Lei Yangming balled his hands into fists and stepped forward. “How could you do this?!” he shouted, his face red. His words were directed at the elder beneath Wu Yulan’s sword, but Lei Yangming would not even look at him. “If this continues, I won’t forgive you! I will cut my ties with the sect and leave! Please, elders, reconsider!”

  One of the Heavenly Mountain Pavilion elders scoffed and waved his hand at Lei Yangming.

  A wave of force propelled forward, and struck Lei Yangming in the stomach, forcing him to his knees, vomiting blood.

  “Then cripple your cultivation and leave,” the elder said, frowning deeply.

  Ren Jinhai blinked, as he saw the top cultivator of his generation and sect, attacked with deadly force, and aimed at crippling his cultivation. Though Lei Yangming managed to protect his Dantian, it left the rest of his body at the mercy of the elder’s attack.

  “You… you… this is Lei Yangming!” Ren Jinhai shouted. “The sect master will never forgive you for this!!”

  “The sect master won’t forgive me? You think Lei Yangming is special? There is one of him every ten years!!” the elder shouted back at Ren Jinhai. “Not a hundred Lei Yangmings, or a thousand of you, can make up for the thousand years of calamity that awaits us if we don’t see this through!”

  “Retract your words from before, cut your ties with Zhu Xuelian, and you may live long enough to see that this is right!” another elder said.

  “No… way…” Lei Yangming groaned as Ren Jinhai helped him to his feet. “From today… onward… we are finished… I, Lei Yang… ming… am no longer… a disciple of… Heavenly Mountain Pavilion.”

  The elders frowned.

  The other disciples, except the Frozen Peak Palace disciples, whose elders did not come to represent the sect here, tore off the patches on their sleeves that identified them as disciples of their respective sects. The gesture was simple to understand. They were now rogue cultivators.

  “So you will all die with Zhu Xuelian?” an elder of the Seven Killing Swords sect asked.

  No one answered. Words were unnecessary. They gripped their weapons tightly and made their peace.

  “Do you see what you do, Zhu Xuelian?” an elder of the Heavenly Mountain Pavilion asked. “You seduced all these people into death with you. And for what? Everywhere you go, you only cause problems. This is the price you made us pay so you can have your shallow satisfaction.”

  Zhu Xuelian suddenly chuckled darkly.

  “What is so funny?”

  Slowly, Zhu Xuelian lifted her teary eyes to the elder in question, and in them burned an ember of hatred. “Today, I have seen the ugliest face of evil; you speak of sacrifice and paying a price, but nothing of yours is sacrificed or lost. You lay the corpses of my friends and my elders at my feet, and you speak as if I am the one holding the sword that killed them.”

  The elders frowned at her words, and more so at the intense aura that enveloped her. It was not sword force — she wasn’t capable of producing any — but the thick, killing intent that wrapped itself around her was something that sent a shiver down their spines.

  “You are mud,” Zhu Xuelian said as she stepped forward. “I have finally dragged my half-dead corpse into a life worth living, yet here you are, pulling me back; sticking to me like ugly, slimy, heavy, disgusting mud…”

  “Watch your word—“

  “Silence!!” Zhu Xuelian shouted and stomped on the head of the elder underneath Wu Yulan’s sword. As her shout echoed in the chamber, tyrannical tones pulsing within the sound, the elder’s skull scattered in every direction.

  “Speaking is what people do,” Zhu Xuelian said coldly, scraping bits of flesh and bone off her heel. “Mud is to be stepped on.”

  It was impossible to describe this situation to anyone who was not a Nascent Soul period cultivator. Only with one’s enhanced senses could one peer into the deeper mysteries of another being; to read the finer points of aura; detect the subtlest hints of energy; and understand situations beyond one’s physical senses.

  Zhu Xuelian possessed none of those tells. Her cultivation truly was pitiful, and not suppressed or altered in a way to resemble something else. Her Physique, regardless of its level, should not be able to overcome an elder’s protective qi and crush his head like a melon.

