Chapter 205: The Final Battle
The sword master sneered, waited, his posture one of arrogant expectation, a king awaiting a crown he already owned.
A second passed, then another.
Each one stretched into a small eternity, a void of silence that screamed louder than any battle cry.
Had the sword heeded his command, or had the nascent Sword Born of the Red Run, in its infantile ignorance, chosen a catastrophic path? The agonizing questions coiled in Krogh’s mind like vipers.
The supreme confidence did not leave him, but it stiffened, becoming a rigid, imperious posture held against a rising, silent tide of... nothing.
Would Red Run, drawn by the sacred bond between them, seek him out here at the serene stone well of the Moon Reflection Mirror to reaffirm its allegiance?
Or had the vile, whispering deceit of Ju-On successfully lured it toward the profane grounds of the Ancestral Shrine?
Another tide of crushing uncertainty gnawed at the very foundations of Krogh’s being, a profound torment that his ironclad Dao Heart, tempered in countless trials, now struggled to endure. Each moment of silence was a needle driven deep into the core of his resolve, and the tapestry of his patience began to fray.
For Krogh Hanz, a supreme demonic sect powerhouse for whom a dozen single measured breaths were time enough to orchestrate the elaborate slaughter of an entire metropolis of mortals, this passive waiting was an exquisite and intolerable torture. He was a sovereign of instantaneous carnage, a being who shaped fate with a thought; to be forced into stillness was a personal and profound affront.
Each stretching second felt less like a moment and more like a year of agonizing silence, a direct insult to his absolute authority. He was not a petitioner; he was a god awaiting a tribute that was already his by divine right, and this delay was nothing short of blasphemy. In his mind’s eye, he could feel it—the distant, beautiful dance of Red Run’s destructive power, that familiar and thrilling song of the artifact’s unparalleled edge as it parted reality, slicing through whatever feeble, inconsequential resistance dared to stand before it.
The presence of his weapon, the extension of his own will, was maddeningly near. He could sense its world-ending potential humming just beyond the veil of the immediate, a promise of power so close it was a physical ache.
So agonizingly, excruciatingly close. Yet that final, crucial gap of distance and time felt like an unbridgeable chasm, magnifying his fury and his thirst into a singular, all-consuming fire.
Yet, it did not arrive.
He remained perfectly, imposingly still, a sovereign sword master carved from blades and pride, seated upon the throne of his own unassailable will. Every line of his body spoke of an expectation so certain it was already fact, a king awaiting the presentation of his crown in a ceremony that was merely a formality, a reaffirmation of a power that had never been—and could never be—questioned. The air itself seemed to hold its breath in deference to the moment of his triumphant reclamation.
The quarter-hour mark slid past, each second an eternity of mounting, incomprehensible humiliation. This was not a mere delay; it was a void where his certainty should have been, a silence that screamed a denial so profound it shook the very pillars of his reality. For a being of his stature, for whom centuries could pass in the blink of an eye, these fifteen minutes stretched into an aeon of personal insult, a lapse in the natural order of the cosmos that he alone was meant to dictate.
The entrance of the Moon Reflection Mirror beyond the courtyard remained starkly, appallingly empty. It was a void that mocked him. The silence that followed was not one of anticipation, but of absence—a deep, resonant, and absolute silence that spoke of a choice not made, a call not answered. It was the unthinkable sound of his own righteous being ignored.
The rigid, high-handed arrogance that had been etched upon Krogh Hanz’s face did not shatter into pieces; instead, it petrified, turning to cold, dead stone, a mask of frozen pride hiding the cataclysm within. The blazing light of supreme confidence in his eyes did not dim; it hollowed out, becoming a vast and empty expanse, like dead stars staring into a void they had just discovered lurking within their own core. The bond, the sacred, inviolable connection to the sliver of his very soul, was still there—he could feel the Sword, alive, thrumming with immense potency... and it was elsewhere. It was actively, consciously elsewhere.
