Chapter 830: I Agreed To This...?

Deep within Silas’s chest, behind his ribs, the Mythic Gold Core began to turn.

VUUUM!

A roaring sun of pure golden mana detonated through his vascular system in a single devastating pulse.

...The golden mana roared down through his femoral artery like liquid sunlight scoured through a frozen pipe.

The moment that pure untainted god-like essence collided with her dark parasitic demonic grip, Rèn’s spiritual sense was incinerated on contact.

"GAH!"

Rèn shrieked in agony as the psychic backlash tore through her brain, feeling as though she had tried to clamp her bare hands around a white-hot furnace iron.

Her spiritual connection shattered into fine dust, her nose bleeding fresh crimson against the stone with the golden pressure violently shoving her intrusive will clean out of his body and slamming her consciousness back into her own bruised skull.

She lay there, gasping like a stranded fish, her fingers clawing weakly at the cracks in the marble, overwhelmed by the boundless biological supremacy humming within the man standing on her ribs.

Rèn lifted her bleeding dust-caked face by half an inch, her dark crimson eyes wide with uncomprehending horror as she stared at the hem of his black trousers.

"What... what the hell are you...?!" Rèn choked out, her voice trembling with the first, terrifying fractures of disbelief. "A mortal core... cannot burn like that... What kind of monster are you...?!"

Before Silas could offer an answer, a slow dragging scuff of boots echoed from the covered stone archway leading from the western wing of the Keep.

Wandering into the courtyard was Morwenna.

The centuries-old pirate queen was dressed in a pair of loose faded linen trousers and an unbuttoned dark blue coat.

Her long stormy-black hair was tied back in a messy knot with a piece of twine and she was casually strolling across the flagstones, absorbed in digging the tip of her pinky finger deep into her left nostril.

She took three lazy steps toward the Dawnspire Gateway, flicked an invisible speck of dirt from her fingernail with a quiet snap, and stopped dead.

Morwenna blinked her stormy gray eyes.

She looked at Silas standing in the center of the terrace in his black tunic, his boot planted firmly on the back of a muscular woman who looked like she had just been dragged through a slaughterhouse trough.

She looked at the two sharp petrified black horns curving back through the woman’s wild hair, looked at the nine jagged fragments of star-gold chains dangling from her ribs, and then looked at the six girls gathered on the steps, who were all watching the scene in tense bewildered silence.

Morwenna scratched the side of her pale jaw, tilted her head at a forty-five-degree angle, and let out a low whistle that carried across the quiet courtyard.

"Well, well, well, Captain..." Morwenna drawled, her voice dripping with sarcasm. "I step away to the galley for twenty minutes to fry up some salted cod, and you’ve already dragged home a horned demoness from the gutter... What on earth is going on out here? Did the summoning array break, or did you decide the Keep needed an aggressive new coat of red paint on the flagstones?"

Silas looked over his shoulder with a grin tugging at the corner of his lips as he kept his boot anchored between Rèn’s shoulder blades.

"The summoning array worked perfectly, Morwenna," Silas explained with an easy shrug. "The light cleared and then she immediately materialized with a notched iron blade and tried to carve my windpipe out before saying hello."

Morwenna arched a dark eyebrow, strolling closer with her hands tucked casually into the pockets of her oversized coat.

"Did she now?" Morwenna chuckled, stopping two paces away from the struggling woman, looking down at Rèn’s blood-caked face with critical, pirate scrutiny. "That’s a bit rude for a newcomer. Usually, your little strays drop out of the sky weeping with gratitude and throwing themselves at your lap. Look at her... she’s still got teeth bared like a cornered reef shark."

"That’s the strange part," Silas noted, tapping his chin with his free hand. "Her loyalty is basically nonexistent I think... Every single Hero usually arrives with their contract fully seated in their soul but this one... she genuinely wanted my head on a spike."

Lupina’s bushy silver tail gave a low agitated swish against her skirts as she pointed an accusing finger at the woman pinned beneath his heel.

"I say we throw her in the lower dungeon cells until she learns some manners, Lord Silas!" Lupina barked, her amber eyes flashing with fierce wolf loyalty. "She’s feral! I could smell the blood on her from twenty paces away! She smells like she spent twenty years bathing in dead bodies!"

’We don’t have a dungeon though...? Should we give her to Thora...?’

