Chapter 141: The Rotting Outside

Chapter 142: The Rotting Outside

The perimeter outside the Ancient Palace was already a graveyard before the screaming even started.

For three days and three nights, soldiers and disciples from the Four Great Sects held the valley. The sky above the mountains was gray and dark. Below it, the ground was covered in mud, black beast blood, and guts.

"Hold the line! Keep firing!"

Captain Kaelen swung his sword with heavy, tired arms.

The blade cut clean through the neck of a blind, scaly beast crawling from a trench. The beast fell, spitting burning acid that hit Kaelen’s armor. Kaelen didn’t even blink. He shoved the dead body into the ditch and kept moving.

Around him, five thousand soldiers and disciples were fighting without rest. They were the rearguard. Their job was to protect the exit while their young prodigies and elders went deep inside the palace.

They were exhausted. But they thought they were winning.

Then, from deep beneath the palace, the earth shook.

THUMP.

It wasn’t a normal earthquake. The sound hit everyone directly in the chest.

Every single soldier stopped moving. Kaelen gasped, his vision turning red. A dozen spearmen dropped to their knees, throwing up yellow bile.

Even the horde of blind beasts stopped. They began to shake in fear. Then, they turned around and scrambled back down into the cracks, running away from the palace gates as fast as they could.

THUMP.

A second pulse shook the valley.

The massive gates of the Ancient Palace groaned.

A thick, oily mist rolled out from the darkness. It didn’t float in the air. It crawled along the mud like spoiled milk. It smelled terrible—like rotten meat, copper, and dead bodies.

"What is that smell?" a young soldier muttered, backing away from the wooden wall. His hands shook around his spear. "Captain... what is coming out of the gate?"

Kaelen didn’t answer. His teeth were chattering.

The cold was in his bones.

The moment the dark mist touched the barricade, the spiritual energy in the air didn’t fade—it rotted.

"Ah... ahhh..."

A low groan came from the third trench.

Private Ren, a boy only nineteen years old who had volunteered from a small border town, dropped his weapon. The spear hit the rocks with a clatter. Ren fell to his hands and knees. He began clawing at the frozen dirt until his fingernails ripped clean off, leaving bloody streaks on the ground.

"Ren!" his sergeant shouted, running toward him. "Pick up your spear! What are you doing?!"

"The teeth..." Ren wept, his voice sounding like a scared child. "The teeth in the rocks... they’re chewing my mother... they’re chewing her into soup..."

"What are you talking about?!" The sergeant grabbed Ren’s shoulder.

The moment he touched him, the sergeant screamed.

Ren’s skin was as cold as ice. Beneath the boy’s pale face, his veins were swollen, dark purple, and moving under his skin like worms.

Then, Ren looked up.

His eyes were gone. They had turned into milky white balls leaking thick black slime down his face.

With a wet CRACK, his jaw broke and dropped open twice as wide as a normal human mouth.

"HUNGRY!" the boy screamed.

Before the sergeant could draw his knife, Ren jumped on him like a wild dog.

He didn’t use Qi. He didn’t use a weapon. He buried his teeth straight into the sergeant’s neck.

TEAR!

Blood sprayed across the mud. It wasn’t red—it was a thick black sludge that burned the air with smoke. The sergeant fought and clawed at Ren’s face, but the boy felt no pain. He ripped out a chunk of flesh, swallowed it whole, and smiled with his bloody mouth.

"Mutiny!" someone screamed from the wall. "The boy is crazy! Shoot him!"

Two archers drew their bows, but before they could shoot, their bodies froze.

SNAP.

Their bowstrings broke. The archers dropped their bows. Slowly, their hands moved toward their own faces.

"Stop..." one of them cried, tears running from his wide eyes. "Please... make it stop... the voice is too loud..."

Without warning, the archer pushed his own thumbs straight into his eyes.

SPLAT.

He didn’t scream. He let out a strange, quiet laugh as black sparks crackled across his head. His body jerked like a broken puppet before falling over the wooden rail and crashing into the mud below.

Panic spread through the camp like fire.

The Ancient Palace had not just released poison. With the ancient entity waking up inside Jules in the deeper levels, pure evil was leaking into the outside world. It fed on fatigue, fear, and panic.

