Profound Sky Continent, Mighty Heavenly Sword Region.
Just like the Divine Hall of Sun and Moon, which possessed its own grandeur as one of the Four Sacred Grounds of the Profound Sky Continent, the Mighty Heavenly Sword Region was not far behind. Colossal mountain chains rose from the ground, tall and straight, with peaks pointing directly toward the heavens, resembling divine swords embedded in the earth. The slopes were steep and smooth, marked by deep and precise cuts, traces left by generations of sword experts. None of these marks conveyed disorder; on the contrary, each fissure seemed to contain a clear intent, as if the very terrain had been shaped by the will of the sword over countless years.
The sky above the region was vast and clear, with sparse clouds moving slowly, almost with reverence.
The structures built among the mountains followed the same principle of simplicity and grandeur. Palaces and halls made of light stone aligned with austere precision, their straight lines and defined angles conveying a sense of absolute order. Tall towers rose like vertical blades, and the great gates lacked excessive ornaments; yet, merely standing before them already made the mind tremble, as if the intruder were being evaluated by an invisible intent.
Upon crossing that territory, the most striking sensation did not come from the sight, but from the constant pressure that permeated everything. The air seemed to cut the skin, sounds became sharp and dry, and even thoughts needed to remain firm, for any distraction was easily crushed by the omnipresent presence of the sword. For cultivators who did not follow the Way of the Sword, remaining there for too long was a silent torment; but for true swordsmen, that place resembled a supreme sanctuary, where merely living there brought new insights.
The disciples who walked through that land wore simple and discreet clothes in light tones, and almost all carried swords with them.
...The metallic sound of swords still echoed through the square when Xuanyuan Wendao advanced a few steps, the light rustle of his green robes being the only noise that dared to stand out in that space imbued with sword intent.
The two disciples who were dueling interrupted the confrontation almost at the same instant. The blades trembled slightly before being sheathed, and both bowed with deep respect, as did everyone around.
"Young Master Wendao."
The voices overlapped in unison, clear and firm.
Xuanyuan Wendao nodded with a slight polite smile, the kind of expression that carried neither arrogance nor false humility. His eyes were calm, almost too ordinary for someone of such status, but they contained a depth difficult to stare at for long. It was like observing a serene lake that hid sharp currents beneath the surface.
"There is no need to interrupt..." He said, with a soft voice, yet clear enough to reach everyone: "A friendly competition is something valuable. The sword only refines itself when it meets another....."
The two Elders responsible for supervision exchanged a brief glance before bowing slightly.
"Young Master, the exchange was about to end..." Replied one of them, an elder with long eyebrows and a penetrating gaze: "But perhaps it would be beneficial for you to evaluate the progress of this generation...."
Xuanyuan Wendao walked to the side of the square, stopping a few meters from the disciples. His posture was relaxed, with his hands hidden in his sleeves, but the invisible pressure around him intensified almost imperceptibly. Someone of his status was, obviously, extremely arrogant; he merely maintained the carefully constructed image of a respectable and courteous elder at least in front of those who knew him within the Mighty Heavenly Sword Region.
"Continue...." He repeated.
The disciples hesitated for a fraction of a second before drawing their swords again. This time, however, each movement seemed more careful, more precise. None of them dared to waste intent or commit a gross error under the gaze of the Heavenly Sovereign's son.
The blades collided, producing a dry and pure sound. There were no extravagant techniques nor explosions of profound energy; just clean cuts, exact defenses, and an exchange of solid fundamentals.
Xuanyuan Wendao watched in silence, his eyes following every detail, the angle of the wrist, the stability of the feet, the fluidity between attack and defense. At a certain moment, his eyebrow rose slightly.
"The second disciple..." He said suddenly: "Your third cut was correct in intent, but unstable at the root. You relied too much on momentum and less on the body's axis...."
The mentioned disciple felt a shiver run down his spine. He stepped back and bowed deeply.
"This disciple accepts the Young Master's guidance...."
"It is not a reprimand...." Xuanyuan Wendao replied naturally, appreciating the admiring gaze of everyone; that was the reason he had corrected that simple ant: "Just a reminder. The sword should not advance before the heart is still..."
With that, he turned away, as if that brief comment had already fulfilled its purpose. The disciples remained motionless for a few moments, assimilating each word as if it were a precious teaching.
The Elders observed the scene in respectful silence. Even among them, few dared to treat Xuanyuan Wendao merely as "the Heavenly Sovereign's son." His real strength, consolidated at the ninth level of the Tyrant Profound Realm, allied with his exceptional understanding of the sword, made him an existence that already walked ahead of the entire young generation and was not far behind many veterans.
