I Guarded the Demon Abyss for 1,000 Years. Forgot Me? Fine, I’m Slacking Off.

I Guarded the Demon Abyss for a Thousand Years, Everyone Forgot My Deeds, So I’m Done

While everyone else was settling into an easy life, the words Demon-Suppressing Envoy had turned into a term nobody needed. The agreement to reinforce the seal once every hundred years had stopped mattering. The cracks in the Demon-Suppressing Stele kept widening. So. What did any of that have to do with me? I checked out.

The cracks in the Demon-Suppressing Stele had already reached the base.

I was squatting in front of the Stele working on a roast chicken when the ten-thousand-year-old demon sealed inside the inscription put one eye against a crack and looked out. The pupil drew itself into a vertical line, fixed on the chicken leg in my hand.

“What are you looking at.” I pushed the chicken bone into the crack. “You want some too?”

The vertical pupil blinked. A strand of black qi curled around the bone and pulled it in. A moment later a satisfied sigh came out of the crack.

I clapped my hands, stood up, and looked at the top of the Demon-Suppressing Stele. The stone plaque up there, the one cut with Eternal Suppression of Ten Thousand Demons, had tilted forty-five degrees. Wind and rain had worn the characters away until only one was still readable, the one for ten thousand. The cracks across the body of the Stele were close and thick as a spiderweb. The widest of them would take a fist. Black mist kept seeping out of it, carrying the smell of sulfur and blood.

A thousand years ago, if I had seen a crack like this one, I would have reported it to the Heavenly Court without a second word, then poured every scrap of my Spiritual Energy into reinforcing the seal.

Now?

I stretched, pulled a flask out of my robe, sat down with my back against the Demon-Suppressing Stele, and threw my head back for a swallow.

Whatever.

My name is Shen Mo. I am the last Demon-Suppressing Envoy in the cultivation world.

Sounds impressive, right? The truth is, you could count on one hand the people left in the whole cultivation world who know what Demon-Suppressing Envoy even means.

A thousand years ago the Demon Abyss Rift tore open in the mortal world. Thirty-six waves of demons came pouring out, and all who lived were plunged into suffering. The Heavenly Court sent down seventy-two Immortal Lords, who joined hands with the finest cultivators of thirty-six Sects and fought for three full years before they got the rift sealed again. But the seal was never permanent. Someone had to stand guard over it year after year and keep reinforcing it, because otherwise the Demonic Qi would eat back into the seal every hundred years, and in the end the rift would open again.

At the time, everyone agreed that I should be the one to do it.

The reason was simple. The Cultivation Technique I practice is unusual. I can sit beside the Demon-Suppressing Stele for ten years without food, without water, without moving, and my Spiritual Energy still flows out steady the whole time. Put plainly, I was the one who could stand the loneliness best.

What was it they used to say back then?

“Fellow Daoist Shen, this is a duty to all under heaven. There is no one but you.”

“The Merit of Demon Suppression will be written into the histories, and remembered for ten thousand generations.”

“When a hundred years have passed, we will lead our people here ourselves to take the rotation. We will not leave you to keep this vigil alone.”

I believed them.

A hundred years in, people really did come. The old Sect Lord of the Heavenly Sword Sect brought a hundred jars of Spirit Wine and three hundred jin of spirit fruit, and drank with me for three days and three nights. On his way out he thumped his chest and said that next century he would come himself to take the rotation.

He never came. Later I found out why. In his seventy-third year he failed Tribulation Transcendence, and his body and his Dao went out together.

Two hundred years in, what came was the Palace Lord of Biluo Palace, with a pile of Formation Plates and Talismans to help me reinforce the seal. She said Biluo Palace would send someone every hundred years from then on. Three hundred years in, Biluo Palace sent a Disciple who had only just joined the Sect. The Palace Lord was in Closed-Door Cultivation, they said, and the child had only been told to drop some things off. That Disciple did not even know what the Demon-Suppressing Stele was. They tossed down a bag of dry rations and ran.

Four hundred years in, nobody came.

Five hundred years in, after I finished reinforcing the seal, I made a trip out on purpose. I flew to the nearest Immortal City, wanting to ask around about how the cultivation world was doing these days.

The guards at the gate stopped me and asked whether I had an identity jade token.

I said I did not.

He asked which Sect I belonged to.

I said I had no Sect and no school, that I was a Rogue Cultivator.

He looked me up and down, and there was a particular dislike in his eyes, the sort you keep for poor relatives from the country. Then he pointed at a notice board by the wall and said a Rogue Cultivator had to pay ten Spirit Stones to get into the city.

I felt around my clothes. I did not have one Spirit Stone. There is nothing beside the Demon-Suppressing Stele. The Spirit Stones had been used up hundreds of years ago.

In the end I did not go in.

