The air inside the smithy felt as if it had been vacuumed out in an instant, becoming heavy, dense, and suffocating like solid lead.
The embers in the forge, previously dampened by the seeping rain, flickered erratically. Under the crushing, silent pressure that filled the small room, the dull red glow shifted into an eerie, tragic violet. The smirk on Liu Zong’s face froze into a distorted mask of disbelief before he could even process what was happening. Looking into Gu Yao’s eyes—eyes clouded by decades of forge-dust, sweat, and forced degradation—Liu Zong did not see a crippled mortal. He saw a bottomless abyss, an ancient burial ground where countless gods and demons had been slaughtered.
"Are you... out of your mind?" Liu Zong stammered, his voice trembling as he instinctively took a step back.
His heel crunched loudly against a jagged shard of the broken porcelain bowl on the floor. The sound was sharp in the dead silence. His hand moved reflexively to the hilt of the steel saber at his waist. As a deacon of the Hall of Rejuvenation, he was a practitioner of the third level of Qi Refining. In the grand hierarchy of the Cloud-Soothed Sect, he was little more than a low-level errand boy. But in a mud-drenched gutter like Qingzhou City, those three meager levels of cultivation made him a god among insects. To him, the resistance of a mortal was not merely foolish; it was a desecration of the natural order.
"Do you have any idea who you are talking to?" Liu Zong shouted, trying to use his own anger to cover the cold, creeping terror rising from his stomach. "You are a piece of slag! A broken cripple living off dirt!"
Gu Yao did not offer a verbal reply. He simply took a second step forward.
Cr-crack—
A sickening, metallic snap echoed from his thick cervical spine.
Deep within his flesh, the first Immortal-Locking Nail reacted to his awakening battle-intent. The rusted steel spike, bound to his bones for fifty years, began to vibrate violently in protest. It felt as though a white-hot branding iron was being forced through the narrow crevices of his vertebrae, releasing an agonizing, saw-like pain that threatened to tear his mind apart. It was a torture designed by the gods to drive any ordinary man insane within seconds, a constant tearing of the soul as every nerve was dragged across a rusted, serrated blade.
The dark-red veins on Gu Yao’s forehead bulged, writhing beneath his skin like angry earthworms. Cold sweat poured down his face, mixing with the soot on his jaw, but his eyes never wavered from Liu Zong’s throat.
He raised his right arm. The movement was stiff, accompanied by the faint, nauseating sound of metal grinding against bone within his shoulder joint.
Yet, his massive, calloused hand—scarred by decades of flying sparks and heavy labor—pressed silently, inevitably, onto Liu Zong’s left shoulder.
"This strike..." Gu Yao rasped. His voice sounded like sandpaper grinding over rusted iron, carrying a heavy, decaying scent of death. "...is to pay for that bowl of tea."
Liu Zong’s eyes went wide. Panic erupted in his mind. He tried to channel his spiritual qi, intending to unleash a blast of energy to sever the mortal’s arm. But to his absolute horror, he discovered that the three levels of spiritual energy within his dantian had collapsed. Like frightened mice facing an ancient predator, his spiritual energy froze in terror, paralyzed within his meridians.
This was an absolute suppression of life-tier. Even a fallen, sealed god possessed a spiritual essence that no ant could look upon without trembling.
"What... what kind of monster are you—"
THUD!
Gu Yao used no fancy martial techniques. He held no internal energy. He simply pressed his hand downward with a sudden, violent burst of raw physical force.
It was pure, unadulterated muscle strength—a brutality forged through fifty years of swinging a heavy hammer beside a furnace, hardened under the crushing weight of the Immortal-Locking Nails.
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"AAAAAAHHHH—!!!"
A shrill, distorted scream tore through the rain curtain of Sophora Alley.
Liu Zong’s legs could not sustain that monstrous, downward weight for even a fraction of a second. Accompanied by the nauseating sound of splintering bone, his kneecaps burst outward through his skin and silk trousers, spraying bone fragments and dark blood into the muddy earth. Because the downward pressure was too fast and too heavy, the steel saber at his waist—an expensive, spirit-infused weapon—snapped into three jagged pieces under the invisible force, scattering scrap metal across the floor.
Liu Zong collapsed onto his ruined knees, his body shaking violently as shock overwhelmed his senses.
"Deacon!"
