In the darkness, the Heavenly Demon was floating.
The torches were out, and even the luminous pearls had lost their light, so the only light was what the Heavenly Demon and Heuk-am gave off themselves.
They had halos.
A faint light flowed from behind their heads.
Along the Heavenly Demon’s cheek, silvery tears kept trailing down little by little.
Both his feet were slightly lifted from the ground.
Light was leaking out from the hole in his chest.
Power could be felt from that light.
It was clearly not Demonic Qi, and it was not ordinary True Qi either.
That radiant light was clearly Divinity.
The Heavenly Demon had already once surpassed humanity and attained a rank like an immortal.
But the Heavenly Demon, born human, had inevitable limits. And yet, could any human imperfection be felt from him now?
“You.”
No, it could not.
The Heavenly Demon’s current state even pressured Heuk-am.
It was a threatening sight even to Chiyou the Heavenly King, who once ruled vast plains and faced the Yellow Emperor and Yinglong alone.
“I’ll make sure you can’t act insolent anymore.”
In the darkness, the Heavenly Demon’s eyes shone.
His red irises were like red jade.
The Heavenly Demon slowly raised his hand.
Shukak-!
A punch beyond human perception unfolded.
Heuk-am avoided the fist pouring down on his face because this place was within his domain.
Even so, he couldn’t avoid it completely.
Tuk.
What fell to the floor was a broken horn.
His right horn had snapped from the punch.
Heuk-am’s hair and fur bristled all at once.
But at the same time, the corner of his mouth lifted slightly.
How long had it been since he felt a sense of danger like this?
His nature was clearly that of a war god mad for battle and martial arts, so Heuk-am smiled.
That reaction ignited the Heavenly Demon’s anger.
Red Aura Qi surged up on the Heavenly Demon’s right hand.
It flared brightly enough to light the entire cavern, then compressed at an astonishing speed.
Until the red Aura Qi turned white.
The light was so dazzling, it was as if he held the sun in his hand…
“Let’s see if you can still laugh with a hole punched through your chest.”
The Heavenly Demon’s hand shot out.
Light burst forth.
It was Aura Qi compressed and compressed again into extreme destructive power, a condensed mass of qi that could be called an Aura Qi Compression Sphere.
The Aura Qi Compression Sphere that exploded from the Heavenly Demon’s hand discharged its force in a single direction.
A line of light shot forward.
No spear or crossbow could have that kind of piercing power.
The beam that pierced Heuk-am’s shoulder didn’t lose power at all.
It bored into the solid cavern wall as if digging through mud.
And even then, the beam didn’t break.
It kept drilling through solid bedrock.
Its speed was no slower than an arrow being loosed.
The beam, in front of the Evil Cult’s main base.
It took only the time of a single blink to punch through the relief of a giant holding up the sky.
An unfortunate Evil Cultist standing before it had a hole punched through his chest.
As he fell, the cultist’s body was split in half by the beam.
Everyone in the midst of battle witnessed that beam.
The beam passed through the space where Ha-jun and Mang-hon were fighting.
By now, Ha-jun’s entire body had been blackened by Demonic Qi.
Even so, he still hadn’t brought Mang-hon down.
Mang-hon glanced toward the direction the light had been fired from and let out a small chuckle.
“Having a hard time, are you?”
Who was he saying that to?
Either way, it was clear Mang-hon was not particularly bothered by it.
His divine form scattered once more into countless insects and covered Ha-jun.
The beam of light passed on without caring.
The moment it passed beneath the building where Gwi-ryeong and Dam Hyun were fighting.
Kwa-kwaang!
The building’s outer wall was torn away, and Dam Hyun was flung out.
He was about to fall straight down.
What followed from the torn wall was a dragon. Bodhidharma.
Bodhidharma saved Dam Hyun as he was about to fall.
Clinging to Bodhidharma’s back, Dam Hyun lifted his head with effort.
His eyes were stained red, and his whole body was coated in blood.
Seueung-
The beam grazed past beneath Dam Hyun and Bodhidharma.
Startled, Dam Hyun tracked the passing beam with his eyes.
The light burned through the night sky as it kept advancing.
Beyond it was a red moon.
A moon red as blood.
It had been a long time since the world changed like this and the blue sky dyed itself purple, but the moon turning that red was recent.