I walked a circle outside the wall and heard several cultivators talking at a tea stall. They were discussing which Sect had produced another genius Disciple, which Secret Realm was about to open, how the price of Medicinal Pills had gone up again. Nobody mentioned the Demon-Suppressing Stele. Nobody mentioned the Demon Abyss Rift. It was as though the catastrophe that had nearly destroyed the mortal world had never happened at all.

I stood beside the tea stall and listened all afternoon, and in the end I could not help asking. “Fellow Daoists, do you know where the Demon-Suppressing Envoy is these days?”

A few of them turned to look at me, blank-faced.

“Demon-Suppressing Envoy? What is that?”

I smiled and said it was nothing, that I had remembered wrong.

Then I flew back to the Demon-Suppressing Stele.

After that, I never went out to ask about anything again.

Today is the one thousand and first year. By the old rule, the seal on the Demon-Suppressing Stele has to be reinforced once every hundred years, and the last time was in the first hundred years. Which is to say this Stele has gone nine hundred years with nobody looking after it.

That it has cracked this badly is not the least bit strange.

I finished the last of the wine and threw the flask aside. It hit the Demon-Suppressing Stele and broke into pieces.

A low vibration came out of the body of the Stele, like something laughing inside it.

“What the hell are you laughing at.” I leaned back against the Stele and shut my eyes. “We will talk when I have slept.”

The vibration stopped, just like that.

To be honest, after a thousand years of living alongside the demons sealed inside this Stele, the two sides reached a kind of understanding. They know I am not going to reinforce the seal anymore. I know they will get out sooner or later. The relationship is something like a jailer and an old convict. Locked up together for a thousand years, you stop being enemies. It turns into something closer to symbiosis.

The oldest demon in the deepest part, I gave it a name. Old Black.

Old Black was the first demon sealed in here, and the strongest of them. In that war a thousand years ago it took seventy-two Immortal Lords working together to suppress it, and even then they had to trade life for life. Three Immortal Lords burned their Souls to drag it into the rift. The moment it was sealed it swore a vicious oath, saying that if it ever broke out it would wash the mortal world in blood.

For the first few hundred years it roared inside the seal every day and hammered at the Demon-Suppressing Stele with Demonic Qi, which meant I had to run my Spiritual Energy flat out to keep the seal patched. It nearly killed me.

Later it must have gotten tired, because it stopped making so much trouble.

Later still, one night four hundred years in, I was sitting in Meditation in front of the Stele when a strand of black qi reached out of the crack and poked my arm.

I jumped. I thought it was going for a sneak attack.

Instead the strand of black qi came back carrying a spirit fruit it had gotten from somewhere, and set it down in front of me.

I stared at it for a while. Then I picked up the spirit fruit and bit into it.

From then on, every so often something would be handed out of the crack. Sometimes a spirit fruit, sometimes ore. Once they even passed out a storage ring, and it was full of Spirit Stones. To this day I do not know where Old Black gets these things. What the Demon-Suppressing Stele seals is the Demon Abyss Rift. There should be nothing inside but endless Demonic Qi and chaos.

But I never bothered to ask.

In return, now and then I would roast a Spirit Beast I had caught outside and give it half. It seems to like the smell of roast meat. Every time I push meat into the crack, the Demonic Qi inside churns with excitement for a good while.

The other demons learned the trick later on. Things began coming out of the crack on a schedule, like paying protection money. The female demon on the thirteenth Layer hands out a black flower every so often, and the flower settles the mind and helps you sleep. I have been sleeping very well at night. The old Demon Lord on the seventh Layer, the one who claims to have lived a hundred thousand years, once handed out a Cultivation Technique. The methods written in it were nothing I had ever heard of. I never practiced them. Who knows whether practicing them would turn me into a demon.

“Shen Mo.”

Old Black’s voice came out of the Stele, low as magma rolling under the ground.

“Yes?”

“You really do not care anymore?”

I opened one eye and looked at the black mist leaking out of the crack. The mist gathered in midair into a vague human shape. Two hollow eye sockets were turned toward me.

“Care about what?” I asked back.

“The seal,” Old Black said. “At this rate, ten years at most before the Demon-Suppressing Stele comes apart completely.”

“Oh.”

“You are not afraid we will get out?”

I rolled over into a more comfortable position and lay there. “I am.”

“Then why not reinforce it?”

“I am tired.”

Old Black was quiet for a while. The human shape swayed, as if it were thinking something over. Then it shrank slowly into a black ball the size of a fist and settled on my knee.

“You are,” its voice had gone a little quieter, with something in it I could not name, “a strange one.”

“You demons are the strange ones,” I said with my eyes closed. “Sealed for a thousand years, and you do not hate me?”

