The midnight air of Blackstone Town was so bitterly cold that it felt crystallized, suspended in the darkness like invisible shards of glass.
The echoing crash of the splintered wooden door kicked open by Gu Yao rippled down the silent, ruined streets, shattering the heavy silence of the abandoned mining settlement. Shen Yi stepped over the threshold first, her slender hand tightly gripping the thick hardwood stick she had pulled from the hearth. At its tip, a solitary, stubborn ember glowed with a fierce, concentrated crimson light.
The flickering orange glow swayed gently in the freezing wind, illuminating her pale, delicate face. Her expression was not one of fear, but of an icy, tranquil detachment that seemed completely out of place in this desolate graveyard of stone.
But as the light of her makeshift torch expanded, it also illuminated the darkness ahead.
There, standing in the shifting fog of the narrow alley, were dozens of human figures. They stood shoulder-to-shoulder, their bodies emaciated, their clothes reduced to filthy, threadbare rags. In the dim, weaving firelight, their eyes did not look human. They gleamed with a dull, sickly green luminosity—the wild, desperate glare of starving wolves that had long since forgotten the taste of bread.
These were the refugees of Blackstone, and the very people Gu Yao had guided through the blood-stained mountain pass. They were cold, they were starving, and they had been driven completely mad by the crushing weight of their own survival.
"That's her! That's the woman!"
A stooped, ragged figure stepped forward from the front of the crowd. It was Zhang Iron-Legs. Once the strongest miner in the district, his broad shoulders were now permanently bent by hunger, his dry skin clinging tightly to his cheekbones like old parchment over a skull. He clutched a heavy, chipped iron cleaver in his right hand, thick ribbons of saliva trailing from the corners of his parched lips.
Behind him, dozens of refugees shifted restlessly in the dark, their breathing heavy and ragged, like a pack of vultures waiting for a carcass to stop twitching.
"Grab her!" Zhang Iron-Legs shrieked, his voice cracking with a frantic, desperate hysteria that made his eyes bulge. "If we take her and the blacksmith's head to the pass, the whole town gets a year's worth of grain! The Immortals promised! Three years of tax exemption for everyone! We won't have to watch our children rot in the dirt anymore!"
Shen Yi did not retreat. She held the burning stick high, her voice remarkably calm, carrying a bone-deep resonance that seemed to cut straight through the whistling wind.
"Zhang Iron-Legs," she said softly, her dark eyes locking onto his trembling frame. "Three months ago, when your youngest son was coughing blood from the mine-rot, who spent half the night beside the furnace, melting scrap iron to forge a hand-pump for your dry well? Who traded his own labor to buy the clean water that saved your boy's life? Today, you bring a cleaver to harvest his head?"
Zhang Iron-Legs flinched. For a single, agonizing heartbeat, his stooped frame went rigid. A flicker of deep, agonizing shame and human warmth struggle to surface within his hollow, green eyes.
But the memory of his starving family, of the empty grain sacks, and of the cold, unfeeling sky above quickly suffocated that fragile spark of conscience. The wild, beastly madness returned to his face, fiercer than before.
"Don't talk to me about three months ago!" he roared, shaking the cleaver in the air, his knuckles turning a stark, bloodless white. "Three months ago there was still moisture in the dirt! Now there is only ash! The Immortals have spoken! If the blacksmith dies, we live! If he lives, we all starve to death in this frozen ditch! He is just one man—why should his life stand in the way of three thousand?!"
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"So," a gravelly, incredibly heavy voice echoed from the shadows of the doorway behind Shen Yi, "you have chosen to let him die?"
Gu Yao stepped out into the freezing night.
He was stripped to the waist, his broad, mountain-like chest covered in a network of jagged, unhealed scars. His hair, which had once been merely grizzled with grey, was now a stark, snowy white, flying wildly in the freezing wind. Across his spine, the seven purple-black scar-mounds were pulsing with a faint, malevolent violet light, indicating the furious, silent war raging between his blood-qi and the cursed Immortal-Locking Nails.