It had not chosen him.
The truth arrived not as a shock, but as a blade forged from absolute zero, plunging deep into his gut and spreading an instantaneous, paralyzing coldness that his cultivated Dao Flame could not touch, could not even comprehend. His faith, an iron-clad, unshakable certainty that had been the bedrock of his existence for a thousand years, crumbled instantly to fine, worthless ash in his chest.
The ghost cockroach.
The pathetic, wretched thing wearing his skin.
It had... what? How?
The questions were not of curiosity but of utter, world-ending disbelief. How could a pale forgery, a ghost of a worm, possibly hold what was inherently, eternally his?
A low, shuddering breath rasped from his lips—a sound so alien it was as if he were breathing for the first time in centuries. It was not a sigh of defeat, but the raw, grating sound of a heaven cracking apart at its foundations, of axioms and absolutes fracturing under the weight of the impossible. The fine dust that hung in the air of the frigid sanctum, which usually stilled only at the command of his power, settled finally of its own accord, not from his influence, but from the sheer, crushing weight of his despair.
As one of the most powerful cultivator of his age, the architect of his own perfect vessel, the future conqueror of the Upper Realms, sat utterly alone in the profound, mocking dark. And for the first time since he was a mewling, powerless child at the very bottom of the food chain, he felt the bitter, tasteless dregs of total, unmitigated failure coating his soul. His Sword was gone. And with it, a fundamental part of his very being was not just missing or stolen, but had willingly, consciously, and utterly abandoned him.
He did not register the failure as a simple emotional state; such petty human stings were beneath him, distant and irrelevant trifles. What he felt, instead, was the systematic, architectural unmaking of his very essence. The supreme, foundational arrogance that had been the core framework of his being, the very substance etched into every line of his impossibly handsome face, began to dissolve and run like ink in a torrential downpour, leaving behind a blurred and unrecognizable canvas. The rich, powerful blood that usually gave his visage a vibrant, intimidating vitality drained away completely, leaving his countenance ashen and corpselike, his eyes hollowed out caverns holding the incomprehensible weight of a defeat so absolute it felt like a foreign, alien concept being forced upon him.
The sharp, imperiously commanding angle of his jaw, a feature so often set in a posture of contemptuous certainty that it could seemingly cut those who dared look upon it, went utterly and completely slack. The faint, perpetually confident smirk that had forever hinted at cosmic secrets only he possessed and at victories he had already written into the fabric of destiny was erased without a trace, leaving behind only a flat, bloodless, and utterly expressionless line. It was the mouth of a stranger, a weakling, and the sight of it on his own face was a more profound violation than any physical wound.
His gaze, usually so sharp, so intensely focused that it could cut through solid stone and lay bare the secrets of any soul it fell upon, was now utterly vacant. It was fixed on some meaningless point in the middle distance, the exact future where the entire grand, glittering tapestry of his personal history of glory had just been meticulously dismantled, each inviolable piece of it proven to be a fragile illusion. He was pointedly not looking in the direction of Twin Peak Hill, where the Ancestral Shrine stood atop its lofty perch. To consciously turn his gaze there, to acknowledge the presence of the victor, would be to make this grotesque new reality official. Instead, he was staring into a profound void, the empty space where the reflection of his own magnificent, undisputed supremacy used to reside.
It was not merely a loss he saw there in the settling dust motes. It was the complete and utter unraveling of the myth of his own cultivation genius, the silent, screaming arithmetic of his new existence laid bare: every past triumph now divided by zero, every boast and claim of inevitability subtracted into a perfect, humiliating nothingness. The stunned silence that enveloped the courtyard was not one of respectful awe; it was the dead, judgmental silence of an unseen audience watching a high-handed sword master’s legendary, inevitable fall from grace, and discovering, to their own shock, that he was not made of divine jade and celestial iron after all, but of common, brittle clay and sheer, unsustainable hubris.