“I do hate you,” Old Black said, honest as anything. “The first five hundred years I hated you so much my teeth ached. Every day I thought about how I would torture you once I got out, until you would have been better off dead.”

“And later?”

“Later I noticed you were pretty pathetic too.”

I could not help laughing. A ten-thousand-year-old demon telling me I am pathetic. Who would believe that if you told them.

“If you do get out, what will you do?” I asked it. “Still planning to wash the mortal world in blood?”

Old Black did not answer.

The black ball rolled back and forth on my knee, like a person trying to decide whether to say something. In the end it sighed. A demon sighing is surreal enough on its own.

“I do not know,” it said.

“You do not know?”

“It has been a thousand years.” Old Black’s voice had gone vague. “I do not know what the outside has turned into. The reason I wanted to wash the mortal world in blood was that cultivators were crushing Mortals, and I came from the Demonic Path myself. I could not stand it, so I turned demon. What the mortal world looks like now, whether those cultivators still push Mortals around, I have no idea. If I get out and start washing, what if I wash the wrong ones?”

I opened my eyes and looked at the ball of black on my knee.

Ten thousand years, and this was the first time I had heard it say why it became a demon.

“So you turned demon because you could not stand cultivators crushing Mortals?”

“Yes.”

“Then what kind of demon does that make you?”

Old Black said nothing again.

After a while the black ball rolled off my knee, turned back into black mist, and slipped into the crack. Before it went in, it left one sentence behind.

“Even if I do not kill anyone once I am out, that lot in here is another matter. The madwoman on the thirteenth Layer, you know her. She turned demon because her Dao Companion betrayed her. The first thing she does when she gets out is go and settle accounts with that Dao Companion’s descendants. That old thing on the seventh Layer was suppressed by the Heavenly Sword Sect throwing in the whole strength of the Sect. Once it is out it will wipe the Heavenly Sword Sect out to the last man.”

“And the lesser demons on the first Layer,” Old Black’s voice was getting farther away, “they have no intelligence, only instinct. The moment the seal breaks they will pour out like locusts and kill everyone they see.”

The voice stopped.

I lay in front of the Demon-Suppressing Stele and looked up at the grey sky.

Ten years.

The Demon-Suppressing Stele will hold for another ten years.

I closed my eyes, rolled over, and buried my face in my arms.

None of my damn business.

The news that the Demon-Suppressing Stele had cracked got out in the end.

Some Rogue Cultivator passing through must have noticed that something here was wrong. He ran back to an Immortal City and spread the story wide: deep in the Eastern Wastelands there was a huge stone tablet about to fall apart, with terrible Demonic Qi sealed inside it. The news grew wings. In less than three days it had run through the whole cultivation world.

On the seventh day the first group arrived.

They were not cultivators from any Sect. They were a crowd of Rogue Cultivators.

Twenty-odd of them. The highest Cultivation Base among them was only Golden Core, and the lowest had barely reached Foundation Establishment. They stood on a hillside three li away from the Demon-Suppressing Stele, pointing and muttering, not daring to come any closer.

I leaned against the Stele and watched them through half-closed eyes.

A middle-aged man at Golden Core screwed up his courage and flew over. He landed ten zhang away from me and gave me a Fist-in-Palm Salute.

“May I ask, Senior. Are you the keeper of this Stele?”

I looked him up and down. He had Magic Tools strapped all over him, a mismatched lot, and the Storage Pouch at his waist was bulging, though you could tell at a glance it was cheap goods. A Rogue Cultivator’s kit, through and through.

“No,” I said.

He froze for a moment. He looked at me, then at the Demon-Suppressing Stele behind me, cracked nearly to pieces. Confusion came over his face.

“Then what is Senior doing out here…”

“Sleeping.”

The confusion on his face turned into blankness.

“Do not disturb me.” I closed my eyes.

He stood there hesitating for a while, then backed carefully away to the hillside. From a distance I heard him tell the other Rogue Cultivators, “That one is strange. Stay away.”

The Rogue Cultivators did not leave. They made camp right there on the hillside, three li away.

On the eighth day another group came. This time it was the Heavenly Sword Sect: three Nascent Soul cultivators and six at Golden Core. They put on quite a show. They came by sword flight, sword light cutting across the sky, and landed in front of the Demon-Suppressing Stele with a great show of force.

The Nascent Soul cultivator leading them was an old man with white hair and beard, dressed all in white, a long sword slung across his back, with a bearing out of the ordinary. He took one look at the cracks in the Demon-Suppressing Stele, and his face changed.

“The seal is broken to this degree!”

A younger Nascent Soul cultivator behind him stepped forward and reached out to touch the body of the Stele. The moment his finger grazed the edge of a crack, a strand of black qi shot out and lashed across the back of his hand like a whip. He screamed. His whole body was flung away. A scorched black weal appeared across the back of his hand, the flesh split open, and the black qi was still burrowing inward.

