Desolate star sovereign: Peerless God-king

Chapter 6: The Ape and the Silver Grass

The roar did not stop at the canyon walls. It rolled through the marrow of the stone, vibrating up through the soles of Chu Yuan’s straw sandals until the pebbles on the path hopped like frightened crickets.

The white morning mist, previously cool and damp with the clean scent of wet pine needles, began to shift. A faint, sickening sweetness seeped through the fog—the smell of stagnant water and dried butcher's aprons, iron-thick and rancid.

Meng Rou stopped five paces behind Chu Yuan. Her knuckles were white around the strap of the small linen sack she had scavenged from Zhou Chen’s fallen retinue.

"Brother Yuan," she whispered, her eyes darting between the contorted gnarled trunks flanking the narrow gorge. "The birds... they aren't coming back."

"They have better instincts than outer disciples," Chu Yuan said calmly.

He did not look back at the severed head of Zhou Chen resting in the crimson gravel. With steady, unhurried steps, he walked past the abandoned iron crossbows and stepped onto the descending trail that wound into the belly of Medicine Mountain.

The Azure Cloud Sect called this a medicinal garden, but fifty paces past the pass, the illusion collapsed.

Ancient pine trees grew at grotesque, unnatural angles, their bark blistered with black fungal growths that oozed reddish sap. Beneath the ferns, half-buried in decaying leaf litter, lay fragments of white bone—some small and splintered like bird wings, others unmistakably human: the cracked curve of a skull, a shattered pelvis, the bronze buckle of an outer-disciple belt rusted green by damp earth.

Elder Chen’s jagged handwriting on the stolen parchment had not lied. For three years, the outer disciples sent into this trial had not been tested. They had been culled.

Chu Yuan paused beside a collapsed stone marker overgrown with thorny brambles. He reached out with two fingers, brushing aside the prickly vines to reveal the moss-covered carving: Three Hundred Paces to the Valley of Clear Springs.

"Stay two steps behind me," Chu Yuan instructed without turning around. "Do not breathe through your mouth. The mist here is saturated with Corpse-Rot Miasma. If your chest feels tight, press your thumb into your throat notch."

"I took the pill you gave me," Meng Rou said, her voice surprisingly steady despite the trembling of her small shoulders. "My bones still feel like they're sitting in warm spring water. The cold air doesn't touch me."

Chu Yuan nodded slightly. The Nine-Yang Bone Cleansing Pill he had refined in the clay pot was a peerless-grade treasure born from Pill Sovereign memories. Even a mortal who swallowed a third of it possessed marrow purer than most Stage 3 cultivators.

He touched the hilt of Xuanji slung across his back. The rusted iron was faintly warm against his palm. Ever since it had severed Zhou Chen’s neck and drunk the blood of a Stage 5 martial artist, the faint violet characters etched beneath the flaking rust had begun to pulse with a slow, rhythmic cadence, like a heart slowly regaining its beat after centuries of dormancy.

A hundred yards ahead, the narrow gorge widened into a bowl-shaped clearing shrouded in thick, swirling fog. In the center of the clearing, surrounded by a pool of black, stagnant water, stood three patches of luminescent vegetation.

The leaves were slender and shaped like crescent daggers, glowing with a soft, milky-white silver radiance that pushed back the foul red mist in a three-pace radius.

Silver-Leaf Spirit Grass.

The nominal objective of the Medicine Mountain Trial. Three stalks were required to present to the Hall of Disciplinary Affairs to burn away a sword slave's brand and elevate them to an official outer disciple.

"There they are!" Meng Rou breathed, her eyes lighting up. "Brother Yuan, we only need three. We can harvest them and hide in the caves until the three days end!"

Chu Yuan did not move. His eyes narrowed, scanning the jagged limestone boulders ringing the stagnant pool.

"A spirit herb with thirty years of growth never grows in the open without an owner," Chu Yuan said quietly. "Look at the mud around the pool."

Meng Rou leaned forward slightly, peering through the gloom.

Her breath caught in her throat.

Imprinted deep into the black muck were tracks—paw prints the size of washbasins, each tipped with the deep gouge of four curved, sickle-like talons. Dried animal carcasses hung from the lower branches of the dead cedar trees above, their ribs picked clean by sharp teeth.

Rustle.

A dry branch snapped twenty paces to their right.

From behind a moss-covered boulder, a low, guttural snarl scraped through the fog. Then another answered it from the left ridge.

Two shadows crept forward into the silver glow of the herbs.

They were wolves, but unlike any common beast of the Grand Chu forests. Their bodies were eight feet long, their coats matted with crimson scabs and bristling with stiff, wire-like black quills. From their lower jaws protruded two curved fangs of translucent scarlet bone, dripping acidic yellow saliva that hissed as it splattered against the stone.