"She is in immense spiritual distress, Lupina," Aurelia cautioned gently, walking down the steps with her hands folded, her golden hair shimmering in the light. "Look at the fragments of celestial chains still bound to her meridians... Those are not mortal shackles. They are divine binding artifacts. She arrived in the middle of a war... her spirit has not yet recognized that the battlefield has ended."

"The runic script carved into her horns is exceptionally dense," Rowenna whispered shyly from behind Solenne’s tails, her blue eyes wide through her fringe. "It appears to be an ancient dialect... It radiates a frequency of death... Hm?"

"Her physical power is remarkable," Morrighan noted in her flat, stoic voice, her crimson brows drawing together. "Even with her core depleted to near nothingness, her bone structure withstood Lord Silas’s downward leverage without snapping."

They stood there in the cool breeze, casually debating her physical parameters, her scent, her manners, and her spiritual distress as if she were an exotic trade beast brought to market, completely unbothered by the fact that she had just tried to assassinate the Lord of the territory.

Beneath Silas’s heavy leather boot, Rèn lay entirely paralyzed with her face mashed into the red-streaked dirt and cracked marble.

The humiliation was an icy, suffocating venom that pooled in her stomach.

...She was the Heavenly Demon of Slaughter.

She was the nightmare of the eastern provinces, the butcher of thirty sects, the monster whose very name caused thousands of righteous cultivators to abandon their ancestral temples and flee into the mountains like frightened sheep.

She had torn the three-thousand-year-old overlord of Mount Xueha apart with her bare hands... she had devoured the golden fate of the Son of Fate... she had shattered the divine chains of the primeval Crucible and buried her horns into the skull of the strongest man under heaven.

And now... here she was.

Her cultivation was gone... Her meridians were dry as sun-bleached river gravel... Her bones were bruised, her ribs were cracked, and she was lying flat on her stomach beneath the boot of a Lord in a black coat, while a pirate picking her nose and a silver-haired dog-girl debated whether she needed to be locked in a cellar.

’Where... where did my life go wrong...?’ Rèn thought, her dark crimson eyes staring blankly at the cracks in the marble, a cold reality-shattering despair clawing at the edges of her mind.

’I’m... I’m the Heavenly Demon...’ her soul snarled in silent, desperate, ragged defiance, her fingernails scraping weakly against the stone dust. ’I survived the pit... I clawed my way through mountains of corpses to stand under the sky... I won’t... I won’t be defeated by the likes of y—’

Her thoughts froze.

Her gaze, trapped at ground level just two inches from her bleeding nose, suddenly caught a pulsing flicker of azure light hovering in the cold air.

Rèn blinked, her vision clearing through the haze of blood and dust.

Floating perfectly still against the dark marble, bobbing gently in the night draft three inches before her eyelashes, was the exact same translucent rectangular blue tab that had appeared on the burning plateau of Jiuxiao Xing.

She had not banished it.

In her frenzied bloodlust on the battlefield, surrounded by ten thousand rotting cultists and the shattered fragments of the Crucible, she had assumed it was the Heavenly Dao’s final judgment talisman.

She had screamed at the sky, cocked her arm back, and punched her fist straight through the center of the light, entirely blind to the characters glowing upon the surface.

...Now, pinned beneath an immovable boot with her face pressed into the dirt, she had no choice.

Her eyes had nowhere else to look.

For the very first time, the Heavenly Demon of Slaughter actually read the words etched upon the glowing azure glass.

[You have been summoned by a Lord.]

[If you accept this summons, your cultivation will be reset from the Divine Supreme Realm to the first layer of the Qi Gathering Realm... Furthermore, you will lose the protection of the Heavenly Dao, as your Heavenly Fortune will be rebound to your new Lord.]

[In return, all your debts to the Heavenly Dao will be forgiven, and your seized memories will be recovered over time as you advance in cultivation... As an added bonus to help you adjust to your new environment, your Spirit Root will be slightly altered to allow cultivation using surrounding energies instead of relying solely on blood. This will not affect your existing Spirit Root Affinities for Blood, Death, Darkness and Water.]

[Do you accept?]

[Y / N]

Rèn’s breath stopped in her throat.

Her crimson pupils contracted to microscopic pinpricks as her gaze dropped to the final glowing line etched at the absolute of the tab:

[You have accepted. Initiating translocation and resetting cultivation.]

"..."

