Chapter 146: BURNING END

Chapter 2 of 2 today. Chapter 147 is coming out tomorrow.

CHAPTER

146

BURNING END

Jieyuan

—∞—

He didn’t appear in any of the forests or towns he’d burned down. Nor did he appear in the midst of the charred, burning landscape that had served as the setting of the seventh through tenth difficulties. It wasn’t the inferno-filled void where he’d experienced the eleventh difficulty, either.

What it was, was red.

Very red.

He was in a large, square room with a high, vaulted ceiling. It was all made of smooth scarlet stone. Near the corners were pillars, darker in color, burgundy, with spiraling, feather-like markings embossed on them. Glowing rubies were embedded in the dome above, illuminating the room with their vibrant red glow.

In the center of the room was a long, low couch, as red as everything else around. A woman was reclining on it, sideways, facing him, a hand propping up her head.

The first thing that caught Jieyuan’s attention was her hair. It was a bright, vibrant red, flowing freely past her shoulders. Her robes were the same flame-like red, patterned with gold.

Then they locked gazes, and Jieyuan wasn’t too surprised to find her eyes were also a bright, burning red, speckled with gold, like a ring of fire blazing around her pupils.

Despite himself, his breath caught in his lungs, just for a moment. She was beautiful; as much as Meiyao was, even if they didn’t look all that alike.

There was something exotic about the woman that went beyond the burning colors; her eyes were long and narrow, upturned, her cheekbones high and razor-sharp, her lips bowed and crimson. The red lighting only added to the impression.

Her neck, he noticed, was bare, and he had to keep himself from staring at it.

“You may sheathe your weapons, for now,” the woman said. Her voice was soft and airy, with a musical lilt, like a songbird’s trill.

Jieyuan slid the Shifting Feathers back into their sheaths; he couldn’t help but note the for now she’d tacked onto the end, there.

She extended an arm and motioned for him to approach with her hand. “Come.”

Jieyuan walked over; he kept his eyes firmly fixed on the woman as his boots sounded dully against the stone floor. A faint, slightly sweet scent hung in the air. Incense.

He stopped in front of the couch; he still didn’t say anything, trying to get the measure of the situation first.

The echo looked him up and down, like an art collector appraising a painting in a gallery. “It is little wonder Fire has chosen you. Your soul is… exquisite. And yet your fire is dampened.” She tilted her head to the side, the motion oddly bird-like. “Curious.”

His soul was exquisite? “What do you mean?”

It wasn’t the first time someone had said something like this about his soul. The Primordial, Muyeshen, had called his soul exceptional. Clearly, there was something he was missing.

The woman gave him a dismissive look. “If you know not, then it does not fall to me to tell you, human.”

Human. “You aren’t human, then?”

She did look unnaturally beautiful, but so did Meiyao. He’d thought it was the work of a bloodright.

One sharp scarlet eyebrow rose. “I most certainly am not. Heavens forbid.” There was a hint of laughter to her voice. “I have merely taken the form of your kind out of convenience.”

She slid her feet down to the floor, then rose upward.

Jieyuan stepped back to give her space, but then she kept rising, and he realized how tall she was.

Standing fully upright now, she towered over him; she had to be at least half a foot taller than he was, probably over seven feet. He’d only met one person (though he might be stretching the definition of person) who was taller: the Xieyueshen empyrean, from the Amphis Concept’s challenge phase.

Suddenly, Jieyuan found it much easier to believe that she wasn’t human.

“Now,” she said, “how to test you, human? For your pursuit, you…” She tilted her head down, her gaze moving down to his chest. Jieyuan opened his mouth to speak, but she beat him to it. “Ah, I see. Interesting. We can do something similar.”

She raised her arm, but paused mid-motion, cocking her head, like she was listening to something. Something only she could hear. Her eyes were still on his chest. “Oh. You wish to…? Well, that can also be done.”

Jieyuan glanced down at himself and then back up at the echo. Some of the echoes from the previous stages had stared at his chest only to have rather unsettling reactions (Fate’s echo, in particular), but someone having a full-blown conversation with his chest was a first for him.

