With the news of victory, the humans in the camp became extremely motivated and, together with the shadow soldiers, forced the beasts to retreat with growing momentum.
The tragic battle on that terrain stained with black blood, beneath skies darkened by gloomy clouds, almost seemed as if, in the face of hopeful news, the entire environment became a little brighter and even pleasant to those who survived.
Among them, Wang Mei, the holy daughter, was exhausted from the battle, yet still steadied her body purely by recognizing that victory was so close.
Even with her status and potential, she was, in truth, not one of the strongest there. On the contrary, due to her young age, she was average in strength, and as a leadership figure who had to take the forefront of the fight, she ended up going through very difficult moments in the past hours.
The news she reported about the Tree of Life earned her the goodwill of the Shadow King, making her one of his spokespeople among the humans, which granted her great status in the camp. However, her strength barely allowed her to keep up with the pace, and at that point in the battle she was completely exhausted, leaning on her delicate sword embedded in the ground with her last strength.
Her breathing was heavy, her eyes struggled to remain open, and her body sweated like a cascade—her energy was near its end. This state alone would already be enough to put her in great danger, should the impurities be able to invade her as they did outside the camp.
'My choice to stay, whether out of gratitude or acceptance, ended up being the right choice in the end.' Wang Mei pondered as she recovered a bit of her energy, now that she was out of combat.
She watched, with a hint of gratitude in her eyes, a shadow soldier take the forefront of the battle and engage the beasts around, preventing her from being torn apart in her moment of weakness.
Everything seemed to be heading in a good direction, which greatly lifted her spirits. And, as the cherry on top, it was at that moment that a loud noise came from behind, drawing everyone's attention.
When they turned, they saw a cloud of shadowy beasts streaking through the air and crossing the inner walls of the camp, like a true swarm of beasts that took over the entire horizon.
The humans froze at the sight and nearly soiled themselves in fear. However, upon noticing that the eyes of those beasts were purely black and lacked the expected crimson tint, they finally understood what it was.
They were not shadow beasts that had broken through other flanks of the camp to attack them, but shadow soldiers, their allies. And their number was far greater than the three hundred thousand who had departed.
As soon as they arrived, they were like reapers, harvesting enemy heads with every step, quickly clearing the heavy flow of shadow beasts.
The beasts were simply powerless to resist. After all, these new soldiers were created with the bodies of shadow beasts that had come with the Rhinoceros King from a deeper part of the small world, where power was much greater than at the edges where they were.
When the tide of shadow soldiers passed harmlessly by the still-frozen humans and moved ahead, massacring everything as far as the eye could see, the cultivators finally came to their senses and collapsed to the ground. Some knelt, others sat, and some even lay down, gasping without energy and with eyes still full of shock, wondering if everything that had happened was real.
Whether their heavy breathing came from the exhaustion of battle or the fear of death they had felt throughout the day, none of them could say.
Wang Mei did not lower herself like the others, even though she was equally exhausted. She remained standing, looking in the direction where a large portion of the shadow soldiers had marched, as if they had a specific purpose.
Her eyes carried a hint of confusion and caution about what they intended to do.
For that was the direction the deserters had run.
…
Aotian controlled his soldiers with one of his minds as he marched toward the place where the cultivators who abandoned the camp had fled.
From the perspective of the shadow soldier leader of that army, whom he controlled directly, the path to the objective was not difficult to recognize.
Bodies upon bodies lay scattered along the road, abandoned and unrecognizable, many torn into pieces. Men and women, elders and youths—even children—were part of the macabre sight.
Although it could not be said that there were real children there, since all cultivators who entered possessed some cultivation realm, at least at the Golden Core, which already proved that their ages likely did not match their appearances, this still did not lessen how disturbing the image was, nor the proven fact of what would truly happen if those beasts, together with the corrupting impurities, were to leave that small world.
The number of bodies was countless, and they were everywhere: hanging from dry trees, sunk into the soil, floating in murky water sources.
'Brutal…' Aotian could only use that word to describe the scene as he observed the bodies spread all around.
All that carnage, in the end, merely served to trace a path along which the soldiers marched without emotion.
Upon turning into shadows, they no longer possessed personalities, only instincts and a bit of common sense carried by their bodies, along with absolute loyalty to their creator. They could act without Aotian's direct control, but they were more like programmed marionettes, incapable of making decisions on their own.