The old man in white turned livid. He raised a hand and struck out with a sword light, cutting the strand of black qi in two. Only then did the younger cultivator stop screaming, but his whole right hand had already gone blue-black.

“Such powerful Demonic Qi,” the old man in white said heavily. “The demons sealed in here are far beyond anything we could have imagined.”

He turned and looked at me.

I do not take up much space, really. When I lean against the Stele and hold still, it is as though I have become part of it. But right now everyone had noticed me. After all, a living man asleep against a Demon-Suppressing Stele that is about to fall apart looks wrong however you look at it.

“Your Excellency,” he said. “Might I know who you are?”

I opened one eye and looked at him.

The Sword Intent of the Heavenly Sword Sect. I remembered the taste of it. A thousand years ago the Founding Ancestor of the Heavenly Sword Sect fought at my side with Sword Intent just like this. The old man’s name was Lu Changyuan. His Sword Dao reached the divine, his temper ran hot, and what he liked best was to curse the other side’s ancestors back eighteen generations before the fighting had even started.

Lu Changyuan told me back then that every generation of Heavenly Sword Sect Disciples would come to the Demon-Suppressing Stele to take their turn. He called it passing the torch from hand to hand.

A thousand years. The fire went out long ago.

“Passing through. Resting my legs,” I said.

The old man’s brows drew tighter. He could not see through my Cultivation Base. That was only natural. The Cultivation Technique I practice is unusual, and every ripple of my Spiritual Energy is drawn inward. From the outside I look like a Mortal.

“This place is dangerous, Your Excellency. You had better leave at once.”

“Oh.”

I did not move.

The old man in white stared at me for several breaths. He must have decided I was more trouble than I was worth, because he said nothing more and turned away to examine the state of the Demon-Suppressing Stele.

On the ninth day more people came.

Biluo Palace, Xuantian Sect, Wanfa Sect, Danxia Valley. Most of the Sects in the cultivation world with a name to them had come. For three li in front of the Demon-Suppressing Stele the ground was thick with tents. Travel lights in every color crossed the sky. It was as lively as a market fair.

They spent the whole day gathered around the Demon-Suppressing Stele, studying it.

Probing spells of every kind were thrown at the Stele. Formation Plates of every kind were laid out around it. Formation Masters from several Sects put their heads together to argue over the structure of the seal, and argued until their faces were red.

In the end they reached a conclusion.

“This seal cannot be reinforced.”

The one speaking was the Formation grandmaster of Biluo Palace, an old woman with greying hair. She pointed at the dense web of cracks across the Demon-Suppressing Stele, and her finger was shaking.

“The structure of the seal has been eaten through by Demonic Qi, every bit of it. It is like a house whose beams and pillars have all rotted away. Patching and propping will not solve it. If we want to seal it again, there is only one way. Go inside.”

“Go inside?” Everyone exchanged glances.

“Enter the inside of the seal and rebuild the seal core from within,” the old woman said. “But that is the deepest part of the Demon Abyss Rift. Whoever goes in will have to face every demon sealed there. And the power of the seal core can only be woken by burning one’s Soul.”

Everyone fell silent.

Burning your Soul means the end of your body and your Dao. It means not even the chance of Rebirth.

“Is there another way?” asked the old man in white of the Heavenly Sword Sect.

The old woman shook her head.

Someone in the crowd said in a low voice, “Is there not a Demon-Suppressing Envoy? Why not let the Demon-Suppressing Envoy handle this sort of thing?”

The words landed like a stone thrown into a still lake.

“Demon-Suppressing Envoy?”

“Right. I have heard it mentioned in the Sect’s records. A thousand years ago there was a Demon-Suppressing Envoy whose whole task was to guard this Stele.”

“Then where is that Demon-Suppressing Envoy now?”

Everyone exchanged glances, and then, as one, they turned their heads toward me.

I was squatting on the ground, poking at a beetle that had crawled out from who knew where with a twig.

The old man in white walked up to me. His expression was far more solemn than before.

“Your Excellency… might you be the Demon-Suppressing Envoy?”

I turned the beetle onto its back and watched its legs thrash in the air.

“No.”

The old man in white stared at me for a good while, then turned to look at the others. They talked among themselves for a while, and in the end their eyes moved off me.

It was not that they were easy to fool.

It was that they did not believe the Demon-Suppressing Envoy was still alive. A thousand years. A cultivator living a thousand years is possible, perhaps. But standing guard in a godforsaken place like this for a thousand years? Who would believe that.

And there really was no ripple of Spiritual Energy on me. However you looked at it, I seemed like a Mortal.

“Perhaps a descendant of the Demon-Suppressing Envoy?” someone guessed.

