Chapter 829: The Heavenly Demon Is Outmatched

The cold edge of her notched iron blade hung suspended in the midnight air, trembling with microscopic vibrations exactly one inch from the man’s jugular.

Rèn stared into his eyes.

The breath caught in her parched throat and in the span of a single frantic pulse against her temples, the bloody tapestries of her past thirty years flashed behind her retinas with blinding clarity.

...She had looked into the eyes of sixty-four core elders of the Blood Demon Sect before opening their carotid arteries... she had looked down into the weeping arrogant face of Bai Chen as she peeled away the golden threads of his destiny... she had looked upon the pristine untouchable majesty of Patriarch Bai Wujian as he knelt upon the silver-veined nephrite, awaiting a swing that she had forgotten why she swung and she had looked into the indifferent gray eyes of Sword Saint Lu Tianxing as her horns shattered his skull.

Every single one of them had carried a face she recognized.

They had worn terror, disgust, desperate righteous rage, or the cold bitter realization that their ancestral bloodlines had reached their final, muddy conclusion...

This man looked like none of them.

He was remarkably young, barely eighteen summers by his bone age, standing broad-shouldered and upright on the polished white stone with both arms resting comfortably at his sides.

His dark hair was tousled by the residual wind of the fading pillar, and his dark blue eyes, framed by glowing golden rings that hummed like miniature suns, held not a single flicker of fear.

There was no terror and there was no hatred either.

’...Huh?’

There was not even the tight defensive panic of a cultivator caught unprepared by an assassin’s leap.

He was looking at her notched blade the exact same way a village shopkeeper looked at an unruly stray cat that had hopped onto the counter to sniff an open barrel of dried salted plums.

The unbothered calm of his face ignited the boiling pitch in her chest.

’Another righteous dog...’ Rèn snarled internally, the fractured remnants of her sanity screaming through the howling void in her skull. ’Another celestial prince wrapped in clean silk who thinks the world exists to bow at his boots...!’

Her lips curled back over her teeth, revealing red-stained enamel and sharp canines as a feral hiss tore from her throat.

"Dog of the Heavenly Dao!" she screamed.

She drove her weight forward, committing every ounce of momentum to the thrust.

Step... Guard... Cut...!

She drove the notched point straight for the hollow of his throat, intending to run the rusted steel through his windpipe and nail his spine to the marble pillars of the gateway behind him.

Halfway through the lunge, her universe violently caved in.

A sickening hollow weightlessness seized her limbs, as if her bones had suddenly been hollowed out and replaced with wet straw.

The vast boundless ocean of stolen demonic vitality, the Heavenly Demon’s three thousand years of hunger and the Son of Fate’s golden luck, the ocean that had split the plateau, turned rivers backward and shattered primeval star-gold chains, was simply gone.

It felt completely extinguished, reduced to a single sputtering ember that sat shivering in the freezing dark of her dantian.

Her muscles, accustomed to moving with the concussive mountain-cleaving velocity of an apex demonic overlord, groaned under the sudden friction of ordinary air.

Her frame felt frail and absurdly light, like a sheet of parched rice paper caught in an alpine draft.

’What’s wrong with me....?!’

Her blade pierced forward, but the air did not scream... It merely hissed as she looked up, expecting to see the iron tip split his skin however the space beneath the point was empty.

Silas was not in front of her anymore.

There had been no flash of white sword-qi, no spatial rift, and no displacement of air... He had simply vacated the coordinate, drifting beneath the arc of her rusted tip with the effortless casualness of falling leaves.

Before her brain could calculate the angle of his retreat, a shadow dropped over her right peripheral vision.

He had stepped directly into the pocket of her reach with his left shoulder pressing into the space beside her bicep.

His center of gravity was balanced and immovably grounded with his dark blue eyes tracking the frantic expansion of her crimson pupils.

He cocked his right fist back, his knuckles whistling through the air in a short compact arc that drove straight into the pit of her stomach.

The impact did not carry a named technique however it did carry the concentrated mass of a Mythic Gold Core driving through flesh.

BOOM!

A circular horizontal shockwave of compressed atmospheric pressure exploded outward from her abdomen, tearing across the polished white marble of the Dawnspire Gateway.

The flagstones shuddered beneath the concussive ring, and the nine shattered fragments of star-gold chains dangling from her ribs rattled like frantic wind chimes as the air was violently blown from her lungs in a single concussive fraction of a heartbeat.

"GUH!"

Rèn’s mouth flew open with her dark crimson eyes bulging until the veins along her sclera turned bright red.

SPLATTER!

A thick dark fountain of arterial crimson burst from her lips, spraying across the pristine white marble as her five-foot-ten frame was lifted completely off the marble by the upward trajectory of his knuckles.

’That’s weird...’ Silas thought, his brow furrowing slightly as he watched her body hang horizontally in the air with his knuckles still warm from the blow.

He didn’t draw a weapon, and he didn’t call for the girls behind him to raise their shields.

In the back of his mind, the system’s territory parameters hummed with clarity.

Every single Hero he had ever summoned, from Eluned to even Aurelia, had materialized with their loyalty stats pegged near the maximum threshold.

The summoning contract was supposed to anchor an instinctive soul-deep revulsion against harming their Lord yet this woman had stepped out of the light with blood running down her teeth and had tried to sever his carotid artery before her heels had even finished touching the stone.

’She really just swung for the fences...’ Silas mused, his golden ring flaring with amused curiosity. ’No hesitation, no hesitation at all... Did the portal glitch out, or did I accidentally summon a rabid hound from the pit...?’

Rèn’s consciousness flickered against the gray edges of a blackout, but the thirty years of cornered survival that had carried her through the blood cattle pens kicked her nervous system back into frantic motion.

