The evil being did not draw any blade. There was no shimmer of steel, no whisper of a scabbard. The evil ghost merely extended its left hand, palm cupped upward as if offering a void to the sky. Its right hand pressed down slowly, as if pushing against the ceiling of the world. The palms aligned, yet did not touch—a sliver of impossible darkness humming between them.
The world screamed.
It was not a sound one heard with ears, but a pressure felt in the marrow, in the soul. Spiritual energy, murderous intent, and pure sword energy—concepts given horrific, tangible form—surged outward in a silent tsunami. In the Twin Peaks Valley, the air itself seemed to fracture.
High above in Stronghold, the great bell tower, a monument of stone and iron, was the first to concede. Its majestic turrets did not explode; they submitted. A section of them, a perfect horizontal slice miles long, simply ceased to be. The stonework slid with an unnatural, greasy smoothness, sheared from the structure below as if by a god's razor. The fine steel frame of the master's study within groaned and then shattered into metallic dust.
And it did not stop.
The wave of nothingness moved outward. Every building that dared to reach for the sky was methodically, precisely planed down. Walls of granite, pillars of oak, gates of hardened steel—all were severed with an obscene, geometric perfection. The vast city resembled a block of soft tofu on a celestial chopping board, being sliced and resliced into ever-thinner layers of ruin.
The earth beneath Krogh's feet groaned and cracked open, a chasm leading to a hellish glow. Above, the very peaks of the Twin Peaks shuddered, vast and ancient, now trembling like leaves in a storm. The sky itself seemed to press down, a palpable weight of judgment.
Heaven and Earth were converging, the very definitions of 'up' and 'down' dissolving into a singular, crushing force. And between them, the only line that remained, the only law in a universe gone mad, was the edge of Ju-On's non-sword—a line of absolute negation, the final border between being and nothingness. It was not a strike; it was an erasure.
And this was Ju-On's sword!
Before Krogh Hanz, the Corpse Wyrm uncoiled, a mountain of blasphemous flesh. It was not one creature, but a seething conglomerate of the fallen, a thousand dead hands scrabbling at the earth, a thousand sightless eyes staring from its ever-shifting form. Its mandibles, forged from the fused skeletons of countless dead, clacked together.
The swordsman was broken. Blood seeped from a dozen rents in his robe, pooling around boots that could barely hold his weight. He had nothing left but the void in his grasp and the fire in his chest.
The Wyrm charged, its segmented body rippling forward with the sound of grinding bone and tearing sinew. The very earth shattered beneath its passage. Krogh did not move. He stood as a lone rock against a tidal wave of death.
The pressure was not merely physical. It was ontological, a decree of un-being that sought to unravel the very concept of Krogh. As the world above pressed down and the hell below reached up, as the city was planed into oblivion around him, a singular, unexpected peace bloomed in the ruin of Krogh's heart.
Not defiance. Not rage. But memory.
It came not as a flood, but as a single, perfect drop of clarity in the maelstrom. He was young again, sixteen legendary mortal katanas strapped to his back. The air had thrummed with his ambition as he set out for the Oni Citadel, to carve his name into the legend of Vermithys.
She had stood at the door of their home. She did not cling, did not weep foolish warnings. She had simply smiled, a gentle, private thing, and with hands that knew every scar and callous on his body, she had straightened his travel-worn cloak. As usual, the final, meticulous adjustment of her husband's clothes before her man's outing. She walked him to the threshold and stood there, waiting for him to look back.
He never did.
He had returned, later, broken not just in body but in spirit, the ashes of his ambition staining his soul. He had passed her at that same threshold, his face a mask of cold stone. She had hesitated, her lips parting to form words that would never be adequate. And then, that same smile. Forced, perhaps. But not false. It held no reproach, no un-joy at his failure, no unhappiness at his coldness. She was simply… there, supporting him. A constant. A shore to his turbulent sea.
And he, in his gloom, had thought her dull. A quiet vessel unworthy of the tempest of his fame, the sharpness of his sword intent.
Now, facing the end of all things, the death fell upon him with the weight of a mountain, yet it lifted him. The distraction was not her silence; it was his own noise. The unworthiness was not in her simplicity, but in his failure to perceive the profound depth of it. In that moment of ultimate pressure, a wave of guilt, vast and absolute, washed over him—and scoured him clean.
His Dao Heart, once a tangled knot of ambition and pride, did not harden. It did not shatter. It became glaze glass. Transparent. Unclouded. Pure.
There was no more Krogh the vicious sword master, nor Krogh the infamous demonic cultivator. There was only a mortal man facing the monstrous evil.