Even if time passed, that ominousness didn’t seem like something one could get used to.
「We go in again.」
With Bodhidharma’s words, Dam Hyun activated his treasures again.
With thirteen treasures worn on his body at once, he charged back into the interior where Gwi-ryeong was.
The devastation unfolding on earth was like hell made manifest.
The red moon watched it quietly.
This catastrophe unfolding on a cliff in Nanman was not known to the world.
But those dying here would not need to find it lonely.
The red moonlight shone not only on Nanman, but equally on the entire world.
And wherever that moonlight reached, there was nowhere without catastrophe.
As the end times arrived.
Yokai rampaged across the world, and uncanny things moved as if alive.
Beneath the red moon.
Nanjing.
People were fighting.
At the end of the Yuan, Zhu Yuanzhang conquered Nanjing, renamed it Yingtian Prefecture, and proclaimed himself emperor.
Once the capital of Great Ming, Nanjing was still a great city.
Even now, after even Great Ming had declined and fallen, it was the same.
House-sized tigers ran through Nanjing’s main roads, dyed red by moonlight.
They were great tigers you would only see deep in the mountains.
It was strange enough that such tigers, which rarely formed packs, were charging in a swarm, but looking closely, there was a leader running at the front as if commanding them.
A beast with ash-gray fur, twice as large as an ordinary great tiger.
But its most striking feature was that it had two heads.
It was a twin-headed ghost tiger.
A yokai one might not see even once in a hundred years had appeared in the middle of the city.
It leapt up and climbed onto a building’s roof tiles.
With a house-sized monster standing on them, there was no way the tiles stayed intact.
A crunching sound rang out, and roof tiles fell and shattered loudly.
Keuheoong-!
It roared thunderously.
The great tigers following it roared after it.
That roar, mixed with infrasonic waves, had the property of stiffening the human body.
Even the swordsmen of the sword pavilion fighting with blades a short distance away flinched.
“Get a grip!”
Bang Ryeong, a master of the Bota Hermitage Sword Pavilion, scattered her sword strikes to save her disciple.
The sword pavilion had lost its home base, and they too were staying in Nanjing.
With trouble like this breaking out, they couldn’t stand by as an Orthodox Sect.
“M-Master, aaagh!”
Just then, one of Bang Ryeong’s disciples let out the sound of dying.
Bang Ryeong clenched her teeth and turned.
Though she was nearing sixty, her sword was still sharp.
Bang Ryeong tried to cut the arm of the one about to stomp her disciple to death.
She brought a blade down on an arm, and yet that sound rang out.
It wasn’t because the opponent wore armor.
It was because it wasn’t human, but a living, moving terracotta warrior.
Stone terracotta warriors had begun appearing all across the Central Plains.
Not only in Xi’an where Qin Shi Huang’s tomb was, but throughout the Central Plains, these terracotta warriors had been hidden.
Perhaps because they were made of stone, those terracotta warriors were extremely tough.
Still, a first-rate martial artist could deal with them easily.
However, sometimes there was one outside the norm.
“Be careful, Master! Sword Qi doesn’t work!”
The terracotta warrior before Bang Ryeong was like that.
It was strange from the start.
Unlike the other terracotta warriors of human-like size, this one was twice as tall by itself.
Its height, a full three-meters, was power in itself.
Its limbs were long, and its eyes were wide and vivid, as if it were alive.
It swung a six-meter iron spear befitting that height, and if it struck, trained martial artist or not, it would be instant death.
Bang Ryeong faced that terracotta warrior general.
She had been through every hardship, yet her body trembled.
But she couldn’t stop, and she couldn’t retreat.
Behind her were disciples still young.
Bang Ryeong shouted loudly.
“Come at me!”
The terracotta warrior seemed unable to understand human speech, but it responded to the shout.
It thrust the massive iron spear with astonishing sharpness.
It was more like a siege weapon than a spear.
The old swordswoman wasn’t pushed back by that momentum and swung her sword.
Sword Aura surged from Bang Ryeong’s blade.
No matter how tough it was, a terracotta warrior should not be able to withstand Sword Aura.
Bang Ryeong and the terracotta warrior brushed past each other.
After passing, Bang Ryeong stood upright with her sword in hand.
