liquid molten gold, scouring the walls of her veins, breaking open dormant ancient energy pathways that had remained locked since her childhood.
Her core expanded with violent shuddering concussions with the density of her blood thickening until it hummed like a drawn bowstring.
WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSH!
It was the most powerful god-like sensation she had ever experienced in her entire life.
…She felt as though she could reach up and crack the purple clouds with her bare knuckles, as though the earth itself was holding its breath beneath the weight of her boots.
When it was over, nothing remained in the grass beneath her hands except a withered gray husk wrapped in tattered rags.
Rèn sat back on her heels in the red mud with her chest heaving and steam rolling off her shoulders in the freezing downpour.
That night, the sky cleared into a freezing, starless vault of black velvet.
Rèn sat beneath the overhang of a hollowed-out limestone crag at the summit of the hill, her knees pulled against her chest and her arms wrapped tightly around her shins.
The golden essence of the Dao still churned through her marrow, but with the stolen luck came the inevitable, crushing weight of celestial retribution.
The Dao’s backlash had begun.