Elder Derry stood before the bone-white altar of the subterranean cathedral in Kaelen’s Crossing, his hands clasped securely behind his back. The heavy crimson braziers cast long, flickering shadows against the porous volcanic rock of the walls, illuminating the meticulously carved trenches that webbed across the cavern floor.
Everything was proceeding flawlessly.
The vessel was chained to the heavy iron pillar in the center of the dais. Her breathing was shallow, the crystalline frost on her chest acting as a temporary, annoying barrier placed by some unknown, overprotective master. But it didn't matter. Against the combined might of the Cult's highest echelons, that ice would melt like snow in a blast furnace.
More importantly, the swordmaster, Thorne, was already en route to the Dragon Crags. Within a week, the Kingdom’s elite would be staring at the sky in absolute, paralyzed terror, entirely distracted by the apocalypse falling upon their capital. And while Elyndria burned, Derry and the Grand Bishop would quietly bathe this miserable border town in blood to welcome their Abyssal God.
"Maintain the blood-troughs," Derry ordered the two dozen elite priests surrounding the altar, gesturing to the glowing red rivers carved into the floor. "The ambient life force must be kept at a simmer. When the Bishop arrives, we will, "
Derry stopped.
A low, deep vibration suddenly hummed through the soles of his heavy leather boots. It didn't roll like a tectonic shift from the dormant fault lines beneath the city; it pulsed. It was a rhythmic, escalating, suffocating pressure that made the blood in Derry’s veins feel suddenly, inexplicably heavy.
*Thump.*
Dust drifted down from the cavernous ceiling, twenty yards above.
*Thump.*
The crimson braziers lining the walls simultaneously flickered. The flames actively leaned away from the center of the room, straining toward the walls as if the oxygen in the cathedral was being forcefully, aggressively sucked upward into the stone.
Derry’s magical senses suddenly screamed at him. A physical pressure unlike anything he had felt in his eighty years of dark cultivation was bearing down on them. It felt as though an invisible ocean had just been dropped directly over their heads.
"Shields!" Derry shrieked, his voice cracking in sheer, unadulterated panic. "RAISE THE BLOOD WARD, "
He didn't even finish the sentence.
The ceiling did not crack; it imploded.
A catastrophic, deafening explosion of displaced air and pulverized volcanic rock shattered the subterranean cathedral. Thousands of tons of solid stone rained down, obliterating the bone-white altar instantly. The sheer, concussive shockwave of the impact flattened every Blood Priest in the room, picking them up and throwing them against the cavern walls like discarded ragdolls.
As the thick cloud of pulverized rock slowly began to settle, the dim light of the surviving braziers illuminated a massive, fractured crater exactly where the altar had been.
Standing in the dead center of the impact zone, entirely unbothered by the falling boulders and choking dust, was a woman.
She wore an immaculate, flowing hanfu of black and crimson silk that seemed to actively reject the dirt of the world entirely. She possessed no staff, no wand, no glowing magical grimoire, and no armor. Her hands were bare.
The woman slowly turned her head. Her irises were blazing with a terrifying, unnatural golden light. Looking into her eyes felt like staring directly into the crushing, lightless depths of the Grand Abyss.
"You," the woman whispered. Her voice wasn't loud, but it carried a dense, vibrating frequency that echoed in the marrow of Derry's bones. "You took something that belongs to me."
Derry’s instincts, honed by decades of survival in the darkest corners of the continent, violently inverted. He was not a fool, and he was not weak. He was an apex predator who had slaughtered thousands to refine his magic. But the sheer, overwhelming, suffocating bloodlust radiating from this woman was on an entirely different scale of existence. She was not a human; she was a calamity wearing human skin.
"Kill her!" Derry screamed, pointing a trembling finger at the woman. "Every priest! Bleed yourselves! Form the *Crimson Purgatory*! NOW!"
The two dozen surviving Blood Priests pushed themselves off the floor. Driven by fanatic zeal and the terrifying command of their Elder, they didn't hesitate. They did not hurl simple spears of magic or spheres of acid. They drew their sacrificial daggers and seamlessly slit their own throats.
They chanted in a dark, guttural unison as they fell, linking their auras together and channeling the absolute entirety of their life force directly into the glowing red rivers carved into the cathedral floor.
The blood in the trenches violently boiled. It erupted upward like an inverted waterfall, converging in the air above the crater to form a colossal, towering monstrosity of coagulated blood and corrosive dark magic.
The *Crimson Purgatory Avatar* swelled to thirty feet in height. It possessed six massive arms, each ending in jagged, crystalline bone-scythes, and it radiated an atmospheric pressure so dense it would have instantly suffocated a Sword Saint.
"Crush her to paste!" Derry roared, his own mana bleeding into the construct to empower its movements.
The massive Blood Avatar let out a deafening, gurgling screech. It swung all six of its mythic-tier crystalline scythes downward in a synchronized, devastating execution strike aimed directly at Xuan Ji.
Xuan Ji didn't dash away. She simply raised her bare arms above her head, crossing her slender wrists.