“Or a Mortal born and raised near the Demon-Suppressing Stele, who has picked up a little Demonic Qi and so is not afraid of it.”

“Forget him. He is only a Mortal. The urgent thing now is the seal.”

I went back to playing with my beetle.

I turned it over and over until it had finally had enough. It opened its wings and flew off. I watched the direction it went, clapped the dirt off my hands, and stood up.

It was right then that the Demon-Suppressing Stele split open with one more new crack.

This crack ran from the top of the Stele straight down to the base, through the whole body of it. A muffled roar came up out of the ground. The earth underfoot began to shake. Three li away, the tents on the hillside were rattled crooked, and a few cultivators with low Cultivation Base went down on the ground outright.

Everyone’s face went bloodless.

“The seal collapse is accelerating!”

“How is it this fast? By our earlier reckoning it should have held at least another ten years!”

“Something inside is hammering at the seal!”

The old woman formed a hand seal with both hands and struck the Demon-Suppressing Stele with a probing spirit light. Her face went from pale to ghastly in an instant.

“The thirteenth Layer… demons on every Layer are striking the seal at the same time!”

“They are working together!”

I leaned back against the Stele and felt the vibration coming through it. Out of a crack, a wisp of black qi slipped quietly free and curled around my finger.

Old Black’s voice sounded in my mind.

“Shen Mo. Something troublesome has arrived.”

“Who?”

“Something new was sealed into the third Layer today. Not one of ours. It was thrown in from the mortal world side.”

My brows moved.

“What sort of thing?”

“A person. A living person.”

I turned my head and looked toward the depths of the crack. In the churning black mist, off in the direction of the third Layer, I saw a faint light flickering. It was the light of a human soul, already very dim, ready to go out at any moment.

“Who threw him in?” I asked.

Old Black was silent for one breath. Then it said three words.

“Behind you.”

I turned around.

The cultivators of the various Sects were still discussing the seal in a panic. Nobody had noticed that the crack at the third Layer of the Demon-Suppressing Stele was bleeding.

Human blood.

I walked over to the bleeding crack and held out a hand to catch a drop. The blood fell into my palm with the last of its warmth still in it, and with a trace of Spiritual Energy left behind, so faint it was almost nothing.

I knew that Spiritual Energy.

A thousand years, and I still knew that Spiritual Energy.

Lu Changyuan of the Heavenly Sword Sect. His Spiritual Energy tasted exactly like this. Like the first snow of winter falling on pine needles.

“This person,” I said, raising my head toward where Old Black’s voice came from, “is a descendant of Lu Changyuan?”

“His family name is Lu. He is called Lu Qing,” Old Black said. “The only son of the current Sect Lord of the Heavenly Sword Sect. They threw him in three days ago.”

“What did he do wrong?”

“He did nothing wrong,” Old Black said, and there was a thread of odd amusement in its voice. “The Heavenly Sword Sect wanted him to go into the Demon-Suppressing Stele and repair the seal. He refused. So they threw him in.”

My fingers stopped moving.

The drop of blood in my palm sank slowly into the skin. The warm feeling spread along my Meridians. The taste of Lu Changyuan’s Spiritual Energy, across a thousand years, across who knew how many generations of descendants, still came through this clearly.

I wiped the blood off my hand, turned, and walked toward the cultivators still locked in their argument.

The old man in white was speaking. “…as things stand, there is only one course. Gather the strength of every Sect, choose our best, send them into the seal, and rebuild the core. It is Nine Deaths, One Life on that road. Fellow Daoists…”

“Earlier,” I cut in, “you threw a person into the Stele?”

The old man’s words stopped. He turned to look at me.

Every eye came back to me again. A fellow who looked like a Mortal suddenly cutting in with a question like that took them by surprise.

The old man in white frowned. “Who are you? This is none of your business.”

“I asked you,” I said, walking up to him. “Did you or did you not throw a person into the Stele?”

My tone was level, but the old man’s face changed. He took a step back without meaning to, and his hand went to the hilt of his sword.

“That is the internal business of the Heavenly Sword Sect,” he said. “Lu Qing is a Disciple of the Heavenly Sword Sect. He clings to life and fears death. He would not sacrifice himself for all living things under heaven. He was dealt with under Sect Law. Where is the wrong in that?”

“Sect Law means throwing him into the Demon Abyss Rift?” I asked.

“Letting him see the state of the seal with his own eyes might change his mind,” the old man said, and his face was as open and easy as if he were remarking on the weather.

I stared at him for three breaths.

Then I laughed.

Not a happy laugh. The kind of laugh a man who has not laughed in a thousand years makes all at once, a laugh that feels strange even to the one laughing it.

“What a fine thing, changing a man’s mind,” I said. “Then I suppose I will change my mind too.”