Cultivators watched in terror as their own inner energy turned foul.

"My dantian... my chest is on fire!" a disciple screamed, ripping his shirt open.

His chest glowed. The bright blue Water Qi he had cultivated turned into black, bubbling sludge. His skin broke out in disgusting black boils that popped, splashing rotten fluid onto the people next to him.

"Kill them!" an officer shouted, drawing his glowing sword. "The fog is a curse! Form a circle! Kill the infected!"

Ten soldiers formed a ring with their iron shields. They combined their Qi to make a protective wall.

BOOM!

The barrier didn’t block the corruption. It absorbed it.

The ten soldiers froze instantly. Their eyes rolled back. At the same time, without saying a word, they turned their shields around and slammed the iron edges straight into the faces of the wounded survivors behind them.

CRUNCH! CRUNCH! CRUNCH!

Bones broke. Skulls crushed. The soldiers didn’t speak. They moved like cold machines, grinding their own comrades into meat while black sparks jumped between their fingers.

"Mercy! Please, have mercy!"

A rogue cultivator dropped his sword, fell to his knees, and hit his head against the bloody dirt in prayer.

Next to him stood a young female medic. She had spent the last three days bandaging wounds. Now, she stared down at her shaking hands. A scalpel glinted between her fingers.

She looked at the praying man. A sweet, empty smile appeared on her face.

"Don’t pray," she whispered softly. "The master says... bones make the best walls."

SHIK.

She shoved the scalpel deep into the back of his neck.

The man’s prayer ended in a gurgle.

She dragged the knife down, cutting open his back while giggling. Black mist poured into the open wound, turning his body into another thrashing monster.

The defensive line was gone.

Not because of monsters.

Because human beings were losing their minds and eating each other alive.

Captain Kaelen stood in the middle of the blood, his sword dripping with the black blood of four of his own men. His lungs burned. He could hear dark whispers in his head:

Drop your sword.

Cut your own throat.

It won’t hurt anymore.

"NO!" Kaelen roared. He bit his own tongue hard until the sharp taste of fresh blood snapped his mind back.

He swung his sword and cut off the head of a crawling body that used to be his friend. The headless corpse still crawled toward his boots before falling flat.

Around him, out of five thousand men, less than two hundred were still sane. They stood back-to-back in small groups, surrounded by hundreds of their former friends who crawled and snarled in the mud with black veins and sharp teeth.

A young soldier behind Kaelen started crying. "Captain... we’re dead. The world is dead..."

"Shut up!" Kaelen shouted, his eyes bloodshot. He raised his broken sword one last time as dozens of blackened monsters climbed over the dead bodies toward them.

"If we die," Kaelen growled, "we die fighting!"

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

The sky above the valley exploded.

A massive pressure came down from the clouds, instantly blowing away the black mist for miles around.

CRACK!

A giant blade of golden-white wind, hundreds of meters wide, slammed into the ground.

It crushed fifty monsters to dust in a single second, leaving a smoking trench in the rock.

The remaining infected stopped and hissed, crushed flat against the mud by the sheer gravity of the pressure.

High above the camp, the air warped.

Four figures stood in the sky on solid platforms of Qi.

At the front stood General Vaelric Ashford.

His white hair blew in the wind, his heavy iron gauntlets crackling with force. His face turned pale with pure horror as he looked down at the bloody mess below.

Next to him was Patriarch Roan Blackwood, his golden Metal Qi burning so hot that the mud dried into cracked stone.

To their left was Matriarch Estelle Argon, her face white as chalk, her hands shaking as she saw humans chewing on human arms.

And next to them stood Lemo Drackar, with bright silver lightning dancing across his dark cloak, his cold eyes staring down at the evil black mist.

Behind them stood the elders of their sects.

They had rushed back the moment they felt the mountain shake.

None of them had expected this nightmare.

General Vaelric looked at the screaming, blackened men, then at the piles of severed limbs, and finally at the dark gates of the Ancient Palace.

His iron gauntlets creaked as he clenched his fists in rage.

"Ancestors forgive us..." the General whispered, his voice shaking.

"What kind of hell... did our children walk into?"​