The Frost-Bound Woods was no longer a place of nature. It had become a theater of the divine and the grotesque. Yin Xue, now the avatar of the Chaos Dragon Navertha, stood with an unnerving poise. Her red slit pupils tracked the panicked movements of the assassins with the cold calculation of an apex predator. The bow in her hand, Vijaya, thrummed with a frequency that seemed to vibrate the very marrow of those standing in its presence.
Wan Linxe, the "Devil Princess," felt the sweat turning to ice on her brow. The power radiating from Yin Xue was no longer the brittle frost of a Foundation Establishment girl; it was the ancient, heavy pressure of a Nascent Soul sovereign.
"You think a change of clothes changes the outcome?" Wan Linxe snarled, though her voice lacked its earlier venomous certainty.
"Kill her! Now!"
Yin Xue didn't respond with words. She raised Vijaya. Her movements were fluid, lacking any of the jagged tension of her previous exhaustion. She reached back, and as her fingers brushed the violet energy-string, a single, pulsating red arrow materialized.
It didn't look like wood or metal; it looked like a shard of a sunset, burning with a lethal intensity.
Twang.
The sound of the release was like a thunderclap in a small room. The red arrow streaked across the clearing, a line of fire cutting through the freezing mist. Wan Linxe, her survival instincts honed by a hundred near-death encounters, threw her body to the left, the heat of the projectile searing the air inches from her ear.
"Missed!" one of the assassins cried out, a brief flash of hope igniting in his chest.
He was wrong.
As soon as Wan Linxe dodged, the red arrow didn't fly off into the trees. It shattered. In a burst of chaotic geometry, the single shaft multiplied into twenty identical red arrows, fanning out in a lethal, blooming lotus of fire.
Two of the assassins, caught in the middle of a forward lunge, had no time to react. The arrows punched through them with the force of ballista bolts. One assassin was struck in the shoulder and chest, pinned to an ancient oak tree as the heat of the arrows began to cauterize his internal organs.
But the second... the second was less fortunate.
A stray arrow, diverted by a sudden gust of chaotic Qi, struck him with unerring, tragic precision. It didn't hit his heart. It didn't hit his head. It buried itself squarely in his private parts.
"GUUUUURGH—!"
The man didn't even have the strength to scream. His eyes bulged, his face turned a shade of purple that matched the twilight, and he slumped over, dead before he hit the ground—the sheer shock and the explosive Qi of the arrow having traveled directly up his spine to shut down his brain.
Yin Xue paused, her hand already reaching for another arrow. She looked at the smoldering corpse and the grotesque angle of the kill. A slight, genuinely apologetic expression crossed her porcelain face.
"Ooooooff," she exhaled, a small, exasperated sound escaping her lips. "I... I honestly didn't mean for that to happen. My apologies to your ancestors. That was... unrefined of me."
The third assassin, who had barely managed to dive behind a rock to escape the volley, looked at his fallen comrade. His face went pale. He didn't look at Yin Xue with hatred anymore; he looked at her with a primal, existential dread. He instinctively clutched his own manhood, his fingers digging into his tactical robes in imaginary, sympathetic pain.
For a moment, the battle-hardened killer looked like he wanted to drop his weapon and run back to the criminal underworld, far away from "The Ice Queen" and her accidental crotch-shots.
"Enough of this!" Wan Linxe screamed, her rage finally overriding her fear. She realized that if she didn't end this now, she wouldn't just lose her subordinates—she would lose her dignity.
Wan Linxe gathered her Rot Qi, pulling the yellow miasma from the surrounding trees. She clapped her hands together, and a massive, violet fireball—swirling with the sickly, corrosive green of her Rotting Art—formed between her palms. It was the size of a carriage, and the heat it radiated was not pure; it smelled of sulfur and decaying meat.
"Die in the filth you belong to!" she roared, launching the fireball at Yin Xue.
Yin Xue didn't move an inch. She reached for Vijaya again, and this time, a blue arrow materialized. It was translucent, looking as if it were carved from the heart of a glacier that had never seen the sun.
She released it. The blue arrow met the violet fireball in the center of the clearing. There was no explosion. Instead, the moment the blue arrow pierced the fireball, a flash of freezing energy erupted from within. The fire didn't go out; it turned into a statue of violet ice, falling to the ground and shattering into harmless, frozen chunks of rotten energy.
"Is that the best the 'Devil' can offer?" Yin Xue asked, her voice now cold and echoing with the Chaos Dragon's resonance.
She didn't wait for an answer. Her fingers danced across the string, and a green arrow appeared. It vibrated with a low, humming sound. When she shot it, it didn't travel in a straight line. It spiraled through the air, and mid-flight, it multiplied into ten arrows.
The remaining three assassins tried to block, raising their Qi shields and crossing their blades. It was useless. The green arrows didn't have the brute force of the red ones; they had something worse. They bypassed the shields, slipping through the gaps in their armor like smoke.
All three assassins were hit. One in the thigh, one in the arm, one in the side. Even Wan Linxe, despite her High-Nascent Soul reflexes, couldn't avoid the sheer volume of the spread. A green arrow grazed her left cheek, leaving a thin, emerald line of blood.