I turned and walked back to the front of the Demon-Suppressing Stele, raised a hand, and pressed it against the body of the Stele.

Spiritual Energy that had not circulated for a thousand years came welling up out of the depths of my Dantian and ran along my Meridians toward my palm. It felt like a machine that had sat sealed in dust for a thousand years suddenly having its start button pressed. Every part of it groaned, and every part of it still turned over faithfully.

Every crack in the Demon-Suppressing Stele lit with golden light at the same instant.

On the hillside three li away, jaws were dropping all over the place.

“Spiri— Spiritual Energy!”

“He is not a Mortal!”

“What terrifying Spiritual Energy! What Realm is this?”

The long sword in the old man’s hand hit the ground with a clang. His whole body went stiff where he stood. The look on his face went from shock to disbelief and settled at last on fear.

Because he had felt what was carried inside my Spiritual Energy.

Sword Intent.

The Sword Intent of the Heavenly Sword Sect.

Sword Intent purer than the Heavenly Sword Sect’s own Founding Ancestor.

“You… who in the world are you?” His voice was shaking.

I did not answer him. My Spiritual Energy poured along the cracks of the Demon-Suppressing Stele into the inside of the seal, like a red-hot knife going into butter, and the Demonic Qi drew back before me on its own. Layer one. Layer two. Layer three. My Spiritual Energy drove straight down and found, without a hair’s error, the faint soul light deep in the third Layer.

Lu Qing.

A young man just past twenty, Foundation Establishment in his Cultivation Base. The Spiritual Energy in his body had been eaten through in a hundred places by Demonic Qi. He was curled up inside a bubble in a corner of the seal, and his mind had already gone hazy.

I wrapped him in Spiritual Energy and pulled him outward.

The crack at the third Layer of the Demon-Suppressing Stele opened wide. A human shape wrapped in golden light flew out of it and dropped to the ground at my feet.

Lu Qing was covered in blood. Black demonic markings crawled across his skin. But he was still breathing.

I crouched down and put one finger between his brows. Spiritual Energy flowed in, and the demonic markings melted away as fast as snow meeting sunlight. His face went from blue-black to pale, and at last there was a little color in it.

He opened his eyes and looked at me blankly.

“You are…”

“Rest,” I said.

I stood up and turned to face the crowd of cultivators.

“I am Shen Mo,” I said. “Demon-Suppressing Envoy.”

Those three words came down like three bolts of thunder splitting the air above every head there.

The old woman of Biluo Palace was the first to come back to herself. Her lips were trembling. She dropped to her knees with a thud.

“Liu Ruyan, thirty-seventh Palace Lord of Biluo Palace, pays her respects to Senior Demon-Suppressing Envoy!”

The moment she knelt, the Disciples of Biluo Palace behind her went down as one.

The people of the other Sects were still standing there stunned. The old man in white of the Heavenly Sword Sect had gone as pale as a man can go. His lips moved. He wanted to say something, and nothing came out.

“There is no need to kneel,” I said. “I am going to say this clearly today.”

I patted the Demon-Suppressing Stele. The whole body of it hummed. The Demonic Qi inside churned harder than before, but it was not hammering at the seal. It was excited.

They were excited.

Because they knew what was going to happen next.

“This Stele, I guarded for a thousand years,” I said. “A thousand years ago, seventy-two Immortal Lords and the cultivators of thirty-six Sects joined hands to seal the Demon Abyss Rift, and they put me forward as Demon-Suppressing Envoy to stand guard here for good. Everyone back then swore up and down that they would take the rotation once every hundred years, that they would never leave me to keep this vigil alone.”

“One hundred years in, someone came. Two hundred years in, someone came to go through the motions. Three hundred years in, they sent a child of a Disciple who knew nothing at all. Four hundred years in, nobody came. Five hundred years in, I went out and asked, and by then nobody on the outside knew what a Demon-Suppressing Envoy was.”

I looked at the people in front of me. My tone was flat, as though I were telling someone else’s story.

“You want to know why this seal is collapsing? I will tell you. Because the seal needs reinforcing once every hundred years, and it has gone nine hundred years without it. Not because I could not. Because I would not.”

“Nine hundred years,” I said again. “Every reinforcement burns ten years of my Cultivation Base. Nine reinforcements is ninety years. What I have poured into this Stele would be enough to raise every one of you standing here from Foundation Establishment to Great Ascension.”

Nobody spoke.

Wind crossed the hillside. The cloth of the tents snapped and flapped.

The old man in white found his voice again at last. It was dry as sandpaper rubbing together.

“Senior… this is our fault. But the seal is in peril even now, at any hour. We beg you, Senior, to think of all living things under heaven—”

“All living things under heaven,” I cut him off. “I have heard those four words too many times.”

