The moon seemed to recoil from the Sun-Dappled Pavilion, its pale light eclipsed by the shimmering, stardust-veined radiance of the entity that had once been Yin Yue. In the center of the garden, the Mother of Cosmos stood ten feet tall, her silhouette framed by ten arms that moved with the slow, terrifying grace of a galaxy's rotation. Each hand clutched a divine instrument of destruction, their humming vibrations shaking the very marrow of the men who surrounded her.
The hundred-plus mercenaries, hardened killers who had survived border skirmishes and underworld wars, were paralyzed. The air had become thick, flavored with the metallic tang of cosmic ozone and the cold, airless vacuum of the void.
Finally, one mercenary—a scarred veteran with a jagged scar running across his nose—spat on the blood-soaked marble. He gripped his heavy claymore with white-knuckled desperation, his voice cracking as he tried to rally his failing courage.
"Don't let the light fool you!" he bellowed, though his knees trembled. "It's just a little girl playing with fancy illusions! Some flashy transformation won't stop a hundred blades! She's still just a—"
He never finished the sentence.
Yin Yue didn't even seem to look at him. One of her secondary right arms, draped in the translucent, starry matter of Zyvaleth's grace, flicked forward. The Spear of the Void—a weapon carved from the heart of a dead star—vanished from her grip.
There was no sound of a projectile traveling through the air. There was only the sudden, violent thwack of impact. The mercenary's head didn't just split; it detonated. The force of the divine spear hitting his skull was so absolute that his head blasted apart like a ripe melon dropped from a mountain peak, spraying brains and bone fragments over his comrades.
Before the headless corpse could even begin to slump, the spear blurred and reappeared in Yin Yue's hand as if it had never left. Not a drop of blood stained its obsidian tip.
Yin Yue turned her gaze toward Yuan Mo. Her eyes, once a bright and bubbly amber, were now twin swirling nebulae of violet and gold. A faint, cruel smirk played on her lips—a expression that looked entirely alien on her youthful face.
"Well?" her voice echoed, a haunting chorus of a thousand whispers layered over her own. "How much longer are you all going to stand there like statues? I thought you came here to kill a 'pig-tailed brat.' Surely a hundred 'great warriors' aren't afraid of one little girl?"
The mockery was the final spark in the powder keg of their terror.
"KILL HER!" Yuan Mo shrieked, his voice reaching a pitch of pure hysteria. He tried to shout more commands, to coordinate a formation, but his words were drowned out by the collective roar of a hundred desperate men charging at once.
Yin Yue didn't retreat. She didn't even take a defensive stance.
One of her upper left hands tossed the Lotus of Divine Light into the air. The flower didn't fall; it hung suspended thirty feet above the courtyard, expanding until its petals were the size of wagon wheels. Suddenly, it ignited. A pillar of white, celestial radiance erupted from its center, shining so brightly that the garden became a miniature sun.
The mercenaries screamed, their retinas searing as the divine light blinded them. To them, the world became a white void; to Yin Yue, the world remained perfectly clear, every enemy highlighted in a crimson hue of destined death.
With the Lotus illuminating her prey, the carnage truly began.
The arm that had thrown the Lotus reached back, seizing the Bone Bow. Simultaneously, her other nine arms began a rhythmic dance of slaughter. As she pulled the bowstring—launching translucent arrows of soul-fire that pierced through three or four men at a time—her primary arms were a whirlwind of steel and force.
The Mace of Demolition swung in a wide arc, pulverizing the chests of five men who tried to close the gap. The sound of their ribcages collapsing was like the staccato of dry timber snapping in a fire. On the opposite side, the Sword of Physical Rend danced through the air, severing limbs and heads with the effortless ease of a hot wire through silk.
The mercenaries were no longer attackers; they were wheat before a cosmic scythe.
"Move! Get around her!" a Core Formation captain yelled, swinging a fire-infused halberd.
Yin Yue's fifth arm thrust the Trident of Gravity toward him. The captain didn't even get to swing. The air in front of him suddenly became a hundred times heavier. He was slammed into the marble floor by an invisible fist of gravitational force, his armor flattening against his skin before his internal organs burst under the pressure.
In the span of five minutes, the garden was a lake of red. Yin Yue moved through the crowd with the fluid, multi-tasking precision of a machine. While two arms blocked incoming strikes with the Axe and Vajra, three others were busy sniping targets at the perimeter with the Bow and Chakram.
The Chakram of Entropy was particularly gruesome. Thrown into the densest part of the crowd, it didn't just cut; it decayed. Every man it touched felt their vitality drained instantly, their skin turning grey and brittle as they crumbled into dust before the blade even moved on to its next victim.
Ten minutes.
That was all it took for the her to systematically dismantle the hundred mercenaries Yuan Mo had brought.
The garden was silent now, save for the crackling of the celestial fire and the wet, rhythmic thud of blood dripping from the pavilion's eaves. The white lilies were gone, replaced by a carpet of broken steel and cooling meat.
Yin Yue stood in the center of it all. She began to walk. Her footsteps were heavy, echoing against the silence. She was completely covered in blood—thick, dark, and steaming in the night air—but not a single drop was her own. It stained her white robes, turned her golden hair into a matted copper, and dripped from the tips of her ten divine weapons.