This time around, though, Jieyuan had an inkling of what was going on.

“Are you… Are you talking to Fire? The Concept?”

The echo didn’t seem to hear, all of her attention on his chest. She nodded. “Very well.” Only then did her eyes flick back up to his face. “You are even more favored than I had thought, human. Be honored, for Fire burns for you.”

“What do you—”

Again, she didn’t seem to hear him. “Step away and arm yourself, human.”

Jieyuan was getting really sick of the echo’s attitude, but his life was on the line here; keeping a lid on his temper, he took a few steps back and drew out the Shifting Feathers. The echo remained where she was, but she extended an arm to the side and flicked her wrist; a stream of scarlet flames burst out of her sleeve, extending several feet and hiding her hand from sight.

It lasted for just a moment before it was gone, revealing her hand again, which now held a long, sleek sword the same bright red as the fire that had just faded. Whatever it was made of, it lacked the reflective sheen of metal; rather, the blade had a sparkling, crystalline quality to it.

She pointed the sword at him; Jieyuan raised the Shifting Feathers, getting into a fighting stance.

“For your challenge, you must defeat me.”

“I’d figured as much,” Jieyuan said. “Just combat, then?”

“No.” The echo smiled, and now Jieyuan saw a clear resemblance to Meiyao; there was something dangerously predatory about her expression. “You shall also burn.”

It was like her words had lit a spark inside him; Jieyuan felt a surge of anger—a rage so powerful that it overwhelmed him. He gritted his teeth so hard he almost cracked them, and before he knew it, he was lunging at the echo, form forgotten, swinging the Shifting Feathers blindly—

No.

A sliver of self-awareness managed to pierce through the rage, and he pulled back; the echo, for her part, merely moved out of the way of his aborted attack, lazily holding her sword in front of him, looking down at him, the rotten—

NO!

Jieyuan caught himself before he lost his senses again. His inexplicable, overpowering rage still burned strong, but he managed to rein it in. The echo still didn’t move, just observed with him the easy, amused scorn of someone watching some dumb, stumbling beast.

Jieyuan drew on Twin Serpent Cognition, and to his relief, he found that his duplicated mind wasn’t nearly as affected; he immediately took away all the control from the anger-riddled mind, pushing it back, letting his second mind take over. Some of the anger still bled through, but it was much more manageable now.

In the absence of the blinding haze of anger, Jieyuan noticed something else. There was something wrong with his body. His arms and legs—they were feeling sore. A little faint, even. Worse, this feeling of weakness was growing stronger by the second.

What’s going on here?

“It appears you have some tricks, human,” the echo said. “Interesting. Well, so be it.”

She rushed forward; in a flash, she was in front of him, swinging her sword down at him. Jieyuan avoided the attack—and as she recovered and swung again, he avoided again. He didn’t strike back.

Not because he didn’t see an opening, though, but because he saw too many of them.

More than anything else, he was confused.

The echo kept swinging her sword, and he kept dodging, keeping himself from striking back at her.

She was faster than he was; judging by the gusts of wind her strikes produced, she was also far stronger. He didn’t try to parry; that seemed like a sure way of getting his arms snapped, given how strong she seemed to be.

Her form, though? It was terrible. Her attacks were wild, reckless. More than that, they were telegraphed; he could read her like a book, knew exactly where and how she’d attack, from where she looked and how she moved. The less said about her footwork, the better.

She didn’t seem entirely unfamiliar with a sword, but the last time he’d faced someone this unskilled, he’d still been a mundane.

For all her lack of success at hitting him, the echo didn’t seem all that bothered, though; she still wore that superior look even as he easily dodged her attacks.

There was something off about the situation—but he’d delayed long enough, and he hadn’t stopped growing weaker. He had to act. He tried to focus on the future, but between holding the anger at bay and tracking the echo’s movements, he couldn’t summon the concentration needed for it. Or for any of his other soulskills besides Twin Serpent Cognition, which just needed him to be holding an amphis.

As the echo went for another overhead strike, he leaned to the side, and fully drawing on his strength, swung the Shifting Feathers in from both directions at the echo’s midsection.