The hand that had held the concept of a sword with the unshakeable authority of a primordial mountain now hung utterly limp and useless at his side, the fingers twitching with faint, spasmodic movements, instinctively searching for a familiar, comforting hilt that was no longer his to command, no longer his to even touch. He looked, for the very first time in his long, untouchable, and revered life, not like a peerless master of the sword-path, but like a mere man—stripped of all pretense, shattered at his core, and rendered terrifyingly, pathetically small against the infinite Dao Path. The victory had not been won through a contest; his entire constructed reality had simply been declared invalid by a higher, colder authority, and he was left standing alone in the hollowed-out, echoing shell of it, a king instantly and utterly deposed by the simple, unassailable truth of his own failure.
"Prepare for the final battle!" the man suddenly declared, his voice a grim, metallic command that echoed through the sanctum with a terrifying, absolute finality, cutting through the heavy silence like a blunt axe.
As he spoke, his once deeply introverted and perfectly controlled spirit energy flared around him with a violent, uncontrolled rage. And in that same moment, the countless blood-colored Threads of Fate—those sinister, gleaming filaments piercing the void around his magnificent body, each one a chain of destiny and a tether of power—began to snap. They did not break all at once, but in a rapid, staccato sequence, one after the other after the other, a symphony of severance.
The sound they made was not the noble shattering of priceless glass or the ringing report of sacred metal meeting its end. It was something smaller, meaner, more insulting. A sharp, elastic twang that seemed to bite the air with petty viciousness. It was the sound of an unbearable, vicious tension—the immense, soul-crushing strain of holding a magnificent consciousness tethered to the very brink of the abyss—finally and catastrophically giving way all at once.
Each individual Thread of Fate, a filament of pure negation thinner than a single thought yet stronger than any mortal concept of destiny, did not break with a hero’s final cry. Each one snapped with the pathetic, final protest of an overstretched rubber band, a cheap and mundane failure.
Where each thread had existed a moment before, a faint, shimmering scar lingered briefly in the atmosphere, a ghostly afterimage reminiscent of a lightning bolt seen behind tightly closed eyelids. Then these too faded, leaving behind only the ordinary air, which now felt shockingly thin, insubstantial, and utterly inadequate.
"My Lord, my love, I beg of you, please reconsider your choice!" Madam Claret’s ethereal form seemed to grow paler, her stunningly beautiful features etching with a horror that was both profound and deeply personal. The beautiful ghostress pleaded with him, her voice trembling with a raw and urgent fear that resonated through the very core of her spectral being. She could feel the cataclysmic intent coiling within him, a self-destructive impulse born of a pride too vast to accept any setback, and the sight of it terrified her more than any external foe.
She understood his current predicament all too well. Krogh Hanz’s Fate Providence, the very script of his destiny, was currently being shackled and actively suppressed by the ancient, vicious curse of the Ninefold Malice. Furthermore, the critical Threads of Fate that connected his spiritual core to the entire Earth Vein spirit energy hub deep beneath Twin Peak Hill were now stretched to their absolute limit, thrumming with a dangerous, unstable energy. If he were to continue on this course, to attempt to break these cosmic bindings through sheer, arrogant force alone, the resulting backlash would do more than merely wound him; it would ravage his very soul, causing catastrophic damage to his foundational vital energy that could never be undone.
Her voice softened, but the intensity of her care only grew, each word imbued with a wife’s desperate concern. "Without the stabilizing power of your Natal Soulbound Artifact, the Sword of Red Run, to act as your anchor and vessel in this life-and-death wager against the evil ghost Ju-On for ascension through the Cosmic Path... you will not be able to hold on for long, my love."
The truth of it was a cold dread in her own heart. "The overwhelming, crushing weight of the Ninefold Malice will shatter your Life Providence. The greedy, insatiable Earth Vein beneath us will drain your life vitality until nothing remains. And your glorious Dao Path, the culmination of a thousand years of striving, will be extinguished right here, in this sanctum! That is not a mere loss; it is a catastrophic, final doom from which there can be no return."