At first, the assassins looked relieved. The wounds were shallow. "It's just a graze!" one shouted.
Then, the screaming started.
The "green" was not an element. It was a primordial poison extracted from the Chaos Void. From the point of impact, black veins began to crawl across their skin like a swarm of angry insects. Their muscles began to liquefy under their skin, and their Qi began to eat itself.
Within seconds, the three assassins collapsed, their bodies convulsing as the poison turned their insides to slush. Their deaths were not quick; it was an agonizing dissolution that left them as nothing more than puddles of black, steaming bile on the forest floor.
Wan Linxe staggered, her hand flying to her cheek. She could feel the poison trying to take root, trying to rot her soul from the inside out. She snarled, forcing her Nascent Soul Dantian to flush her system with pure, concentrated Qi. The effort was immense; it was like trying to put out a forest fire with a cup of water.
She managed to purge the toxin, but the cost was visible. Her aura dimmed, and her breathing became heavy.
She looked at Yin Xue with a look of pure, unadulterated hatred. But beneath the hate, there was finally the realization: she was outmatched.
"You... you monster..." Wan Linxe hissed, her red eyes burning. "Fine! If I go to hell tonight, I'm taking you with me! I'll show you why they call me the Devil Princess!"
Wan Linxe bit her tongue, spitting a mouthful of blood into her hands. She began to chant in a forgotten, gutteral language. The ground beneath her began to crack, and hundreds of ghostly, skeletal hands emerged from the rot.
"Rotting Art: Thousand Shaman's Vengeance!"
The skeletal hands coalesced into a towering, hundred-foot-tall specter of decay—a skeletal titan made of Rot Qi and the souls of those Wan Linxe had killed. It raised a massive, dripping scythe of green energy, ready to reap the entire forest.
Yin Xue looked up at the titan, her red slit pupils reflecting the looming doom. She didn't look impressed. She looked... bored.
"A thousand shamans?" Yin Xue whispered. "I'll answer them with the death of a star."
She reached for Vijaya one last time. This time, three colors began to swirl around the notch: Gold, Black, and White. The arrow that manifested was a beautiful, terrifying contradiction—a shaft of pure light wrapped in a coil of absolute shadow, tipped with a point of shimmering gold.
"Burning Eclipse."
She didn't aim at Wan Linxe. She aimed at the sky.
The tri-color arrow shot upward, piercing through the canopy and disappearing into the clouds. For a heartbeat, there was silence.
Then, the sky turned to fire.
A massive, circular shockwave of gold and black energy erupted from the clouds, descending like the lid of a celestial coffin. It met the "Thousand Shaman's Vengeance" head-on.
BOOM—!
The sound was not a single explosion. It was a continuous, earth-shaking roar that felt as if the world were being ground between two millstones. The skeletal titan was crushed instantly, its Rot Qi incinerated by the "Burning Eclipse." The shockwave hit the ground, and the Frost-Bound Woods simply ceased to exist.
Trees were vaporized. The rock formations were flattened into dust. The clearing was transformed into a blasted wasteland of grey ash and scorched earth, extending for miles.
As the dust began to settle and the roar faded into a dull ring in the ears, Wan Linxe lay in the center of the wasteland, her gown in tatters, her Qi depleted to the point of collapse. She looked up, her vision blurry, trying to find her opponent.
"Where... where are you?" she wheezed.
"Behind you."
Wan Linxe's heart stopped. She tried to turn, but her body was too slow.
Yin Xue stood directly behind her, Vijaya raised and drawn. She was no longer aiming for the sky. Three red arrows were notched, pointed directly at Wan Linxe's back.
"It was a good fight, Devil Princess," Yin Xue said, her voice soft, almost merciful. "Truly. You were the most 'enjoyable' challenge I've had in a long time."
Twang.
The three arrows were released at point-blank range.
The first arrow punched through Wan Linxe's skull, erasing her consciousness instantly.
The second arrow pierced her heart, stopping the flow of her corrupted lifeblood.
The third arrow detonated in her Dantian, shattering her Nascent Soul and ensuring that not even a ghost would remain to haunt the world.
Wan Linxe didn't even have time to scream. Her body was thrown forward by the impact, falling into the ash of the forest she had helped destroy. The "Devil Princess" was no more.
Yin Xue took a long, deep breath. The golden light around her began to flicker and fade. The horns on her head receded, the red slit pupils returned to their calm, icy blue, and her silver hair shortened to its original length. The bow Vijaya dissolved into stardust, returning to the Void.
Her legs gave out.
Yin Xue fell to her knees, her hands pressing into the warm ash. The backlash of jumping two realms and using a Forbidden Art hit her like a physical hammer. Her lungs burned, and her meridians felt as if they were filled with broken glass.
She looked around at the wasteland she had created—a miles-wide circle of nothingness where once there had been an ancient forest.
She let out a weak, dry chuckle, a small smile playing on her blood-stained lips.
"Enjoyable..." she whispered to the empty air. "It really was... enjoyable."
She closed her eyes, her head lolling forward. She was exhausted, broken, and drained of every drop of Qi, but she was alive. And more importantly, her brother was still out there.