  Yet, this was the situation.

  “A thousand years of calamity awaits you?” Zhu Xuelian asked. “You no longer have to worry about that. The Heavenly Mountain Pavilion sect, the Galaxy Sword sect, the Seven Killing Swords sect — I now vow to annihilate every one of your filthy, disgusting cabals…”

  As she spoke, the elders drew their weapons. Deep in their hearts, they knew they no longer had the opportunity to try to convince Zhu Xuelian to die willingly for their greater good.

  “I will never take back these words. No matter how much you beg and plead and negotiate, I will make ashes of your mud and peace of your demise.”

  A bright white line appeared before the elders, forming a perimeter through a vibrating and pulsing string of unprecedented sword force. Even at a glance, they could tell that crossing that perimeter would be the equivalent of seeking death. They looked at Wu Yulan and cursed her silently. They feared her, and her extraordinary techniques, the most.

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  “You want me to carry the burden of this bloody sword? You will get what you want. So be it!! Today, I sow my garden of hate in your mud. I will exterminate every trace of you. I, Zhu Xuelian, can no longer exist under the same heaven as the likes of you. Come, ruin; come, calamity; no matter whose blood fertilizes this cursed ground, these flowers will consume your sun and liberate my soul.”

  An elder of the Heavenly Mountain Pavilion could not hold back anymore, and despite the threat, lunged forward, crossing the white line. He had never heard such a charged curse before. She wasn’t just cursing them, but also herself. It made his spine tingle.

  It was not a lack of patience that caused this elder to act so rashly, but the very real and genuinely credible feeling that this threat — no, this curse — held. Zhu Xuelian had to die at all costs.

  No one saw the sword that disemboweled the elder; all they saw were the organs that went flying forth, as his body crossed the perimeter of the white line. Then, the elder dropped onto the ground, screaming as he desperately tried to pack his organs where they belonged.

  “I, Zhu Xuelian, merely yearned to live the life of peace and freedom that I have earned, but now I dedicate it to the end of yours. I renounce all notions and principles of righteousness or justice, and embrace the devil in my heart.”

  Another elder charged forward, leaping into the air to jump over the white line that remained in the air, with its threatening promise of death, but someone’s hand clasped around his ankle, pulled him down, and slammed him into the ground.

  “Where are you going?” Wu Yulan asked, gold eyes glowing brilliantly. A gold halo glittered behind her back, as the force of her gold core suppressed even this elder’s far superior cultivation.

  This elder’s expression reflected nothing but terror and fear, as he helplessly watched Wu Yulan’s sword thrust into his chest, impaling him all the way through.

  Then, she lifted the elder’s body, and tossed him to the side, as if he was nothing.

  “I will kill every last one of you and all nine generations crawling in the shadow of your foul tree. This I vow!”

  Then, no less than eight elders appeared beside Wu Yulan, completely surrounding her, and their weapons — swords, sabers, and spears — all descended on her.

  The chamber plunged into black and silver ice as snow erupted from where Wu Yulan stood, drawing mad spirals and helices of power, with muted light glimmering from the center of all the chaos.

  Their weapons found nothing but the ephemeral afterimages of Wu Yulan's form, as it burst into snowflakes each time they tried to strike her. She moved in ways that defied their intuition, and then she leaned sideways, falling like a cut flower, and her sword descended with her.

  The tiles under them cracked and exploded outward. Simultaneously, eight slashes fell from above, carving through the swirl of snow and painting it red. Screams emerged from the veil of snow, and none of them were Wu Yulan's.

  An arc of sword energy flew out of the cloud of snow, carving into the ceiling with such immense force and power that the stone melted, dripping off the canopy and onto the floor. Though the building was reinforced with top-grade materials, it still managed to get damaged.

