Desolate star sovereign: Peerless God-king

Chapter 7: Slaying the Ape, Forging the Second Star

The world turned red.

The Blood Demon Ape descended like a collapsing mountain, its shadow swallowing the entire clearing. Twelve feet of knotted muscle and crimson fur, its landing cratered the earth, hurling stone shrapnel in a deadly halo. The ancient pines at the clearing's edge groaned and snapped like dry kindling.

Chu Yuan moved.

Not a heartbeat sooner. Not a heartbeat later. The instant the beast's feet touched the earth, before its massive arms could sweep outward, he threw himself into a slide across the shattered ground, the rusted dark-iron blade singing a single, razor-thin note.

The starlight edge carved a line across the ape's shin.

Blood welled—then stopped. The flesh around the wound writhed, and the cut sealed itself with a sound like sizzling fat.

Chu Yuan's eyes narrowed. "Corrupted blood essence. It heals as fast as steel can cut."

"Chu Yuan!" Meng Rou's voice cracked with terror. She was on her feet now, pressed against the boulder where they had hidden the herb baskets, her small fists white-knuckled. "Its hide—ordinary strikes can't—"

"I know." He rolled to his feet as a fist the size of a millstone hammered down where he had stood. The stone floor did not shatter; it liquefied, compressing into a crater of powdered rock. "Get behind the boulder. Do not move. No matter what you see—do not move."

The ape's blazing crimson eyes tracked him with ugly cunning. This was no mindless beast. Three years of blood sacrifice had refined its instincts into something close to a cultivator's battle sense. It feinted left, then its shoulder dropped, and it came right—a backhand sweep that arrived faster than a falling boulder.

Chu Yuan met it with the Desolate Yuan Star fully ignited.

Forty thousand jin of force slammed into forty thousand jin of force. The shockwave flattened the fern groves in a hundred-meter ring. Chu Yuan skidded back nine meters, boots carving twin furrows, his arms singing with numbness—and a wild, furious grin split his bloody face.

Five thousand jin weaker. And the gap was growing. The ape's wounded aura was feeding, the blood mist seeping from the mountain's depths drawn into its lungs with every breath.

Then I cannot win by exchange. He tilted his blade, letting the starlight line catch the crimson gloom. I win by sword.

"Come," he said. "Show me what three hundred lives bought."

The ape charged.

What followed was a butcher's lesson in desperation. Chu Yuan stopped trying to match the beast's force and became something the demon had never hunted: a phantom with an edge. He read the twitch of its shoulder, the flex of its claws, the shift of weight through its ruined, two-toed feet. Xuanji's starlight edge flashed again and again—wrist, knee, throat, eye—each strike shallow, each strike precise, each one answered by that revolting wriggle of healing flesh.

But he was bleeding. The ape was not.

A claw tip he never fully evaded opened four trenches across his back. A grazing fist cracked two of his ribs and threw him through a dead pine. He tasted copper, stood up on legs that trembled, and stood anyway.

In my first life, I fell from the heavens for lesser wounds than these.

In this life, I will not fall at all.

"Xuanji." He breathed the name into the storm of battle. "Lend me your memory."

The blade trembled in his grip. And through the welter of pain, a strand of star-cold understanding uncoiled—the rusted sword spirit's oldest recollection, not of a technique, but of a truth: Flesh that feeds on blood carries its master in its blood. Cut the river, not the waves.

The heart. The black blood vessel of the Nether Seal coiled around it like a serpent around a pillar.

Chu Yuan exhaled.

Then he did the one thing no sane cultivator would do. He stopped retreating and charged into the beast's chest, sliding beneath its guarding elbow as its claws raked the air above his spine.

"Desolate Yuan—" The star behind his heart detonated, every remaining thread of his strength flooding his arm. "—OPENING THE HEAVENS!"

It was the first form he had ever learned in his first life, executed with a slave's broken body and a sword that was barely a sword. The starlight edge, driven by forty thousand jin and the full weight of two lifetimes of refusal, pierced the corrupt hide over the ape's chest and sank in to the hilt.

The ape shrieked. Its arms closed around him like a collapsing cave.

Ribs buckled. Vision went white. And still Chu Yuan twisted the blade, grinding the starlight edge through flesh that healed almost as fast as it tore—except now it could not, because the edge was buried in the river of blood itself, in the current that fed every wound.

The black-vessel serpent recoiled. And for one instant, the Demon Ape's regeneration stuttered.

Chu Yuan wrenched the blade free in a spray of near-black blood and threw himself backward out of the closing crushing grip, cracking another rib on a boulder as he landed.

