Dusk had settled over the Twin Peak Hill, cloaking the Hanz Estate's landscape in a twilight shroud that seemed to deepen the air's oppressive weight. The Water Lily Lake, once serene, now lay under a spectral pall, its surface disturbed by a cascade of burning joss paper fluttering down like the ashes of a funeral pyre, swirling in an eerie, windless dance.
Jorge Blue's face was ashen, his usual composure frayed as the Thirst Bull Captain snapped his folding fan shut with a trembling hand. Nearby, Soren Langley's limbless form was a grotesque mockery of living being, his face and body fissured with cracks like a shattered porcelain vase.
Bang!
A moment later, a brittle crack echoed through the still air, and Soren's body exploded into a cloud of blood dust, his essence scattering into nothingness, leaving only the faint tang of scorched earth behind.
"How fares Junior Brother Vincent?" Jorge asked, his voice tight as he turned to his squad companion.
A short distance away, Rodney Luther stood up from his knee, the man's expression grim as he shook his head. "His soul has unraveled. There's no saving him."
Beside him, Emma Dawson and Ann Marlph stood in disarray, their robes and dress splattered with blood, Emma's delicate arm marked by two jagged wounds that wept crimson. Another surviving male cultivator, his clothes stained and tattered, stared blankly, his eyes hollow with shock, as if the just now horror of their ordeal had stripped his spirit bare. All of the Thirst Bull Squad looked miserable.
Jorge opened his mouth to speak, but before he could form the words, a beam of silver moonlight sliced through the suffocating darkness of the clouds, striking the water like a blade. For a handful of heartbeats, the beam stood there, a luminous pillar between heaven and earth, before vanishing as if swallowed whole. But beneath the still waters, something sinister began to awaken.
The water, thick with the stench of blood gore and rotten human flesh, began to move. Not with the ripple of waves, but with something far worse—a slow, deliberate churn, as if unseen hands were dragging the depths upward. Countless severed limbs bobbed like macabre buoys, severed heads rolled with hollow-eyed stares, and the gore-thickened water darkened further, swirling now into a vast, gaping whirlpool.
The blood lake—thick with the stench of blood, gore, and rotting flesh—began to move. But this was no ordinary ripple. The blood surface churned slowly, deliberately, as if something monstrous were clawing its way up from the abyss. Severed limbs floated like grotesque buoys, lifeless hands twitching in the current. Hollow-eyed severed heads rolled in the murk, their slack jaws whispering secrets of the drowned. Then the blood water darkened, twisting into a vast, gaping whirlpool—a hungry maw dragging everything down into the depths.
The wind came—but not from the mountain or from the sky. It rose from the whirlpool itself, a gale of rotting flesh and clotting blood, howling like a thing alive. It lashed at the onlookers, spectral fingers snatching at their robes, dragging them toward the vortex's gaping maw. And there, in its center, something formed.
A doorway.
A mouth.
Maybe both.
Its edges trembled, blurred—as if the world's fabric were unraveling at the seams. Yet the pull was unmistakable: a blackened threshold humming with hunger. What is this thing? This was no invitation. It was a lure. And the lake, now a churning gullet of crimson and shadow, waited with ravenous patience.
The Thirst Bull Squad stood frozen, their blood turning to both fire and ice as the luring nightmare unfolded before them. The air reeked of rust and decay, the lake's churning depths now a grotesque, gaping wound in the world. Yet amid the horror, Emma's beauty was a fleeting light in the darkness—her luminous eyes wide with dawning dread, her lips parted in a whisper that trembled like a candle flame in the wind.
"The Hanz Clan Treasure House…?" Her voice, once so confident, wavered as if the words themselves were afraid. She tore her gaze from the abyss to lock eyes with her companions. Their faces were pale, their pupils dilated with a feverish mix of greed and terror. The promise of untold riches glittered in their eyes, but the memory of the blood lake's horrors clung to them like a curse.
