In his Spiritual Sea, the lotus took root.
It was not the complete Prime Emperor Lotus Flower from ancient legend, not the world-swallowing bloom Empyrean Primordius had once used to drag starfields into chaos. It was only a fragment, a seed—a single petal of an idea.
But even that petal carried a weight that could crush worlds.
His Spiritual Sea roared around it.
The lotus opened a fraction.
Darkness spilled out.
It was not the void between worlds, not the raging storms that chewed apart broken space. This darkness was older. It was the breath held between the first heartbeat and the second, the instant before heaven separated from earth, before yin and yang, five elements, and ten thousand laws were birthed into existence.
The moment it appeared, his Spiritual Sea shivered.
The sea's surface warped. Dao runes that had once been as steady as carved stone began to blur. His Fire Law, normally a crimson sun that burned in one corner of his inner world, wavered, its outline smearing until it was only a dull warmth without shape. Thunder stopped being arcs and detonations, dissolving into a pure pattern of violent change. Space and Time, once two layered diagrams—one of invisible lattices, one of streaming rivers—lost their borders, collapsing into a single, dissolving "here" and "now" whose edges frayed away into nothing.
Even his own foundations were not spared.
True essence, origin energy, battle spirit, will, the very soul force he had accumulated layer by layer… everything that made up "Ren" in this inner world was tugged toward a single direction, as if an unseen tide wanted to fold them back into one formless state.
Grandmist.
The first chaos.
The state before any path, before any Dao, before even the concept of "existence" had settled.
In that instant, Ren understood why this power had terrified even Empyreans.
Within this field, laws did not merely weaken—they unraveled. Techniques did not merely fail—they ceased to exist. All things, from soul to stone, were pushed toward one outcome: return to nothing, return to chaos.
"…So that's how it is."
Ren's thoughts remained clear.
His Immortal Soul Bone flared.
That mysterious bone, hidden at the deepest layer of his soul, did what it always did: it caught the incomprehensible and shaved away everything unnecessary, reducing impossible complexity into lines a human mind could grasp. What would have been madness to others, it turned into simple patterns, into principles and paths.
Ren did not resist the grandmist field.
He let it touch him.
His Fire Law unraveled, collapsing into a raw, attribute-less heat that could not be called "fire" anymore. Thunder stripped off its sound and light, becoming only the idea of sudden, ruthless change. Space and Time's diagrams tore themselves apart and fell away, leaving only a trembling sense of "presence" that frayed at the edges when he reached for it.
Even his Heaven-Piercing Martial Intent felt the tug. That needle-thin strand of multicolored light that usually stretched from his heart to pierce through the world shivered, its shape wanting to melt, its colors wanting to bleed into the surrounding chaos.
Ren's Dao Heart did not move.
He watched himself come apart.
He watched as the carefully built structure of his cultivation—Laws, Intents, realms, techniques—all were reduced to nameless currents in the dark. At the same time, the Immortal Soul Bone watched with him, absorbing the logic, memorizing every change as grandmist tore his inner world down to first principles.
"So this is the source you used," he thought, a small flicker of wry amusement touching his inner voice. "Primordius… you were really greedy."
Grandmist energy was the chaotic state that existed before the universe. Chaos stones, formed at the beginning of that universe and carved with the revolutions of its source energy, were a fossil of that first moment.
Grandmist energy didn't bother with distinctions. It pushed all matter into entropy and chaos. Even time and space could come under its influence, collapsing into a singularity where "before" and "after" lost meaning. Yin and yang had not yet divided; fire, water, metal, wood, earth had not yet taken their own names. In that state, stripped of every protective layer of energy, what flesh and blood could survive for even an instant? It would naturally return to nothing inside the grandmist.
The Immortal Soul Bone drank that understanding in.
Lines of comprehension flashed across its luminous surface, etching themselves into place. A new rune formed upon the bone—a ring of darkness edged with faint multi-colored light, like a black sun crowned with a subtle halo.
The lotus in his Spiritual Sea shuddered.
Its petals closed slightly, then settled.
The wild, devouring nature of grandmist energy folded inward. Its mindless erasure narrowed and focused, becoming something he could hold and direct instead of something that existed only to consume him.
Prime Emperor.
Not as a distant legend whispered in old jade slips.
As his own martial intent, carved into his soul by the road he had just walked.
...
Outside, in the Magic Cube's independent space, Mo Eversnow gasped.
