The Rejected Disciple, Successor to The Demonic Path

The Hadarac Desert, Part Two

Scarface leaned back, mischief flashing in his eyes.

“I pity that girl,” he said loudly enough for Rong Tian to hear. “Miss Zhao Hua has no idea her fiancé is already gone. In a day or two, perhaps she will be betrothed to someone more suitable.”

Rong Tian did not move. Yet his jaw tightened so visibly that everyone inside the carriage noticed.

“Be quiet,” Rong Tian said. The single sentence was quieter than a whisper, but it carried something that made Scarface stop laughing for half a breath before laughing again.

“Oh, that hit a nerve,” Scarface said with greater amusement. His eyes savored every shift in Rong Tian’s expression. “Then I chose the right target.”

The group leader did not stop him this time. He only looked through the narrow carriage window with the expression of someone who no longer cared about such details.

The driver laughed from outside, his voice passing through the thin carriage wall. “I cannot wait to see this boy become wolf food!”

Rong Tian did not answer. He lowered his head and let them believe there was nothing happening behind his bruised face.

Inside, he kept Zhao Hua’s name in a place none of them could touch. Not to forget it. To remember it differently one day.

Several days later, the wind entering through the cracks in the carriage carried a different temperature. It was drier. Colder in a way unlike ordinary night chill, deeper and more absolute, as if it would touch him the same way whether he moved or remained still.

Wolves howled in the distance.

They had entered the Hadarac Desert.

Scarface noticed Rong Tian’s expression and decided the opportunity was too good to waste.

“Poor boy, do not think we will leave you at the edge of the desert.” He leaned against the carriage wall, far too comfortable with the situation. “This is not a sightseeing trip.”

Laughter erupted again. The driver outside joined in.

The carriage stopped.

“We have arrived at Kunan Shenyuan!” the driver shouted from the front. “The Abyss of Suffering!”

Rong Tian knew that name. There were no official records of anyone returning from that place, not because no one had tried, but because no one had succeeded.

Scarface dragged him from the carriage with one pull that sent pain through Rong Tian’s shoulder.

“Do not!” Rong Tian struggled as his feet tried to find stable ground. “I have no grudge against any of you. We did not even know each other before this. Speak to the city lord. I can leave far away and never return. No one needs to die today.”

“You are only begging now?” Scarface slapped him again, hard, striking a different side of his face and sending his head snapping away. “You are ten days too late, brat.”

They took him to the edge of the abyss.

The wind rising from its depths carried sounds that could not be explained by ordinary wind. It was something between groaning and whispering, coming from a place too deep for light to reach.

Rong Tian stood at the edge while two men held him from either side. Below him was darkness without a visible bottom.

No tears fell from his eyes.

Scarface noticed that, and something in his expression shifted from satisfaction to discomfort.

“Leader,” he said, his voice slightly raised, “allow me to destroy his spirit pearl first. I have watched his eyes during this journey. He has not surrendered. If he somehow survives by luck, we should make sure he can never cultivate.”

The group leader stood at the edge of Rong Tian’s vision, his hair stirred by the night wind. He looked at Rong Tian briefly, as though deciding whether such a precaution was necessary or merely a waste of time.

Then he gave a short nod.

“Do it. He will die anyway. But there is no harm in being careful.”

Rong Tian heard the decision and closed his eyes for one second.

Not because he was afraid. He wanted to preserve one last image before the coming pain, an image of Zhao Hua laughing beneath an osmanthus tree in the rear garden of the vice minister’s residence, on an afternoon when the world had not yet found a reason to become so cruel.

The image was stored away. His eyes opened again.

Scarface gathered Qi in his palm. Even without deep cultivation, Rong Tian could feel the warm and unpleasant pressure moving toward him.

“This will feel as though your entire body is burning from the inside,” Scarface said. His voice carried the purest satisfaction he had felt all night. “But you will not die immediately. I am too experienced to make that kind of mistake.”

Rong Tian did not answer.

The palm struck the point where his spirit pearl rested.

What followed could not be described by ordinary words. It was not merely pain. It was not merely heat. It was something more fundamental, as though someone had torn something from within him that he had never realized existed until it was gone.

Rong Tian did not scream.

It was not because the pain was absent. It was because the pain was greater than every word that could describe it, and he refused to grant those men the final satisfaction they wanted.

He bit his lip until blood flowed, keeping his eyes open as he stared at the starless sky over the Hadarac Desert.

“Throw him down.”

Three men pushed at once, and Rong Tian’s body fell into the darkness below the Abyss of Suffering.

The wind from the depths received him like something that had been waiting for him for a long time.

In the instant before everything went dark, one final thought crossed his mind.

“I will not die here. I cannot die here.”

It was not hope. It was not a prayer.

It was a decision.

Five breaths passed. The sounds below grew restless in a way that told the men above everything they needed to know.

“Leave.” The leader had already turned around before the word fully left his mouth.

The carriage departed. Its wheels were swept by windblown sand, erasing every trace of those who had brought Rong Tian there.

Beneath the starless sky of the Hadarac Desert, the Abyss of Suffering kept its secret as it always had.

Only tonight, something inside that abyss was still breathing.

To be continued.