Far from diminishing, the indomitable Sword Intent enveloping Krogh intensified. It was no longer mere high realm cultivator energy or superior martial technique; it was the pure, unassailable manifestation of his Dao Heart—a core of absolute certainty and Slash Will that transcended flesh, cultivation, and the very concept of mortality.
The air around Krogh hummed, but with the blinding, singular truth of a man who had chosen his path to death and would walk it into the terrified abyss without a single glance backward. This was the true horror the Ju-On could never replicate: not the strength it had pilfered, but the sublime, terrifying beauty of a will marching willingly, triumphantly, into its own end.
Yes, the Ju-On could plunder his martial power, mimic his cultivation strength, and even replicate his Sword Intent through its thieving essence, but it could never wrest away the core of his being: his Dao Heart, that immutable fortress of Sword Will forged in the crucible of endless trials.
Ju-On was horrified by this display of shining, noble humanity. The evil ghost, a creature defined by its endless hatred for the living, was confronted with a sight it could never fathom: a mortal man, of his own free will, pursuing death for the sake of some strange and lofty goal. This act of purposeful self-sacrifice stood in absolute opposition to Ju-On's own nature of inflicting cruel suffering, rendering this scene an eternal mystery to the malevolent entity.
The man stepped onto the trembling ground and began to march.
The first step was a hobble, less than half a normal mortal man's stride.
The second was surer, faster, the gait of a common man.
The third covered the ground of two, a gathering of momentum, of purpose.
He was not drawing a sword. He was becoming one. His clothes frayed first, then his skin, peeling back in ribbons as the unimaginable force of his own awakening intent began to flay him. Blood misted the air around him, a crimson halo. The man was oblivious, his laughter now a roaring, majestic thing, a peal of thunder from a clear soul. A flash of white light—the pure, incandescent manifestation of his Sword Intent—erupted from his core.
He was the sword. The final, invincible strike.
The Corpse Wyrm was already upon him, its colossal maw opening, a cave lined with the dead, ready to swallow him whole.
It was not a beam of light, not a wave of force. It was a pure energy blast. The air itself split with a sound like a universe being torn in two. A line of utter annihilation, invisible and absolute, lanced forward.
Where it touched the Wyrm, existence ceased. The leading third of the monstrous creature—tons of fused corpses, ancient artifact armor, and cursed bone—did not explode. It did not shatter. It was erased. A perfect, canyon-like tunnel was bored through its body, the edges of the wound seared not with heat, but with the glassy, smooth finish of a cut that had transcended any physical law. The countless bodies that made up that section simply ceased to be, their tormented forms liberated into nothingness.
The blast did not stop. It screamed through the Wyrm's entire length, disintegrating segment after segment in a blink. The creature's forward momentum carried its now-severed remains, but its central nervous system, its vile consciousness, was vaporized along the path of that unimaginable cut. The titanic body, from head to the midway point of its grisly coil, collapsed into a rain of disconnected, lifeless flesh, each piece cleanly severed from the whole.
A deafening, absolute silence, broken only by the soft, meaty thud of a million corpse-parts raining down. The sky, once obscured by the Wyrm's bulk, was clear.
The man's still dashing.
The swordsman tore through Ju-On's conjoined world collapsing sword next, a single, precise cut of absolute clarity against the void's negation. The sky and earth, once crushed together, were violently parted, thrown back into their stations with a shockwave that turned the air dark and misty. Ju-On's monstrous sword energy, a painting of an immortal slaying a giant, met a force that was not a blade, but a principle.
There was no Krogh to be seen. Only the sword intent. It wound across the ravaged land, a river of lightning, a path of thunder, a deafening, rumbling declaration of a soul finally, perfectly, understood.
But before the two forces could meet, before sword of evil could clash with sword of self, their auras collided.
The very atmosphere of the Hanz estate shrieked.
The air did not vibrate; it boiled. It exploded. The terrifying pressure erupted outwards, and with a sound like a universe snapping, it found a target. The Inner Formation of the Gloomwater Phantom Lily Array, a masterpiece of defensive sorcery, could not withstand the spiritual backlash. It shattered completely, its intricate weaves of energy bursting apart like gossamer in a hurricane.
And from the epicenter, from the highest peak where the Hanz Clan's Ancestral Shrine stood, a light erupted. It was not the blinding white of Krogh's awakening soul, nor the devouring black of Ju-On's malice void.
It was a translucent, shimmering silver.
This was the essence of the clash—Sword Intent against Sword Intent. The legendary mastery of Krogh Hanz against the perfect, mocking mimicry of the evil representative, Ju-On. The resulting blast was a power type that far surpassed even the peak Advanced Phase Foundation Stage's force. It was so pure, so overwhelming, so foundational in its power that it seemed to cut not at matter, but at the very threads of destiny.