The blood lake convulsed as the whirlpool expanded, its vortex gnashing like the jaws of a starved beast. The stench of rotting flesh thickened the air, and the wind—no, not wind, but something alive—clawed at them with spectral fingers, dragging willow branches at the waterfront into its maw. The trees writhed, their skeletal limbs fluttering like damned souls dancing at the edge of oblivion. The malice in that gale was palpable, a force that wanted to devour.
Then, the whirlpool roared—a sound like a thousand drowning voices screaming in unison—and the lake's surface shattered into a blackened maw, swallowing the sky's reflection whole.
And there, in the heart of the abyss, the doorway revealed itself fully.
A colossal archway of drowned stone erupted from the depths, its surface glistening with centuries of submerged decay. Runes flickered across its surface, their glow sickly and rhythmic, like the slow pulse of a sleeping Cthulhu. Blood and rotten flesh cascaded from its edges in shimmering curtains, each droplet humming with forbidden demonic power. This was no mere gate—it was a blasphemy, an impossibility made flesh. The lake itself knelt before it, the whirlpool's fury now a worshipful chant.
The moment the potential Hanz Clan Treasury House's doorway emerged, greed surged through Thirst Bull squad's veins like poison, twisting their hearts into ravenous, clawing things. The crowd tensed, muscles coiling—ready to leap from the lake pavilion and plunge into the blood lake's vortex. Their eyes burned with hunger, their breaths coming fast and feverish.
However—
A blinding crimson light exploded from the whirlpool's depths suddenly.
It tore through the darkness like a scream, painting the lake in violent, pulsing glowing scarlet. The light wasn't just bright—it was alive, seething with something ancient and furious. For a single, heart-stopping second, the entire world was blood-red.
The Thirst Bull Squad barely had time to halt their paces or even blink before the vortex unleashed hell in a sudden.
A vicious, bloodthirsty killing intent erupted from its depths—silent, invisible, and faster than thought.
A blast—
SLASH! SLASH! SLASH!
A storm of crimson sword auras tore through the air, each one sharper than a guillotine's fall. The pavilion's wooden beams splintered like bones, the ground beneath them gouged open in ragged wounds. The attacks came not like blades, but like a slaughterhouse's frenzy—a hurricane of carnage that turned the air into a whirlwind of severed limbs and spraying blood.
No warning. No mercy.
One moment, the squad stood at the precipice of greed—the next, the world was nothing but scarlet violence and silent screams.
Jorge's world erupted in crimson.
One moment—greed, anticipation, the thrill of the treasure hunt. The next—a flood of blood-red light seared his vision, the metallic stench of slaughter clogging his nose, his throat, choking him before he could scream. His senses short-circuited—sight gone, sound muffled, even the ground beneath him feeling distant, as if he were already falling into the abyss.
Every nerve in his body screamed. His skin prickled, hairs standing rigid like a beast sensing the reaper's breath. Raw, mindless terror seized him, flooding his veins with ice. There was no thought—only the animal desperation to survive. His body moved before he could command it, lurching, twisting, scrambling in a frantic dance with death.
Somewhere in the chaos, a detached part of him realized: This wasn't a fight. This was slaughter.
And he was a mere livestock in the butchery.
The air itself seemed to scream as the sword aura descended—an apocalyptic tide of slaughter given form. It was not merely a strike, but the wrath of a furious god made manifest, a crimson deluge that blotted out the heavens. The very fabric of reality trembled as if the sky had been torn asunder, revealing not stars, but a churning abyss of gore and flame.
A blood river of carnage, vast as a galaxy, roared downward, its gore currents writhing with the echoes of countless slaughtered souls. Some unseen, unfathomable hand—be it a titan of the void or a waking Cthulhic horror—had seized this nightmare and slashed it like a demon blade toward the earth. The blade's edge was not steel, but the distilled essence of annihilation, a force so vast it crushed the air into thunder, so merciless it promised not death, but obliteration.