The Sword Aura that had been blazing from her blade had already vanished cleanly.
Jjeolgeureong.
A sword almost never falls from a swordsman’s hand.
But Bang Ryeong had no choice.
Because there was a gaping hole through her shoulder.
Spilling blood, Bang Ryeong fell.
“Keuheuk, heuk.”
Bang Ryeong barely managed to acupoint-seal herself and staunch the wound.
Then she turned back.
It was an immense relief.
The terracotta warrior had fallen with its waist split in two.
It was Bang Ryeong’s victory.
But her expression wasn’t good.
“With monsters like that running rampant… who will stop them?”
There were too many terracotta warriors and yokai for martial artists to handle.
It was a bleak situation.
“Kyaaak!”
Just then, a disciple screamed.
Startled, she turned, and it was the child standing before the terracotta warrior with its waist split in half.
Was he screaming like that just from seeing a terracotta warrior’s corpse?
It was absurd, and even irritating.
As Bang Ryeong was about to scold him, the disciple shouted.
“Master! P-Please look at this!”
“What on earth are you making such a fuss about!”
Bang Ryeong went to her disciple’s side.
And she felt a chill run down her spine.
“W-What.”
The broken cross-section of the terracotta warrior’s waist.
Naturally, she thought it would be filled with clay like other terracotta warriors, but it wasn’t.
“It looks like… internal organs.”
It had been dead a long time and dried up like jerky.
But what showed in that cross-section was clearly human organs and a spine.
A giant’s corpse was inside the terracotta warrior.
“Heuk, heok.”
Yi-gang ran.
For some reason, his breathing grew rough.
It made no sense for an Absolute master to tire from running only that much, so there had to be another problem.
In truth, Yi-gang’s body was not in one piece.
He had been ambushed by Mang-hon and had bled quite a lot all over.
Salt from his sweat got into the wounds, and it burned with pain.
On top of that, he had used Supreme Ultimate Techniques several times, and he had cut Heuk-am with the sword strike that once cut the Great Sage Equal to Heaven.
The single blow he took from Heuk-am had shaken his insides.
Even now, the smell of blood was in his mouth.
Those conditions were not the only things wearing him down.
Once again, he had left Zhang Sanfeng and the Heavenly Demon behind.
Zhang Sanfeng had clearly resolved himself to death.
“Heok…”
His limbs felt impossibly heavy.
Was it because of guilt?
He thought so, but it didn’t seem to be only that.
‘There’s something… ahead.’
The closer he got, the feel of the air changed.
Qi was overflowing. An unknown presence grew denser and denser, to the point breathing became difficult.
A strange, harsh smell, like alcohol, also drifted through.
His vision was still dark, so he couldn’t see much.
Yi-gang felt like he might pass out.
Perhaps it was fortunate. Something happened that snapped his mind awake.
Kwa-gwaang-!
With a thunderous roar, the ground trembled.
It was a shockwave from the Heavenly Demon and Heuk-am’s collision.
Absurdly, Yi-gang fell.
Only after rolling on the floor did he barely regain himself.
Then he jolted.
A corpse was sitting against the wall right in front of him.
It was clearly a corpse because there was a gaping hole in its chest.
“Cheokgol…”
It was Taoist Cheok-gol’s corpse, the one they still hadn’t found.
He had made it the farthest.
Even though he was ultimately caught and killed by Heuk-am…
Taoist Cheok-gol’s eyes were wide open, his mouth slightly parted.
Heuk-am wouldn’t have seated the corpse like this, so he must have leaned himself against the wall and died.
The martial uncle’s gaze, unable to close even in death, was fixed in one direction.
With an expression as if he had seen something and been horrified.
Yi-gang looked that way.
It was too dark to see anything.
With no choice, he moved in that direction.
It was still dark and hard to see, but he could tell the space had suddenly widened.
Yi-gang raised his hand and lit True Samadhi Fire.
A light source formed and illuminated the interior.
The revealed sight inside.
Yi-gang gripped his sword without realizing.
Countless figures were lined up. For a moment, it was enough to make him think he’d been ambushed.
But they weren’t people. They were terracotta warriors.
Thousands of terracotta warriors.
And every single one was the shape of a giant, twice as large as an ordinary person.