She moved closer, her form shimmering with anxious light. "My dearest," she urged, her tone now one of reasoned, respectful counsel, "the situation is dangerously unclear. To act now is to gamble everything on a blind assumption. Would it not be the wiser, more strategic course to first dispatch someone to the Driftdream Loch? To have them check on the Red Run’s status and properly investigate the root cause of its... delay? Knowledge must precede action, especially now."
Seeing the unyielding set of his jaw, she knew a greater demonstration was needed to break through his resolve. With a grace that spoke of her former life as a cultivator of immense power, she extended a hand. It was not a dramatic flourish, but a slow, deliberate, and sacred motion. Her arm, pale as bleached bone in the eerie glow of the spirit candles, swept gracefully towards the placid surface of the tiny lotus pond. The air above the water immediately began to shimmer, not with heat, but with a profound and unnatural cold that stole the very breath from the room. The shadows gathered at the pond’s edge deepened and coalesced, drawn to her will as if they were iron filings pulled to a powerful magnet.
The placid surface of the water, which had moments before serenely reflected the gentle light of the matsuri lanterns and flickering spirit candles, now grew perfectly, unnaturally still, transforming into a dark and flawless mirror. Then, from the deepest, most weed-choked center of the pond, a faint, sickly phosphorescent glow began to pulse with a slow, rhythmic throb. A shape, indistinct and ominous at first, began to rise from the abyssal depths against its will.
First came a swirling mass of purple hair, the color of a deeply bruised twilight, fanning out around the emerging form like a morbid and sorrowful halo. Then, the crown of a head broke the surface, followed by a pale, waxy forehead. The figure emerged from the depths inch by agonizing inch, a nightmarish and silent inversion of a sacred birth, a profane resurrection.
It was a woman. Her skin possessed the bluish-white pallor of a fish’s belly, waxy, taut, and utterly lifeless. She was soaked through, her once-elegant emerald gauze dress now clinging to a form that was too still, too limp, robbed of all vitality. Water streamed from her sleeves and the hem of her gown in a continuous, silent trickle, each drop hitting the now-still surface of the pond without a sound.
She floated upright, suspended just above the water like a grotesque puppet held aloft by invisible strings of dark magic. Her head lolled limply to one side, exposing the graceful, terrible line of her throat. Her eyes were not peacefully closed in rest; they were squeezed firmly shut, as if in the final, frozen moment of some unbearable agony or soul-shattering terror.
The beautiful features of Ruru Rosa were frozen in a state of perpetual, silent surprise, her lips slightly parted, not in a gentle sigh, but as if caught in the act of forming a crucial word that had been forever stolen from her by the suffocating water.
This was a resource they had been hoarding. With Krogh Hanz’s previous command, Ruru Rosa’s body and soul had been intended for a purpose: to be used as the fertilizer for The Soul Eater Kodama ghost tree, a necessary sacrifice to replenish the massive spirit essence losses that the man called himself Kinson Wexford had drained from it.
However, in this desperate and unforeseen hour, priorities had to shift. Finding out what had happened to the Sword of Red Run and discovering its whereabouts was now the single most important objective. The nourishment of the Souleater Kodama, and the tree’s recovery, would simply have to wait.
Krogh shook his head slowly, a gesture of profound and unyielding finality, his expression having returned to a state of preternatural calm that was more terrifying than any outburst of rage. It was the deep, still silence of a mountain that had decided to avalanche, a resolve forged in the coldest fires of absolute necessity. He looked upon the spectral form of his wife, his gaze holding a tenderness for her concern, but also an immovable certainty in the path he had chosen.