Man's Will of Sword Path pierced the heavens, a shimmering, unwavering pillar of resolve that tore through the lingering darkness and stained the night with its absolute, silent authority.
It did not ask for dominance.
It simply was.
An immutable law, written in light upon the world.
——
"The Martial Arts Arena is next."
Madam Claret, a phantom of elegant sorrow and lethal beauty, felt the directive solidify within her consciousness, a single point of unwavering purpose in the tangled, mournful web of her afterlife. It was a simple, clean objective, a destination that promised direction, a fixed point in the chaotic storm of her obligations and her grief.
Yet, in the very instant she gathered her will to act upon this resolve, the fabric of her reality tore asunder. The world around her—the shadows, the stone, the very air—did not fade but was violently replaced by a sensation of pure, unadulterated agony. It was a pain that bypassed nerve and flesh attacked the foundational pillars of her spirit.
A scream, utterly alien and devoid of any trace of her customary poise, was ripped from her throat. It was a raw, ragged sound, the visceral cry of a soul being systematically flayed alive. Her hands, usually so graceful and controlled, flew to her head, her fingers clawing at her own temples as if to physically tear out the source of the torment. Her legs, intangible as they were, gave way beneath the onslaught, and she collapsed onto the cold, unfeeling stone of the floor. Her form was seized by violent, involuntary spasms, a puppet jerking on strings of pure suffering.
The defined, potent silhouette of a woman dissolved into a turbulent, seething cloud of darkness. Her essence roiled and bled, its edges blurring and fluctuating into a hazy corona of crimson mist. For a terrifying, elongated moment, she hovered on the precipice of total dissolution, her very consciousness threatening to scatter into a thousand meaningless fragments, like smoke torn apart by a gale. This was no simple injury; it was a metaphysical horror. The soul-bound pact with Krogh Hanz, a contract woven with the most profound threads of fate, was not a gentle martial technique. Its backlash was a psychic poison that attacked the absolute core of her being, a simultaneous shredding of every memory, every emotion, every fragment of spirit that constituted who she was.
An eternity of vertigo and primal dread seemed to pass within that chaos. Then, slowly, agonizingly, the convulsions began to subside. The scream died in her throat, leaving behind a silence that rang louder and more deafening than any noise. The profound quiet was itself a new kind of agony.
When she could finally muster the strength to push herself up from the cold stone, she was irrevocably diminished. Her entire physique, once a vision of potent spectral beauty, had lost a vital measure of its substance. She appeared markedly more ethereal, more translucent, a fragile afterimage of her former self, as if a fundamental portion of her essence had been siphoned away into a hungry void.
Ignoring the profound weakness that permeated every atom of her being, a fatigue that was of the soul itself, she lifted her head. Her wide, luminous eyes, now burning with a fear that gnawed at the very edges of her sanity, fixed upon the distant, brooding silhouette of the Ancestral Shrine. This dread was not for herself. The affliction was a mere echo, a devastating feedback through the unbreakable Thread of Fate that bound her existence to Krogh Hanz's. Her suffering was a reflection; his was the source. The terrifying thought of what cataclysm he must be enduring to cause such a violent rupture in their pact was a colder, deeper pain than any the backlash could ever inflict. It was the agony of shared fate, of a love that meant his pain was hers, amplified by a helpless dread.
"The martial practice field..." she whispered, the words a breath of sheer will. The plan flashed before her mind's eye, no longer a mere objective but a cold, polished stone of desperation dropped into the silent pool of her terror. The soul contract was transmitting the toll of his agony directly to her, inflicting a substantial drain that echoed through her being like a vicious, parasitic curse.
"I must hasten without delay!"
Madam Claret gritted the words through clenched teeth, a sound of pure determination against the overwhelming tide of weakness. Summoning every last vestige of her remaining strength, she propelled herself from the crumbling building, becoming a streak of sorrow and desperation against the oppressive gloom. Her mind was a whirlwind of silent, frantic incantations, a single driving purpose:
"Shatter every last Earth Vein, deny the Ju-On any chance of regeneration—thus, my master may seize the chance to claim back his Life Providence and cling to that slender thread of survival!"
Her determination became a fleeting beacon in the encompassing horror, a desperate gambit driven by unyielding devotion. She navigated the mountain estate's labyrinthine paths with the frantic urgency of one racing against the reaper's inexorable march, not for her own sake, but for the man's soul to which hers was eternally bound.
——
At this moment, upon the rear mountain.
