Lord of the dead: Exiled by my sect

“Li Tian, do you admit your crime?”

The words did not just fall from the high platform; they crashed down like physical weights. The voice belonged to Grand Elder Wu, vibrating with a cultivation base that made the very air hum with lethal intent.

Across the vast Judgment Plaza, ten thousand disciples stood in absolute, suffocating silence. They formed a sea of pristine, white robes, their faces masked with expressions ranging from cold indifference to twisted satisfaction. Every single pair of eyes in the stone arena was locked onto the center of the plaza.

There knelt Li Tian.

He slowly forced his head up, the movement dragging a sharp groan from his throat. The heavy Spirit-Sealing Shackles bound to his wrists dug deep into his flesh, their cold iron biting into his skin. Dark blue runes pulsed along the metal, actively suppressing his meridians and turning his blood into sluggish ice. His once-proud disciple robes were shredded, stained dark with the copper-scented blood of a three-day interrogation.

Yet, as he looked up at the elders, his eyes remained terrifyingly calm. They were the eyes of a wolf cornered, but completely unbroken.

“I committed no crime,” Li Tian said. His voice was raspy, dry from dehydration, but it carried to the edge of the arena.

The silence shattered instantly.

“Shameless scum!” a core disciple roared from the front ranks.

“He still dares to deny it! After everything the sect has given him!”

“Execute him! Break his limbs and hang him from the mountain gates!”

The wave of hatred washed over Li Tian, but he barely heard it. His fists clenched so tightly that his fingernails pierced his palms, drawing fresh blood. Three days ago, he had returned from the frozen hell of the Northern Wastes. He had bled for the sect. He had watched three of his junior brothers die to secure the borders.

And his reward? The moment he stepped through the gates, he was ambushed, beaten, and accused of stealing the Heaven-Breaking Jade—the sect’s most sacred foundational treasure. There was no trial. There were no witnesses. There was only a sudden, absolute verdict.

Li Tian’s gaze shifted away from the shouting crowd and climbed the marble stairs of the elders’ platform. It passed the sneering faces of the outer elders, bypassed the cold glare of Grand Elder Wu, and stopped on a single figure standing just a step behind them.

Zhao Feng.

Li Tian’s chest tightened, a pain sharper than any physical wound slicing through his heart. Zhao Feng was wearing the jade pendant Li Tian had gifted him three years ago. They had entered the sect together as starving orphans. They had shared frozen rations, defended each other’s backs from demonic beasts, and sworn an oath of brotherhood under the moon.

Now, Zhao Feng stood in the shadow of power, his eyes fixed firmly on the stone floor, completely refusing to meet Li Tian's gaze.

A bitter, hollow realization bloomed in Li Tian’s mind. The missing treasure. The perfectly fabricated timeline of the theft. The sudden ambush at the gates. Someone in the high ranks needed a scapegoat to cover up the true thief, and the friend he had trusted with his life had gladly handed him over on a silver platter.

“Why?” Li Tian’s voice was barely a whisper, yet in the brief lull of the crowd, it reached the platform.

Zhao Feng’s shoulders visibly trembled. For a fraction of a second, a raw look of panic and guilt washed over his features. But as Grand Elder Wu cast a sideways glance at him, Zhao Feng’s expression hardened into a mask of cold, righteous fury.

He stepped forward, his voice amplified by spiritual energy so it boomed across the plaza. “The evidence gathered by the Discipline Hall is absolute, Li Tian. I personally saw the residual energy of the Jade on your robes. Stop clinging to your lies. You betrayed the sect, and you betrayed our brotherhood.”

The last fragile thread holding Li Tian’s loyalty together didn't just snap; it disintegrated.

A low chuckle escaped Li Tian’s dry lips. The chuckle grew into a ragged laugh, vibrating in his chest until he was throwing his head back, laughing openly at the heavens. The sound was wild, jagged, and entirely devoid of hope. The surrounding disciples stared at him, whispering in hushed, unnerved tones. They thought he had gone mad.

Perhaps he had. After spending ten years giving his youth, his blood, and his soul to the Heavenly Sword Sect, this farce was his final reward.

“Enough.”

A single word cut through the laughter like a guillotine.

The Sect Master, who had remained seated in his carved jade throne like an unmoving statue, slowly stood up. The moment his feet touched the marble, the sky above darkens. The terrifying pressure of a Nascent Soul expert descended upon the plaza like a collapsing mountain.

