On the third day after crossing the Watershed, the sky finally ceased its relentless downpour. Yet, no merciful sunlight broke through to warm the frozen earth.
Instead, a suffocating ceiling of leaden clouds hung low over the wasteland, so thick and heavy it felt as though the heavens themselves were sagging beneath an unbearable weight. A dense, sulfurous fog rolled across the barren plains in slow, languid coils, wrapping the landscape in a gray, clinging shroud that smelled endlessly of cold ash, stagnant water, and rotting vegetation.
The ragged procession of three thousand refugees had finally stumbled into a desolate, ruined settlement known throughout the borderlands as Blackstone Town.
Situated precisely upon the grey, unmapped threshold between the northern wastes of Qingzhou and the outer perimeter of the Middle Three Provinces, Blackstone was a graveyard of mortal industry. Decades ago, it had been a bustling mining hub, choked with iron works and furnace smoke. But once the underground veins of spirit-bearing ore were completely drained and the soil turned to slag, the Immortal Sects had discarded the town like a dried husk.
Now, only leaning stone ruins, collapsed wooden rafters, and streets carpeted in black dust remained. The air carried a sharp, biting stench of sulfur and dried mud that burned the back of the throat with every breath.
Deep within a half-collapsed mud hut at the edge of the abandoned town, Gu Yao sat motionlessly upon the frozen earth.
The shelter was little more than a crude lean-to, constructed by Shen Yi using a piece of rotted beast-hide, several cracked wooden beams, and stacked stones to ward off the biting mountain drafts. Inside, the furnace fire was absent. The only warmth came from a tiny, sputtering hearth built from three blackened bricks.
Gu Yao sat stripped to the waist, his broad back leaning heavily against the damp mud wall.
The condition of his body was terrifying to behold. The fleeting, explosive surge of vitality that had allowed him to shatter the twelve Disciplinary Guards and cross the pass had entirely receded, leaving behind a ruined, hollow frame. His broad, mountain-like shoulders had visibly shriveled, the thick slabs of muscle atrophying under the ruinous over-extraction of his life force.
Most horrifying of all were the seven scar-mounds running down his spinal column.
The holes where the Immortal-Locking Nails were embedded had turned a sickening, bruised shade of purplish-black. Because his vitality was exhausted, the first and second nails—which he had forcibly shaken loose during the battles—were now actively attempting to crawl back into his marrow. Deep beneath his skin, the rusted steel spikes vibrated with a malevolent, parasitic life of their own, slowly dragging themselves back into the bone crevices, trying to re-seal the bloody fractures he had fought so desperately to open.
"Cough... cough-gh..."
Gu Yao’s massive torso jerked violently as a dry, convulsive spasm seized his chest. He leaned forward, spitting a glob of thick, black blood onto the dry earth between his boots. The moment the blood struck the cold ground, it let out a faint, audible hiss, releasing a plume of thin white steam that smelled of scorched iron and internal decay.
"Don't move, A-Yao. Half of your meridians are fractured. Your physical vessel is like a broken bucket leaking water from every seam."
Shen Yi’s voice was barely a whisper, yet it held a tight, unyielding discipline. She was crouching beside the tiny hearth, her thin fingers tightly gripping a chipped, soot-stained clay pot she had scavenged from the ruins.
Inside the pot, a dark, viscous liquid was bubbling sluggishly over the embers. It was not medicine. In a world where the spiritual qi had been drained to the dregs, mortal herbs held no power against the cosmic curse of the Immortal-Locking Nails.
The pot contained nothing more than a handful of scorched, coarse barley grains that Shen Yi had gathered from the bottom of an abandoned grain sack. With a smooth stone, she had painstakingly ground the burnt grains into a powder, boiling it with well water until it formed a thick, bitter, and dark barley paste.
"Drink this," she said softly, scooping a wooden spoon full of the hot, sticky paste and lifting it carefully to his blood-crusted lips. "It won't heal your bones, but it will keep the fire in your stomach from consuming your own flesh."
Gu Yao swallowed the paste with difficulty. The bitter, burnt taste washed over his dry tongue, suppressing the sharp, metallic tang of internal bleeding that had lingered in his mouth since dawn. He let out a long, wheezing breath, his grey, bloodshot eyes staring out through the crack in the wooden door toward the foggy ruins of the town.
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"Yi-er..." Gu Yao rasped, his voice sounding like two rusted iron plates grinding together in a dry well. "Go... look at the people outside."
Shen Yi paused, the wooden spoon hovering in the air above the clay pot. Her clear, dark eyes dimmed slightly, but she did not interrupt him.
"Blackstone Town... has no clean water, no crops, and no grain," Gu Yao murmured, his chest rising and falling in ragged, shallow rhythms. "If we remain motionless here... by tomorrow, the hunger will turn them into beasts. They will begin to feed upon the weak."
Gu Yao understood the brutal reality of this world far better than anyone. The Immortal Sects exploited the "Mortal Rhyme" from above, stripping humanity of its spiritual essence. But down in the mud, when resources were completely drained, the mortal realm devolved into the most primitive, merciless law of the jungle.