The realization detonated behind Rèn’s temples with the force of a shattered meridian.

She lay pressed into the grit, her cheek scraping the cold flagstones with her crimson pupils dilated until they swallowed the red glow of her iris.

The blue letters hung motionless before her nose, suspended in the cold air, indifferent to the screaming fire burning through her skull.

’I... I accepted this...?’

The thought clawed through her mind like jagged shale.

’I punched it... The Dao sent a trick from the clouds, and instead of severing the heavenly thread... I struck the character... I agreed to this?!’

The volcanic rage that had carried her through thirty years of slaughter, through the butcheries of the eastern sects, through the blood cattle pens of Mount Xueha, broke through the last remaining seal on her mind.

"RAAAARGH!"

Rèn exploded beneath his boot.

Her spine arched with savage convulsive force, her hips twisting against the stone with enough desperation to splinter her own bruised pelvis.

She clawed at the polished flagstones, her fingernails tearing against the seams, screeching with a raw animal frenzy that echoed off the white arches of the Dawnspire Gateway.

"GET OFF ME! GET OFF ME, YOU CELESTIAL DOG!" she howled, her voice tearing her vocal cords into wet ribbons. "I AM THE HEAVENLY DEMON! I AM THE SLAUGHTER OF JIUXIAO XING! I WILL RIP YOUR MARROW FROM YOUR SPINE! I WILL DRINK YOUR ENTRAILS! LET GO OF ME!"

Her leather-clad legs thrashed against the marble, kicking wildly at the empty air, her black horns scraping against the white marble, leaving deep gouged furrows in the upgraded stone.

From two paces away, Morwenna stood with her hands buried lazily in the deep pockets of her salt-stained coat.

She leaned forward slightly, watching the thrashing blood-drenched woman with the casual gaze of a veteran captain inspecting an unruly cargo crate that refused to sit flat in the hold.

Morwenna scratched the bridge of her pale nose with her thumb, let out a dry breath and offered a helpful suggestion.

"You know, Captain," Morwenna drawled, her stormy gray eyes flicking toward Silas with cheerful indifference, "if she’s making this much of a fuss, we could just break her skull."

The courtyard went entirely dead.

Lupina’s silver ears froze mid-twitch, Aurelia’s gentle lips parted in mild, breathless horror, while Rowenna shrank back three inches further behind Solenne’s nine fluffed-out silver fox tails.

Morrighan didn’t blink, but her spade-tipped tail halted its steady sweep against her calves, hanging stiff in the night air.

Every single person in the courtyard turned their heads in unified synchronization, staring at the pirate queen as if she were a psychopath.

Morwenna felt the weight of seven horrified stares pressing against her ribs.

She offered a careless unbothered shrug, pulling one hand from her pocket to make a quick graphic cracking motion with her knuckles.

"What?" Morwenna said, her tone as reasonable as someone discussing the weather over morning porridge. "I’m being practical... If we crack her head open with a good clean cobble, knock her unconscious for eight or ten hours, and have Eluned heal it before she wakes up, she’ll probably calm down... Works on drunken deckhands every time. You crack ’em, you tie ’em to the mast, they wake up with a headache, and by midday they’re peeling potatoes without shouting about the heavens."

"We are not cracking our newly summoned sister’s skull open with a cobblestone, Morwenna!" Aurelia protested, her gentle voice rising in rare alarm as she took half a step forward. "She is a wounded soul in the throes of cosmic disorientation! We meet violence with patience, not cranial fractures!"

"Aye, well, patience doesn’t keep your boots clean of red spit," Morwenna muttered, rolling her eyes toward the stars.

Beneath the sole of Silas’s boot, the mention of cracking her skull only poured fresh oil onto Rèn’s burning hysteria.

"TRY IT, SALTWATER WHORE!" Rèn screamed, her cheek thrashing against the marble dust, foam gathering at the corners of her lips. "CRACK IT! BRING YOUR STEEL! I WILL EAT YOUR TONGUE OUT OF YOUR HEAD! I WILL TEAR THIS MOUNTAIN TO DUST!"

Silas looked down at the wild unkempt mane of jet-black hair thrashing against his leather toe, looked at the blood she was smearing across the newly swept platform, and let out a long weary sigh through his nose.

His golden ring flickered once, settling back into calm sapphire as he lifted his boot and stepped back.

"Alright," Silas sighed. "Up you go."