It should have hit; he’d timed the attack just right. But she blurred away, reacting far faster than he’d thought possible. For just a moment, she just stood there, hanging back. Then she lifted an eyebrow, gave him a mocking look, and charged at him again.

This time, Jieyuan didn’t hold back, attacking every opening he found. But the echo’s reaction time was just too fast; she dodged his attacks as easily as he did hers. And unlike him, she wasn’t growing weaker by the second.

Something had to change, Jieyuan decided. For all her lack of skill, she was too fast and too strong; he didn’t stand a chance as it was. At the very least, he needed to do something about his strength; if this kept on much longer, he wouldn’t even be able to swing the Shifting Feathers anymore.

“You still fail to see it, human,” the echo chirped between attacks. “What a disgrace it is, for one so adored by Fire to burn and not know it.”

Burn? She’d said that earlier, too, before the fight. How he’d burn. That was when he’d felt that overpowering rage—and also when he started growing weaker. Burning. But he didn’t feel any heat, nor was he on fire. So it wasn’t a physical type of burning.

He noticed something, then: the anger overwhelming his first mind was starting to diminish. To dwindle. Like a flame, petering out.  

Something flashed past his mind: a vision of a bright red fire, burning inside him, in his limbs and core—and of the resulting flames rising, surging, feeding into a red, dark storm raging inside his mind.

It was his strength that was burning, he realized. And it was stoking his anger, somehow. Feeding it. But as he was running out of strength, the surge of anger was also waning.

So that was it. He knew what was going on. Now he just had to do something about it.

His anger-riddled mind wasn’t so overwhelmed anymore, so he put it back in control of his body, letting it handle the echo, and fully focused inward with his other mind. The vision of his burning body appeared again, and Jieyuan tried to stop it, to contain the fires sapping him of his strength, but it didn’t work.

There had to be something he could do. The empyrean was somehow burning his strength to increase his anger. He couldn’t stop the process. But maybe he could do the reverse? He focused on his anger, on the angry storm raging in his head, and tried to direct the fire to it, to make it burn instead.

No luck there, either.

Come on, come on. This was Fire’s challenge. In the previous phase, he’d become fire. He refused to believe he couldn’t control the fire burning inside him now in some way. He couldn’t burn his anger. But what if he burned something else? Not anything physical, he couldn’t handle another handicap. But another emotion?

Fear, maybe? He was afraid, of course. Afraid of dying. Afraid of failing. Afraid of not being good enough. Out of all his emotions, Jieyuan reckoned that was a good one to burn. It was strong, and it wasn’t all that important.

Jieyuan envisioned his fear; it came to mind immediately, a hazy cloud of yellow, grasping tendrils sinking into his mind, replacing the red storm of his rage. He wasn’t sure why it’d taken this form, but it didn’t matter.

He willed it to burn.

And in his mind’s eye, he saw it: his fear, aflame, the yellow haze converted into flame. And with it came a pressure, building inside him. Power, energy, unused. Produced by burning of his fear. Jieyuan didn’t give himself time to wonder at his success, at the fact he’d gotten it right (and that this might very well be a new soulskill). He had to act.

First, he tried to direct it toward his muscles, to recover his strength—but the yellow flames of his fear didn’t mix with the red ones of his strength.

Something else, then. If not strength, then… agility?

He’d just thought so when the yellow flames surged.

A different energy flooded his body; his strength was still falling, fading, but Jieyuan found his movements to be faster, easier. And as the echo came at him again, she seemed slower.

Flame-red eyes narrowed at him, but the echo didn’t say a word.

Jieyuan didn’t think twice; he stepped to the side as her blade swept past him and he whipped his arms forward; like all the previous times so far, the echo reacted in a split-second, pulling out of the way—but Jieyuan managed to follow the movement now and leaned forward, shifting his grip, extending his reach—

The blades of the Shifting Feathers cut into the echo’s robes.

The echo pulled away fully, her smiling slipping.

Jieyuan hadn’t felt too much resistance, so he shouldn’t have actually struck her body. It didn’t matter, though. He had the situation well in hand. The echo didn’t pose a threat anymore; now that he’d figured out the trick, she didn’t stand a chance.