Without the imminent threat of flying swords or lightning to unite them, the three thousand refugees were beginning to fracture from within under the suffocating, grinding pressure of absolute starvation.
Shen Yi set the clay pot down upon a flat stone. Her expression remained calm, but a dark, profound sadness flickered in the depths of her gaze.
"They have already begun, A-Yao," she whispered softly, her fingers tightening around her faded apron. "I heard them talking when I went to the well. Some of the older men are talking about turning back toward Qingzhou to surrender to the Hall of Rejuvenation. They believe that even if they are chained to the Blood-Refining Array as living pillars, the Sect will at least give their families a bowl of thin rice before they die."
She turned her head slightly, looking toward the dark shadows lurking in the alley outside their shack.
"And there are others..." Shen Yi continued, her tone dropping into a cold, quiet register. "...who are standing in the fog, staring at the women and the young children with hollow, green eyes."
Gu Yao closed his bloodshot eyes, his thick, calloused hands trembling violently where they rested on his knees.
This was the true horror of the Ninety-Seven Mile Blood Road. Killing cultivators with a hammer was simple; it required only muscle, speed, and absolute violence. But keeping three thousand starving, terrified human beings alive—preserving their dignity when the world demanded they act like beasts—was a nightmare that no hammer could solve.
"Shen Yi... help me," Gu Yao rasped, his eyes snapping open with a sudden, desperate resolve. He raised his trembling, blood-crusted right hand, pointing his thick finger toward his own lower spine. "Pull it... pull the second nail the rest of the way out."
"No! A-Yao, you will die!"
Shen Yi’s voice cracked into a sharp, heartbreaking shriek. She dropped to her knees beside him, her hands flying forward to grasp his wrists, her eyes filled with a fierce, terrified panic.
"The Ju-Que Nail is the only thing keeping your spinal column from shattering under its own density!" she cried, her tears finally overflowing and tracing clean paths through the soot on her pale cheeks. "If I pull it now, while your blood-qi is exhausted, your body will collapse into a pile of broken bone and cold meat before the sun sets!"
"If I do not pull it..." Gu Yao let out a harsh, bitter laugh that ended in a spray of dark phlegm, "...we all die in this ditch. Elder Mo Xiu and First Seat Lei Zhen are broken, but they will not stop. They will issue the Heaven-Pole Order. They will put a price on my head that would tempt even a saint to commit murder. The流民 (refugees) in this town... even the three thousand people we brought through the pass... there are plenty among them who would trade my head for a handful of spirit-stones or a bag of grain."
Shen Yi fell completely silent.
She knelt in the cold dust, her thin shoulders shaking as she held his massive, scarred hand against her cheek. She knew he was telling the truth. The world was a furnace, and morality was the first thing to burn away when the wood ran out.
"Just... wait a little longer," Shen Yi whispered, her voice dropping into an impossibly soft, melodic cadence that seemed to vibrate with a strange, otherworldly resonance. She picked up the wooden spoon once more, feeding him another mouthful of the warm barley paste. "As long as I am standing beside you, no one will hand you over to the clouds. Not the cultivators... and not this cold heaven."
Gu Yao looked down at his wife.
As the dim firelight from the hearth caught the side of her face, he felt an sudden, inexplicable tremor ripple through the marrow of his spine. For a fleeting fraction of a microsecond, the dark pupils of Shen Yi’s eyes seemed to absorb the ambient light of the room, flaring with an infinitely subtle, ancient golden sheen—a radiance that felt completely detached from the mortal realm, older than the mountains, and vastly more terrifying than the Golden Core aura of any Immortal Elder.
In that exact instant, the malevolent Immortal-Locking Nails buried deep within Gu Yao’s spine suddenly shuddered.
The two partially extracted steel spikes, which had been actively burrowing back into his flesh moments before, abruptly shrank back into his bone crevices, freezing completely in place as if recoiling in instinctual, horror-stricken panic before an ancient, unnamable authority that transcended the laws of the realm.
The golden glow vanished as quickly as it had appeared, sinking beneath her clear, gentle gaze like an ember dipping below deep, dark water. Shen Yi reached out, her calloused palm resting gently against Gu Yao’s cold, damp cheek, her countenance completely untroubled, as if nothing extraordinary had occurred.
Gu Yao stared at her in utter, breathless shock. His heart hammered against his ribs like a war drum.
Looking into the quiet, loving eyes of the woman who had brewed barley tea for him in a dilapidated smithy for fifty years, a profound, bone-chilling realization struck him.
The truth of this world, the hidden gears of fate, and the frail woman holding his hand were far deeper, far darker, and infinitely more complex than he had ever dared to imagine.
Shen Yi was not merely his refuge in the mire. She was the dormant, terrifying ember around which the destiny of the entire Great Desolation revolved—the sole spark of life remaining upon this ninety-seven-mile road of blood.