She had been sitting in meditation, eyes closed, her Divine Sense tracing Ren's vague shadow as he walked that incomplete Samsara Road. The Magic Cube's connection let her sense only broad strokes—waves of soul force, faint glimmers of martial intent, the rise and fall of his will. It was like watching someone move behind a gauze curtain.
When the lotus opened, the curtain burned away.
An invisible shockwave rolled through the cube space. The jade platform beneath Eversnow's feet trembled once, formation lines flaring in instinctive defense before calming. Her eyes snapped open, icy blue pupils contracting sharply.
"This is…?"
In front of her, the projection that represented Ren's Spiritual Sea sharpened.
What had once been a blurred sea of light and shadow resolved into a scene that should not have existed at World King level. A lotus formed from pure distortion hung over his inner sea. Its petals were neither light nor darkness; they were the absence of both, edges fuzzy and yet sharp enough to make the soul ache to look at them.
Where its shadow fell, everything blurred… and then calmed.
Dao runes dissolved when they touched that shadow, their meanings stripped away, but there was no chaos after. Instead, the space returned to a quiet, formless equilibrium. Like a sheet of still water after someone had wiped away the ripples with a single hand.
Mo Eversnow's chest tightened.
Her Divine Sense was the culmination of World King soul cultivation, bolstered further by the Magic Cube's ancient spirituality. She had watched Empyrean descendants, Divine Lords, even glimpsed traces of Empyrean might inside the cube. And yet, in front of this lotus…
She could not see through it at a glance.
The grandmist aura spilling from it did not follow the laws of the Divine Realm. It was not like the Heavenly Dao of the Divine Sea. It sat above them, as if watching them from the outside.
"…What exactly are you, Ren Ming…" she whispered.
The Magic Cube floated silently in front of her, its many facets dimmed to a deep, steady glow, like an ancient eye opening halfway.
...
Back on the Road of Emperor, Ren slowly opened his eyes.
In his Spiritual Sea, the lotus closed.
The darkness did not vanish. It folded neatly into the lotus's heart, condensing into a compact seed of pressure. It no longer tried to erase him. Instead, it sat there like a quiet, terrifying heart, beating soundlessly in rhythm with his own.
From it spread a thin field, barely a few dozen feet across, that turned everything within it slightly dimmer, slightly slower, slightly closer to the state before laws.
Prime Emperor Force Field.
He didn't need anyone to tell him the name. The meaning came naturally with the understanding. Within that field, the grandmist energy he had touched would suppress all forms of energy—true essence, origin energy, battle spirit, will, even the divine soul. The more complex something was, the more violently it would be stripped down. Techniques, supernatural powers, even some forms of will force would disintegrate under its pressure, losing their form and returning to a neutral, chaotic state.
He raised his right hand.
On the pad of his index finger, a point of dull red light appeared.
It grew.
Petals unfolded from that light one after another, each one translucent and edged in a thin ring of shadow. It wasn't an illusion, nor a phantom projection. It was a small, condensed manifestation of that Prime Emperor lotus, formed and guided entirely through his will.
As it bloomed, the darkness pressing down upon the Road of Emperor deepened.
Cracks whispered through the void.
The obsidian statues of ancient Emperors lining the plank road—proud men, serene women, monstrous figures in regal armor—seemed to shiver. Their eyes were only carvings, yet the residual will within them flickered, a soundless flinch as they instinctively recoiled from that lotus's shadow. The lights above their heads, condensed Emperor auras that had been forged across entire epochs, dimmed as if someone had drawn a veil over them.
Ren smiled.
"Red lotus, huh. Not bad."
His voice was relaxed, almost amused, like a man trying out a new toy in his hands.
He turned his finger slightly.
The lotus spun in the air, lazy and slow.
Where its shadow passed, the Road's pressure vanished. The overlapping wills that had once crushed geniuses into trembling wrecks simply… failed to function. Emperor battle spirits shrank away from that tiny field, like blades whose essence had been corroded, leaving only empty hilts.
In the Magic Cube, Mo Eversnow pressed a hand to her chest.
Even through the artifact's filters, the grandmist aura sweeping off that tiny lotus made her soul quiver. Everything she knew—true essence structures, combat skills, the delicate soul arts she had polished across countless years—felt like elaborate sculptures of sand placed under a descending tide.
