Within the oppressive, suffocating confines of the Hanz Clan Estate, buried deep beneath the still, cold waters of the Moon Reflection Mirror in the desolate rear mountains, a chilling and profound stillness held dominion over the hidden courtyard. It was a silence that was less an absence of sound and more a presence of its own, a heavy, watchful quiet that seemed to swallow all echoes and smother all hope, leaving only the weight of ancient stone and the burden of legacy.
It was into this tomblike hush that Krogh Hanz, who had been seated in motionless meditation for countless hours, snapped his eyes open. His gaze, sharp and preternaturally aware, cut through the gloom with a sudden, visceral intensity, fixing upon the tiny, perfectly still lotus pond at the heart of the Frigid Sanctum.
His face, usually a masterpiece of cold, implacable resolve, betrayed for a single, unguarded moment a flicker of deep unease, a crack in the granite of his composure. The very air in the sanctum grew thicker, heavier with an unspoken and gathering dread, as if the weight of the fate he had chosen for them all were pressing down upon his shoulders like a spectral, unforgiving hand.
He was not alone in that sacred, sorrowful place. A presence, both intimately familiar and chillingly alien to all he had once held dear, coalesced from the shadows beside him—a whisper of fine silk moving against stone and the faint, metallic scent of old copper that no amount of perfume could ever truly mask.
It was Madam Claret, the Raven Bride, his wife. Not as she was in the vibrant days of their youth, but as his actions had remade her: a specter of breathtaking beauty and profound, endless sorrow, her form shimmering in the low light between corporeal solidity and a phantom's heart-wrenching translucence. The hands that had once held his with a fierce and mortal love now seemed perpetually stained with a fresh, glistening crimson, a permanent testament to the bloody covenant that sustained her.
"Should one only ascend on a staircase of bones, Ceci?" Krogh Hanz said, his voice a low, weary rumble that seemed to rise from the very depths of his chest. He did not turn to look at her; his gaze remained fixed upon the shimmering lotus leaves floating serenely under the flickering light of the spirit candles, as if he could find some answer in their placid, unnatural beauty.
"I have always known the price, calculated it to the last grain of sand in the hourglass. I have accounted for every drop of blood and sweat, every scream I have extinguished, every life I have diverted into this current. And I would pay it again, without hesitation. The goal was everything. It had to be. The power we sought… is everything."
A soft, sorrowful laugh escaped Madam Claret's lips, a sound like a mournful wind stirring through a field of dead and brittle reeds, devoid of any true joy. "And look what it has purchased for you, my ruthless king," the beauty whispered, her voice echoing with a loneliness that spanned realms.
"A throne in a silent, empty hall. A wife who is but a ghost, sustained by the very blood you taught me to spill. And our dear, sweet Jennifer…" Her voice broke then, fracturing around the edges of that cherished name, letting it hang in the frigid air between them, a shared and agonizing wound that time and power could never, would never, heal.
Krogh's jaw tightened imperceptibly, a minute spasm of pure, unadulterated pain. The memory was a phantom limb, an ache sharper and more precise than any celestial blade. Jennifer Olwen, his beloved, her brilliant spirit now irrevocably fused with the ancient, tormented Wailing Kodama tree, her beautiful consciousness scattered and lost amongst its countless whispering leaves, singing a perpetual, maddening lament into the uncaring void. He had reclaimed his supreme sword intent, his formidable power, even this fragile, haunted shadow of his wife. But some losses, he had learned, were absolute and eternal, the one debt his newfound strength could never repay.
"Yet the Cosmic Path Dao Pillar," he continued, his tone hardening once more as he forged ahead on the path of his own bleak and inexorable logic, "it remains the ultimate prize, the singular purpose that justifies all. This body… this new vessel… it has achieved what my previous one could only dream of in its most ambitious moments. The Cosmic Path Foundation Establishment Technique is not merely a gathering of power, Cecilia. It is purity itself. An impeccable, unassailable base, a flawless foundation upon which a true and lasting godhood can be constructed, stone by divine stone. I will break into the Upper Realms not as a supplicant begging for entry, but as a conqueror taking what is rightfully mine."
"To conquer what?" Madam Claret asked, her ethereal hand moving in a gesture of heartbreaking tenderness to rest over the place where his heart beat a steady, determined rhythm in his chest. "What awaits you there but more empty lands? More silent, glittering realms for you to rule alone in your magnificent solitude?"
A long, slow sigh escaped him then, a sound of such profound and weary resignation that it seemed to startle even the stagnant air of the sanctum. She had not seen her man yield to such a human sound in decades, and the sight of it was more shocking than any display of fury.
"I... have become an evil demon stained with the blood of countless lives," Krogh confessed, his voice thick with a loathing he directed entirely inward. "A demon that I myself would hunt without mercy."
