Chapter 610 - 381: Scar

"...Then don’t blame me for taking what you were so eager to give to him!"

Qian Yunxi instantly grew wary, her slender fingers tightened their grip around the hilt of her sword until her knuckles turned a stark, bloodless white.

Her two battered wings flared behind her shoulders, shedding pale flecks of white gold light into the dank shadows of the alcove.

The air had turned foul, choking on an oily, corruptive miasma that seeped from Qing Yan’s pores, but even with her meridians parched and her ribs throbbing in agony, she forced her spine straight.

"Student Qing Yan," she spoke, her voice laced with sharp, razor-edged warning, "stand down and take a step away from me. What madness are you planning to do?"

Qing Yan said nothing.

The suffocating silence between them stretched, thick with malice.

The polite, diffident disciple who had trodden the academy grounds with downcast eyes was gone, hollowed out and discarded.

Now, his eyes held a manic light, like a beast that cornered its prey.

Just then, with flick of his wrist, a sword appeared on his hands.

It materialized not from an ordinary spatial ring, but with a sickening, digital chime accompanied by a tear in the local reality.

The blade was slender, curved, and forged of a dull, curdled grey metal that seemed to suck the ambient light into its fuller, weeping faint wisps of soul-rotting black mist.

"What are you—" before Qian Yunxi could finish her words, Qing Yan slashed.

He did not cross the distance with a cultivator’s measured leap; his figure simply flickered, carried by the terrifying speed of his system’s movement arts!

The grey edge sliced through the empty air faster than thought, faster than breath, catching her completely off-guard while her depleted spiritual sense struggled to register the displacement!

SHLICK!

The steel bit deep, carving across her pale brow, slicing past the corner of her eye, and cleaving through the porcelain skin of her cheekbone down to the jawline!

"AHHHH!"

A piercing, ragged cry tore from her throat as a bright fountain of crimson splattered across the dark obsidian flagstones!

The agony was not mere flesh being divided; it was a burning hot, sizzling fire that pierced directly into the marrow of her skull, gnawing at her divine sense like concentrated acid!

But Qian Yunxi quickly clamp her teeth down until her gums bled, and forced her two wings to beat in a violent, desperate flap, throwing her body backward to put distance between herself and the blade!

THUD!

Unfortunately, her back immediately touched a wall.

The cold, unforgiving obsidian surface offered no escape.

The corridor ended in a brutal, jagged dead-end, trapping her in a three meter pocket of stone.

She pressed her spine hard against the damp rock, her chest heaving in frantic, shuddering gasps, blood pouring down the left side of her face and dripping from her chin onto the tattered silk of her collar.

Qing Yan smirked, his fingers idly flicking a single drop of her blood from the flat of his grey sword.

"Look at you," he murmured, his voice dripping with venomous, mocking amusement. "Haoran only likes you for your face, Yunxi. So I will ruin it. Then, you can only wait to be abandoned by that man."

He took a slow, leisurely step toward her, his bloodshot eyes drinking in the sight of her disfigurement with perverse, manic delight.

"To a man like him, you are just an ornament," Qing Yan sneered, his chest heaving with distorted fervor. "A pretty flower to pluck and show off to the other ancient clans. But now? That flower has withered, its petal turning brown and dry. In other words, you have become an ugly girl that no one would want, cast aside into the dust the moment he sees this wretched ruin. But I, Qing Yan, am different. I love you, Qian Yunxi, not for your body, so even if your whole face was ruined, I will continue loving you."

He placed a trembling, filth-caked hand over his heart, his face twisting into a hideous parody of earnest devotion. "Only I see your soul, Yunxi. Only I truly cherish you. Even if you were skinned alive, even if your flesh rotted to the bone, I would still build an altar for you and worship you every second of my life!"

"I’m charmed," Qian Yunxi said sarcastically as she glared at him, the left side of her face bleeding, a river of red staining her vision, painting the world in shades of carmine.

Her breath came in ragged, wheezing gasps, but the hatred burning in her right, unclouded golden eye was pure, unyielding fire.