If that lotus's field had been pointed at her instead of his own sea, her techniques, her merit laws, the whole framework of her cultivation… all of it felt like it would be peeled away layer by layer until only something formless remained.
She exhaled slowly, fingers unconsciously curling into the front of her robe.
"…Monster," she thought, a flash of bleak humor in her eyes.
...
Ren let the lotus fade.
He did not intend to keep the Prime Emperor field active here. This road, this altar of will, belonged to Empyrean Primordius and Heavenly Empress Xuanqing.
He rose to his feet.
The plank ahead of him had gone quiet.
No more lights.
No more phantom Emperors.
The road of will, the Emperor battle spirits, the final test left behind by Heavenly Empress Xuanqing—he had walked them all. The Samsara Road had spent its last card.
"Thanks for the meal," Ren said softly.
His tone was casual, almost light, but buried underneath was a rare, sincere respect—for the Emperors who had walked here before him, for the Empress who had dared to leave her soul behind, for the mad Empyrean who had taken all of that as raw material to hammer at reincarnation and grandmist.
The darkness cracked.
The plank under his feet dissolved into motes of light.
Blood-red radiance rose around him, swallowing his figure whole.
...
The smell of blood hit him first.
Thick, metallic, cloying. It clung to the air like a curtain.
Then came the roar.
Ren stepped back onto the altar deep within Polaris Skysplit Tower as if stepping through a doorway. One instant, he was surrounded by formless, silent darkness. The next, he stood in the heart of a storm of sound—demonic shouts, the clash of weapons, the screech of tearing barriers, the low, hungry hum of ancient formations greedily sucking in infernal energy.
Blood light faded from his eyes.
Stone reasserted itself under his boots. Array lines, dim with age and soaked in dried blood, circled the sacrificial altar in twisted patterns. Old restrictions lay shattered around him, cracked like brittle shells. Cold, heavy infernal energy seeped up from below, thick enough to sting his skin.
To anyone outside, only a heartbeat had passed.
To the Samsara Road, an entire era of will had turned over.
To Ren, nothing felt out of place.
He flexed his fingers.
True essence flowed smoothly. His body responded as it had a moment ago. But beneath his soul and even beneath his Dao Heart, something had changed.
Every breath he took carried a faint, hard-to-sense distortion.
Grandmist.
He smiled, the corner of his mouth lifting.
"First, new toy," he murmured. "Then… errands."
His Spiritual Sea stirred.
Ren took a single step.
Space folded.
The altar disappeared.
...
A High Lord was laughing when death arrived.
He lounged on a throne made of skulls and black stone at the center of a killing stage near Polaris City's core. Below him, a circular arena churned with carnage. Infernal energy rolled like thick, bloody fog over the stone, pouring ceaselessly from the polar vortex that pierced the sky in the distance. Martial artists—human and demon—hacked each other apart on the arena floor, their blood steaming, their souls screaming as both were dragged into the vortex's pull to be refined into purer infernal energy.
The High Lord's eyes burned with cruel delight.
"Heh—kill! Kill more!" he shouted, demonic true essence boiling, his voice cutting through the din like a blade. "Your despair is this lord's joy! Your deaths are this lord's path to twelve wings!"
A blurry Heavenly Demon Tattoo writhed faintly across his back under his armor—six wings, half-formed, greedily drinking in the infernal energy that flowed around him. The killing stage's arrays fed him power with every scream, with every soul broken. The air around his throne was thick with bloody shadows, echoes of the lives he had taken.
He lifted his hand, ready to cast another martial artist down into the arena.
The air beside his throne rippled.
A man stepped out.
No warning. No flare of demonic aura. No distortion of infernal energy to announce a teleportation art.
One moment, there was only empty space.
The next, Ren stood there, hands in his sleeves, gaze sweeping lazily across the killing stage before drifting up to the High Lord.
The High Lord jerked to his feet.
"Who are—"
He never finished.
Ren met his gaze. His eyes were calm, almost bored, like a man who had come to settle a small matter before lunch. He didn't bother releasing Fire, Thunder, or the bone-deep cruelty of his Asura Intent. He didn't even allow his Ancient Ming bloodline's killing instinct to leak out.
His index finger lifted.
A pinprick of red light blossomed at its tip.
The moment that tiny red lotus opened, the world around the High Lord changed.