The echo came at him again. He didn’t bother paying her form attention this time. Why would he? He’d it all figured out. All that mattered was his attack; he’d swing the Shifting Feathers, and she’d be struck down.

She thrust her sword at him.

Heavens, she’s so easy to read.

He brought the Shifting Feathers forward to parry.

His arms almost collapsed under the force of her strike. He lost his grip on one of the Shifting Feathers; the half-amphis was thrown to the side.

No matter, Jieyuan decided, ignoring the ringing in his arms; it wasn’t like he needed both his weapons to deal with the echo, anyway. He pushed forward, holding his remaining weapon with both his hands now as he attacked.

Smiling again, the echo swept her sword to the side, parrying his attack.

The red blade struck the Shifting Feather; it flew out of his grip.

Fine. Jieyuan only smiled. The Shifting Feather had just been dead weight, anyway. He put up his fists. His body was all he needed.

“By the Primordial,” the echo said, stepping away from him, her smile growing even wider. “You are truly idiotic, aren’t you? Of everything you could’ve used Sublime Fire Immolation on, and you chose fear.” She laughed.

All Jieyuan heard was yapping, and he knew just how to shut her up; a punch to the face should do the trick. He made to step forward—only to stumble and fall to his knees, his legs giving out.

What just happened?

He stared down, uncomprehending, at the stone floor, which suddenly looked a whole lot closer. Then he looked back up at the echo, who was still laughing at him.

Laugh while you can. Jieyuan just needed to get up, and he would put her in her place. But he couldn’t find the strength for it, so he sent his focus inward again, looking for something else he could burn. His attention was drawn to the yellow flames of his fear, now much smaller than before.

Something about it… Something about it struck him as wrong. He wasn’t sure what, but he trusted his instincts—they’d never failed him before—and stopped burning his fear.

Clarity hit him like a shock of freezing water. He physically recoiled, realizing just what he’d been doing. Just what had been happening.

Eyes widened, he stared up at the echo in horror. She’d stopped laughing, but her eyes were still bright, her smile still wide, ivory teeth bared.

“Ah. It seems you have seen the truth of your folly. Pity. That was entertaining.”

Jieyuan couldn’t find the words in him to respond. Burning his fear hadn’t been like burning his strength; his strength had slowly drained away, but his fear—it’d left him altogether. Rendered him fearless. Stupidly so.

Heavens take me.

“Your expression is just delightful,” the echo sang, stepping forward. Her sword still hung by her side. “What does it feel like, I wonder, to be the architect of your own demise? Does it burn, human? I suspect it does.”

Jieyuan gritted his teeth. That artificial overwhelming anger from before was gone—he wasn’t sure when it’d disappeared, probably when he’d been busy burning his fear and acting like a complete lunatic—but he was feeling plenty of real anger to make up for it. At himself. At the echo. At everything.

He flexed his fingers; he still felt weak, frail, sapped of his strength—but it wasn’t as bad as it’d been when he’d fallen to the ground. He was recovering; he felt like he could even stand up again, if he wanted to. But he was still in no condition to fight, and he reckoned it’d be some time before he was.

Time he really didn’t have.

“Of course,” the echo continued, “you would have lost regardless. I know not how you made it to the sixth stage. Even for a human, you are pathetic.”

She stopped just inches in front of him, then crouched down; Jieyuan pulled away, but she grabbed onto his chin, held his face firmly in front of hers.

“I can sense you are not carrying a trial token. I know not why, but you humans have never made much sense to me. All that matters is that you will die here.”

Jieyuan stared right back at her, keeping his expression inscrutable so his thoughts wouldn’t show as he came up with a plan.

“Tell me, human, what will it be?” She trailed the back of her long, slender fingers against his cheek. “Your head cut off? A blade through your chest? You might be human, but I cannot deny Fire’s love for you. For that, I shall let you choose your fate. Be grateful.”

“Ravenous,” Jieyuan said. Chanted.

The pain came. Needle pricks all over his body. He showed no signs of it.

The echo tilted her head to the side. “Ravenous?” she said.

“Ravenous,” he repeated.