*CLANG.*
The six massive blood-scythes slammed directly into her forearms.
The sheer weight of the Avatar's strike violently shattered the bedrock beneath her boots, driving Xuan Ji knee-deep into the crushed stone of the crater. A massive shockwave of displaced air blew the remaining braziers out entirely, plunging the cavern into twilight. The air smelled sharply of vaporized iron and ozone.
Xuan Ji unsealed her Dantian, sending a sweeping wave of *Yang Qi* outward to blast the massive blades away. She chambered her right fist and threw a devastating, concussive punch aimed squarely at the Avatar's chest.
Instead of shattering, the thick, hyper-condensed blood forming the Avatar's torso rapidly hardened, turning into an impenetrable, ruby-like shield. The force of Xuan Ji's punch cracked the shield, sending a violent ripple through the liquid body, but the construct held its ground, rapidly regenerating the damaged blood-armor.
Derry’s eyes widened in vicious triumph. The Avatar could withstand her blows!
"A synchronized, localized territorial overwrite powered by life-force sacrifice," Xuan Ji's voice echoed calmly from beneath the shadow of the colossal construct. "Decent power. Your defenses are significantly denser than a standard mob. I'll admit, your cult is an actual, legitimate threat to the squishy mages of this world. But your elemental purity is absolute garbage."
Xuan Ji shifted her stance. A simple strike wasn't going to penetrate a liquid, regenerating shield. She needed to boil the blood away entirely.
She opened her palms, catching the razor-sharp edges of the Avatar's descending blades once more, and violently merged her intense vibrational Qi with the absolute, soul-incinerating heat of her *[True Fire Samadhi]*.
*[Heavenly Demon Secret Art: Flame-Devouring Star Spear].*
A blinding, spiraling drill of silver and golden fire erupted from her hands. The flames did not just burn; they eagerly devoured the corrupted blood magic like a starving beast. The massive Blood Avatar let out a horrific hiss as the supreme Yang Qi flashed through its liquid body. The dense blood-shields could not withstand the absolute heat, flash-boiling the thirty-foot construct into thick, foul-smelling steam in a fraction of a second.
But the attack did not stop there.
The golden spear of fire tore straight through the vaporized Avatar, illuminating the entire cavern in blinding light. Because the priests had directly tethered their own life forces to the Avatar, the backlash was catastrophic.
The silver fire traveled down the magical tethers, striking the two dozen elite priests simultaneously. Their internal mana cores violently detonated from the sheer thermal shock, dropping them to the floor as smoking, lifeless husks.
The force of the *Star Spear* carried onward, slamming into the back wall of the subterranean cathedral. With a catastrophic boom, the technique blew a massive, perfectly cylindrical hole through the solid volcanic rock, leaving a bottomless, glowing tunnel of molten glass in its wake.
Derry watched the entirety of his elite vanguard wiped from existence in a single, devastating counter-attack. His instincts, honed by decades of survival, violently inverted. He was not the predator anymore.
Panicking, Derry drew upon the massive, pooling blood of his dead cultists. He frantically wove the dark magic into a colossal, boiling wave of crimson acid, hurling the ultimate attack directly at the mysterious woman to create a smokescreen. Without waiting to see if it hit, the Elder turned on his heel and sprinted toward the cavern exit.
"The vessel," Derry gasped, his mind desperately grasping for any leverage. If he could just get his hands on the girl, if he could hold a blade to her throat, he might survive.
He took exactly one step.
Behind him, Ming Xuan Ji casually waved her hand, deploying a dome of Yang Qi to completely part the wave of boiling acid. With a sonic crack of *Qinggong*, she dashed entirely through the smokescreen.
A hand, cold and unyielding as a steel vise, clamped onto the back of Derry's neck.
"You do not get to look at her," the woman whispered directly into his ear, her voice carrying the absolute chill of the grave.
Xuan Ji lifted the high-ranking Elder off the floor with one hand. Derry thrashed wildly, slamming his glowing palms directly into her arm, attempting to melt her flesh off the bone. The dark magic hissed and spat against her silk, violently rejected by the pure, searing Yang Qi rolling off her skin.
"You... what are you?!" Derry choked out, staring down into her terrifying, glowing golden eyes.
"I am her master," Xuan Ji said coldly.
She pointed her index and middle fingers directly at the center of his chest. A blinding, localized beam of white-hot, soul-incinerating fire erupted from her fingertips. The *[True Fire Samadhi]* pierced straight through Derry’s chest, actively igniting the dark magic in his veins. Within three seconds, the Elder of the Blood God Cult was reduced to a shower of fine, gray ash that drifted harmlessly to the stone floor.
Xuan Ji turned her back on the ashes and walked toward the iron pillar.
Chained to the stone, Evanthe was staring at her master. The fourteen-year-old girl’s eyes were wide, filled with a mixture of absolute awe, profound relief, and lingering terror. Xuan Ji reached out, gripping the thick dwarven-iron chains binding Evanthe’s wrists. She squeezed gently, and the metal shattered like brittle glass, falling away to the floor.
