Elder Mo Xiu could no longer remain seated on his white jade throne.
Watching dozens of his most prized inner disciples beaten down like common flies before a broken piece of scrap iron, a mixture of intense humiliation and cold terror caused the Golden Core within his dantian to vibrate frantically. His white hair whipped around his head in the rising wind, devoid of its previous immortal composure.
"Senior Brother, this man..." The second Elder sitting across the go board stood up slowly, his long beard trembling as he stared at the white-haired giant below. "Look at the posture, the way he holds the weight of that iron. He is a remnant of the Spine-Breaker Battalion from fifty years ago! Only that pack of lunatics fights with such reckless disregard for their own lives!"
"I don't care who he is! I don't care what battalion he belonged to!" Mo Xiu roared, completely losing his temper.
He swept his long sleeve violently across the white jade table. The pristine go board and the crystalline stones were smashed to dust instantly under his spiritual power.
"In this spirit-exhausted Qingzhou, even if a True Immortal descended from the upper realms, they would be turned into dregs for my pills!" Mo Xiu shrieked, his voice turning shrill. He slammed his right hand onto the armrest of his floating seat. "Blood-Refining Array, ROTATE! Drain every last drop of Mortal Rhyme from every ant in this plaza! I will use three thousand living sacrifices to prime this single strike of mine!"
Mo Xiu’s voice echoed across the square like a demon’s curse.
The Blood-Refining Array, which had been flickering uncertainly under the heavy rain, suddenly erupted with a blinding, terrifying scarlet light. The dark-red runes carved into the cobblestones glowed so brightly they turned the falling raindrops into steam.
Immediately, the three thousand mortals kneeling in the mud let out screams so shrill, so full of agony, that it made the hair on one's neck stand up. The iron chains piercing through their collarbones began to glow white-hot. Their exposed skin shriveled at a visible rate as threads of tangible, dark-red Mortal Rhyme were forcibly ripped from their bone marrow. The siphoned energy flowed along the stone channels, converging frantically into the Marrow-Sucking Sword hovering in Mo Xiu’s palm.
"Save us... Brother Gu, save us..."
A desperate, gurgling cry rose from the front row of the chained crowd. A young miner, his skin rapidly turning as grey and dry as a corpse's, reached his thin, trembling arm toward Gu Yao’s silhouette in the dark.
That cry, coming from the very depths of human despair, struck Gu Yao’s heart like a series of heavy sledgehammers.
Gu Yao stopped his movement toward the edge of the plaza.
Beneath his feet was the narrow alley leading out of Qingzhou City. With his current physical strength, shielding Shen Yi under his arm, no one in this square could stop him if he chose to break out right now. If he left, he could live. He could find a hidden corner in the vast wilderness and survive.
But he felt the trembling of the woman in his arms.
Shen Yi was looking past his shoulder at the neighbors who were being drained of their marrow. She saw the old woman who lived across the alley, the apprentices from the smithy, the children who had shared their stale bread with her. Her clear, dark eyes were filled with tears and an unstated, heartbreaking supplication. She did not speak a word to force him, but Gu Yao understood her gaze better than he understood his own soul.
She was his only anchor in this cold, rotten world. If he ignored these three thousand lives tonight to save his own skin, he would no longer be the blacksmith Gu Yao she knew. He would become just like those beasts sitting above the clouds... a cold, unfeeling God.
Gu Yao stood still in the pouring rain, the blood-red light of the array illuminating his white hair.
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"Fifty years ago, I abandoned the masses on the Ascension Platform for the sake of my own Dao," Gu Yao whispered, his raspy voice audible only to the woman in his chest.
He lowered his head slightly, gently pressing his cold lips against the fresh bruise on Shen Yi’s forehead. The bitter smell of rain and the harsh, metallic scent of blood-rust filled their shared breath.
"Tonight, for your sake, I will be a lunatic once more."
Gu Yao turned his head violently toward the center of the plaza, his grey pupils bursting with a dark-red, judicial flame.
His right hand let go of the hammer’s hilt for a fraction of a second, reaching behind his neck. His fingers, covered in old scars, clamped directly onto the cold, rusted metal of the second Immortal-Locking Nail embedded in his upper spine—the Ju-Que Nail, the seal that locked the explosive power of his physical frame.