  To everyone present, this was all an apocalyptic sight. They could all get obliterated here by a stray spark of energy — they couldn’t even understand how Wu Yulan was not dead yet.

  Then, just as the snow became lighter, they could see Wu Yulan’s smaller form throw an elder to the ground with one hand, while she fended off a spear with her sword. Then, Wu Yulan stomped her glittering ice-heel on the elder’s throat, producing a noise that scarred those present.

  Wu Yulan’s swordsmanship was as beautiful as it was utterly brutal.

  “Frozen Sword Art,” Wu Yulan whispered. “Calamity Winter.”

  In the blink of a moment, it was as if the world stood still and that time was frozen. The glint of a sword carved through the cloud of snow, cutting through every elder surrounding Wu Yulan.

  Yet, when the moment passed, there was no blood or screams — the elders merely jumped back from Wu Yulan, with horrified expressions.

  “You… you…!” one of the elders hissed. “What did you do…!?”

  “What happened…?” one of the elders asked — one who didn’t join the fray.

  “She… she cut our lifespan… our life…”

  Everyone’s faces darkened.

  The white line suddenly unraveled and disappeared, opening the most secure path toward Wu Yulan and Zhu Xuelian. It was an open invitation.

  Wu Yulan came to stand next to Zhu Xuelian and Yun Fei again. Her eyes glimmered with beauty and stillness as she coldly watched the elders.

  Everyone knew of Wu Yulan. A genius with an unprecedented result. A person like her appeared so rarely, that her worth could not be compared to, say, Lei Yangming or even a sect. The elders desperately wanted to avoid having to kill Wu Yulan.

  However, none of them knew Wu Yulan.

  Wu Yulan was not the cultivator they thought she was — not a sword cultivator, not a genius, not the heir of the future they wanted her to be. Wu Yulan was a weapon of war with a deeply twisted mind who yearned to be like a soft veil of silk gliding across the sharp edge of a sword; afraid of being cut; high on the thrill of being alive. No wonder her sword was so deadly — it was a calamity dreaming of its own demise, and each nightmare it overcame only made it sharper. The carmine lips that enchanted so many were as beautiful as their ache for the flame in the proximity of death which could thrill and melt her monstrous, frozen heart.

  In those eyes, the elders saw a tiny, infinitesimal hint of this, and their guts tied into knots.

  She could’ve killed them, then and there. But she chose not to. Instead, she cut their lifespans. It is not because Wu Yulan was a sadist — no, she disliked suffering; all her mortal combat, she ended cleanly and quickly.

  The other thing no one knew about Wu Yulan was just how deep her affection and loyalty to Zhu Xuelian was. If Zhu Xuelian promised she would kill them all, then Wu Yulan would never deprive her of that.

  It was their own bad luck that they forced Zhu Xuelian to make that vow because otherwise, Wu Yulan would’ve sent them all to hell without any suffering.

  “When I saw eighteen old rags bullying one little girl, I thought I had seen it all. But then I saw half of them get beaten up by a little girl. Never in my entire life did I think my poor eyes would be so thoroughly fouled by something this pathetic. Mud is not enough to describe what you are. You are all truly, comprehensibly, inexcusably disgusting and foul.”

  The light, female voice rang through the chambers from all directions, with no obvious source.

  “Who is there!? Show yourself!” An elder shouted.

  A woman stepped forward, from the shadows, as if she had always been there. Her long, black hair swayed behind her in a fashion that made her appear otherworldly. Her feet barely touched the ground. She was like an otherworldly fairy.

  “What do you want with a member of my Yue clan? Explain yourselves quickly and simply. I will warn you only once. If you do not comply with my request, I will kill you all.”

  As she approached, Zhu Xuelian slowly cupped her fist and bowed to the woman. “Lady Yue, this disciple greets master.”

  Likewise, Wu Yulan and Yun Fei silently followed suit and greeted Lady Yue.

  Everyone else was speechless.