Before Evanthe could collapse, Xuan Ji caught her, pulling the girl into a fierce, protective embrace. "I have you," Xuan Ji murmured softly, her cold, terrifying aura completely vanishing. "You are safe."
Evanthe buried her face in the black-and-crimson silk of her master's robes, her small hands gripping the fabric tightly. But she didn't break down into weeping apologies. The crucible of the past few weeks had forged something stronger within the young noble.
"Master..." Evanthe gasped, pulling back slightly, her blood-red eyes filled with desperate urgency. "The Vanguard? Durgan and Axel... are they alive?"
A faint, genuine smile of profound pride touched Xuan Ji’s lips. Even after being tortured and chained in a dark cavern, her disciple’s first thought was for the mercenaries who had bled for her.
"They held the line," Xuan Ji reassured her gently. "They are battered, but they are recovering under the Apothecary's care. They are alive because you bought them time."
But as Xuan Ji looked down at Evanthe's chest, her blood ran cold.
The original Yin seal she had placed over the girl's heart was completely unstable. The crystalline frost was violently flickering, turning a dangerous, glowing shade of orange as the chaotic, boiling energy of the *Heavenly Killing Star* desperately tried to break free. The stress of the kidnapping and the ambient dark magic of the cathedral had pushed the girl's constitution to the absolute brink of sublimation.
"The seal is failing," Xuan Ji said, her voice dropping into a tone of absolute, clinical focus.
"Master," Evanthe gasped, suddenly shivering violently as the internal fever aggressively spiked, burning her veins from the inside out. "Do you have the cure?"
"I secured the Abyssal Frost Marrow from the twentieth floor of the dungeon," Xuan Ji stated smoothly, laying her palms flat against Evanthe's chest to manually feed her stabilizing Qi. "But if I push raw, unrefined Yin into your core right now, the thermal shock will shatter your heart. I left the Marrow with Apothecary Vane at the Vael estate. He is brewing it into a stable elixir while I came to retrieve you."
At the mention of the capital, Evanthe’s eyes suddenly widened in sheer, unadulterated horror. The physical pain in her chest was violently interrupted by the horrific memory of the conversation she had witnessed just minutes before the cathedral collapsed.
Evanthe bolted upright, ignoring the searing heat in her meridians, and grabbed the sleeves of Xuan Ji’s silk hanfu in a blind panic.
"Master, we can't rest!" Evanthe cried out, her voice frantic and breathless. "The man who killed my family, Sword Master Thorne! He was here!"
Xuan Ji’s expression instantly hardened, her eyes narrowing into dangerous slits. "Thorne is alive? Where did he go?"
"Thorne went to the Dragon Crags, Master! He stole an Ancient Dragon's egg, and he's smuggling it into the black market in Elyndria right now!" Evanthe explained rapidly, her words tumbling out in a desperate, terrified rush. "They're using the egg as bait to make the mother dragon attack the capital as a distraction!"
Xuan Ji completely froze.
A dragon? The word echoed through her gamer mind, sorting through the vast lore of this world. Such a being was common enough as an endgame boss in *UBAO*, but this was the first time Ming Xuan Ji had heard of a living, breathing dragon operating in this reality.
Aside from the minor Earth Dragon she had hunted on the mountain, of course. That beast had been strong, but it was merely a terrestrial, dim-witted offshoot. It was far from being a *True Dragon*.
If the books and tales she had read about the True Dragons in this world held any weight, then the Capital was in grave, immediate danger. Only the sprawling Nakterngard Empire possessed the concentrated magical firepower to repel such an entity.
At this exact moment, an enraged, grieving Ancient Dragon was about to burn the Royal Capital of Elyndria to the bedrock.
And sitting completely exposed inside those walls was her newly acquired Vanguard, her Apothecary, and the *only* physical catalyst in the entire world capable of permanently saving Evanthe's life.
If Elyndria burned, Silas Vane burned. If the apothecary burned, the potion burned. And if the potion burned, Evanthe would boil from the inside out.
"Master?" Evanthe asked, her voice trembling as a fresh wave of agonizing heat rolled through her chest. "What do we do?"
Ming Xuan Ji’s golden eyes flared to life once more, burning not with the cold, focused rage of a rescuer, but with the terrifying, battle-hungry thrill of the Heavenly Demon.
She bypassed the need for a physical catalyst. She violently unsealed her Dantian, pouring raw, unadulterated *Ultimate Yin* directly into the girl's core. It was a brutal, agonizing process, but it forced Evanthe’s failing meridians into an emergency, cryogenic stasis to buy them time.
"We are going back," Xuan Ji stated, hoisting the shivering Evanthe onto her back and securing the girl tightly with a tether of pure spiritual energy. "Hold on tight."
*BOOM.*
With a shockwave that completely collapsed the remaining, fractured roof of the Blood God's cathedral, Ming Xuan Ji launched herself into the night sky. She rocketed back toward Elyndria, locked in a desperate, hypersonic race against the apocalypse.