I looked down at Lu Qing on the ground. He was watching me with his eyes open. There was something in his eyes I could not name. Not gratitude. Not awe. The raw shock a man feels when he sees something enormous.

“When you threw a living person into the Demon Abyss Rift,” I asked the old man in white, “did you think of all living things under heaven?”

His face went red.

“That… that was to make him understand—”

“Understand, and then what? Let him burn his Soul to repair the seal?” I laughed once. “Did he agree to it?”

The old man in white had nothing left to say.

“Let me tell you what all living things under heaven means.” I raised a hand and pointed back at the Demon-Suppressing Stele behind me, cracked nearly to pieces. “A thousand years ago, to seal this rift, three Immortal Lords burned their Souls, and their bodies and their Dao went out with them. They volunteered. All seventy-two Immortal Lords came away wounded. More than half the cultivators of the thirty-six Sects were lost. They volunteered too.”

“Volunteering and being forced are two different things.”

My voice was not loud, but every word landed like a hammer on the hearts of everyone there.

“If Lu Qing had stood up on his own and said he was willing to burn his Soul to repair the seal, I would call him a real man. But you threw him in. You pushed him toward death. And then you turn around and talk to me about all living things under heaven?”

I raised a hand, my index finger leveled at the old man in white.

A strand of sword qi shot from my fingertip. It passed so close it grazed his ear and took off a lock of his white hair, then blew a pit three zhang deep in the ground behind him.

The old man’s legs went soft. He sat down on the ground outright.

“Lu Changyuan, the Founding Ancestor of your Heavenly Sword Sect,” I said, “fought at my side a thousand years ago. The thing he hated most in the world was a man who forced his Disciples to go and die. If he knew his descendants had come to this, he would be rattling the boards of his own coffin.”

“Now. All of you, get out.”

I stamped one foot into the ground.

A wave of golden Spiritual Energy burst outward from me in every direction. Three li away, the tents were ripped up by the roots. The cultivators of every Sect went tumbling backward like leaves caught in a gale. The ones at Golden Core were blown ten li. The ones at Nascent Soul kept their footing, barely, and were pushed back several hundred zhang. Only a few old monsters at Spirit Severing and above were still standing where they had been, and their faces had changed too.

“Senior, calm your anger!”

Liu Ruyan of Biluo Palace stayed on her knees and did not move. The wave of force went around her. She raised her head. Her old face was running with tears.

“Biluo Palace has failed you, Senior. Biluo Palace promised to take the rotation every hundred years. Then the Palace Lord changed, the records were scattered and lost, and the matter was forgotten. This is the crime of Biluo Palace, and this old woman will bear it alone.”

“There is no need,” I said. “Go. What happens to this Stele has nothing to do with you anymore.”

“But the seal—”

“The seal is mine to deal with.”

Liu Ruyan froze for a moment. Then she bowed her head low to the ground, and took the people of Biluo Palace away with her.

The other Sects left in their turn. As the old man in white of the Heavenly Sword Sect was helped away, he looked back at me once. His lips moved. In the end he said nothing.

Only Lu Qing, still on the ground, did not go.

He pushed himself up, knelt there, and looked at me.

“Senior, I…”

“What was your Founding Ancestor’s name?” I asked him.

He froze. “Lu… Lu Changyuan.”

“Do you know how Lu Changyuan died?”

He shook his head. The records of the Heavenly Sword Sect say only that Lu Changyuan was the Founding Ancestor and that his Sword Dao reached the divine. How he died is not written down anywhere.

“He died in front of the Demon Abyss Rift,” I said. “To buy time for three Immortal Lords to burn their Souls, he fought thirty-six demons alone, and in the end his strength gave out and he died. Before he died he said one thing to me.”

Lu Qing’s eyes went red.

“What did he say?”

“He said: Shen Mo, this old man has someone to carry on after him. He is not afraid of his line ending.”

Lu Qing’s tears fell.

I turned around and walked toward the Demon-Suppressing Stele.

“Go,” I said. “The descendant of your Founding Ancestor should not die in a place like this.”

“And what about you, Senior?”

I did not answer.

At the foot of the Demon-Suppressing Stele I raised a hand and pressed it against the body of the Stele. The black qi welling out of the cracks wound around my arm. It was not an attack. It was more like the embrace of someone you have not seen in a very long time.

“Old Black,” I said.

“Yes.”

“I am going in.”

Old Black was silent for a long while. Then it said, “What would you come in for?”

“That thing that came into the third Layer. You sent it to the deepest part?”

“…Yes.”

“Why?”

There was a thread of helplessness in Old Black’s voice. “Because that thing was not thrown in. It jumped in on its own.”

My hand stopped.

“It jumped in on its own?”

“Three days ago, after that brat of the Heavenly Sword Sect was thrown in, before any of us could react, a hole split open in the third Layer. Then something jumped in from outside and went straight for the deepest part.”