The march continued for miles, and as expected, all he found were the dead.
In the end, in a small clearing, he found what was likely the last stand of those who abandoned the camp: a large pile of human corpses.
Around it, millions of shadow beasts and even many humans transformed into corrupted beings wandered the area, without much purpose, as if searching for sources of impurity to hunt, but still having identified none.
'They look like zombies…' Aotian reflected, frowning.
As they were very far from the camp, added to the reduced number of humans there, the attraction was much weaker, and it had not yet drawn those shadow beings back to that location.
But Aotian knew that soon, the scent of impurities from the camp would surpass that of the humans who had fallen in that place of massacre and would once again invite them to feast.
'It's a pity you won't be here anymore when the scent of impurities arrives to attract you again.'
Shaking his head, while controlling the leader of the shadow soldiers, he raised a finger, pointing at the creatures ahead, and under his order, the soldiers advanced like a tidal wave, destroying everything in their path.
When attacked, the shadow beasts snarled and fought back, but they were completely powerless to resist. This time they lost in every aspect: numbers, strength, and organization.
The shadow leader did not participate in the massacre and simply walked to the pile of human bodies there, which bore many bite and claw marks scattered across them, with some even showing signs of having been thrown aside as something emerged from beneath.
'Probably newly converted shadow beings. They must not have died before transforming,' he analyzed as he crouched down, resting his arms on his knees.
In the end, seeing no sign of life, he sighed, shaking his head helplessly.
'If you had stayed, this wouldn't have happened.'
Even though they were traitors and unworthy of trust, if not for the sudden crisis of the Rhinoceros King's attack, he would have preferred that they had never left.
Beyond the clear utility of having more people in the camp as attractants for shadow beasts, which would strengthen his army, he simply did not want so many people to die uselessly there.
It was not because they had abandoned the camp that he judged them deserving of death. Aotian had never been so executioner-like in his judgments.
At most, he was merciless toward rapists, whom he never judged to have any right to mercy, regardless of the reasons. He hated them.
Aside from that, he was quite clement and merciful, as shown on the occasion when he was recruiting for the sect and encountered a man who had let his friend die while hiding in cowardice. He did nothing to the man, though he showed him no goodwill either.
His judgments for accepting disciples could be harsher, but that concerned a power that belonged to him, so it was fair that he decided meticulously to whom he wanted to grant it or not.
And those who did not pass his test were simply not accepted as disciples, without suffering any loss throughout the examination. Unless they had crossed the threshold of villainy, being cruel and murderous without cause or reason, driven only by pure malice—those, if Aotian discovered them, would receive no mercy.
Pushing himself up with his hands on his knees, the shadow leader, directly controlled by Aotian, looked at the surrounding corpses with slightly conflicted eyes.
'I really have changed a lot.'
He sighed to himself as he sensed the metallic smell in the air, the fetid odor of impurities, the pool of blood and entrails beneath his feet, and observed the surrounding scene, which, beyond the bodies, was also composed of the massacre his soldiers were carrying out among the enemy ranks of corrupted creatures.
At this point, Aotian could not deny that he was no longer the same person as before.
'If this were the past, I wouldn't even be able to stay here, indifferent to everything around me. I would have already looked away, vomited, or even gone mad… It seems I've changed far more than I realize.' He looked at his pitch-black, ink-dark hands, which now, in his vision, suddenly seemed stained with blood.
Sighing once more, after a moment, he lowered his hands, as if already resigned to his new mentality.
Aotian then commanded his soldiers, who had already eliminated the beasts in record time with their great numbers, to bury the human bodies, as well as to separate and carry the bodies of the shadow beings for conversion.
Although he was not opposed to turning human corpses into soldiers, he usually did so only with enemies or with those whose actions he had categorized as "courting death." As for the humans there, they did not fit that category, as he had conducted no such investigation into them.
Thus, he decided to bury them. After all, transforming them would, in fact, be a profanation of the bodies of the deceased, and outside of matters concerning his enemies, Aotian was still quite decent.
Moreover, these hundreds of thousands of bodies would not change much of his army's strength, which after the battle with the Rhinoceros King had grown to an impressive twenty-five million, and would only continue to grow from there.
As for the humans who had turned into shadow beings, Aotian would still convert them. After all, when someone is consumed by impurities, the nature of the entire body changes, and one can no longer say that it is still that person's body. Thus, he regarded it as profaning the body of a shadow beast, not a real human.
