Chapter 826: Red Heaven’s Revenge
Chapter 826: Red Heaven’s Revenge
Rèn took a forward step, closing the distance to three feet.
Her right hand whipped out with the blinding speed of a striking viper with her calloused fingers clamping around the leader’s windpipe like an iron vise.
CRUNCH!
She crushed his throat in a single effortless contraction of her fingers, throwing his limp body aside into the tables.
The second bandit lunged with his dagger however she caught his wrist, twisted the bone until the elbow inverted with a wet crack, and drove his own blade straight through his sternum.
The third man turned to run for the window, but Rèn’s notched iron sword cleared the scabbard in a whisper-thin arc, severing his spine at the waist before his boots could touch the sill.
THUMP!
THUMP!
The tavern returned to silence as the demon sighed.
“Huuu…”
Rèn had not killed them out of righteous anger, nor had she slain them to protect the absent old man.
They had simply been standing between her boots and the open doorway.
She stepped through the shattered pine frames, walking out onto the dirt road beneath the gray autumn sky.
Within three months of Mount Xueha’s fall, the world began to fracture around her footsteps.
The Red Heaven carried no legal charters, no ancestral halls, and no unified manual of cultivation… It was hardly a sect at all…
It was a plague.
They were an unhinged sprawling cult of thousands of broken cultivators, escaped blood cattle, wandering demonic madmen, and lunatic renegades who had been cast out by both the righteous sects and the shattered remnants of the Blood Demon clans.
They followed her across the eastern provinces like a swarm of ravenous locusts.
They trailed five leagues behind her boots, keeping their distance out of paralyzed terror, painting their faces and foreheads with thick dripping strokes of animal and human blood to mimic the marks upon her horns.
…They called her the Red Heaven.
They built crude blood-stained altars of river stone along the roads where she had rested, burning offerings of dried human marrow and stolen jade in her name.
Whenever a town, a righteous checkpoint, or a garrison fortress resisted her path, the cult would swarm the barricades like rabid wolves, butchering every living soul within the walls, screaming her title into the sky until their lungs tore.
…Rèn never spoke to them.
She never learned a single one of their names, she never accepted their offerings, and she never looked back at the smoke rising from the valleys behind her.
When an orthodox elder descended from the clouds to smite the vanguard of the cult, turning twenty of the red-faced fanatics into ash with a celestial sword-strike, the dying men would crawl toward her boots, their lips bloody and their eyes wide with unholy ecstasy.
“Red Heaven! Look upon your servants! We bleed for the slaughter! Red Heav—”
Rèn would step over their severed torsos without breaking her stride, her heavy leather boots planting into their pooled blood with her crimson eyes staring straight ahead at the distant mountain ridges, never once looking down to acknowledge their existence.
They were nothing to her… The righteous were liars, the demons were vermin, and the lunatics who worshiped her shadow were merely dead men who had not yet stopped walking…
She stopped beside a weathered stone boundary marker on the high road leading into the central province.
The wind whipped her wild black hair around the curve of her black horns, rustling the coarse hemp of her traveling cloak.
Rèn reached into her spatial ring, pulling out the worn scroll of coarse parchment that had sat against her ribs for years and she unrolled the yellowed fiber with calloused fingers.
At the very top of the ledger, written in thick dark crimson strokes, was the title she had taken… The Heavenly Demon.
Rèn raised her right thumb, dipping her nail into a fresh drop of blood weeping from her knuckle, and drew a thick horizontal line clean through the name.
The line was absolute and she lowered her gaze.
Resting directly beneath the crossed-out title, written in clean elegant strokes that had never faded through all the blood and fire of the eastern plains, was the second name on the ledger.
Bai Wujian, Patriarch of the Heavenly Sword Court.
Rèn rolled the parchment tight, tucked it back against her ribs, and gripped the hilt of her notched iron sword as she looked toward the towering, snow-capped spires of the righteous eastern mountains.
…
The granite steps were no longer cracked and worn.
The Heavenly Sword Court had paved over the mountain path with slabs of polished white nephrite, veined with silver spirit-ore that hummed with ambient spiritual qi.
Where wild mountain pine needles and dry bamboo leaves once drifted into the dirt gutters, arrays of warding lanterns shaped like soaring cranes lined the path, casting an immaculate pale radiance over every riser yet the number had not changed.
Rèn stepped onto the first stone at the base of Mount Cangmu with her heavy leather boots planting firmly against the white jade.
Her notched iron sword hung loosely in her right hand, dragging a thin scarlet line through the dew.
Behind her, curling around her temples and sweeping through her wild, jet-black hair, the twin horns of petrified black bone drank the gray morning fog with their etched crimson runes pulsing with the quiet suffocating pressure of a slaughterhouse floor.
…One.
SWISH!
She climbed without rushing.
The white-robed outer disciples stationed at the lower pavilion saw her coming through the morning mist, shouted warnings, and drew their flying swords… however she did not bother breaking her pace.
Her Primordial Blood Root reached out through the air, seizing the carotid arteries in their throats, thickening their blood into frozen sludge before their toes could leave the flags.
They collapsed into the rhododendron bushes, clutching their necks in soundless convulsions, while her boots carried her upward.
…Fifty… One hundred… Two hundred… Three hundred and eleven… Three hundred and twelve…
Rèn crested the final step, stepping onto the expansive grand terrace that had once been the dirt yard of the Quiet Pine Sect.
The three drafty halls, the leaking roof, and the chicken coops were completely gone and in their place stood a sprawling palace of white marble and lacquered sandalwood, soaring five tiers into the clouds, ringed by defensive banners of white silk.
Standing in the center of the terrace, surrounded by a dozen senior cultivators in high-collared elder vestments, was Wei Heng.