She did not let her limbs go limp.

Mid-air, with her stomach screaming in agonizing burning spasms and blood dripping from her chin, she contorted her spine with savage flexibility.

She twisted her hips, whipped her long black hair around her black horns, and brought her heavy steel-capped leather boot around in a vicious horizontal roundhouse kick aimed dead center at his exposed right hand, intending to snap his wrist-bones clean across the radius.

SWOOSH!

The kick connected as her leather sole struck his open palm with full desperate momentum.

CLACK!

The sound was not the splintering of bone or the tearing of sinew... It sounded as if she had kicked a five-ton block of solid glacial granite.

The concussive rebound traveled violently backward up through her ankle, through her tibia, and shattered the calcaneus alignment in her heel, sending a blinding flare of white-hot agony shooting straight into her knee joint.

His hand did not move back by so much as a hair... His fingers remained relaxed, absorbing the force of her desperate strike as casually as a stone wall absorbing a thrown plum.

’N-no...’ Rèn gasped internally, her mind reeling in pure, dizzying, reality-shattering panic. ’This is impossible... This body... this density... He hasn’t even condensed an elemental domain... Why is his flesh like primeval basalt?’

Desperation clawed at her throat.

She fell toward the marble with her boots scrambling to find purchase, her spiritual senses reaching frantically outward into the cool mountain night air, clawing at the atmosphere for the familiar dense currents of spiritual qi to ignite her meridians.

... Rèn found nothing.

The air was clean and fragrant with blooming jasmine but the free floating spiritual qi of Jiuxiao Xing, the heavenly energy that every cultivator drew into their pores with every breath, was utterly absent.

The energy existed, but it did not float freely in the wind like loose mist.

It was locked deep inside the physical essence of the world itself, bound within the soil, the mountain rock, the pine needles, and the cold starlight above.

To use it, she would have to sit in lotus posture, unravel the essence of the environment, draw it through her skin, and laboriously refine it into internal qi through hours of meditation... however Rèn didn’t have hours.

She didn’t even have half a second.

Silas looked down at her as she tumbled to the flags, his dark blue eyes tracing the thick crust of dried viscera clinging to her torn linen tunic, the bloody handprints streaking her collarbones, and the dark wet stains matting her cascading black hair.

"You know," Silas remarked conversationally. "for a Hero who just arrived through a sacred celestial gateway, you’re quite dirty..."

He took a half-step forward.

His left hand shot out with effortless precision, his calloused fingers clamping around the back of her neck like an unyielding collar of solid iron.

Before her notched blade could even sweep across the flags to threaten his shins, Silas twisted his hips, shifted his weight, and drove her face-first straight down into the cold white marble with concussive, downward leverage.

THOOM!

The impact detonated through the Dawnspire Gateway like an artillery shell.

A massive circular shockwave tore across the courtyard, blowing the fallen autumn leaves from the balustrades, rattling the crystal windows of the Keep and sending spiderweb cracks racing through the polished surface directly beneath her cheek.

Rèn’s head slammed into the stone, her nose breaking with a wet crunch with her vision exploding into a constellation of blinding white stars.

"AARGH!"

She coughed, spitting a mixture of scarlet foam, loose saliva, and marble dust onto the flags as her cheek was pressed flat against the cold stone.

Before she could thrash, a heavy weight planted directly onto the center of her spine between her shoulder blades.

Silas stood tall above her, resting his boot firmly against her upper back, pinning her muscular frame flat to the courtyard floor with the casual undisputed authority of a hunter pinning a wolf.

Behind them on the terrace, Kaelia clutched her wooden soup ladle to her chest with her dark eyes wide.

Lupina’s silver ears were pinned back, her sharp fangs showing in a protective growl, while Aurelia’s gentle hands rested on the silver hilt of her ceremonial blade.

Morrighan stood rigid, her molten-gold eyes narrowed, her black spade-tipped tail giving a slow agitated flick against her thighs.

’She’s a demon too...?’

"Stay down," Silas said softly from above her. "You’re going to break the rest of the pavers, and I used UP for those!"

Rèn lay with her cheek mashed into the red-stained marble with her teeth grinding together so violently that the enamel groaned.

The humiliation was a physical fire that burned hotter than the blood of the Heavenly Demon.

To be pinned... To be held beneath a man’s boot in the dirt like a butchered pig in the pens, with strangers watching her defeat...

"I WILL TEAR YOUR THROAT OUT!" Rèn shrieked, her voice muffled by the stone, her vocal cords tearing in raw, feral fury.

She couldn’t use spiritual qi with her dantian was empty, and her bones were hollow but blood was still blood.

She reached deep into the ancient foundation of her Primordial Blood Root, ignoring the agonizing screams of her broken heel and her pulverized ribs.

She locked her spiritual will onto the warm heavy boot resting between her shoulder blades, tracing the biological current up through his leather, through his socks, through his skin, and plunging straight into the femoral and tibial arteries running down his right leg.

’Blood-Warping Rend!’

She tried to twist it... Rèn exerted the entirety of her demonic will to violently reverse the flow of the vital fluid inside his calf, to curdle his blood into jagged iron crystals, to burst his veins from the inside out and force his knee to buckle.

For one brief heartbeat, it actually worked.

Silas’s right calf tightened, the muscles along his shin twitching involuntarily as a strange icy prickle ran through his circulation.

His toes curled inside his boot, his eyebrows lifting slightly in genuine surprise.

"Oh?" Silas murmured, looking down at his foot. "Now that’s a neat trick... You can manipulate blood without mana?"

Rèn gritted her teeth, pouring every drop of her fading soul into the grip, ready to tear his leg apart...