The accompanying disciple let out a high-pitched shriek of pure panic. His hands shook so violently he could barely hold his posture. Reaching into his robes, he pulled out a yellowed paper talisman—a Fire-Bullet Talisman bestowed by the Hall for self-defense.
"Die! Die, you freak!" the disciple shrieked, frantically trying to bite his finger to use his blood as an activator for the spell.
However, before a single shred of spiritual qi could be channeled into the paper, Gu Yao moved.
His movement was eerie and mechanical, like an ancient piece of heavy siege machinery forced back into operation after eons of rust. He did not turn around. He did not even look at the second man. He simply shifted his weight onto his left leg, twisted his torso, and slammed his broad, slouched back straight into the disciple’s chest.
BOOM!
It was not the sound of flesh hitting flesh; it was the sound of a massive iron battering ram striking a hollow war drum.
The disciple flew backward out of the smithy like a scrap of paper caught in a winter gale. He traced a pathetic, bloody arc through the heavy rain, smashing directly into a hundred-pound blue-stone millstone sitting across the alley.
Stone chips and dust erupted into the night air as the man collapsed into the mud like a pile of wet rags. His chest had caved in by more than half, his ribs pushed clean through his lungs. Thick, dark-red blood clots sprayed continuously from his lips, painting the wet cobblestones a violent shade of crimson.
Inside the smithy, the quiet returned, broken only by the steady dripping of rain from the broken roof.
Gu Yao stopped his movement, his chest heaving as he drew in heavy, wet bursts of air.
On his back, the seven scar-mounds pierced by the nails were hemorrhaging a thick, dark-red fluid. The liquid hissed as it met the freezing rain drifting through the open doorway, sending up plumes of white steam that smelled faintly of sulfur and heavy rust. This was the first time in fifty years he had allowed his broken spine to carry the weight of his fury, and the cost was being extracted directly from his vitality.
"A-Yao..."
Shen Yi leaned against the side of the heavy anvil, clutching her bleeding forehead. Her thin hands were covered in grime and blood, her eyes wide with terror as she stared at Gu Yao’s towering silhouette. The familiar, somewhat clumsy husband who had spent decades quietly striking iron now looked like a god of slaughter who had just walked out from the deepest pits of the nine hells.
Gu Yao turned slowly around.
When his eyes fell upon the fresh blood trickling down Shen Yi’s temple, the destructive red glow in his eyes flickered and softened for a fleeting moment. He reached out with his thick, calloused fingertip, his touch impossibly gentle despite his massive size, and wiped the mud and blood from her cheek.
"The bowl is broken," Gu Yao’s voice returned to its slow, deliberate rhythm, though the deathly intent within it had only thickened. "I am taking you away."
"Away?" Shen Yi whispered, her voice trembling. "Where can we go, A-Yao? The Sect owns the sky, the land... they own everything."
"Not everything," Gu Yao said flatly.
He turned and walked toward the darkest, most neglected corner of the smithy. Pushing aside a mountain of rusted iron dregs, broken plow-blades, and scrap metal that he had accumulated over half a century, he revealed a long, heavy object wrapped in multiple layers of black, oil-stained cloth.
He knelt in the dirt, his knees making a heavy cracking sound. With a steady hand, he gripped the oilcloth and gave it a violent shake.
CLANG!
A monstrously large, blackened iron hammer—its head missing half of its left corner—slammed heavily into the mud floor, shaking the dust from the wooden walls.
It was the weapon known as Severed Head.
There was no spiritual light on its surface, no delicate runes or ancient engravings. It was an ugly, brutal thing, weighing six hundred pounds of pure, dense pig-iron. Across its dark surface were countless dry, dark-red stains—blood from fifty years ago that had long since soaked deep into the grain of the metal, impossible to wash away.
It was his past, his sin, and the nightmare this world was about to face once more.
Gu Yao reached down and wrapped his thick fingers around the cloth-bound hilt. As his skin touched the handle, the hammer seemed to emit a low, vibrating hum, as if an old friend was greeting him after a lifetime in the dark.
"Before we leave this city," Gu Yao said, his voice echoing in the small, ruined shop, "I must collect a portion of the interest on these fifty years."
He lifted the six-hundred-pound weapon with a single hand, resting the heavy head against his scarred, slouched shoulder.
"Stay behind me, Shen Yi," he murmured, stepping over the unconscious, bleeding body of Liu Zong toward the open street. "Tonight, we walk the blood road."