The Sky Rending Peak was drowning in blood, but the Righteous Coalition was no longer shouting. They had learned over the past brutal month. Screaming at Mo Jue was a waste of breath.
He stood at the center of the shattered Peak, leaning heavily against a petrified Rank 5 Phantom. His once immaculate robes were reduced to blood-soaked rags, sticking to the countless lacerations across his flesh.
The encirclement was absolute. Every mountain pass was blocked by the world's high rank Grafters. Every path to the sky was sealed by a suffocating golden suppression array.
Death was a certainty.
Yet, Mo Jue processed this fact with cold detachment. There was no frantic light in his eyes, no trembling in his ruined hands. His gaze was as deep as the sea. It made the surrounding Sect Elders and rising stars instinctively tighten their grips on their weapons.
They kept their distance. Every survivor on the peak knew that a Rank 7 Demon, backed into the abyss, carried the explosive yield of a collapsing star. The blood debt he owed the Shattered Heavens was incalculable.
Two thousand years of depravity, millions of lives refined to temper his Phantom.
"The containment arrays are stabilizing!" a voice finally pierced the howling gale. "His essence is bleeding out! Prepare the execution strike!"
Mo Jue swayed, a lonely figure bathed in the fading twilight. He hadn't trusted another living soul in a thousand years. He had walked the path of the Shattered Dao alone, acting as an apex predator in a world that romanticized competition. But to rise up against the world was to eventually be crushed by the weight of its collective resistance. He had always known this truth.
Looking at the sun, a chuckle escaped Mo Jue's throat.
He didn't offer a final poetic lament. Poems were for scholars, and he had abandoned that life a long time ago.
Instead, he looked down at his own chest, where the phantom weight of his ultimate creation rested.
"The firmament is just another cage," Mo Jue murmured to himself, his voice carrying the chilling weight of absolute certainty. "And cages erode."
"He's channeling! Strike him down! Secure the Seed!"
The coalition surged forward like a tide of steel and blinding light.
Mo Jue didn't fight back. He simply collapsed his own Reliquary, driving every drop of his strength directly into the Aeon Erosion Seed.
The eruption was soundless. It was not a bang, but a terrifying, visual roar of space and time tearing itself apart, swallowing the peak in a sphere of absolute, devouring white.
The sensory return was jarring.
---------------
The first thing Mo Jue processed was rain against a thin windowpane. It was deep into the night. The air was cold, carrying the distinct scent of nature.
Black Silt Ridge.
Outside, the darkness was punctuated by clusters of lanterns glowing like embers in the mist. These lights marked the dense residential blocks of the Mo Clan Village. A fragile pocket of order clinging to survival in a world of horror.
At the highest point of the village, the windows of the Refinement Hall were ablaze with candlelight.
"Pressure at forty percent and climbing," a deacon murmured, his hands trembling as he held a diagnostic jade. "The Ridge is restless tonight. The earth is pushing back."
The Head of the Mo Clan stood stoically before the central altar. He was a man of fifty with silvered temples, his hands permanently stained with the black ink of the archives. He wore a pristine white robe, but his posture was as rigid and stressed as a drawn bow.
Before him floated the core of the Village's Protection Array, surrounded by thick coils of incense smoke.
Behind the Clan Head, twenty elders and high-ranking deacons knelt in unison. These were the masters of the local containment zones. They were pressing their hands to the floor, actively bleeding their own soul essence into the array to keep the village's protective golden membrane from collapsing.
"The quota for the Expedition is still short three vessels," an elder stated, his voice tight with strain. "If tomorrow's trainees are as brittle as last year's batch..."
"The quality is irrelevant, we need bodies," another elder snapped. "The Zhao Clan just secured two Rank 2 combatants from their latest awakening. They are already encroaching on the southern gates. If we don't produce a great talent tomorrow, we lose the resource veins by autumn."
A heavy, oppressive silence fell over the kneeling men.
"There is... a chance," one elder finally noted, lowering his voice. "The orphan from the outer branch. Mo Jue."
The Clan Head didn't turn around. "That boy."
"Precisely. He has spent the last decade reciting fragmented scriptures. His intellect and processing speed are unsettling. Early cognitive development often correlates with an expansive Reliquary capacity."
"It also correlates with madness if the vessel cannot contain the Phantom," the Clan Head countered coldly. "But... beggars cannot be choosers. If his Reliquary hits even a seventy percent capacity, he becomes our best chance to plug the gap in the next generation. We need stability."
The Clan Head finally turned, his gaze sweeping over the exhausted elders.
"The hour is late. Withdraw and rest. Tomorrow's evaluation requires your absolute focus. The survival of the Mo Clan depends on it."
"May the Dao be contained," the elders murmured in unison, bowing deeply before rising to disperse into the quiet corridors.
Alone in the hall, the Clan Head walked to the window, looking up at the thin, flickering golden membrane shielding them from the horrors of the Ridge.
"The hope of the clan," he whispered bitterly to the glass.
At that exact moment, in a cramped, freezing room in the outer village, a pair of eyes snapped open.
They were perfectly clear, devoid of the fog of sleep, and filled with a cold, terrifying depth.
Mo Jue sat up on his straw mat, letting the cold spray of the spring rain hit his face through the cracked windowpane.
"Mo Clan Village," he whispered, his voice a youthful, unused rasp. "Before the Great Disaster."
He didn't look at his hands. He immediately closed his eyes and drove his consciousness inward, searching his own chest. He bypassed his lungs and heart, plunging into his spiritual center.
Where there should have been a vast, starry ocean of demonic power, there was only a cramped, unrefined void.
Although he has a seventy-four percent capacity Reliquary, it does not matter now. It is currently a fragile vessel.
"It worked," Mo Jue breathed, a dark, chilling smile touching his lips. "A regression of two thousand years."
The rain continued to patter against the sill. But as he felt the cold bite of the wind, he knew better.
He received another chance