Everyone was still watching Xuanyuan Wendao when something changed.
The clear blue sky above the Mighty Heavenly Sword Region was stained in a single instant, as if someone had spilled blood directly onto the firmament. The sparse clouds turned crimson, dissolving into deep shades of dark red, and even the sun, that eternal and distant existence, was tinged with an oppressive red, like an open eye observing everything with malice.
The entire world seemed to sink.
At the same moment, an indescribable sensation took over the territory. A primordial fear, too ancient, too deep, as if everyone, regardless of strength or mental state, had been dragged into a bottomless hell, surrounded by countless invisible demons, all fixing their gaze on them… all desiring only one thing: to kill.
The disciples were the first to succumb. Some paled instantly, their faces losing all color. Others widened their eyes, their mouths opening in a scream that never managed to come out. There were those who tried to circulate profound strength, only to discover that their own heart seemed to be gripped by an invisible hand, squeezed mercilessly.
"Ah…" One disciple fell to his knees, his hands digging into the stone ground. His body trembled violently, his eyes shaking with pure despair: "N-no… this… this isn't…"
The sound of something breaking echoed from within his chest.
He fell forward, dead, from the absolute terror that crushed his mind and heart at the same time.
And he was not the only one.
One after another, disciples collapsed like lifeless dolls. Some cried, others screamed, others simply ceased to exist, their gaze frozen in pure despair. Even cultivators in the Tyrant Profound Realm felt their legs fail.
One of the Elders took two steps back, his face pale as paper. His voice came out hoarse, trembling, almost unrecognizable.
"W-what… what is happening…?"
"What kind of phenomenon is this…?!"
He tried to elevate his aura, attempting to protect the disciples around him, but his profound strength seemed… irrelevant. Like a candle trying to illuminate an infinite abyss.
Then—
Came the silence.
An absolute silence, so perfect that it made the ears ache.
And soon after…
The entire territory was plunged into infinite invisible blades!
There was no sound of cutting wind, nor gleam of energy; just an omnipresent presence, like an absolute domain expanding in all directions, tearing the air, the earth, and the flesh with merciless precision. It was as if the "space" itself had transformed into a living slaughterhouse, where every inch was filled with invisible cuts, slicing and dicing everything infinitely.
—PUFFF—!
An Elder tried to raise a profound energy barrier the instant he sensed the danger. The defensive formation rose for less than half a second before being torn into thousands of fragments, immediately followed by his body.
He was not cut in two; he was quartered.
Arms, legs, torso, head, everything was sliced into countless tiny pieces, like flesh passing through a storm of invisible blades.
The disciples who had fallen to their knees were the first to be hit. Their bodies contorted for a fraction of a second before being torn into innumerable pieces, blood spurting in red arcs that mingled with the already scarlet sky. Even those who instinctively raised profound force barriers, releasing protective auras in the Tyrant Profound Realm or higher, it made no difference. The invisible blades ignored the defenses as if they were thin paper.
Screams echoed briefly, mixed with wet sounds of flesh being torn, before silencing forever.
Xuanyuan Wendao, with his cultivation at the ninth level of the Tyrant Profound Realm, tried to move, his sword coming out of its sheath in a blur of light. But it was too late. The killing intent enveloped him like an inescapable net, and he felt his body being sliced from the inside out, everything breaking into tiny fragments. His eyes, still full of disbelief and fury, captured a final glimpse of the chaos: the Elders being reduced to bloody mist, the palace towers collapsing into cut pieces, and the colossal mountains gaining new deep fissures, as if even the earth were being punished.
In moments, the once grandiose Mighty Heavenly Sword Region transformed into a field of absolute carnage, with pieces of bodies and debris scattered everywhere, bathed in the blood red that still dominated the sky....
The ensuing silence was deafening, broken only by the distant drip of blood, as if hell had claimed its prize and departed...
As if that were not enough, the red sky, already oppressive and bloody, began to change again. An indescribable wave of heat emerged from nowhere, as if the entire air were being transformed into a divine furnace. The scarlet red intensified, becoming scalding, shining with a light that burned the eyes even of those already dead or dying. What remained of the territory—the pieces of bodies, the ruins of the towers, the cut mountains—began to tremble with an absolute heat that made the earth creak like superheated metal.
Then came the sea of flames.
