Chapter 825: Red Heaven
Chapter 825: Red Heaven
It was a sharp barking sound that tore out of her throat without warning.
She didn’t know why she laughed… there was no joy in her chest, no triumph, and no warmth.
Her ribs screamed with agony where his attack had cracked the bone, her left shoulder was soaked through with her own blood, and her heart felt as if it were being squeezed in a vise of frozen lead.
Yet, as the Heavenly Demon roared in fury spinning around to crush her skull with a two-handed hammer blow, the stolen golden favor of the Heavenly Dao flared behind her temples.
The Heavenly Demon’s right heel, planted firmly on the smooth basalt, struck a puddle of the thick oily rain.
His footing, flawless and immovable for three thousand years, slipped by three-eighths of an inch as his massive downward hammer blow drifted off-center.
The concussive strike missed Rèn’s temple entirely, detonating into the floor beside her shoulder and obliterating forty square feet of obsidian into a gaping, smoking pit.
…The luck that had shielded the Son of Fate for over thirty years now turned its cold blind machinery against the ancient overlord and Rèn didn’t waste a breath.
She stepped through the smoke, driving the pommel of her sword straight into the side of the Heavenly Demon’s knee joint, snapping the bone backward with a sickening wet crunch.
CRACK!
The monster roared in agony, dropping to one knee, but even as his limb gave way, his ancient consciousness reached into the air between them.
He went straight for the blood flowing through her chest.
’Heart-Grip Hex!’
The Heavenly Demon clutched his talons into a tight trembling fist with his spiritual sense plunging directly through Rèn’s sternum into her ventricles.
Rèn’s breath stopped dead.
Her heart seized as if an iron hand had clamped down on the muscle, freezing the fluid in her aortic arch into jagged, burning needles of stationary ice.
Her vision blurred into pure gray with blood bursting from her nostrils and the corners of her eyes and her knees trembling violently as the room began to tilt.
He was tearing her life from the inside out, ripping the stolen Dao favor from her channels to nourish his dying marrow.
’Fight it…’ Rèn’s thoughts snarled through the suffocating darkness of her mind. ’Don’t let him have it… Not a single drop… Not one…’
Instead of trying to push his foreign qi out of her chest, Rèn did the opposite.
She opened every single dormant meridian in her body.
She allowed her Primordial Blood Root to bite down on his invasive grip, turning her own heart into a grinding alchemical mill.
She dragged his spiritual sense into her veins, her blood boiling at temperatures that scorched her own flesh, shredding his consciousness against the raw edges of the Son of Fate’s stolen luck.
“WHAT?!” the Heavenly Demon choked out, his eyes bulging as his own life-essence began flowing backward through the spiritual tether into her chest. “You… you mad beast… you’re incinerating your own channels!”
“I don’t need them.” Rèn rasped through teeth coated in scarlet foam.
Then she smiled.
It was a slow terrible smile that split her blood-soaked face from ear to ear, and it didn’t belong on the face of someone whose heart was being crushed from the inside.
Her crimson eyes were wide open and shining, and the Heavenly Demon, who had looked down on ten thousand screaming children without blinking, felt something cold crawl up his spine for the first time in three thousand years.
’Why is she smiling…?’ he thought. ’Why is she smiling at me…?’
She dropped her notched iron sword onto the shattered basalt as her empty hands shot forward like two iron hooks, plunging past his flailing guard, driving her calloused blood-stained fingers straight into the hollows of his collarbones.
SQUELCH!
Her fingers tore through the rust-colored skin, hooking behind his ribs with savage leverage.
The Heavenly Demon shrieked, a shattering sound of terror that shook the rafters of the Great Hall as the roof beams cracked and began to tumble.
Rèn drove her thumbs into the center of his sternum, planting her boots on either side of his massive hips.
“Hehehehehe…”
The giggle bubbled out of her throat on its own, high and breathless, like a little girl who’d found a sweet hidden in her pocket.
She didn’t know why she was laughing but she didn’t care… Something deep in her chest had come loose, and it felt wonderful.
“Stop… stop laughing…!” the Heavenly Demon wheezed, his talons scrabbling weakly at her wrists. “What are you…?! What kind of creature are you…?!”
“Your cattle,” Rèn whispered sweetly, leaning in until her nose almost touched his. “You raised me, remember…?”