A field, barely ten feet wide, spread out in an invisible wave. Within that space, infernal energy thick enough to drive ordinary men mad froze mid-flow, its snarling rivers smearing into a gray blur. The laws carved into the High Lord's bones—the Demonic Path insights he had stolen from countless battles—softened, their edges melting as if someone had poured hot wax over them. Even the Heavenly Demon Tattoo on his back wavered, its wings blurring at the tips, unable to maintain their sharp shapes.
The High Lord's pupils shrank.
"What is—"
From Ren's perspective, nothing dramatic happened.
He moved his finger forward and tapped the High Lord lightly between the eyebrows, no harder than one might tap a piece of glass to test its thickness.
The red lotus's grandmist field compressed to a needle, drilling into the center of the High Lord's soul.
For an instant, the High Lord's consciousness expanded in terror.
He felt his demonic true essence lose its attributes, the infernal energy he had hoarded turning into something cold and gray. He felt the Heavenly Demon Tattoo on his back unravel, its wings turning to mist. He felt the structure of his thoughts—rage, greed, the twisted pride in his heart—smear into a strange, quiet calm.
Then that, too, was erased.
The throne, the skulls, the High Lord's entire body—all of it crumbled into dust a heartbeat later, not in a thunderous explosion, but in a soft, almost gentle disintegration. Like a sand sculpture meeting the tide.
Only a single jet-black token dropped from midair, falling through the drifting dust.
Ren caught it between two fingers.
The Blood Slaughter Token was heavy for its size, dense with ancient arrays tuned to the Holy Demon Continent's infernal energy. Fine lines of demonic runes and strange, twisting characters crawled across its surface like a living parasite, constantly reconfiguring themselves to form tiny vortexes that drew in the surrounding infernal energy. It was designed to guide that power, to help a martial artist form the Heavenly Demon Tattoo that all natives of the Blood Slaughter Steppes lusted after.
Below, the killing stage fell silent.
Blood-spattered martial artists who had been moments away from tearing each other apart froze, blades still raised. They stared up at the empty throne. At the pile of dust where the High Lord had sat a breath ago. At the relaxed man now standing in his place, spinning the black token lazily between his fingers.
Ren weighed it once in his palm.
"Mm," he said. "Good enough."
He flicked his wrist.
His soul force spread out, a silent command reaching into the tower's deeper formations.
Space folded again.
...
The center of Polaris City was a hellish storm.
Here, the polar vortex rose from the depths of the Blood Slaughter Steppes like a black spear piercing the heavens. Infernal energy spewed from its core in endless torrents, painting the sky a perpetual blood-red. Floating platforms and killing stages hung at varying heights around the vortex, their stone surfaces slick with old blood and newly dried viscera. On some, fights still raged; on others, only corpses remained, slowly turning into black dust as the vortex stripped them of everything useful.
Ren appeared on one of the empty stages near the vortex's heart.
The moment his foot touched the stone, a formation lit up beneath him. Array lines that had lain dormant flared in black and red patterns. The Blood Slaughter Token in his hand shivered, then dissolved into a stream of light that flowed into his dantian, settling there like a burning brand.
The vortex reacted.
Infernal energy howled.
The pillar of bloody wind surged, as if some enormous beast had turned its attention toward him. Thick rivers of slaughter-qi and demonic resentment broke away from the main current, rushing toward the killing stage from all directions. It was a concentration of killing intent born from countless massacres, thick enough to drown a city's worth of souls.
Ren's lips curved.
"Come on, then," he whispered.
The Ancient Ming bloodline woke up.
Dark-gold lines lit up beneath his skin, coiling across his bones like a predator's sigil. The incoming infernal energy hit that pattern—and was seized. The bloodline devoured impurities first, tearing out the twisted desires, the madness, the screaming remnants of slaughtered wills. What remained, stripped of filth, compressed into a dense, crimson power that his own Dao could use.
At the same time, the Immortal Soul Bone guided the process with cold clarity.
It read the principles of infernal energy in real-time. How it clumped. How it tried to drill into his meridians like needles of madness. How it wanted to carve its own demonic imprints into his soul. It mapped those tendencies and flipped them, opening channels where they would be most easily dissolved, reshaping the flow so that instead of corrupting him, that energy became bricks in his new foundation.
Ren closed his eyes and sat down in the middle of the killing stage.
He crossed his legs, laid his hands on his knees, and let the storm swallow him.
The infernal flood crashed into him like a sea trying to chew its way through a dam.