Finally, he turned to look upon her ghostly visage, and his eyes burned like smoldering coals in the depths of a cosmic forge. There was no softness in them, only a terrifying, absolute, and focused will. But his words, meant for her and her alone, were the closest this demon-king could ever come to tenderness. "I do not seek to conquer more realms, my love. I seek to conquer the absurd, cruel machinery of our fate. And in doing so, perhaps… to amend it."
He paused then, the silence in the chamber deepening, thickening with the gravity of a monumental and deeply personal decision being irrevocably made. The very stones of the Frigid Sanctum seemed to lean in, bearing witness to a decree that would alter the fabric of a soul's destiny.
"How could a vengeful wraith, a ghost existence born of pure hatred and loss, ever find its way back to something as fragile as humanity…" he mused, his voice a low, wondering thunder that spoke not of skepticism, but of a reverence for the impossible. "It is a miracle born from unbearable suffering, a single, perfect lotus blooming in a sea of blood and ash. Since the child has, against all cosmic logic and reason, miraculously regained her humanity, I will formally accept her. She will be recognized to all as my personal disciple, the sole inheritor of my direct lineage."
He stated this not as a offer, but as a foundational decision. "But that humanity is a tender, nascent flame," he continued, his tone leaving no room for dissent, brokering no argument, "and she is too fragile, too precious, to be left to wither in this malicious, demonic world. She will not be permitted to linger here, in this graveyard of memories and loss."
Madam Claret's spectral form stilled, the very shimmer of her essence pausing as if time itself had halted around her. The implications of his words unfolded in her mind, vast and staggering. "You would… you would willingly sever your connection to one of your selected precious vessel-bodies of such unparalleled potential?" she breathed, her voice a mixture of awe and disbelief. "You would sacrifice the very key to your conquest of the Upper Realms, just to grant her the chance to reincarnate?" To her, it was an act of madness, a renunciation of everything he had ever claimed to value.
"I would give her a chance we were never granted," he corrected her, his voice softening with a tenderness reserved only for these ghosts of his past, yet beneath it lay a will of unbreakable adamant. "I will not have her exist as we do, as pale shadows haunting the ruins of our choices—a memory cursed to wander a desolate estate or bound eternally to the cold steel of a sword. No." The finality in that single word shook the room.
"I will send her down to Vermithys myself. I will carve a path through the realm barriers with my own hands to deliver her to that quiet, lower realm. There, she will be reborn under a sun that knows no blood-red tint. She will know the peace of a gentle wind, the simplicity of an unburdened life. She will know a world untouched by the ambitions of demons and the weight of ancient vendettas."
The words—sunlight, peace, quiet—were foreign upon his tongue, concepts he had spent a lifetime and beyond grinding under his heel in his relentless march toward power. Yet for her, for the echo of the love he had once taken care of by the little lady's grandfather, he would wield these gentle, alien things like the most powerful of artifacts and make them real.
A cold, contemptuous fury seeped back into his tone as his thoughts turned to the name of who moved with Yunny's soul. "That cunning, short-sighted fool, Kinson Wexford. His death was an offense in its simplicity, a wasteful end he in no way deserved. He believed that stealing a sliver of her soul and binding it as a trophy under his own skin was a prize, a testament to his cleverness."
Krogh's hand clenched into a fist at his side, and the air in the sanctum crackled with the promise of violence yet to come, the temperature plunging as his killing intent momentarily bled into the world. "He was a worm, blind to the true nature of the power he sought to manipulate."
"Let him enjoy the peace of the grave for now," Krogh hissed, the words a venomous promise. "His rest is a temporary illusion, a fleeting comfort I will personally revoke. The moment my hand once again closes around the familiar, hungry hilt of my Sword of Red Run, I will tear open the earth itself to find his decaying corpse. I will peel his wretched soul from its rotting marrow, piece by agonizing piece. I will unmake every fragment of his being, unraveling him through aeons of meticulously crafted torment until the last, fading echo of his existence is nothing but pure, undiluted, screaming agony. And only then,"
Krogh vowed, the certainty in his voice absolute, "when his spirit is utterly and forever erased, will the final, vile seal he placed upon Yunny's own soul be shattered. Only through the totality of his obliteration will she be completely, and finally, free."
His gaze turned inward, looking through the stone walls of his sanctum and across the vast, starry voids, already fixed upon a distant, bloody future only he could see.
"But her freedom alone is not enough," he declared, his protectiveness a force as potent as his wrath. "To ensure that no other worm like Wexford ever dares to threaten the peace I gift her, she will not journey into her new life defenseless." He raised his hand, palm open, and the space between his fingers warped and condensed, pulling the very light from the room into a single, shimmering point of profound darkness—a soul seed, a perfect, concentrated essence containing the brutal, flawless truths of countless years of slaughter, refinement, and unparalleled mastery of the sword.