She braced her knees, locked her spine, and threw the entirety of her muscular five-foot-ten frame backward with all the screaming fury of an orphan who had survived the bone-pit.
RIP!
With a sickening concussive tear of muscle, tendon, and cracked bone, she tore the Heavenly Demon’s chest cavity wide open.
The three-thousand-year-old core, a pulsing blackish-red orb of compressed, stolen vitality the size of a human skull, lay exposed amidst his shattered ribs, beating with dying rhythms.
Rèn stared down at it with her head tilted to one side and blood dripping from the tips of her hair onto the pulsing meat.
Her stomach growled and Rèn did not hesitate for a second.
’I need to eat…’
It growled again.
’I need to eat… I need to eat… I need to eat…’
She lunged forward, sinking her teeth directly into the dark, steaming meat of the core.
CHOMP!
The taste hit her first.
Three thousand years of other people’s blood had curdled inside him into something thick and it tasted of rust, rotting meat and the sour sickly smell of the pens she’d grown up in.
It coated her tongue, ran down her chin and filled her nose and somewhere in every mouthful was the wet echo of a child crying.
Rèn gagged then she bit down again then she started laughing.
She laughed with her mouth full, black blood spilling over her lips and spraying across his shattered ribs.
She laughed while she chewed, while she swallowed and while she gagged again.
The sound echoed off the collapsing rafters, wet and choking and delighted, and the Heavenly Demon stared up at her with the dull horrified eyes of a man who had finally met something worse than himself.
’More…’
…The slaughter became a feast as she drank him.
She tore through the hardened casing of his heart, her hands ripping the ancient marrow from his spine, her mouth drinking the concentrated essence of ten thousand dead children that had sustained his empire for millennia.
The Heavenly Demon thrashed beneath her with his massive hands clawing weakly at her black tunic with his skin withering from rust-red to pale gray, then to dry cracked parchment, until his fingers lost their grip and fell limp against the shattered floor.
Rèn kept eating long after he stopped moving.
When there was nothing left to tear, she sat back on her heels in the wreckage with her chin dripping and her chest heaving, and licked her fingers clean one by one, still giggling softly under her breath.
…Then came the refining, and it was worse than the eating.
The Heavenly Demon’s essence refused to settle.
It raged through her meridians like a flood of boiling tar, and it was full of him… his hunger, his age, and his memories of ten thousand children whimpering over bronze bowls.
Rèn curled up on the shattered floor and forced it down into her core layer by layer, grinding it against the Son of Fate’s stolen fortune until the two burned against each other like flint on steel.
She threw up black clots of blood that crawled across the stone on their own before they went still, she clawed furrows into the obsidian with her fingernails and she screamed until her throat tore, even then she kept refining…
BOOM!
The structural pillars of the Great Hall could no longer support the weight of the shattered ceiling.
The eastern wall collapsed outward in a roaring avalanche of black stone and timber, tumbling down the precipice of Mount Xueha, carrying half the mountain crest into the abyss below.
The storm broke as the first pale cold sliver of dawn cracked along the eastern horizon.
Rèn lay amidst the smoking rubble of the Great Hall with her body arched backward against a slab of fallen obsidian and her limbs twitching in violent uncontrollable spasms.
“Ooooo…”
Three thousand years of ancient unrefined demonic hunger were flooding through her marrow like liquid iron poured into dry sand.
Her dark crimson irises burned with the raw brilliance of two dying stars with the pupils narrowing into vertical slits that swallowed the morning light and an unimaginable agony detonated behind her brow.
“AHHHH!”
The scream tore out of her throat, shaking the dust from the fallen stones.
Her skull felt as if it were being cleaved in two from the inside by an iron wedge… The skin at her temples stretched, thinned, and tore open in twin sprays of blackish-red blood.
CRACK!
Two sharp horns of solid, pitch-black bone erupted through her untamed black hair, curving gracefully backward over her ears with their surfaces grooved with microscopic glowing crimson script that felt good.
The transformation settled and something else unfolded with it.
Rèn felt it spread outward from her body like a drop of blood falling into clear water.
Every drop of blood on the mountainside, in the rubble, in the mud, and in the veins of every living thing within three hundred paces answered her at once.
Above Mount Xueha, the pale dawn sky slowly bled to a deep wet crimson, and a fine red mist began to drift down over the ruins.
It was a domain… a world of her own laid over the real one, where her will was the only law.
’Red Heaven…’ Rèn thought, staring up into the bleeding sky.
