Iron Slave's fingers were as withered as eagle talons, his golden mechanical knuckles emitting a fine grinding of gears as they trembled. This fanatical fervor, unseen for ten thousand years, threatened to burn right through his brass mask.
"Li'er, let go."
Cang Yaochen's voice was incredibly soft, yet it carried a finality that brooked no argument. Behind his neck, the Nine Abyss Soul-Settling Needle sensed the end of its destiny, its hum growing more shrill and mournful.
Jiang Li gripped his collar with white-knuckled intensity, her palms drenched in cold sweat. She stared into Cang Yaochen's bloodshot double pupils, forcing the words through clenched teeth: "Cang Yaochen, if you dare lose yourself, I will slaughter my way to the Nine Heavens just to drag your soul back for execution."
She let go.
Cang Yaochen walked toward Iron Slave, turning his back to the shifting dark-gold divine fire at the center of the forge.
"Do it."
Iron Slave let out a short, jagged cackle. His mechanical hand shot forward, cold metal fingers clamping onto the tail of the Soul-Settling Needle. Then, without a word of warning, he ripped it out.
Squelch—!
The moment the long needle was torn free, a spray of dark red demonic blood, laced with blue lightning, erupted. The droplets hit the iron floor with a hiss, rising in acrid white smoke and eating black holes into the metal plates.
Cang Yaochen let out a muffled groan, his back arching violently as his entire skeleton erupted in a cacophony of sharp cracks. Deprived of the needle's suppression, the Asura markings dormant in his marrow surged like poisonous vines, instantly blanketing his neck and half his face. That face, usually as cool and clear as moonlight, now appeared sinister and terrifying in the firelight.
"Blood!" Iron Slave roared.
His mechanical palm slammed against the hollow in Cang Yaochen's spine. A brutal suction exploded, forcibly wrenching a glob of viscous, dark purple essence-blood from the divine bone.
Cang Yaochen convulsed. The last spark of clarity in his eyes flickered and died.
Iron Slave took the essence-blood and the blood-stained needle and hurled them into the Mirror of Profound Inquiry at the heart of the furnace.
BOOM—!
The ancient mirror, dormant for three thousand years, erupted in a beam of pitch-black heretical light the moment it touched the essence-blood. The cracks of varying depths on the mirror's surface began to writhe and contract like living wounds under the nourishment of divine fire and demonic blood, finally sealing shut.
"Now! Girl, enter the mirror!" Iron Slave's voice was shrill in the vibrating stone chamber. "Find your three souls! Get in there!"
Jiang Li cast one last look at Cang Yaochen—kneeling in a pool of blood, his aura now entirely unrecognizable—and lunged into the black ripples of the mirror.
(Inside the Mirror: The Sea of Consciousness Wasteland)
The moment she landed, the searing heat vanished.
It was a wasteland of dark red. The sky hung low, and countless tattered battle-banners of the Sacred Sect stood planted in the scorched earth, their flapping sounds like the weeping ghosts of a thousand years ago. At the center of the waste, three translucent figures huddled in the shadows. They were Jiang Li's sealed souls.
"I remember..."
With every step Jiang Li took, fractured memories stabbed into her mind like blades. She didn't see the encirclement of the Sacred Ground; instead, she saw a white-robed monk on the Execution Platform of a millennium past.
At the moment the lightning and fire of the Heavens descended, it was that man who used his body to shield her from the killing blow. To preserve her spirit, he had personally sealed her three souls into the mirror and hollowed out half of his own heart to fill the void in her body.
"You've been suffering in my place all this time..." Jiang Li's tears hit the scorched earth, instantly blooming into red lotus fires.
(Outside the Mirror: The Subterranean Forge)
The massive iron doors shattered, shards of metal shrieking through the air like meteors.
Two Enforcers of the Sacred Ground, ten feet tall and shimmering with blinding gold light, stepped through the flames. The divine halberds in their hands crackled with demon-breaking lightning, instantly locking onto the wreckage before the forge.
"Sequence Confirmed: Iron Slave has defected. Cang Yaochen is fully demonized. By order of the Heavens—Obliterate all."
Iron Slave's mechanical arms shielded the furnace. He shrieked without looking back, "Cang Yaochen! You aren't dead yet, are you?! Your woman hasn't come out—do you really expect me to die with you?"
Cang Yaochen, kneeling in the pool of blood, slowly raised his head.
The light of reason in his eyes had vanished, leaving only a bottomless, dark purple void. His white robes were soaked through with demonic blood. The Rakshasa Phantasm behind him was no longer a distorted shadow; it had completely solidified.
He didn't stand. He simply reached out, grabbed a piece of discarded iron ore from the floor, and swung it against the descending divine halberd.
CLANG!
A thunderous boom echoed. The Divine General was sent reeling back five steps by that casual strike, the halberd nearly flying from his grasp.
Cang Yaochen's voice was low and raspy, devoid of any human emotion:
"Touch her... and die."