The pain grew, surged. Now he felt stabbing sensations all over, felt his flesh being shredded, his bones broken, over and over.

“You are… Communing? There’s a weight to that word… Is that a heavenly hymn? I’ve heard of those little artifices you humans use to replicate what comes so naturally to my kind. But—no. It’s too short. It is poems, is it not, that you humans use to entice the favor of the Heavens? Where is the rest of your inane poetry, human?”

“Ravenous.”

He felt a burning now—like fiery daggers were being stabbed into him. He still didn’t react.

Almost there.

“Human, I know not what you are doing, but you are trying my patience.”

The echo cupped his chin again, and she wasn’t so gentle this time, her nails digging into his skin.

Just as the pain was about to peak—just as the First Pain was about to strike in full—Jieyuan visualized it, a pulsing yellow aura suffusing his body.

Then, drawing on Hollow Pain Resonance, he threw it all at the echo.

His plan had been simple; he’d use the surge of pain to throw the echo off, and before she could recover, he’d burn his anger—which he had plenty of right now—and use it to stoke his strength. Then he’d kill her. It’d have been risky, but it was the best he’d been able to come up with.

He hadn’t accounted, though, for the echo letting out the shrillest scream he’d ever heard and then collapsing.

Jieyuan staggered back as the echo screamed her lungs out, rolling and squirming on the red stone floor. He was so surprised he almost lost his hold on Hollow Pain Resonance.

“Ravenous,” Jieyuan kept chanting. The pain was white, blinding, but it was only the pain of imbuing. In the previous stage, he’d managed to remain conscious even through the Second Pain.

He could handle this level of pain.

The echo, evidently, couldn’t.

She hadn’t stopped screaming, the noise of her voice sharp and deafening. Scream of pure, undiluted agony tore from her throat.

Jieyuan slowly rose to his feet, still chanting; he didn’t burn his anger to boost his strength. It’d been his idea, but more of a last resort. After all, if what happened when he burned fear was any indication, there was a chance that if he burned his anger, he’d turn into a pacifist or something along those lines.

It was a risk he didn’t want to take if he didn’t need to. And, from the looks (and sounds) of it, he didn’t.

“Ravenous.”

He wasn’t sure what was going on; no cultivator would react this badly to the First Pain. He’d only reacted so badly to it once, when he was still a child and his old man had fed him a Cultivator’s Agony pill to dissuade him from becoming a cultivator.

But the woman wasn’t human. It also seemed like she wasn’t too familiar with heavenly hymns.

Could it be… Could it be she’d never felt the Pains?

“Ravenous.”

Leaving the echo to her screaming and writhing, Jieyuan made his way over to the nearest Shifting Feather. He picked it up, groaning at the effort, ignoring the protests of his muscles, then ambled back to where the echo was rolling around.

He raised the golden blade over his head, arms trembling with the effort, and put one foot down on the squirming echo’s shoulders. Her frantic movements almost threw him off her, but he put his weight down on it, holding her in place. She was still flailing about in a frenzy, screaming without end.

But all Jieyuan cared about was her neck, and with her held in place by his foot, it couldn’t move around that much.

“Ravenous.”

He eyed the bulging veins of her long, pale neck.

Pathetic, was it?

He swung the Shifting Feather down.

—∞—

Jieyuan stared up at the Sword Tower’s Heavenly Vault, taking in the endless ocean of stars. His heart drummed steady but loud.

This was it. The last Heavenly Selection. The beginning of the end.

Overhead, a single cluster of stars lit up. Jieyuan had no idea what it could be. Fire had been the only one to select him in the sixth stage.

Only Concepts with a strong connection to him should appear now. Problem was, he was fresh out of those. Fire should have been his seventh-stage Concept; it was by far the one he was closest to. So he was stumped.

Maybe it was Spear, making a return? It could also be Authority, because of Absolute Will Command. His connection to either wasn’t nearly as strong as his tie to Fire, but he struggled to think of anything else.

A sphere blinked into existence before his eyes, hovering in the void.

It was red. Crimson, deep and dark. Swirling softly.

Jieyuan focused on it. Curious, and more than a little apprehensive.

BLOOD.