CRACK!

The reinforced stone beneath Li Tian’s knees shattered into web-like fissures. The sheer gravity of the pressure forced his chest toward the ground, a fresh torrent of blood erupting from his mouth and splashing against the grey rock. Still, using every ounce of his remaining physical strength, he kept his chin high. He refused to press his forehead to the dirt.

The Sect Master’s eyes narrowed into slits of pure ice. “Li Tian. You stand accused of grand larceny of the foundational artifact. You stand accused of colluding with the unholy demonic sects of the outer rims. According to the iron laws of our ancestors…” He paused, his voice dropping into a register that felt like a death knell. “…your cultivation shall be permanently severed, and your name erased from the registry.”

The crowd gasped, a collective shiver running through the younger disciples. Stripping a cultivator of their dantian was far worse than a simple execution. It meant turning a proud dragon into a worm, leaving them to live out their days in a world where the weak were crushed like insects.

“Do you have any final words before the law is executed?” the Sect Master asked, his hand slowly rising, glowing with a blinding, oppressive golden light.

Li Tian spat a mouthful of bloody phlegm onto the pristine white stairs. He looked at the disciples he had once shielded in battle. He looked at the elders who had praised his talent just last month. He looked at the brother who had sold his soul for a promotion.

He smiled, his teeth stained crimson. “If I truly stole the Heaven-Breaking Jade… then produce it. Show it to the thousands gathered here today. Let them see it in my possession.”

Absolute silence met his demand. No elder moved. No enforcer stepped forward with a storage ring. The truth was glaringly obvious to anyone with a brain, but nobody cared about the truth.

Grand Elder Wu’s face turned purplish-black with rage. “Still stubborn at the gates of hell! Die!”

He didn't wait for the Sect Master. Wu threw his hand forward, and a massive, fifty-foot golden palm materialized in the clouds above, burning with the power of the Core Formation realm.

BOOM!

The palm slammed directly into Li Tian’s chest.

The sound of shattering bones echoed across the arena like breaking timber. Li Tian’s chest collapsed inward, his meridians tearing apart one by one as the golden energy forced its way into his lower abdomen.

SHATTER!

Deep within his soul, his pristine, glowing dantian—the core of his ten years of hard work—exploded into countless dull fragments. The spiritual energy he had meticulously gathered drained out of his pores like escaping mist. The sudden, agonizing emptiness was worse than the physical pain. It felt as if his very soul was being hollowed out with a rusty knife.

His vision blurred into shades of grey and black. He collapsed sideways into the pool of his own blood, his fingers twitching weakly against the cracked stone.

The Sect Master didn't even look at the broken body. He merely turned his back. “He is no longer of our blood. Throw him into the Abyss of Ten Thousands Graves. Let the filth rot with the filth.”

Hearing that name, even the most cold-blooded disciples took a step back. The Abyss. A bottomless tear in the earth at the back of the mountain, howling with malicious yin energy. For thousands of years, it was the sect's dumping ground for executed criminals and demonic corpses. No one who fell into its depths had ever breathed a word of the living world again.

Two iron-faced enforcers stepped forward, dragging Li Tian by his broken shoulders. His feet dragged along the stone, leaving two long, smeary trails of red.

They reached the edge of the cliff. Below them, a sea of churning, pitch-black fog swirled violently, swallowing the sunlight. The wind howling up from the depths sounded like the synchronized weeping of a million ghosts.

The enforcers didn't hesitate. With a harsh swing, they pitched his broken body over the precipice.

The world went into a violent spin. The roaring wind deafened his ears, tearing at his bloody clothes as he plummeted into the freezing, dark void. The light of the Heavenly Sword Sect grew smaller and smaller above him until it was nothing but a speck of dust, completely consumed by the shadows.

Li Tian let his eyelids fall shut. So this is the end of my path…

Suddenly, the frantic howling of the wind ceased entirely. The air became dead, heavy, and smelling faintly of ancient dust and iron.

From the absolute primordial darkness beneath him, a voice rumbled. It didn't strike his ears; it vibrated directly inside the marrow of his bones. It was a voice older than the mountains, laced with a terrifying amusement.

“You finally came.”

Li Tian’s eyes snapped open.

Deep within the black abyss, two gargantuan, burning crimson eyes materialized out of the dark, staring directly into his soul. And then, a colossal, bone-white hand made of a thousand interlocking skeletons rose from the fog, reaching up to catch his falling form.