"She will carry my legacy within her, a gift from me, her shifu," he intoned, his voice resonating with the power he was willingly parting with. "I will impart unto her, sealed within this seed, every insight, every conquered truth of the sword Dao I have ever claimed. It will sleep within her soul, a dormant star of unimaginable power. Should any force, any being, from any realm, ever threaten the sunlight and the peace I have given her, it will awaken. And it will cut down heaven itself to protect her."
Finally, he turned his smoldering gaze back to Madam Claret, his expression a terrifying amalgamation of boundless love and absolute resolution. "This act of creation is my atonement for a lifetime of destruction. This act of vengeance is the purest expression of my love. They are not two paths, Cecilia. They are the same. This is my penance, and this is my promise."
The tall, beautiful ghostress, her form shimmering with a sorrow that seemed to deepen with his every word, parted her lips as if to speak. Perhaps it was a plea for caution, a whisper of concern for the reckless decision he was so confidently commanding.
But before a single ethereal syllable could escape, Krogh's expression shifted.
A cold, confident smile touched his lips, which then quickly twisted into a feral, predatory grin—a stark, terrifying crack across his statue-like handsome face, revealing the primal force that dwelled beneath the cultivated composure.
His eyes, fixed on some distant point beyond the sanctum's walls, blazed with an incandescent, unshakable confidence, a roaring sword intent visibly swirling within their depths like a contained storm. He was not a man hoping for a reunion; he was a sovereign emperor awaiting the return of a subject who had strayed, utterly certain of its loyalty and its power.
"It is time," he declared, his voice not raised, yet it carried the weight of a final decree, resonating with the absolute authority of one accustomed to his every word shaping reality. "Red Run has made its decision."
The swordsman could feel it in the very marrow of his bones, in the core of his perfected foundation—a resonance that was as fundamental to his being as his own heartbeat. He had felt the first subtle stir moments before, the awakening call of his natal sword. This was no mere weapon; it was the sliver of his own soul, painstakingly excised and tempered in celestial fire, quenched and honed in the blood of countless fallen cultivation geniuses, each a legend in their own right whom he had personally extinguished to feed its hunger.
A contemptuous sneer curled his lip as he recalled the bald cultivator Donovan Valdez's earlier, foolish words. The man had dared to believe his own pathetic narrative—that the Sword of Red Run, in its infinite wisdom, had somehow been deceived. That it believed the true Krogh Hanz was some righteous, powerful cultivator who wouldn't harm his fellow disciples, and that the evil Ju-On wearing Krogh's face was a separate entity, a monster possessing an inhumane desire to kill all living things.
Now that the worm Kinson Wexford was dead, that bald fool doubtless believed he only needed to rush to Driftdream Loch and bring the "news" to the sentient sword, and the "truth" would be revealed, as if he were enlightening a child.
"Now is for my Natal Soulbound Sword to return to its master's hand," Krogh stated, the words dripping with condescending certainty.
The very thought of that disgusting, evil cockroach—that pale and pathetic forgery of his glory, a fucking pathetic ghost thing, a piece of rubbish worm—daring to wear his face filled him with a cold, clean fury. He had deemed the imitation so utterly beneath him, so worthless, that it was unworthy of even a flicker of his direct attention. He had trusted his true sword's will, a reflection of his own, to recognize the fraud and grind it into nothingness without requiring his intervention.
How dare that fucking pathetic Ju-On, that pale specter of stolen flesh, even attempt to compete for the allegiance of his Natal Soulbound Sword? The arrogance of the imitation was an insult that demanded annihilation.
The feral grin widened on Krogh's face, a silent promise of the exquisite violence to come. Let it come. Let the fate bring the sword to him. Let the test be unequivocal, a final, irrefutable demonstration of his supremacy.
That cockroach wore his visage like a cheap mask, but it could never hold a candle to the inferno of his soul, could never mimic the perfect, terrible resonance of his will. The Sword was not a mere weapon to be wielded; it was his judgment made manifest, an extension of his very consciousness. It would see the cheap imitation for the filth it was, and it would tear through that pathetic malice Ju-On's flesh without a moment's hesitation to return to its one and only true master.
To him.
PS:
Hey there! ✨
Just a little life update from my writing desk! I've been a bit buried in the real world lately, so the writing pace has slowed down. But fear not! I'm determined to craft a truly epic, jaw-dropping climax to wrap up this volume with a BANG! 💥
To make it up to you, I'm locking in a new schedule: I'll be back to posting a new chapter at least every two days! Consider it my promise to you—and to the story.
Get ready for the grand finale! The best is yet to come.
Happy reading!