The Shattered Vortex

Chapter 12 The Harvest of the Sky

The severed corpse of Clan Chief Zhou grew cold in the mud, yet no one dared to move a single muscle to retrieve it. The two hundred remaining inner disciples huddled at the edge of the courtyard, their master-crafted swords trembling so violently against their silver bracers that the air filled with a frantic, metallic clicking. They looked at the mud-slicked, blood-stained youth in black hide, and then they looked up at the sky. They knew that the petty politics of mortal clans had just burned to ash. The true war was about to begin.

Up on his platform of condensed cloud-matter, Sect Master Jiang Chen slowly stood up. He did not look like an angry ruler whose sect had been thrown into chaos. Instead, a deeply unsettling, radiant joy broke through his serene, ancient features. He looked at Lu Chen the way an alchemist looks at a perfected, golden pill that had taken four centuries to brew.

"Magnificent," Jiang Chen whispered. His voice was soft, yet it bypassed the ears of the five thousand spectators, vibrating directly within the cerebral walls of everyone in the stadium. "Perfected width of the meridians. An unyielding physical structure forged in exquisite agony. And a True Foundation needle that can bridge the gap between the divine and the profane. Lu Chen, you have exceeded every variable I calculated when I placed that manual in the lowest tier of the archives."

Lu Chen did not lower his stance. He stood in the smoking crater of the plaza, his bare feet firmly planted on the cracked marble. His emerald-crimson needle was spinning at a manic speed inside his gut, its solid crystalline edges grinding against the massive influx of stolen energy he had just vacuumed from Clan Chief Zhou.

"You left it there on purpose," Lu Chen said, his voice flat, carrying the cold resonance of the deep abyss. "You didn't want an exceptional disciple. You wanted a vessel."

"A vessel? No, that is too crude a word," Sect Master Jiang replied, stepping directly off his cloud platform.

Instead of falling, the air beneath his leather boots hardened into translucent steps of pure, crystallized golden Qi. With each step he took down toward the earth, the sky above the Vermilion Sect darkened, the vibrant sunlight replaced by a heavy, bruising purple haze. The true, unrestricted power of a late-stage Core Formation Realm master rolled off his frame, flattening the wooden stands and causing the marble tiers to groan under an artificial gravity.

"For four hundred years, I have ruled this mountain," Jiang Chen continued, his eyes locked onto Lu Chen with a terrifying, predatory hunger. "But my own standard Core is decaying. Every time I draw upon the heavens, my life force leaks into the void. The traditional path of cultivation is a trap—it builds a fragile vase that eventually cracks under the weight of time. But the Shattered Mirror Technique... it builds a black hole. It cannot crack, because it is already broken."

The Sect Master reached the bottom of his invisible staircase, his feet settling onto the blood-splattered marble ten paces from Lu Chen. He raised his plain wooden staff, and the simple timber began to peel back like old skin, revealing a column of jagged, white bone carved from the spine of a primordial cosmic entity.

"I needed an underdog, Lu Chen. Someone with a heart so consumed by malice and a mind so desperate for survival that they would willingly plunge a knife into their own soul and survive the grinding," Jiang Chen smiled, his teeth gleaming white in the dark purple shadow of the sky. "You did the work. You harvested the abyss. Now, the farmer takes his crop."

Thrum!

The bone staff struck the stone. Instantly, the ground beneath Lu Chen’s feet erupted into a massive, glowing array of emerald-green runes—the Soul-Possession Ritual.

Lu Chen felt his limbs freeze instantly. An invisible, spectral vice clamped around his joints, pinning his arms to his sides and locking his spine straight. The emerald-crimson needle inside his belly vibrated so violently it threatened to tear its way out through his skin, resisting the foreign spiritual authority that was violently boring into his mind.

"Do not fight it, my child," Jiang Chen said, walking forward as his physical body began to slowly dissolve into a cloud of bright golden mist, his soul extending out like a massive, multi-limbed phantom that towered over the plaza. "Your memories will be wiped, but your perfect, unyielding flesh will live on as the supreme ruler of this continent. Your vortex belongs to me."

The golden soul-phantom of the Sect Master lunged forward, pouring itself straight into Lu Chen’s open eyes, nose, and mouth.

The agony was unlike anything Lu Chen had ever experienced—even worse than the moment he shattered his own dantian. It felt as if a roaring furnace of liquid gold was being poured directly into his brain, violently burning away his childhood memories, his three years in the toxic mountains, and his hatred for the panther that started it all. His consciousness began to drift into a soft, inviting gray void.

Give up, a voice echoed within his fading mind. You have fought enough, beggar. Let the immortal take the weight.

No, a dark, snarling voice answered from the deepest depths of his fractured foundation.

Lu Chen’s inner eyes snapped open within his own soul space. He looked down at his internal landscape. The golden phantom of Jiang Chen was already wrapping its ethereal tendrils around his wide meridians, trying to seize control of the emerald needle.

"You think you can farm me?" Lu Chen’s soul-voice roared, shaking the internal space. "You think you can buy my suffering with a golden robe? I didn't break my own bones to become another man's armor!"

With a terrifying surge of pure, unadulterated malice, Lu Chen executed the ultimate command of his mutated technique. He did not try to push the Sect Master out. Instead, he commanded the emerald-crimson needle at the center of his vortex to shatter itself.

CRACK.

The solid needle of energy detonated inside his own soul space, transforming his entire dantian into an absolute, localized black hole. The violent, crushing vacuum didn't just pull the ambient energy of the world—it locked onto the golden soul of Sect Master Jiang Chen that was currently trapped inside his flesh.

The Devouring Maw opened within his mind.

"What?! What are you doing?!" Jiang Chen’s arrogant voice suddenly morphed into a shriek of pure, unadulterated panic within Lu Chen's consciousness. The golden phantom tried to frantically tear itself away, to escape back into the open air, but the gravity of the shattered needle was absolute. The vacuum was drinking his soul. "Stop! Your own mind will collapse! We will both dissolve into nothingness!"

"Then we die in the dirt together, old man," Lu Chen growled.

He didn't flinch as the extreme friction of the soul-grinding began to tear at his own sanity. He forced the shattered fragments of his foundation to aggressively clamp down on the golden immortal soul, grinding Jiang Chen's four hundred years of cultivation, his memories, and his divine authority into raw, unrefined power.

Outside, in the physical plaza, the thousands of watching disciples saw Lu Chen’s body violently convulse. Blood poured from his eyes, ears, and fingernails, but the brilliant golden mist that had been invading him was no longer flowing inward—it was being forcefully s*ck*d down his throat like water down a drain.

The dark purple sky above the mountain began to violently crack, white lightning striking the high palaces as the supreme master of the mountain was systematically eaten from the inside out by a beggar in animal skins.