Mutated Blood-Fanged Hounds. Second-rank low-grade spirit beasts, equivalent to human cultivators at Stage 4 of the Martial Path. In packs, their coordinated hunting could tear even a Stage 6 inner disciple to pieces.

The wolf on the left lowered its snout, its cloudy red eyes locking onto Meng Rou. Its nostrils flared, catching the scent of pure, uncorrupted vital qi lingering on her skin from the Nine-Yang Pill. To a corrupted beast, that purity was an intoxicating feast.

GRRR-RAWR!

With a tearing screech, the left hound exploded from the ferns. Its massive hind legs cracked the rock beneath it as it soared six feet into the air, its scarlet bone fangs spread wide, aiming straight for Meng Rou's neck!

"Down," Chu Yuan uttered.

He didn't draw the sword.

When the beast’s gaping maw was three feet from his face, Chu Yuan’s right foot slammed into the ground.

Desolate Yuan Star — pulse!

A dull, subterranean tremor resonated through the earth. Thirty thousand jin of unyielding star-force surged into Chu Yuan’s right arm as he stepped forward, meeting the flying eighty-pound beast with a bare-handed backhand slap across its snout!

CRACK!

The sound was not the wet impact of flesh on fur. It was the deafening smash of an iron hammer hitting a granite boulder.

The hound's foot-long scarlet fangs shattered into a dozen jagged splinters. Its entire jaw collapsed into a bloody pulp as the kinetic shockwave traveled through its skull, snapping its cervical vertebrae instantly. The beast did not even have time to whimper; its massive body reversed direction midair, hurtling twenty paces across the clearing and crashing into a stone wall with a wet, heavy thud before sliding into the mud, lifeless.

The second hound, which had been creeping along the right flank to cut off their retreat, skidded to a dead halt. Its quills flattened against its ribs, its tail tucked between its trembling legs.

Wild beasts possessed an instinct for survival far sharper than arrogant disciples like Zhou Chen. In the span of a single breath, it recognized that the scrawny two-legged creature before it was not prey. It was an apex predator disguised in rags.

The hound let out a high-pitched yelp and turned to bolt back into the thicket.

Chu Yuan’s left hand reached over his shoulder.

SHING.

Xuanji cleared the sackcloth wrap with a cold, metallic hiss. Chu Yuan did not pursue; he simply gripped the rusted iron hilt, cocked his elbow, and hurled the heavy blade like a javelin.

The rusted sword cut through the red mist with a shrieking whistle.

THWACK!

The blade pinned the fleeing hound through the base of its spine, driving through four inches of muscle, bone, and stone, nailing the thrashing beast firmly to the trunk of an ancient pine tree. The wolf gave two violent spasms, its limbs went limp, and its head dropped forward in silence.

Chu Yuan walked over with steady strides. As he gripped the hilt to pull the blade free, he paused.

A faint crimson mist began to rise from the dead wolf’s wound, swirling along the rusted grooves of the iron blade. The iron seemed to drink the beast's vital essence greedily. Peel after peel of ancient surface rust flaked away, revealing a dark, starlight-colored core of cold metal that hummed with quiet, savage satisfaction.

Inside his sea of consciousness, a faint, crystalline whisper echoed for a fraction of an instant—sharp, proud, and distant:

Too thin... wild dog blood is foul...

Chu Yuan’s lips twitched slightly.

"Be patient," he thought toward the sword spirit. "A bigger meal is coming."

He wrenched Xuanji from the tree trunk and flicked the black blood from its flat. He walked over to the stagnant pool, knelt beside the luminescent patch, and cleanly harvested six stalks of the Silver-Leaf Spirit Grass using his thumb and index finger, severing the root filaments with surgical precision so the medicinal fluid would not leak.

He tossed three stalks to Meng Rou.

"Tuck them deep into your inner pocket," he told her. "That guarantees your outer-disciple status. No elder can overturn an ancestral decree backed by the physical herbs."

"What about you, Brother Yuan?" Meng Rou asked, carefully wrapping the glowing leaves in a dry cloth.

"My status was never going to come from weeds," Chu Yuan replied calmly.

His gaze was not on the remaining three stalks of Silver-Leaf Grass. His eyes were fixed on the rocky cleft behind the pool, where a fissure in the cliff face leaked a faint, deep-red glow into the fog.

Chu Yuan stepped across the stagnant water and peered into the crevice.

Tangled around an ancient, weathered skeleton clad in the tattered blue robes of an Azure Cloud Sect Inner Elder was a vine as thick as a man's wrist. The vine was dark purple, shaped like interlocking dragon scales, and bore a single fist-sized fruit that glowed like a burning ember in the dark.

Blood Sun Vine.

A sixty-year-old earth-grade spiritual treasure. To an ordinary cultivator, its fiery energy was too violent to consume directly—it would incinerate the meridians within minutes. But to someone cultivating the Desolate Star Tyrant Body Art, which required celestial heat and violent physical destruction to forge the stars... it was pure nectar.