The air itself had grown thick and clotted with silence. The Driftdream Loch was undergo a change of fundamental nature; the very light that fell here seemed sickly and depleted, drained of its vitality as if filtered through a shroud. The once-lush expanse of verdant foliage that had thrived along the shores, a vibrant tapestry of life that mirrored the lake's own abundance, had not just died—it had been utterly unmade. In its place hung a palpable aura of desolation, a chilling vacuum that sucked at the spirit and whispered of endings. The air was stale, carrying the faint, sweetly-rotten odor of a long-sealed tomb.
Dominating this blighted panorama was the Souleater Kodama Tree, a blasphemous monument against the sky. It did not simply stand but hovered, a leviathan of corrupted wood, its colossal trunk a twisted sentinel that seemed less to have grown from the earth and more to have risen, groaning, from some lightless underworld.
Its true horror lay in its roots: a squirming, profuse mass of gnarled and prehensile tendrils that hung like a beard of parasites into the lake's basin. They were not still; they pulsed with a slow, rhythmic, and methodical greed, and it was this motion that had scoured the Water Lily Lake clean. Every last droplet of water had been sucked away, leaving the basin barren and exposed, a gaping wound in the landscape.
The subsoil below was not merely dry; it was necrotic, fractured into a spiderweb of jagged fissures that radiated a pattern of absolute decay, as if the ground itself had died of a sudden, terrible plague. The encircling flora was reduced to brittle husks, their life essence consumed in a silent, voracious holocaust. And amidst this devastation, the roots were not idle; they coiled and slithered around countless severed limbs and heads drawing them inexorably into their fibrous embrace to be absorbed. What was left was then cast aside, not even worthy of being called remains, just desiccated refuse and shattered bone, the worthless chaff of a monstrous harvest.
This place, another vital node of Twin Peak Hill's Earth Vein, had not just been damaged; it had been comprehensively obliterated, its life force devoured to the dregs.
The myriad countless malice eyes embedded across the tree's bark and within the folds of its trunks gleamed with a perverse, gluttonous satisfaction. Each orb, a captured fragment of tormented soul, swiveled and blinked in a nauseating, unsynchronized rhythm, their collective gaze reflecting a satiated vicious gleam. It was the look of a primordial predator not just sated, but reveling in the lingering echoes of its feast, a chorus of silent gloating from a thousand damned witnesses.
This monstrous indulgence shattered in an instant. A shuddering jolt, violent and profound, racked the entire ghastly entity as if it had been struck by an invisible thunderbolt summoned from the deepest abyss. The crown of branches thrashed in a wild, agonized frenzy, a convulsion that was terrifying in its uncontrolled violence. It unleashed a cascade of withering leaves and splintered twigs that plummeted down like a macabre, funereal rainfall, each falling piece a tangible harbinger of the thing's sudden diminishment. The most horrifying transformation occurred in the eyes: a significant portion of those watchful, hateful orbs cracked open like overripe fruit, weeping streams of shadowy, crimson ichor. Others simply vanished, extinguished like snuffed candles, leaving behind hollow, bleeding sockets that stared out in accusatory blindness. It was a horrifying regression, a peeling away of stolen vitality in layers of escalating dread, as if the tree itself were being unmade from the inside out.
Only after an extended period of labored, shuddering recovery did the convulsions still into a persistent, sinister tremor. The Souleater Kodama Tree, its form stabilized but visibly weakened, its canopy thinned and its trunk now pockmarked with weeping voids, wasted no further moments in hesitation. With a purpose that had turned from gluttonous revelry to desperate, urgent haste, it propelled its giant body toward the front mountain. Its roots tore free from the cracked earth, trailing behind it like a train of serpents, slithering with a vile momentum in pursuit of the next phase of its destructive mandate, leaving the absolute silence of the grave in its wake.
PS: Hey everyone! Let's talk about Krogh Hanz for a second. 😊 I have to confess—I absolutely adore writing this character.
I really wanted to depict a man with a truly manly spirit. Now, yes, Krogh is an evil-aligned cultivator from a demonic sect, but that doesn't mean he's a hollow villain. He's filled with rich emotions—love, hate, and burning passion.
His bravery and composure don't come from being a cold-blooded killer or from overwhelming talent. They come from his struggle as a solitary cultivator constantly suppressing his humanity within a cruel cult—becoming cold, numb, and ruthless just to survive.
But here's the twist: when faced with death, or when his passed loved ones' souls are brutally tortured, he dares to sacrifice himself. He'll challenge impossible odds and fight even unkillable demons. That's his core!
So, while he's an evil demonic sect cultivator, I believe all people are ultimately human. We will meet many true evils beyond human understanding in future plots—entities of pure malice and hatred. And sometimes, it's the "villains" like Krogh who become anti-heroes, rediscovering their humanity to fight against true evil.
Hope you enjoy his journey as much as I enjoy writing it!