In his flesh and blood, patterns lit up—faint at first, then increasingly bold. Lines of black-red light crawled along his back, etching ancient demonic runes in circles around a central symbol. At first, the shape was blurry, the wings indistinct, like a demon seen through thick fog.
Four wings.
Six.
Eight.
With each pair of wings that solidified, his demonic aura grew heavier. The tattoo's lines sank deeper, pushing into his flesh, then his bones, then into the interface between body and soul. The killing intent saturating the Holy Demon Continent found a new echo inside him, resonating with the Asura domain in his Spiritual Sea. The demonic runes on his back and the scarlet battlefields in his inner world began to hum in unison.
The Blood Slaughter Token burned like a second heart inside his dantian.
It acted as a funnel, preventing the infernal energy from simply dispersing. It gathered the mad power pouring from the vortex, refined it, and forced it straight into the forming tattoo on his back. Normally, martial artists needed to fight for months, even years, in the Blood Slaughter Steppes to gather enough infernal energy for a twelve-winged Heavenly Demon Tattoo. Even then, much of that energy leaked away, wasted, like water cupped in bare hands.
Ren's hands were not bare.
He had the token.
He had the Ancient Ming bloodline.
He had an Immortal Soul Bone that tore apart complex flows in a single glance.
His true essence cultivation was "only" at Xiantian by this world's standards. In terms of pure realm, monks and demons around him might have considered him merely another talented youth.
But his Dao foundation was a mountain pressing down on the roof of a straw hut.
Ten wings.
Infernal energy screamed.
The vortex's focus narrowed further, like a vast eye opening, its pupil shrinking around him. The sky above the killing stage darkened; low rumbles, deeper than thunder, rolled out from the vortex's depths as it redirected more and more of its flow toward that single point.
On surrounding platforms, martial artists who had been condensing their own tattoos suddenly felt their supply of infernal energy thin.
"Who's stealing the infernal energy!?"
"Is someone trying to condense twelve wings in a single sitting!?"
"Impossible! Their meridians would explode!"
Curses and shouts rose in a chaotic chorus.
From the outside, all they could see was a column of blood-red light thickening around the empty stage. Its color slowly deepened toward black at the center, as if a hole was being punched through the world itself.
Inside that column, Ren was nearing completion.
The tenth pair of wings had already pushed his flesh to the very edge. Demonic runes crawled into his bones; his meridians felt as if molten iron were flowing through them instead of true essence. Every breath he took sent a wave of burning force through his lungs; every heartbeat felt like a hammer blow.
Ren's Dao Heart remained steady.
He let the Hell Suppressing Immortal Physique bear the strain. Bones and tendons, tempered by that ancient merit law, acted as hidden pillars, shunting the weight away from the weaker parts of his body. At the same time, he nudged the chaos energy he had cultivated from other worlds, spreading it through his meridians like a cool, invisible lubricant. Where infernal power tried to tear, chaos soaked in, softening edges, spreading stress evenly.
Eleven wings.
In his Spiritual Sea, the Asura domain rose.
Blood-soaked battlefields piled atop one another, blades sticking up like forests of steel. Rivers ran red and silent. The infernal energy pouring into his body resonated with that domain, sending waves of killing intent crashing through it like storm tides.
Each wave left a mark.
Those marks did not remain in the Asura domain alone. They looped back along subtle lines into his flesh, his bones, the demonic tattoo forming on his back. The half-formed twelfth pair of wings drank those marks in, adding each scar of slaughter as another line of power.
Ren breathed in.
And pushed.
The twelfth pair of wings burst into existence.
Outside, the column of blood-red light surrounding the stage detonated, turning pitch-black for a single, terrifying heartbeat. In that instant, the infernal energy within a large radius around the vortex simply… vanished. It hadn't been dispersed. It had been swallowed whole and dragged into a new structure.
On Ren's back, the complete Heavenly Demon Tattoo blazed to life.
Twelve wings, each feather razor sharp, each rune glowing with a depth of slaughter and despair that made the air itself tremble. The tattoo didn't lie flat on his skin; it hovered just above it, a layer of demonic formation nestled between flesh and soul. The wings twitched faintly, as if eager to spread.
In his Spiritual Sea, something woke with them.
Darkness rose again.
This time, it wasn't the grandmist darkness of Prime Emperor.
It was a colder night, familiar in a different way—the night that waited at the end of every road.
A figure stepped out of that night.