Yuan Mo was no longer standing. He had fallen onto his butt, his hands scrambling for purchase in the gory slush as he tried to crawl backward. His eyes were wide, his pupils dilated until they were almost entirely black. He let out indignant, high-pitched whimpers, his mind unable to reconcile the bubbly girl he knew with the ten-armed slaughterer approaching him.
"Stay back!" he screamed, his voice breaking into a sob. "Monster! Demon! You're a curse on this family! You're not Yin Yue! Get away from me!"
Yin Yue stopped three paces from him. She looked down at him, her nebulae-eyes devoid of any sisterly warmth or even human pity.
"You threatened Shen-er," she said. The voice was no longer a chorus; it was just Yin Yue, but it was a Yin Yue who had looked into the eyes of a Death Goddess and didn't blink. "You told me he was being butchered. You laughed at the thought of his head on a spike."
She raised the Chakram of Entropy.
"Let's see if you're still laughing when the pieces are yours."
Fwoosh.
The Chakram spun. Yuan Mo let out a gargled shriek as his right arm was severed at the shoulder. The entropy-energy immediately cauterized the wound with a grey, dead crust, preventing him from bleeding out too quickly. He needed to be awake for the rest.
"MY ARM! AHHH! YOU BITCH!"
Yin Yue didn't blink. The Mace of Demolition descended next.
CRUNCH.
With a sickening wet thud, the mace slammed into his left leg, pulverizing the femur and tibia into a paste of bone and marrow. Yuan Mo's head snapped back, his mouth opening in a silent scream as the shock hit his nervous system.
"One for my brother you mocked." Yin Yue whispered.
The Sword of Physical Rend flicked out in a blur of silver.
Slice.
His left arm fell into the blood-slush, cut so cleanly that he didn't even feel the pain for a full three seconds. He looked at the stump, his mind finally breaking into true madness.
"Please... please stop... mercy..."
"Mercy is a luxury for the living," Yin Yue replied. She raised the Orb of the Nebula. "And you, Yuan Mo, died the moment you stepped into my garden."
She didn't strike him with the Orb. She simply pointed it at his right leg. A localized field of intense gravitational pressure—the weight of a collapsing moon—crushed down on his limb. The leg didn't just break; it was flattened against the marble, the muscle and skin bursting like an overfilled balloon under the weight of the cosmic force.
Yuan Mo lay there, a limbless, shattered torso in a sea of his own gore. His breathing was shallow, a wet rattling in his chest. But before the darkness could take him, he looked up at her, a final, spiteful glint in his dying eyes.
"You... you think this is over?" he wheezed, blood bubbling from his lips. "I was... just the beginning. The Wu Family... they won't spare the Yin... next time. One of the Five... they want you all... gone. My failure... is just a delay..."
Yin Yue's eyes narrowed. The Wu Family. One of the other Great Families had been the architect behind this night. The treason went deeper than a disgruntled former Elder.
"Thank you for the name, Uncle," Yin Yue said, her voice like ice. "I'll be sure to tell the Goddess of Death where to find them."
She raised the Executioner's Axe.
SHLICK.
With a single, powerful stroke, the axe cleaved through Yuan Mo's neck. His head rolled away, the expression of spite still frozen on his face.
But Yin Yue wasn't done. She raised her tertiary right arm, the one clutching the Vajra. She pointed it at the limbless, headless torso remaining on the ground.
"Burn in the silence of the hell."
A bolt of violet-white celestial lightning erupted from the Vajra. It didn't just strike the body; it consumed it. In a flash of blinding heat and the smell of ozone, Yuan Mo's remains were vaporized, turned into fine grey ash that was instantly scattered by the cold mountain wind.
Only the head remained, a grisly orb of bone and flesh rolling to a stop against a shattered stone lantern.
The silence that followed was absolute.
Slowly, the shimmering, starry matter of the eight auxiliary arms began to dissolve, receding back into Yin Yue's shoulder blades like smoke being pulled into a vacuum. Her height shrank, her muscles softened, and the divine weapons vanished one by one into the ether of her pact.
The Spike Crown flickered and died.
Yin Yue stood in the center of the massacre, once again a seventeen-year-old girl in blood-soaked robes. The transformation had taken an immense toll; her skin was pale, and her breath was a shallow, shivering rasp. Her legs wobbled, the adrenaline and divine energy leaving her system and leaving only the crushing weight of exhaustion behind.
She swayed, nearly falling over a mercenary's discarded shield, but she caught herself. She wiped a smudge of blood from her cheek—only succeeding in smearing more across her forehead.
She looked toward the doorway of the pavilion. Xiao Mei was still standing there, her face a mask of such profound, speechless terror that she looked like a statue herself.
Yin Yue took a shaky step toward her, then stopped. She took a deep breath, forced her trembling lips into a wide, bright, and utterly characteristic smile, and raised a shaky hand.
She gave a clumsy thumbs up.
"Mission... accomplished, Xiao Mei," she croaked, her voice regaining a hint of its usual bubbly lilt despite the carnage surrounding her. "The garden is... a bit messy. I think we'll need... a lot of soap."
With that, her eyes rolled back slightly, and she sat down hard on the bloody marble, the "Mother of Cosmos" once again becoming the youngest mistress of the Yin, waiting for the sun to rise over the ruins of her home.