"Her strength is a mere flickering candle in a hurricane," the sword master stated, his voice low and even, devoid of any doubt. After all, this female cultivator, Ruru Rosa, was only at the Eighth Layer of the Qi Refinement Stage. With that paltry, insignificant cultivation base, she was less than an insect in the grand scheme of the forces now in play. She couldn’t even hope to withstand three casual slash strikes from his Natal Soulbound Sword, let alone contend with the abomination that now wielded it.
What meaningful intelligence could such a fragile vessel possibly hope to find out?
What profound truth could she ever hope to uncover against such overwhelming malice?
Besides, sending her out now, unprepared and weak, risked her immediately encountering the Ju-On’s pervasive evil curse. He would not so carelessly waste a cultivator for nothing, and he certainly would not hand to that evil ghost thing another potential puppet, another tool of malice to be used against him. The cost was too high for the meager, uncertain reward.
The man had resolved himself to stare directly into the heart of the worst possible outcome and meet it on his own terms. His mind was set, his will an unbreakable blade. He would leave the safety of the Frigid Sanctum immediately and march directly into the jaws of the impending storm. He would confront the Ju-On in a final, desperate battle for not just victory, but for the slimmest chance at mere survival.
Though the catastrophic act of breaking the Threads of Fate had doomed his glorious dream of ascension to the Foundation Stage through the legendary Cosmic Path Foundation Establishment, it was still a far better alternative than the certain damnation that awaited him here.
Dealying or waiting meant allowing the Ju-On to finish refining the spirit sword’s core, to fully assimilate and retrieve all the stolen power from the Sword of Red Run. Waiting meant the inevitable moment when that abomination would storm the Moon Reflection Mirror Stone Well at the head of a vast horde of cultivator puppets and shrieking vengeful wraiths, all to butcher him with his own sword.
The Ju-On would wrest and rob him of every ounce of his hard-won cultivation strength, snatch the Souleater Kodama ghost tree from his control, and worst of all, it would take Madam Claret, his darling wife, and all the assets, treasures, fame, and status he had spent a lifetime accumulating. He would be erased completely, his legacy becoming nothing more than a footnote in the story of the evil itself that replaced him.
By striking now, with the brutal, decisive force of a cornered predator, he could potentially catch the Ju-On before it had fully harnessed the Red Run’s power. He could reclaim his Natal Soulbound Sword and the other half of his Life Providence that had been stolen by the scourge being from him. The sublime dream of Ascension through the legendary Cosmic Path might be lost forever, reduced to ashes, but his own survival, the bare fact of his continued existence, remained a possibility worth spilling every last drop of his blood to seize.
Thinking up to this point, Krogh’s face settled into a mask of grim, unshakeable determination, the kind a man wears when he knows the horrific, soul-rending price of his power and has decided, with a sickening finality, to pay it in full. From the depths of his spatial ring, his fingers closed around an object so vile that the very light in the courtyard seemed to flinch away from it, recoiling in disgust.
He drew forth a doll. It was a pathetic, abhorrent thing, no larger than his palm, seeming to pulse with a sickly, stolen vitality in the gloom. Its form was crudely stitched together from a patch of rough, sallow leather that seemed to sweat a faint miasma of despair. But its most abhorrent feature was its hair: a shock of coarse, black human hair, as if violently torn from a dead god’s head and sewn crudely into its scalp.
Without a sound, without even a flicker of pain crossing his features, Krogh drove the fingers of his other hand into his own chest. There was a wet, tearing sound of supreme self-violation, a horrible intimacy of flesh and muscle parting under sheer, unforgiving will alone. He did not cry out. Instead, he reached into the cavity he had made, and when his hand emerged, it was cupped around his own, still-beating heart, glistening and dark in the eerie spirit light. He squeezed, and a torrent of thick, vital heart’s blood splashed across the doll’s featureless face, painting it in a grotesque, dripping red mask.
A low, guttural chant began to spill from his lips, forbidden pacts that twisted the air. The blood on the doll did not drip; it was consumed, soaked in hungrily as if the fetish were a starving mouth. And then the air itself began to weep, thick with the cloying scent of iron and ozone.