Then, she he brought her hands to her wound and tried healing it, her trembling fingers pressed against her left temple and cheek, summoning the last lingering dregs of her light energy.

A soft, warm Divine radiance bloomed beneath her pale fingers, searing the open flesh with holy heat.

The bleeding stopped, the ragged edges of the skin knitting together under the sacred light, but the scar remained.

Beneath her fingertips, the skin did not smooth out into its former porcelain perfection.

Instead, a thick, blackened, jagged seam ran from her brow down to her jaw—an ugly mark that throbbed with a sickly, purplish hue, stubbornly resisting every thread of celestial vitality she poured into it.

Qing Yan shook his head, a patronizing, pitying smile stretching across his mangled face.

"Save your strength, my sweet Yunxi," he whispered. "This attack not only injures the flesh but the soul as well, after all, that blade was forged with the Soul-Brand of Perpetual Sorrow. Although you are healed now, the scar will remain, so even if your soul were to leave and find a new body, it won’t heal nor will it disappear. It is engraved into your very spiritual matrix. You are marked forever."

"You...!" Qian Yunxi was breathing heavily, her hand slowly dropping from her ruined cheek, her fingers slick with clotted red.

A cold, bitter sneer pulled at the right corner of her lips, her gaze cutting through him like shards of winter ice.

"It seems to me," she rasped, her voice trembling with disgust, "that it was you, Qing Yan, who treats women like trophies, not Haoran."

Her words sliced directly into the delusion he had spun for himself.

"You project your own pathetic, groveling nature onto him," she continued, her breathing shallow as she forced herself to stand tall against the stone. "Do you think that doing this would make me love you? What a joke. You carve my face, lock me in a corner, and expect me to throw myself into your arms out of gratitude? You disgust me to the very marrow of my bones. She’d rather bite her own tongue and detonate her own core than let him have his way."

The sheer, unapologetic venom in her refusal struck him like a lash across the face.

Qing Yan shook his head, his eyes widening in frantic, disbelieving frustration. "Why? Why are you so stubborn?!"

He took another aggressive stride forward, his sword trembling in his grip. "Haoran will not like you anymore! You’re ugly, and the scar is disgusting to look at! When he sees you, he will turn away in revulsion! He will find another jade-skinned maiden to warm his bed, and you will be left in the gutter! Only me, only I can accept you! Only I will look at that wretched mark and call you beautiful!"

Qian Yunxi remained silent, her gaze unblinking, utterly unmoved by his desperate ravings.

So she shook her head.

"It doesn’t matter," she said, her tone calm, flat, and absolute. "Even if he scorns me, even if he casts me aside, it changes nothing about who I am or who I choose to follow him, so I will continue following him, even if it’s in the dark. I will be his sword from the shadows, his shield when the sky falls, and I will die for him with a smile before I ever let a crawling cur like you touch the hem of my robe."

Qing Yan’s jaw clenched so hard a molar cracked, sending a sharp burst of copper into his mouth.

His eyes drowned in pure, hysterical darkness.

"How stubborn."

With that, he rushed towards Qian Yunxi!

BOOM!

The stone beneath his boots shattered as his Spirit Ascension cultivation erupted without restraint!

The narrow corridor became an inescapable kill-zone of suffocating, violent pressure!

Qing Yan was overwhelming Qian Yunxi completely!

She raised her Sword, attempting to parry, but the disparity in their current states was an insurmountable chasm.

Qian Yunxi’s core was parched, her ribs cracked, and her soul reeling from the spiritual curse; Qing Yan, fueled by system stimulants and mad adrenaline, struck with the crushing kinetic force of a collapsing fortress!

CLANG!

His grey sword hammered down onto her golden blade!

The impact drove Qian Yunxi to her knees, the stone flags fracturing beneath her shins, a fresh spray of blood bursting from her lips as the kinetic shock ripped through her broken meridians!

She can’t even fight back!