The crowd below had but a heartbeat to comprehend their doom before the cascade was upon them—an inverted waterfall of slaughter, crashing down with undisguised, ravenous hunger. There would be no resistance. No last stand. Only the crimson dark, swallowing all.
It was a sword.
But no ordinary blade—this was a thing of nightmares.
A crimson abomination, its steel not forged in fire, but drowned in centuries of slaughter. The stench of old blood clung to it, thick and suffocating, as if the very metal had rotted from the inside out.
The air itself shrieked as the sword moved—unseen hands guiding its hunger. Three times it struck within an instance, faster than lightning, its edge carving through space with predatory grace. Where it passed, the world seemed to bleed, the cuts lingering in the air like wounds that refused to close.
Then, with a final, bone-chilling hum, the sword ascended—hovering beneath the blood moon, a silent executioner awaiting its next command.
The air turned to copper, thick with the stench of spilled lifeblood. The elegant pavilion had become a slaughterhouse in mere moments, its wooden beams now dripping crimson.
"Junior Sister Marlph!" Jorge's scream tore through the chaos, his voice cracking with horrified realization. Though he and Rodney Luther—both ninth-layer Qi Refinement experts—had survived through razor-thin margins of skill and instinct...
Rodney had acted without thought, his arm snaking around Emma's slender waist in a desperate lunge that saved her life. The beauty now shook violently in his grasp, her delicate frame trembling like a leaf in a storm as she stared at where the deathblow had passed.
But the rest of their companions were not so fortunate.
The young male cultivator lay in ruin, his body carved apart with chilling precision—each segment of meat laid bare, as if some monstrous artisan had arranged him for display. His entrails unfurled across the ground in slick, ropey coils, steaming faintly in the cooling air.
Nearby, Ann Marlph's bisected corpse slumped in opposite directions, her torso sheared diagonally from shoulder to hip. The force of the cut had been so clean, so obscenely exact, that for a single, grotesque moment, her halves remained upright—before sliding apart in a wet, meaty sigh. Her organs, half-spilled from their cavities, painted the shattered tiles in lurid streaks of crimson and bile.
The force of Ann's ruptured corpse had sent a scalding wave of viscera crashing over Emma, painting her skin and hair in a grotesque mosaic of gore. Shards of bone, flecks of lung, and the stinging slap of arterial spray clung to her, the heat of it still fresh, still alive. The roof yawned open above them, as if the heavens themselves had recoiled at the slaughter.
Ann Marlph lay broken, her severed body ravaged by fatal wounds no cultivator could survive—yet still, her stubborn vitality refused to surrender. Blood pooled beneath her, seeping into the wooden planks of the pavilion, as her trembling fingers stretched toward Emma. Her eyes, already dimming with death's approach, burned with a final, desperate plea—save me, help me, don't let me go.
Emma's chest tightened like a vice. Grief clawed at her throat; fury scorched her veins. "Junior Sister..." The words came out as a shattered whisper, barely audible over the ringing silence that followed the massacre. She watched, helpless, as Ann's breath hitched—one last, shuddering gasp—before stillness claimed her.
Emma's fists clenched. Her nails bit into her palms, drawing blood, but the pain was nothing compared to the storm inside her. Teeth gritted, she forced down the scream building in her chest and instead lifted her blazing gaze to the blood-soaked sword hovering above them.
The sword dominated the night—a jagged scar of clotted crimson against the moon's pallid glow. This was no mere weapon; it was a tomb for the slaughtered, its pitted surface crusted with layers of ancient gore that still wept fresh blood mist. A visible shroud of malice pulsed around it, thick as fog, and within that haze screaming faces writhed—souls trapped in eternal torment, their mouths stretched in soundless agony.
Below, the blood lake had gone unnaturally still. The whirlpool's filth—the floating limbs, the staring heads—had vanished without a trace, as if the sword had consumed even the evidence of its butchery. Only mirror-clear water remained, perfectly reflecting the blade's monstrous silhouette.