Chu Yuan reached out and snapped the glowing fruit from the vine.

Beside the skeleton lay an iron token bearing the name Elder Liu—Third Mountain Pavilion. The elder’s skull was crushed from behind by an enormous fist that bore five distinct claw marks—the signature of Elder Chen's Demonic Mountain-Splitting Palm.

Chu Yuan did not need to guess the story. Elder Liu had discovered Elder Chen’s secret breeding pit years ago and had been ambushed and left to rot in this crevice, his corpse used to nourish the very herb that had now fallen into Chu Yuan’s hands.

"The heavens give, and the earth takes," Chu Yuan murmured.

Without hesitation, he tossed the Blood Sun Fruit into his mouth and bit down.

CRUNCH.

A flood of molten, volcanic juice erupted across his tongue. It did not taste of fruit; it tasted of iron, sulfur, and blistering heat. The moment it slid down his throat, a pillar of white-hot fire exploded in his abdomen, threatening to tear his internal organs to shreds!

Chu Yuan closed his eyes and sat cross-legged on the stone beside the skeleton.

Desolate Star Tyrant Body Art: Star Consumption!

He did not guide the heat through the standard meridians of the human body. He dragged every ounce of the volcanic energy downward—forcing it into the sole of his right foot, directly into the blazing core of the Desolate Yuan Star!

The star flared. It expanded from the size of a grain of sand to the size of a pigeon egg, rotating with terrifying gravity.

CRACK-CRACK-CRACK!

Every bone in Chu Yuan’s right leg shattered with microscopic fractures, only to be instantly fused, tempered, and rebuilt with dense, star-forged bone marrow that gleamed with faint metallic luster. Thirty thousand jin of force swelled, broke through its ceiling, and surged upward—

Thirty-five thousand jin.

Forty thousand jin!

A low sonic boom erupted from Chu Yuan’s pores, scattering the crimson mist ten paces around him in a circular wave of compressed air.

When Chu Yuan opened his eyes, the pitch-black pupils were flecked with tiny rings of white starlight. The fatigue from the morning battle was completely gone. His body felt lighter than a sparrow, yet heavy enough to flatten mountains.

"Brother Yuan... look!" Meng Rou’s voice suddenly cracked with terror.

Chu Yuan stood up smoothly and looked toward the upper rim of the gorge.

The red mist had stopped swirling. It was being sucked inward, pulled toward a gaping cavern three hundred yards up the cliffside like water draining into a whirlpool.

The ground groaned.

From the mouth of the cavern, two massive arms covered in coarse, blood-red fur reached out, gripping the stone pillars of the cliff. Each arm was as thick as an ancient oak tree, with black steel-like talons digging deep into the rock, gouging out six-foot ruts.

A monstrous silhouette pulled itself out into the open air.

It was twelve feet tall. Its chest was a slab of crimson muscle crisscrossed with ancient, festering ritual brands—the exact same Nine-Nether markings that sat on Chu Yuan’s chest, but enlarged a hundredfold! From its spine protruded jagged white bone spikes that dripped foul black ichor. Its eyes were not the eyes of a beast, but two burning furnaces of demonic crimson fire, filled with insatiable slaughter and madness.

In its right fist, it held the mangled, half-eaten torso of an outer disciple in black-and-red robes.

The Blood Demon Ape!

Elder Chen’s three-year abomination. A third-rank peak spirit beast, teetering on the verge of forming a demonic core—possessing physical might exceeding fifty thousand jin and skin impervious to common steel!

The beast sniffed the air. Its massive head swung downward, its blazing crimson gaze locking onto the dead hounds by the pool, then onto the small figure of Meng Rou, and finally settling upon Chu Yuan.

It opened its cavernous maw, lined with three rows of jagged yellow teeth, and let out a bellow that shook loose boulders from the cliff face!

ROOOAAAR—!

The hurricane of foul, blood-drenched wind flattened the fern groves and tore the thatched bushes from their roots.

The beast flung the disciple's mangled corpse aside and bent its knees. The entire cliff wall buckled under its weight as it launched itself into the sky like a falling meteor, descending directly toward the clearing!

Meng Rou fell to her knees, paralyzed by the suffocating demonic pressure.

Chu Yuan stood motionless in the center of the clearing. He did not step back. He did not look for a cave to hide in.

He slowly unwound the last strip of sackcloth from Xuanji.

The dark iron blade caught the crimson light of the falling demon. For the first time, a razor-thin line of starlight ran along its jagged edge, humming with a sound so pure and lethal it silenced the howling wind.

Chu Yuan looked up at the descending mountain of blood and bone, his eyes as still as an ancient well.

"Elder Chen spent three years feeding you," Chu Yuan whispered into the falling gale. "Today, you die to forge my second star."