He was forty now, his frame filled out with broad muscle, his white robes trimmed with threads of pure gold and a sword of refined celestial steel resting in an ornate scabbard at his belt.
He looked at the tall woman standing at the head of the steps.
His eyes traveled over the notched iron blade, the blood-soaked black linen, the burning crimson embers of her pupils, and the two black horns rising from her skull.
The color drained from his face until his skin matched his silk collar, his breath hitching in his chest.
“R-Rèn…?” Wei Heng stammered, his voice climbing into a disbelieving wheeze as he took half a step backward. “It’s… it’s you… You survived the south…?”
The surrounding elders drew their blades, but Wei Heng frantically threw his arms out, waving them back.
“Stand down! Stand down, all of you!” Wei Heng shouted, his hands trembling as he took a cautious step forward, forcing a desperate, pleading smile across his pale lips. “Rèn… little broom… listen to me! Put the sword down! You have to understand what happened that night… The Court was going to purge the mountain regardless! The elders had already marked the spirit vein! If I hadn’t made that arrangement with the southern traders, you would have died in the courtyard with the others! I saved your life! I gave you a chance to breathe!”
Rèn stopped five paces before him.
She looked at his gold-embroidered robes, looked at his soft, uncalloused hands, and looked at the silver nephrite flags beneath his boots.
Her chest was entirely silent.
The hollow ache she had carried for over a decade did not stir.. the memory of his broad shoulders carrying her through the garden did not return as she felt only the cold stillness of an iron axle.
“I remember the thirty taels,” Rèn said, her voice flat and dry as bleached bone.
Wei Heng’s breath seized.
“Rèn, please!” he begged, dropping to one knee on the marble, his hands reaching out in frantic supplication. “Look at what you’ve become! You’re thirty-two years old, and you’ve thrown away your entire youth for a dead mountain! You ate people to get those horns! I’m an elder of the Court now! I have resources, spirit stones, ancient manuals! I can clear your name! I can petition the Patriarch to grant you a mountain peak! We can rebuild Quiet Pine together, just like we promised! You and me, little sister!”
Rèn took a forward step, her left boot sliding smoothly across the polished stone.
She raised her notched iron sword, locking the crossguard level before her breastbone.
Step… Guard… Cut!
Wei Heng saw the movement, his instincts flaring as he desperately drew his celestial blade to parry the downward arc.
SHING!
Rèn’s blade did not clash with his steel.
Her left wrist angled by two inches, deflecting the celestial sword into the flags while her descending edge tracked the carotid artery along the left side of his throat.
SHHK!
The notched iron parted skin, muscle, and cartilage in a single, whisper-quiet stroke as Wei Heng froze on his knee.
His hands flew to his neck with his fingers clawing at the crimson torrent bursting through his fingers, his eyes wide with fading disbelief as he stared up into her impassive crimson pupils.
He pitched forward onto his face, his white silk robes soaking through with dark arterial spray, staining the pristine nephrite stairs he had sold his family to purchase.
The surrounding Court elders screamed in fury, unleashing their flying blades, but Rèn did not stop to watch him bleed.
She walked through their formation like a sickle through ripe wheat.
Her sword opened wrists, hamstrings, and windpipes with three-beat precision, stepping over their falling bodies as she kicked the heavy sandalwood doors of the main sanctuary off their hinges.
BOOM!
The inner sanctum was vast, vaulted with white jade arches and scented with bitter sandalwood incense.
At the far end of the meditation hall, seated upon a raised dais of blue spirit-slate, was Patriarch Bai Wujian.
The paragon of righteousness was older now, his long beard silver-white, his robes pristine and untouched by earthly dust.
His eyes opened as the splintered doors clattered across the rugs with their depths cold.
He saw the black horns, saw the blood dripping from her cuffs, and recognized the jagged scrawl of fate humming behind her ribs.
“The blood cattle from the southern pits,” Bai Wujian said, his voice deep and smooth as a mountain bell. “You slaughtered my grandson… You stole his celestial destiny, and now you drag your filth into my ancestral hall.”
His cold gaze traveled over her horns with open contempt. “Over thirty years old, and you’ve gorged yourself to the peak of the demonic path like a pig at a trough… All your power was gotten from eating which you never earned… You threw away an entire human life for that cursed shortcut, and you dare to call it strength?”
He did not draw his sword with his hands.
With a mere flick of his spiritual will, nine flying blades of white starlight detached from the weapon racks behind the dais, shrieking through the air in an interlocking lotus formation that sealed every escape vector in the chamber.
Rèn lowered her stance, her boots digging into the slate floor.
’Blood-Tide Mirror!’
She reached into the blood pooling on the threshold behind her, whipping a dense sheet of boiling crimson fluid into the air before her face, hardening the droplets into crystalline glass.
CRASH!
Six of the starlight blades shattered against the blood shield with their shards embedding into the pillars, but the remaining three pierced cleanly through her flesh… one through her right shoulder, one through her left bicep, and one grazing along her ribs.
Pain flared but her grip on the notched iron hilt did not loosen by a hair.
Rèn closed the distance in two blurring thunderous strides, leaping onto the dais.
Bai Wujian drew his ancestral blade, rising to meet her with three centuries of immaculate orthodox sword mastery.
His edge hummed with blinding white sword-qi, driving a piercing thrust aimed dead center for her throat however Rèn tilted her neck half an inch, allowing the white blade to shear through the flesh of her collarbone, and drove her left hand forward like an uncoiling iron spring, grabbing the elder by the beard.
She yanked his head downward with violent, bone-snapping leverage, smashing his face directly into the rising ridge of her left black horn.
CRACK!