Radeon had a fair idea what the sword array was meant to do. It was a sharp answer to blunt problems.
It could punch through a sect's barrier, or it could scour a battlefield clean and leave nothing but ash and honest silence.
The Ashlime Crag had a barrier array too. It should have been up. It should have been doing its job.
Yet it was open. Right then. Gaping, useless.
Across the ships, the tribulation swelled, larger and larger, until what endured it finally showed itself.
Dark crimson, as if its power had been trying to make the sky bleed.
"The blood core..."
Faces were writhing within its surface, and the skin of it was bulging outward in soft blisters where they pressed.
Mouths were stretching wide in soundless wailing while noses and brows were flattening, sliding, and reforming.
Something inside had been pushing and pushing, trying to tear through and breathe.
Radeon saw it and fear found him for the first time in this life, cold and intimate.
Not only because the thing could wipe them all away with contempt.
Because everything, the barrier left open, the sword array brought to bear, the urgency in every order, suddenly made a horrible kind of sense.
The Heavenly Dao would not have let an anomaly like this endure for long. It would have struck it down in the cradle.
Yet the tribulation was still coming, steady and blind, like a trap springing because the wire had been pulled.
It was doing its job, yes, but only in the way a machine kept turning after the hand that built it was gone.
That was the sign that heaven itself had been torn asunder long ago, and what remained above them was only the habit of judgment.
'This realm's sick. Wrong. Something ending behind the calm. But who's fighting it?'
The answer came simple. No one. Nobody was fighting the apocalypse.
Everyone was left unaware, heads down, hands busy, as if diligence alone could mend a cracking sky.
"Ha. Ha. Hah. Fuck this," Radeon said. "Now what?"
Thousands of questions were popping into his mind, sharp as splinters, but the battlefield around him was waiting for no one.
In his stupor, someone was approaching, an itinerant cultivator with hungry eyes and a posture that was calling itself brave.
Glory was wanting a name, and he was thinking Radeon's would do.
Radeon was lifting one hand, the only one he had, and he was flicking.
Needles were leaving his fingers like a handful of spite.
They were striking soft places, slipping between ribs, finding throat and heart and liver with the clean certainty of practice.
The man was folding without a sound, and the ground was taking him as if it had been expecting him all along.
Radeon's face was not changing, but something in him was sinking to a low he had not known he could reach.
The blood ruby in his hand was feeling light, almost weightless, as if it did not matter.
An apocalypse, simply put, was ending a realm so it could begin again.
That was the story cultivators had been telling to make ruin sound like a cycle, like the last puff of smoke meant to numb the mind.
But he was looking at the people from the Skyflight Sword Court, at the captain, at the commander, and at the sword grandmaster right above.
They were shouting orders, bracing arrays, arguing over angles and timing.
They were acting as if victory was still a thing you could earn. No one was knowing what was really happening.
And Radeon was standing among them, the only one who knew what was really going on.
In that moment, he was feeling small, knowing he was standing against what was coming.
The only thing he could do now was to cultivate as fast as he could and reach the eighth stage of cultivation, which was Aether Crossing.
Allowing him to traverse through the void. And maybe. Just maybe.
Radeon shook these thoughts out of his head.
Fay was the child of the Heavenly Dao. If she existed, then there is still hope.
He picked up the sword of the fallen man and wore his clothes.
He had found no foundation for his hopes, but his life still needed to move on.
'Treasures belong in my pockets,' he thought.
It was a mocking thought, and it was turning on him like a knife turned in the hand.
He had been given a new lease on life, but it was feeling like all of it had been a lie.
"No. I can turn this. I will."
His single eye was spotting gilded cores tumbling down through the smoke, falling from below like drops of filthy light.
He was turning his glider, angling into the fall, and he was flying hard over the corpses, low enough to taste iron on the wind.
He was snatching what he could, scooping cores from broken flesh, quick and practiced, as if this was the only work left that made sense.
He was letting the rush of air slap his face and tear at his sleeves, trying to let the breeze carry the uncertainty out of his heart, trying and failing and trying again.
"Guess this is what Fay felt back then," he joked, easing himself down.
Now that he was able to focus, he was looking to the ships of the allied righteous sects.
He was knowing what they were. Treasure troves. His plan was simple in the way hunger was simple.
He was skimming most of the middle grade spirit stones from the flight array, leaving only what the ships needed to stay aloft.
With that plan in mind, he was banking away from the falling cores and flying toward the line of people being dragged out from the ominous array, one by one.
They were coming out coughing and blinking, slick with sweat and soot, like they had been awoken from an inescapable nightmare.
His face was settling back into the first face he had borrowed.
Rai, the scholar. Gentle eyes. Measured mouth. A man made of questions and ink, not blood.
Only the missing parts betrayed the mask. No tongue to shape careful words.
One eye instead of two. Arms gone to the elbow, sleeves pinned and empty. The sort of wounds that did not belong in a lecture hall.
For Radeon, it was still the best identity, right then. A harmless face got you close.
A wounded face made people look away from what you were doing with your hands.