Golden flames, pure and merciless, the flames erupted from the horizon like an inverted ocean, engulfing the entire sky in an instant. They were not ordinary fire; they were the flames of the Golden Crow! Flames so powerful that the surrounding air distorted. The red of the sky was devoured by this flaming gold, and at the center of that storm, the flames shaped themselves into a colossal form: a Golden Crow, with wings extending for kilometers, eyes like miniature suns, and a sharp beak that seemed capable of tearing the entire world.
The Golden Crow hovered for a second, its suffocating presence raising the temperature to levels beyond mortal comprehension. The air hissed, molecules breaking under the absolute heat. Any remnant of moisture evaporated instantly; the blood scattered on the ground bubbled and vanished into red vapor, and the stones of the mountains began to melt like wax under a hot iron.....
With a silent cry that echoed in the souls of the few still agonizing, the Golden Crow descended. It crashed into the territory of the once grandiose Mighty Heavenly Sword Region like a living meteor, a primordial fireball that stopped at nothing. The impact was cataclysmic: an explosion of light and heat that blinded the surrounding world, followed by a shockwave that pulverized the ground in a radius of hundreds of kilometers. The colossal mountains did not resist; their steep slopes melted into rivers of lava, the peaks evaporating into clouds of superheated gas, leaving behind molten craters where grandeur once stood.....
The Golden Crow dissipated after the crash, its flames spreading like a devouring tide, burning away the last vestige of existence from the entire Mighty Heavenly Sword Region!
After a few minutes, the flaming gold of the Golden Crow dissipated like mist in the wind, and the bloody red that dominated the firmament faded gradually, revealing the clear and vast blue from before.
The sparse clouds reappeared, moving slowly with reverence, as if nothing had happened.
The sun regained its light, bathing the continent with a normal, almost peaceful glow.
Everything returned to normal, except for the absolute destruction below. The territory of the Mighty Heavenly Sword Region was now a vast smoking crater, with rivers of lava hardening into black glass, mountains reduced to ionized dust, and no trace of life!
From that day on, the Mighty Heavenly Sword Region no longer existed!
Beyond the clouds, a figure hovered motionless in the air.
In his right hand, he held the neck of a man, lifting him without any effort, as if he were just a disposable rag.
The man wore simple green clothes. His body was slender and flexible, shaped by years of absolute sword mastery. His long black hair was tied in an unpretentious ponytail that fell to his waist, swaying weakly in the wind. His face was thin and hollow, with features so ordinary that they would easily get lost in a crowd, but now they were distorted by asphyxiation, his eyes wide open, filled with panic and disbelief.
That man was Xuanyuan Wentian, the Heavenly Sovereign of the once glorious Mighty Heavenly Sword Region!
An existence that had once stood at the apex of the Profound Sky Continent, feared and revered as a god among mortals… and who now was nothing more than an ant, someone he could crush at any moment if he so desired.
Ren Zu observed that figure who had once dominated the world with an absolutely indifferent gaze, as if evaluating an ant without any value. His fingers closed slightly. Xuanyuan Wentian choked, his body trembling as veins pulsed under his skin, indicating that he was using all his strength in a pathetic and futile attempt to resist.
"I remember that moments ago, when I captured you like this and told you to stay quiet and enjoy the show, you said I was courting death, right? You ended up being quite arrogant in my presence..."
He looked at the destruction below them and sneered.
"Courting your own death, hehehe, how good that they died, it's fabulous that they have died…"
Xuanyuan Wentian gurgled something unintelligible, his eyes trembling with fury and terror mixed. Although he was one of the Four Sacred Masters of the Profound Sky Continent in his youth, he was a person with mediocre talent. Moreover, in a place like the Mighty Heavenly Sword Region, his aptitude could not even be considered mediocre. If it weren't for the "Xuanyuan" surname he bore, he would have been expelled from the Mighty Heavenly Sword Region due to his weak aptitude.
The Profound Sky Continent was a world where the profound way reigned supreme, and a place like the Mighty Heavenly Sword Region even had a clear distinction of levels. The levels of profound strength represented absolute positions within the place. He was not expelled because of the Xuanyuan lineage running in his veins, but similarly, for carrying that lineage, his aptitude became the shame of the Xuanyuan family. In the Mighty Heavenly Sword Region, he faced countless cold gazes of ridicule, contempt, humiliation, and even his biological parents were completely disappointed with him, closing their eyes to him. He had six biological siblings, but none of them paid him the slightest attention.
He had endured excessive contempt and humiliation, and, added to the hatred he harbored for himself, on a certain day, he finally lost control completely. Like an awakened demon, his thirst for power grew uncontrollably.