The spasms slowed.
Rèn took a long rattling breath of the cold mountain air, wiping the dried gore from her chin with the back of her bruised wrist as she stood up from the wreckage.
Her frame had hardened with the density of the ancient marrow, her long black hair cascading in wild, untamed waves past her waist, framing a pale carved face dominated by burning crimson eyes and black horns that caught the pale dawn sun.
She stepped through the shattered gap where the eastern wall had once stood.
Below her, stretching across the lower terraces, the mountain paths, and the winding dirt switchbacks of Mount Xueha, hundreds of surviving demonic cultivators were gathered…
They were core disciples, hall masters, and wandering fiends who had survived the night of red rain.
They saw the collapsed hall… They saw the withered, hollow husk of the ancient overlord lying torn upon the stones and they saw the woman with the black horns standing at the precipice, wrapped in blood-soaked linen, holding her notched iron sword.
A collective shuddering wave of bone-deep terror rippled through the ranks however nobody raised a weapon.
One by one, like grass flattened beneath the tread of an advancing siege engine, hundreds of demonic cultivators dropped to their knees, pressing their foreheads flat against the bloody mud of Mount Xueha.
A low trembling chant began from the front ranks, swelling until it echoed off the jagged crags of the southern range.
“All hail the new Heavenly Demon…”
“All hail the master of the blood…”
“Heavenly Demon of Slaughter! Queen of the Red Heaven!”
Rèn looked down at the sea of bowed heads, her crimson eyes cold and indifferent as stone.
She did not tell them to rise, and she did not claim their oaths… She turned her back on the kneeling army, stepped over the shattered obsidian lintel, and walked down the mountain alone.
A week later, the autumn wind blew dry and thin along the lowlands.
Rèn pushed open the crooked wooden door of Lao Ma’s roadside tavern, the warped hinges letting out their familiar squeak.
SCREEECH!
The tavern smelled of stale beer, wood ash, and boiled turnip broth.
Lao Ma was standing behind the counter, a chipped ceramic jug of sour grain wine in his flour-dusted hands, wiping a bowl with a grease-stained rag.
He looked up at the sound of the door and the old man stopped moving.
His rheumy half-blind eyes traveled from the muddy leather boots, up the tall, black-clad frame, past the notched iron sword resting at her hip, and locked onto her face.
He saw the two sharp pitch-black horns curving back through her wild hair.
He saw the cold burning crimson embers glowing in her pupils, and he saw the dark dried crust of the Heavenly Demon’s heart still clinging to the collar of her tunic.
Lao Ma’s jaw worked silently, but no sound came out as his trembling fingers lost their grip.
SMASH!
The ceramic jug slipped from his hands, shattering against the pine floorboards into a dozen pieces, sour grain wine splashing across his cloth slippers.
The old tavern keeper did not ask for silver.
He backed toward the kitchen threshold, his face as white as bleached lard, his chest heaving with terrified suffocating gasps.
He tripped over a low wooden stool, scrambled to his feet on his hands and knees, and bolted through the rear screen door into the bamboo grove behind the tavern as the back door slammed shut.
SLAM!
His frantic stumbling footsteps faded down the dirt trail until the forest returned to quiet wind.
…He never came back.
Rèn stood in the center of the empty tavern with her heavy boots planted beside the pool of spilled wine and she stood there for a very long time.
…She stood there for ten breaths, then thirty, then a hundred.
She waited for the hollow ache in her ribs to tighten… She waited for the sting of tears behind her crimson eyes, or the familiar burning prickle of sorrow that used to make her throat ache when the older boys laughed at her on Mount Cangmu, however nothing came.
Her chest was as still, dark, and empty as an abandoned stone cistern.
The world had carved away the little girl who swept the steps, piece by piece, until only the blade remained.
From the dark corner booth beneath the leaking roof, three men pushed themselves up from their bench.
They were local highway bandits, armed with notched cleavers and rusted iron daggers, who had been hiding in the shadows waiting to slit the old man’s throat and loot his copper box.
They had not recognized the black horns, nor had they heard the rumors from Mount Xueha… To their dull mortal eyes, they saw only a lone woman with an old sword standing between them and the front door.
“Hey, girl,” the leader spat, brandishing his cleaver as he stepped across the pine planks. “You broke the old bastard’s jug… Leave your purse on the counter and your boots on the rug, or we’ll carve you into—”