From the charged space around Krogh, the countless, severed Threads of Fate suddenly manifested anew. They were not solid, not quite ethereal, but they moved with a serpentine, malevolent intelligence, humming with a energy of pure spite. They slithered through the heavy air, a creeping, unstoppable tide of crimson malice.
As Krogh lifted a single, blood-smeared finger in a gesture of ultimate command, the threads that had moments before been binding him uncoiled with a whispery, eager slither. They abandoned him like discarded snakeskins and joined the horrific migration, sinuously twisting through the gloom to ensnare Ruru Rosa’s form. They wrapped around her limp limbs, her torso, her throat—weaving a living, breathing lattice of scarlet fate, transferring the terrible burden of his curse onto her, preparing her as a vessel for a purpose too dark to name.
At the same time, the puppet doll’s purpose now fulfilled, crumbled into nothingness. It did not break apart or fall to pieces; it simply disintegrated into a fine, silent handful of blackened gravel in the blink of an eye.
"My Golem Substitution Technique works as I thought," Krogh parted his lip, "It will allow this female cultivator to stand in my place, to be bound by the Threads of Fate for a short moment." A faint, cold smile wore on his face.
"It will fool that evil Ju-On’s senses, clouding its perception just long enough for it to be caught entirely off guard by the totality of my surprise strike. It will believe me still shackled, still trapped, right up until the very moment my sword finds its disgusting evil heart."
Krogh uncoiled from the futon. The luxury mat of woven spirit straw beneath him, unable to withstand the invisible, crushing pressure suddenly radiating from his form, instantly withered and dissolved into a fine, gray dust, disintegrated by the sheer magnitude of the power he was now unleashing.
A sound began to permeate the Frigid Sanctum, a low, resonant hum that was less an audible noise and more a fundamental disturbance in the very fabric of the world around him. It deepened rapidly, thickening into a visceral, overwhelming roar that vibrated through the stone floor and the very air. It was the sound of his immense spirit energy, a dam of unimaginable scale and containment that he had finally, and catastrophically, shattered. The aura surged from him not like a gentle wave, but like a tsunami of raw, untamed.
Every breath he drew was a contained cyclone, pulling the world’s energy into the vortex of his being. With each inhalation, the vast cultivation base he had so meticulously concealed and compressed for decades, perhaps even centuries, tore through its self-imposed seals with a soundless, internal scream of release. It didn’t just rise; it erupted, a volcano of spiritual might that had been dormant for too long. The air around him shimmered and warped with a intense heat haze, the very light bending and distorting around the colossal, advancing density of his unleashed power.
There was no wind in the sealed sanctum, but Krogh’s robes were caught in the invisible maelstrom. They billowed and whipped around him as if he stood in the heart of an invisible hurricane, the luxury fabric snapping and cracking with a fury that spoke eloquently of the terrifying energy now screaming through his newly opened meridians.
And then his eyes opened again.
The desperate, calculating madness within them was not the chaos of a broken mind, but the terrifying, razor-sharp, single-minded focus of an apex predator who has finally tired of the long hunt and decided to end it. They burned with a fierce inner light, twin stars of incandescent fury and long-suppressed, monumental rage. All pretense, all subtlety, every vestige of restraint was scorched away in the intensity of that gaze, leaving only a pure, undiluted purpose.
The killing intent that rolled off him in waves was a physical, suffocating weight, a blanket of pure, undiluted malice that promised annihilation without remorse and without exception.
"We must," he stated, his voice not raised, but carrying with it the chilling finality of a verdict that had already been passed. "Act soon!"
PS:
This 4500+ word Chapter served fresh just for you! Consider this a giant literary hug for your patience. 🤗
Now, while you’re diving into this update, I have a burning question for you all: who do YOU think will win the final battle?
Place your bets!