Others cultivated for eight hours every day, while he cultivated for sixteen hours and even twenty hours a day. To obtain even more resources for training, he resorted to all possible means and even maliciously harmed one clan member after another in secret, including two of his brothers.
As his strength grew rapidly, surpassing more and more people of the same age, he began to be recognized, praised, and even flattered by some. The enormous difference in treatment between the weak and the strong led him to even greater extremes in his pursuit of power, and his actions became increasingly wild and unscrupulous. On the day he finally reached the top of the Mighty Heavenly Sword Region and became the Sword Master, he changed his own name to "Xuanyuan Wentian."
The meaning behind the name was that he would one day challenge the heavens.
But who could imagine that all his great ambitions would be erased by a simple boy who appeared out of nowhere, snatching him from his meditation with a spatial manipulation so perfect that he didn't even feel it?
Who was that young man, after all? Where had he come from… and, above all, why had he become his target? But those questions were irrelevant at that moment....
Would he die in that place....?
Ren Zu tilted his head slightly, a cold smile curving his lips as he observed Xuanyuan Wentian's pathetic struggle.
"Ah, I'm sorry about that. Not being able to speak because your throat is crushed must not be pleasant...." He said, his voice calm and almost casual, as if he were talking about the weather. But at the same instant, his fingers closed even tighter around the man's neck, squeezing with precise and merciless force.
Xuanyuan Wentian choked violently, his eyes rolling upward, the whites standing out as air escaped his lungs in a weak hiss. Veins bulged on his hollow face, and his slender body trembled like a leaf in the wind, on the verge of collapse.
Ren Zu did not loosen his grip, keeping him exactly on the edge between life and unconsciousness.
"The reason I didn't kill you as soon as I arrived here... was so that you could see all this with your own eyes. The destruction of the place you spent your entire life building, and even the end of your precious son. I'm kind, right? I let you enjoy the show until the end."
Xuanyuan Wentian, even while suffocating, managed to focus his eyes on him for a brief moment. There was no plea there, just pure hatred, a feral gleam that promised eternal vengeance, as if his soul were cursing Ren Zu beyond death.
"Don't look at me like that. As if you still had any power to threaten me...." Ren Zu sneered calmly before pausing, looking at the smoking crater below, where nothing remained of the grandeur of the Mighty Heavenly Sword Region: "Well, now that everything is concluded... I can kill you."
Suddenly, golden flames erupted from his arm, like a river of primordial fire born from his skin. They enveloped Xuanyuan Wentian's neck in an instant, snaking like living serpents, hot enough to melt the surrounding air.
"G—GRAAAAH—!! KRRR—" The man screamed, a hoarse and desperate sound that echoed through the clear sky, full of absolute agony. His skin hissed, bubbles forming and bursting as the flames devoured his flesh, bones, and profound veins. The smell of burning filled the air, and his body contorted one last time before crumbling into fine ashes, carried by the wind like insignificant dust.
Ren Zu opened his empty hand, letting the ashes scatter freely. He observed the horizon for a moment, his face expressionless.
With that, he had finally avenged what the Mighty Heavenly Sword Region had done to his family. That Sacred Ground had pursued his adoptive parents in search of the [Mirror of Samsara], murdered his blood father, imprisoned his adoptive grandfather, and moreover, was one of the main reasons behind the Little Demon Empress's suffering. Any one of those motives, taken in isolation, would already be more than enough to justify the annihilation of yet another Sacred Ground, in addition to the Divine Hall of Sun and Moon that he had destroyed a few hours ago....
But, being honest with himself, it wasn't just about justifications. Even setting aside everything they had done to his adoptive parents, the simple fact that they had made his wife suffer already placed them, inevitably, on his list of targets.
Moreover, for what he planned to do, the destruction of the Sacred Grounds was inevitable. Except for the Absolute Monarch Sanctuary, from which he had only looted everything of value, and the Supreme Ocean Palace, where he had done the same in the last hours—two places that, weakened, would naturally lose their position in the following years—all the other Sacred Grounds had been destroyed. And that was good.
An inevitable shift in power was about to sweep the Profound Sky Continent, and he had already decided what would be the new pillar of that era. The Frozen Cloud Asgard would become the supreme force of the continent, an existence above all others, obeying only him.
In this way, many of the problems that would arise with the collapse of the ancient Sacred Grounds would be nipped in the bud before they even took shape.
Of course, there still remained to deal with the Divine Phoenix Empire.
A smile appeared on his lips, before his figure disappeared like a ghost.
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