After all, if he applied this rule strictly, he also would not be able to convert shadow beasts, since they had probably once been normal spiritual beasts.
While thinking about various things, amid a scene of slaughter, treating everything as something natural, Aotian suddenly looked to his right, where, a few hundred feet away, some commotion was taking place.
"Let her go! What do you want to do?!"
A shout of rage and fear rang out, breaking the silence that followed the extermination of the surrounding beasts.
The one shouting was a young man who appeared suddenly and shoved a shadow aside, running to embrace the body of a young and beautiful red-haired girl, who had been dragged by the creature moments before.
Covered in tears and anger, the cultivator's face could not hide the deep sorrow he felt at the pain of loss as he looked at the girl who no longer had breath.
The shadow soldier that had been shoved had the bodily form of a leopard, and, reacting instinctively to the aggression, bared its teeth and raised its paw, claws extended, ready to strike with lethal intent—almost draining the young man of all courage.
Fortunately, Aotian raised the shadow's hand and, through his mental command, made the leopard stop.
The beast lowered its paw and retreated a few steps slowly before lying down, never taking its eyes off the young man.
Aotian then approached with silent steps. First, he looked at the bloodied body of the girl and her eternally closed eyes. Thoughtful, he then raised his gaze, staring at the young man.
That cultivator had, in fact, followed him since the camp, but Aotian had never stopped him nor revealed his presence. He wanted to see what he would do, and it seemed the answer was already there.
["Why are you stopping us from burying the dead?"]
The shadow suddenly asked, making the boy widen his eyes and tighten his embrace around the girl's body.
"B-Bury…?" he stammered, a mixture of surprise and fright in his voice, as if he hadn't fully returned to his senses yet.
The shadow in front of him tilted its head.
["Yes, bury."]
The answer was simple, but it deeply shocked the one who heard it.
"Y-You're not going to eat her, or turn her into one of yours?" He swallowed hard and stood up, holding the girl in his arms, taking a few steps back.
The shadow remained still, merely observing him, which made him even more nervous.
["We, shadows, do not eat; we only live on energy. And we do not transform humans; we are not impurities."]
Aotian answered the first part truthfully, while blatantly lying in the second. At the same time, he pointed to the side, where his soldiers were already digging holes and burying the dead.
Upon seeing the scene, the cultivator immediately fell silent, torn between shame for having misjudged others and sorrow, as he lowered his eyes to the beautiful girl in his arms, filled with bitterness.
Aotian originally did not intend to pay much attention to the young man, perhaps even ignore him, but the sudden realization he had about the drastic change in his own mentality since arriving in that world made him act differently.
Thus, he asked something that confused the person in front of him.
["What was she to you?"]
The question made the young man pause for a second. Looking at the being who had protected them, yet at the same time resembled so much the enemies they had fought against and had killed his beloved, he hesitated.
Aotian, seeing him remain silent and stare back in confusion, slowly lost interest.
He began to turn away, when suddenly the boy's voice rang out behind him.
"She is my junior sister, and I… I thought we were in love and that we would share the same destiny. But when everything went wrong, and I stood firm, insisting it was better to stay in the camp, she… she waited until I looked away and left without me. I think she didn't want her decision to influence me, or perhaps she feared that I would keep holding her back…"
Aotian halted where he was and listened.
"I don't know what she was thinking, but in the end she ended up falling here, while I remained alive… if she had listened to me, if I had been firmer…"
The cultivator began to lament, but Aotian's thoughts were already far away, lost in his own.
He stood there with his back to the young man, listening to his many 'ifs' for a few minutes, until finally, he responded abruptly.
["Ifs won't bring her back. Some things in life do not depend on our choices, but on the choices of others. We cannot force everyone to follow a path predetermined by ourselves…"]
He spoke while reflecting on his own attitudes since arriving in that world.
As his power grew, he realized that he began to value his own voice more and more, setting aside the doubts and hesitations he had at the beginning. He became increasingly the leader he was forced to be, while losing something essential in the process: others did not always need to be led, but also listened to.
With complicated thoughts in mind, he left with his great army, leaving behind the young man kneeling in tears, with the body of his beloved in his arms, and countless graves around.
What the poor cultivator did not know was that there was a single shadow hidden beside a tree, waiting there to escort him safely back.
Perhaps the only thing that had not changed in Aotian, in the end… was his gentle heart.