Walker Of The Worlds

Chapter 3017: A Harbinger Of Their Doom

The silence in the chamber was absolute.

The swirling fragments of broken fate continued to drift through the air, casting flickering shadows across the stone walls as the High Oracle of the Ephemera Sect stood frozen. His hand, still outstretched from the scrying ritual, trembled faintly.

His breathing had slowed, each breath labored, as if the revelation he had just witnessed weighed heavier than the very mountains above.

The flickering image of the vision lingered for only a moment—just long enough to burn itself into the minds of everyone present.

A field of withered lotus petals...Monks weeping blood...Twin blades dancing amidst crimson storms...Lin Mu, not as a cultivator, not as a righteous hero or a lone swordsman, but as a devil cloaked in celestial steel.

The image showed the sky burning red and silver. In the midst of the sacred fires and collapsing temples, Lin Mu stood alone, drenched in blood, surrounded by the echoes of a million howling souls.

His expression was twisted, yet his eyes gleamed with horrifying clarity—no madness, just resolve. Not a single step of his was faltering, not a single blow wasted. Every life taken, every soul crushed, had purpose.

Just as the vision seemed to end, the image zoomed out, revealing what they had never seen before in previous divinations.

The bodies.

The corpses littering the battlefield, broken and desecrated, were not faceless enemies. No... they were familiar.

They were theirs.

Priestess Xinru was the first to speak, though her voice trembled as if choked by disbelief.

"Those... they were our people," she whispered. "The Sect’s robes. The crimson insignias. The markings of the Hollow Eye. The banners of the Veiled Roots Pavilion... even the Crescent Moon seal..."

Her voice fell into a stunned hush. Around her, the others recoiled, cold sweat forming on their brows.

One of the other robed elders, voice cracking, stammered, "But this is the same vision we’ve seen for years! This battlefield... this man... Lin Mu... he was meant to lead us to salvation, to tear down the rot and burn away the world’s shackles. He was supposed to be the calamity we unleashed upon the world, not upon ourselves!"

The Oracle, still staring into the void where the orb had been, finally spoke again.

"No..."

That one word silenced every murmur, every muttered fear.

"No," he repeated. "We were never seeing the truth. Only its shadow."

Priestess Xinru turned toward him, her face pale. "Then what have we seen all these years? The signs... the portents... the ancestral fragments?"

The Oracle slowly lowered his hand, a shadow falling across his veiled face. His voice, barely above a whisper, held the weight of crumbling fate.

"They were not wrong," he said. "Lin Mu is a calamity. But not one we control."

He turned, facing them fully now. His aura was unstable, turbulent, as if what he had just seen had shaken his very core. "We thought he was the herald of a new era. A force to cleanse the world for us to claim. That the chaos he brought would spare us, elevate us, crown us."

His fingers clenched tightly. "But we never looked beyond the flame."

"What do you mean?" Priestess Xinru asked, dread already creeping up her spine.

The Oracle looked her directly in the eye, his own gaze hollow.

"I mean that Lin Mu is not the key to our salvation... he is the blade that severs our destiny. He is the end."

His words echoed like a death knell through the chamber.

"The vision never changed," the Oracle continued. "We simply never looked far enough. The scrying always ended with Lin Mu standing victorious. We assumed he had torn down our enemies. But we never questioned the nature of the corpses at his feet. We never dared look too closely."

Sure they could see the corpses of the monks and other righteous factions in the orb, but there was no surety they had been killed by Lin Mu. After all deaths were inevitable in a war and this was a holy war they were going to bring.

And yet in their confidence they had forgotten the big picture. The devilish expression on Lin Mu’s face was not because he had accepted to become their key, but rather him holding a fury greater than anything.

A fury that had sparked within him due to the deaths of his companions and allies. The Souls he was crushing were not due to reveling in power, but in vengeance!

A stunned silence followed.

Priestess Xinru stumbled back, grasping the edge of the ritual altar. "We... we placed so much hope on him. We offered sacrifices. We realigned the ley lines. The Crimson Eye branch tried to contact him... and they were erased. Erased because he is what we thought he could never be."

"A weapon," the Oracle said bitterly. "But not our weapon. A sword without a master."

Another elder’s voice cracked through the silence, hoarse with fear. "Then what do we do now? We have waited four years in hiding. The ancestors grow restless. The alliance demands movement. But if we act—if we move too soon—we might be walking straight into our own destruction."

The Oracle was silent for a long while.

Finally, he turned away from the shattered remnants of his scrying ritual and walked slowly back toward the inner sanctum. His words echoed softly behind him, but they rang louder than any command.

"We cannot avoid fate... but perhaps we can delay it."

He paused at the threshold of the inner gate.

"Until we are ready... or until we find something that can stand against him."

No one responded.

For the first time in decades, the Ephemera Sect and its allied cults tasted true fear—not of the immortals, not of the empires, not of guardian beasts or ancient secrets—but of a man they had once thought was their chosen harbinger.

The one that might become the vessel to Ephemera.

Lin Mu—the twin-bladed devil amidst the petals of doom.

And this time, he would not wait for them to strike first.