He walked slowly, leaning heavily upon the long handle of Severed Head. Every step he took seemed to cause the frozen earth beneath his boots to tremble with an invisible, crushing vibration.
"A-Yao, go back inside," Shen Yi whispered, stepping slightly in front of his massive frame. "Your meridians are shattered. You cannot afford to expend another drop of your vitality."
"Yi-er," Gu Yao murmured, gently placing his massive, calloused hand upon her shoulder to guide her behind him. "There are some paths in this world that cannot be avoided. If they want my life, they must prove their teeth are sharp enough to bite through my bones."
He stood tall, his posture straight—straighter than it had been in fifty years, despite the agonizing pain gnawing at his spine. He swept his bloodshot, grey pupils across the crowd of silent, trembling refugees.
"I am standing right here," Gu Yao rasped, his voice vibrating through the valley like a low, rolling war drum. He raised his left hand and tapped his own thick, scarred neck. "The blade is in your hands. Who strikes first?"
The entire alley fell into a dead, suffocating silence.
The torches carried by the refugees flickered erratically, casting long, monstrous shadows against the collapsed stone walls. In the dark, the refugees stared at the legendary warhammer resting in the dirt, and then at the white-haired giant who had bled to carry them through the pass. The weight of their own conscience, of the simple kindnesses this crippled blacksmith had shown them over the decades, became a suffocating weight that paralyzed their limbs.
"Dammit! Why are you all standing there like cowards?!" Zhang Iron-Legs shrieked, his face contorting into a hysterical, weeping grimace as the conflict within his mind tore him apart. "He's a cripple! He's half-dead! If we don't kill him, our children will starve! Attack! ATTACK!"
With a desperate, animalistic scream, Zhang Iron-Legs lunged forward, his feet kicking up clouds of black dust as he swung the rusted butcher's cleaver with all his strength straight at Gu Yao’s unprotected throat!
Gu Yao did not raise his six-hundred-pound hammer. He did not draw upon the fragile, flickering reserves of his spiritual energy.
He knew these refugees were not his enemies; they were merely the tragic, burnt ash left behind by a cruel, parasitic era. To use the weapon of a god-slayer to slaughter starving peasants would be a profound insult to the steel of Severed Head.
He simply waited until Zhang Iron-Legs was within three paces of his chest, and then, with a slow, heavy sigh that carried the sorrow of a thousand years, he raised his lead foot and drove it violently down into the frozen earth.
BOOM—!!!
It was not a blast of magical energy, but a shockwave of pure, unadulterated kinetic force generated by the sheer, terrifying density of his physical frame.
The frozen snow and black mud within a ten-foot radius were instantly blasted into the air, creating a localized ring of compressed, howling atmospheric pressure. Zhang Iron-Legs did not even have the chance to complete his swing. The violent shockwave struck his chest like a charging iron battering ram, shattering his cleaver into fragments.
With a high-pitched, strangled shriek, his body was launched backward through the air, flying over ten meters before crashing heavily into a pile of stone rubble at the end of the alley. He lay there in the dirt, groaning weakly, his cleaver reduced to a handful of bent, useless iron scraps.
"Is there anyone else?" Gu Yao asked softly.
He stood in the center of the clearing, a sudden spasm causing him to cough up another mouthful of thick, dark-red blood. The blood dripped from his jaw, his body shaking violently as the Immortal-Locking Nails dug deeper into his vertebrae. Yet, his grey eyes remained as bright and cold as the winter stars.
He looked at the silent, trembling crowd of refugees, who had dropped their weapons in terror, their knees buckling as they fell to the earth in shame.
"In this world, the most tragic thing is not that the Immortal Sects eat people," Gu Yao murmured, his sand-like voice carrying a deep, echoing sorrow into the hearts of every mortal present.
"It is that those who are being eaten... are standing in the mud, helping the butcher sharpen his blade."