The ape staggered.

It did not fall. Its crimson eyes burned with hellish vitality, and the wound over its heart was already knotting closed—but something had changed. The blood mist that fed it had been cut, and through that gap Chu Yuan could see it: the demonic core in the beast's abdomen, beating like a second heart, flickering with every labored pulse.

"One more," he whispered. "Xuanji, one more."

There was no answer. There never was. Only the blade humming in his hand, low and eager, like a hunting dog that has finally scented the quarry.

The ape came at him again—and Chu Yuan saw the difference. Its charge had lost half a beat of speed. Its left arm dragged. The heart wound that had closed on the surface had not closed within.

It heals outward. Not inward.

Good.

They met in the center of the ruined clearing one final time. Fist against blade. Mountain against star. Chu Yuan took a backhand across the shoulder that would have killed an ordinary man and used the momentum—used the pain itself—to spin inside its guard, drop low, and drive Xuanji's starlight edge up through the soft flesh beneath the ape's jaw.

The blade sank past the jaw, past the spine, and out the crown of the skull in a fountain of darkness.

The Blood Demon Ape stood swaying for three long breaths, as if astonished that anything in this mountain could still reach it.

Then it fell.

The impact shook mist from the entire valley.

Chu Yuan stood over the corpse, chest heaving, the dark-iron blade braced against the ground to keep him upright. Blood sheeted down his sides from his back and shoulder. His right arm had gone entirely numb. Four ribs, perhaps five.

Slowly, the corpse began to boil.

Not flesh—essence. Three hundred sacrificed cultivators' worth of blood essence, refined by three years of demonic nourishment, rose from the body in a slow crimson tide, coiling toward Chu Yuan like a serpent recognizing a new master. The ape's demonic core shattered into motes of dark light that streamed into his chest.

His heart lurched. Behind it, in the darkness where the Desolate Yuan Star burned alone, something answered.

The Desolate Yuan Star flared—and dragged the tide of blood essence into itself, crushing it, condensing it, forging it in a fury of heat and pressure. The star rotated. Cracked. Reforged itself into two.

A second star ignited beside the first—deeper in color, a smoldering, blood-dark ember that drank the last of the essence and settled into a slow, terrible pulse.

The Desolate Nether Star.

The knowledge arrived without words, the way the first star's had. This star did not govern force. It governed what remained after force—the nether-current of blood and marrow, the shadow-strength that lived in death itself. His wounded body seized it ravenously. Ribs knitted. The trenches across his back closed into pale seams. His strength, moments from empty, refilled to overflowing—and then climbed past it.

Forty-five thousand jin. Fifty. Fifty-five.

Chu Yuan opened his eyes.

The world had changed. He could hear the pulse of blood in the mist, could feel the fading ember of the ape's core dissolving into his own star, could sense—far above the mountain, far beyond it—a vein of cold, dark energy winding through the earth beneath the Azure Cloud Sect like a buried river.

He followed that sense with his eyes. It led downhill. Toward a rift in the rock half a mile below the clearing, half-hidden by fog, from which the blood mist of Medicine Mountain had been flowing all along.

A stone arch, ancient and sealed, its threshold stained black by centuries of old blood. And carved above the arch, in characters that made Xuanji's blade shudder against his palm:

Blood Demon Pit.

"Chu Yuan." Meng Rou's small voice. She stood at the edge of the crater the ape's corpse had left, white-faced, holding the basket of Silver-Leaf Spirit Grass against her chest like a shield. Her eyes were fixed on him—on the two slow-turning points of light reflected faintly in his irises. "You... the elder's seal. The poison. It's quiet. Since you killed it, I can't feel it at all."

"The Nether blood in that beast came from the same source as the poison in your seal." He wiped Xuanji's blade clean on his ruined sleeve and looked at the blood-black arch, and his voice dropped to something colder than the mountain mist. "Elder Chen has been feeding his pit from this mountain for three years. Three hundred disciples. Meng Rou—how many more names are carved down there, waiting for their turn?"

He slung the blade across his back, took one of the herb baskets from her shaking hands, and looked up through the thinning fog, toward the distant, invisible sect.

He had come to this mountain for three blades of grass.

He was leaving with a second star, a forged body—and the address of the man who had built a slaughterhouse out of the Azure Cloud Sect's children.

"Elder Chen," Chu Yuan said softly. "You should have let the ape kill me."

Two days remained until the trial's end—and the Desolate Nether Star turned slowly in his chest, hungry to see what was buried under the Blood Demon Pit.