Her muscles screamed in protest, her arms shaking so violently she could barely keep her grip on the hilt.

Qing Yan didn’t use his blade to sever her head. Instead, he dropped the weapon, his hands shooting forward like iron vices, trying to touch her inappropriately!

His bruised, filthy fingers reached for the torn silk across her collarbones, his eyes burning with rabid lust as he lunged to tear the white fabric from her breasts!

"You’re mine!" he hissed, his foul breath washing over her face. "You’ve always been mine!"

Qian Yunxi gritted her teeth in pure revulsion, twisting her torso with frantic, serpentine agility!

She snapped her upper right wing forward like an iron shield, smashing the golden feathers against his face, forcing his grasping claws aside!

She rolled across the stone floor, her boots kicking off the wall, scrambling back toward the entrance of the alcove!

Qing Yan snarled, his hand whipping around to grab the hem of her skirt!

RIIIP!

The white fabric tore in his fist, but Qian Yunxi pulled herself free, throwing a desperate, left-handed palm strike charged with solar flame straight into his throat!

Qing Yan didn’t even flinch. His Spirit Ascension strength snapped the nascent flames out of existence with a casual pulse.

He lunged again, tackling her around the waist, his broad frame slamming her down against the cold flags!

BANG!

The breath was violently knocked from her lungs, her vision flashing white as her head cracked against the stone!

Qing Yan scrambled on top of her, his heavy knees pinning her thighs to the floorboards, his hands locking around her slender wrists and slamming them hard above her head against the stone!

Qian Yunxi trashed frantically, her wings beating uselessly against the narrow walls, her boots kicking at the air, but her depleted strength was like water slipping through iron bars against his heavy, realm-suppressed weight.

Qing Yan loomed over her, his chest heaving, his face contorted in a triumphant, rabid sneer.

His dark, matted hair hung down, framing a visage of utter madness.

"Look at you," he chuckled, a wet, breathless sound. "Pinned under me. Where is your proud Young Master now, Yunxi? Where is your savior?!"

He lowered his head, his chapped, blood-stained lips parting, and was about to be kissed!

The stench of his sour bile and rotting breath washed over her mouth, his lips descending toward hers in a frantic, violating plunge!

Qian Yunxi’s eyes flared with glacial, homicidal wrath.

Instead, she is simply gathering the absolute last, agonizing spark of physical kinetic force remaining in her battered body, she arched her spine, bent her right knee back to its absolute limit, and drove her armored boot upward with everything she had!

CRACK!

She kicked him in the balls with the pointed, iron-reinforced steel plate of her sabaton!

OOF!

The sickening, dull crunch of shattered cartilage and pulverized bone echoed off the obsidian walls like a snapped branch!

The triumphant sneer on Qing Yan’s face died instantly

His eyes bulged out of his skull until the red veins threatened to burst, his pupils shrinking to needlepoints.

Every drop of blood drained from his face, turning his skin a ghastly, translucent shade of sickly grey.

The breath froze in his windpipe, his mouth opening in an empty, silent scream as an unimaginable, soul-tearing agony radiated from his groin, shooting straight up his spine and detonating inside his brain like a celestial thunderbolt!

His grip on her wrists went completely slack.

Qian Yun wasted not a single second as she shoved his dead weight off her chest with both hands, kicking her heels against the stone to slide out from beneath him, scrambling to her feet like a cornered lioness!

Leaving Qing Yan writhing in pain!

"GAHHHHHHH! HNNNNG... AHHH!"

A strangled, high-pitched wail finally tore from his throat as he collapsed onto his side, curling into a tight, pathetic ball against the wet flagstones.

His hands clutched frantically between his thighs, his knees drawn up to his chin, his entire body convulsing in violent, uncontrollable spasms as he dry-heaved onto the stone, vomit and bile spilling past his trembling lips.

Qian Yunxi backed out of the alcove, her chest heaving, the sword retrieved in her trembling right hand, the bloody black scar across her face throbbing with dull, burning agony as she glared down at the wretched, groveling creature in the dirt.