Its outline was humanoid, but hazy, formed of layers of shadow. A cloak of countless black feathers wrapped its frame, fluttering in soundless wind. Its face was featureless, a void framed by the hood, with only two pinpricks of pale light where eyes should have been.
Death God.
A martial intent born from endless killing. From hands that had ended lives without number, from hearts hardened until the idea of death became an intimate companion rather than a distant fear. Its presence seeped into the deepest layer of the soul, whispering of inevitability, shaking the grip a person had on their own body. For the weak, that whisper alone could sever the thread of their life.
Ren watched the new intent take shape.
Beside it, his Asura Intent stood like a towering fiend, wreathed in blood and war. Its domain was a world forever at dusk, horizon burning red, blades clashing in every direction, shrieks and roars forming a constant, furious hymn.
Behind them, the red lotus of Prime Emperor turned slowly.
Its petals opened and closed in silence, each motion releasing a faint breath of grandmist. Within its field, all color dimmed, all lines blurred, all meaning drifted toward that first, formless chaos.
Three domains.
Three force fields.
Three truths about killing.
Asura: the cruel joy of battle, the madness of slaughter that dyed heaven and earth red.
Death God: the quiet certainty of endings, the hand that reached into the river of time to pull a person's final moment forward.
Prime Emperor: the supreme suppression that did not simply kill, but returned everything to the source, wiping away even the imprint of what had been.
The Immortal Soul Bone gleamed.
Lines of comprehension linked the three, connecting them like stars forming a constellation.
He saw how Asura's brutality could give shape to Death God's cold field, turning that suffocating fog of inevitability into edges and blades.
He saw how Prime Emperor's grandmist could strip away all distractions, leaving only the bare essence of life and death, of killing and being killed.
He saw how Death God's grasp on the soul could anchor Prime Emperor's suppression, allowing grandmist to seize enemies more easily, pulling them down into the first chaos where Asura's slaughter would be absolute.
His Dao Heart stirred.
"…Heavenly Demon."
The name rose in his mind without effort.
Not the childish story told to scare mortals—a horned beast roaring in the dark.
The Heavenly Demon Martial Intent. The field that was born when Death God, Asura, and Prime Emperor were fused into one: a complete demonic domain that could crush the hearts and bodies of all beneath heaven.
Ren reached out.
In his Spiritual Sea, the Asura fiend, the Death God shade, and the red lotus turned toward his True Self.
He opened his hand.
They stepped into it.
The fusion was not gentle.
Asura's domain roared as grandmist crashed into it. Parts of the scarlet battlefields were seized and ground down, their chaotic slaughter refined into cleaner, sharper paths of killing. The rivers of blood thickened, their currents straightening, less wasted foam, more direct, unstoppable surge.
Death God's cloak of feathers shuddered as Asura's wildness poured into it, giving motion to what had been still. Its quiet inevitability was stained with rage, transforming its touch from a soft hand at the back of the neck to a scythe's arc.
Prime Emperor's lotus shivered.
Some of its aloof detachment was dyed crimson. The neutral grandmist energy learned to roll forward like a wave instead of simply standing in place and erasing passively. Lines of killing intent etched themselves along its petals, giving the formerly indifferent chaos a direction.
At the center of it all, Ren's Anima sat unmoving.
He decided what the new intent would be.
Slowly, a new field formed.
It was not purely darkness.
Within its boundaries, colors flickered—the red of blood, the black of night, the gray of grandmist, the pale white of bone. The air within it grew heavier, not just on the body, but on the concept of being alive. Every breath inside that space felt like it was being weighed and judged.
In that domain, killing intent was the natural air.
Life was the intruder.
Any martial artist dragged into it would feel their true essence smothered as Prime Emperor suppressed and erased. Their law comprehension would blur. Techniques that once flowed like instinct would stutter and break as their foundations were eaten. Their souls would tremble as Death God's whisper sank deep, stirring primal fear from the marrow. Their bodies would feel heavier, as if the world itself had decided they should kneel, as if the sky had leaned down to press its full weight onto their shoulders.
Heavenly Demon Martial Intent.
It settled into his Spiritual Sea as a new world, hooking roots into his Heavenly Demon Tattoo and into the twelve wings now etched into his flesh. Every feather in that tattoo resonated faintly with the new field. When he willed it, the wings would not just be a demonic badge, but the physical anchor of that domain.
Ren let out a slow breath.
On the killing stage, his eyes opened.