"RISE... FOR ME!!!"
Gu Yao unleashed a roar like the tearing of thick silk, a sound that tore through the noise of the thunderstorm.
CRACK—!!!
Accompanied by a horrifying sound of rending flesh and snapping cartilage, the second Immortal-Locking Nail was forcibly pulled out of his spine by a third of its length!
In that single instant, Gu Yao’s skin shattered into countless tiny, hairline wounds. Unable to withstand the sudden, astronomical eruption of internal pressure, his blood atomized, enveloping him in a thick, boiling mist of crimson. A tangible, brutal physical force—a force capable of shaking the very foundations of the earth—exploded outward with him as the epicenter.
The air around him collapsed under the sheer pressure.
He did not charge upward at Mo Xiu. He did not aim for the floating platform.
Instead, Gu Yao raised Severed Head high above his head with both arms, his muscles swelling to twice their size, and slammed the six-hundred-pound hammer down with all his remaining strength into the central foundation stone of the array beneath his boots!
"THIS STRIKE IS FOR THE LIVING!"
BOOM—!!!!!!
All of Qingzhou City seemed to shudder at that precise second.
The hard stone plaza looked as if it had been struck by a falling meteorite. The white jade tiles shattered, and the bedrock beneath collapsed inward into a massive, cavernous crater thirty feet wide.
The Blood-Refining Array, which had been devouring the lives of three thousand people, saw its dark-red runes dim instantly under this heavy blow that transcended mortal understanding. The siphoned, swirling crimson Rhyme, having lost its central magnetic core, reversed its direction. Like a dammed river finding its original course, the golden-red energy surged backward along the iron chains, pouring wildly back into the bodies of the dying mortals.
THUD! THUD! THUD!
The iron chains binding the collarbones of the mortals snapped under the force of the energy surge.
The array was shattered.
Three thousand mortals, who had been on the verge of death, fell forward onto the wet mud, gasping frantically for air. They stared blankly at the smoking, ruined crater in front of them, the shock of their narrow escape stealing their voices.
High above on the floating platform, Elder Mo Xiu let out a bloody shriek.
Because his natal weapon, the Marrow-Sucking Sword, was directly linked to the array's core, the sudden destruction of the formation triggered a violent backlash. Mo Xiu spat out a massive mouthful of dark-red organ fragments, his face turning as white as parched paper as his cultivation dropped rapidly.
"You... you lunatic!" Mo Xiu shrieked, pointing a trembling, blood-stained finger down at Gu Yao. His eyes were filled with an incomprehensible, hysterical madness. "You actually pulled the second nail for these dregs?! You self-mutilated a divine body for the sake of ants?! This is the most absurd joke in the world!"
Gu Yao stood at the edge of the crater, leaning heavily on the handle of his hammer with one hand. More than half of his body was stained crimson with his own blood, and every breath he drew sounded like a rusty bellows grinding together.
He slowly wiped the dark blood from his jaw, his voice raspy, deliberate, yet echoing into the ears of every single person present:
"In your eyes, they are slag, fuel, and dregs."
Gu Yao reached down, pulling Shen Yi securely back to her feet, and stepped through the smoking ruins toward the city gate. His boots left deep, bloody footprints on the shattered stone, but his posture was straight—straighter than it had been in fifty years.
"But in my eyes, they are... People."
At the far end of the plaza, near the north gate of the city, several hundred city guards held their heavy crossbows, trembling violently as they aimed their arrows at the blood-soaked giant walking toward them.
Yet, not a single guard dared to pull the trigger.
Because behind that white-haired, blood-stained figure, the three thousand mortals who had once been submissive, who had spent their entire lives kneeling in the dirt, were now slowly, silently standing up.
They had no weapons. They were weak, covered in mud and their own blood. But as they looked past Gu Yao’s back toward the high and mighty Immortals above, their eyes held a gaze that the Sects had not seen in three millennia.
It was a cold, sharp, unyielding hatred. A hatred like a drawn blade.
Tonight, in the mud of Qingzhou, the spine of humanity had broken, only to be forged anew.