“What sort of thing?”

“A… something I do not know either,” Old Black said, and its voice had grown heavy. “There is not a ripple of Spiritual Energy on it anywhere, and no Demonic Qi either. But I can feel one thing about it. It is hungry.”

“Hungry?”

“Yes. Since it came in, every demon below the third Layer has been running for the upper Layers. That madwoman on the thirteenth Layer. You know her. Nothing under heaven or on earth frightens her. Right now she is huddled in a corner of the first Layer, shaking.”

I felt a cold run down my back.

What in the world could frighten into shaking that madwoman on the thirteenth Layer, the one who turned demon because her Dao Companion betrayed her, the one who swings at everyone she sees?

“So the reason you have been hammering at the seal,” I asked, “is not that you want out?”

“It is that we want out to save our lives.” It was the first time fear had come into Old Black’s voice. “Shen Mo, that thing is eating demons. In three days it has already eaten half the demons on the twelfth Layer. At this rate, ten days at most before it eats its way up to the first Layer.”

“And then?”

“Then it will eat us. And after that it will eat the seal. And in the end—”

Old Black did not finish.

But I knew what it was going to say.

In the end, it will get out.

From deep inside the rift came a low sound of chewing, as though something enormous were slowly grinding its teeth.

I drew a deep breath. Spiritual Energy lit in my palm. I prepared to step into the seal.

From behind me came Lu Qing’s voice.

“Senior! I am going with you!”

I looked back at him. A young man just past twenty, covered in wounds, barely steady on his feet. But there was a light in his eyes I knew.

Lu Changyuan had that same light in his eyes the day he went to his death.

“You are not afraid of dying?” I asked.

“I am,” he said. “But my Founding Ancestor was not. And I am not either.”

I looked at him for three breaths. Then I laughed.

“Then keep up.”

The crack in the Demon-Suppressing Stele opened in front of me like a door onto the abyss. Black mist came boiling out, carrying the smell of sulfur and blood, and under it that other smell, growing thicker all the time. The smell of hunger.

I stepped in.

Behind me, Lu Qing came staggering after.

The crack drew slowly closed behind us. Before the last thread of light disappeared, I heard a voice from outside.

It was Liu Ruyan. She was shouting from far away.

“Disciples of Biluo Palace, hear my order. Set Up the Formation! Until Senior Demon-Suppressing Envoy comes out, we hold this ground. Not one step away!”

Then the voices of more Sects.

“Disciples of Xuantian Sect, Set Up the Formation!”

“Disciples of Wanfa Sect, Set Up the Formation!”

“Disciples of Danxia Valley, Set Up the Formation!”

Spirit light after spirit light lit up outside the Demon-Suppressing Stele, lighting this wasteland that had been forgotten for a thousand years.

I pulled my gaze back and stepped into the abyss.

The inside of the Demon Abyss Rift was quieter than I had imagined.

I had not been in here for a thousand years. The last time was when the seal was first being built. Back then this place was full of what the fighting had left behind: shards of broken Magic Tools, dried blood, broken formation patterns, and bones scattered everywhere. It was here, in this chaos, that three of the seventy-two Immortal Lords burned their Souls and built the seal core with the last of their strength.

Now most of those traces had been eaten by Demonic Qi past all recognition. The shards of Magic Tools had turned to black residue. The blood had gone into the chaos. The formation patterns had gone dark long ago. Only the bones were still there, wrapped in Demonic Qi and hanging in the void, holding the posture of their last moment a thousand years ago.

The first Layer was very quiet.

I landed on a floating rock. Lu Qing came down right behind me. It was his first time in a place like this. His face had gone white, but he set his teeth and showed no fear.

“Are you afraid?” I asked.

“Yes,” he admitted honestly. “But it is better than being thrown in by my own Sect.”

I could not help looking at him a moment longer. The brat is honest, at least.

Most of the demons on the first Layer are low things with no intelligence, shaped like clumps of black silt. Usually they writhe toward the edge of the seal and try to squeeze out. Right now every one of them was crammed into a corner of the first Layer, packed together like a flock of sheep frightened out of their wits.

I walked toward the huddled mass of them. They felt me coming, and instead of lunging at me as they always had, they only shook harder.

“Where is Thirteen?” I asked.

The mass of demons writhed a few times, and a clump of black mud slightly larger than the rest squeezed out of it and pulled itself, barely, into a human shape. The head turned toward me. In the hollow sockets two dim green flames were dancing.

So this was the madwoman of the thirteenth Layer. She had once been an Elder of the Hehuan Sect. Her Dao Companion betrayed her, and in her rage she butchered half the Hehuan Sect. After she turned demon she was suppressed and locked away here. She had been very beautiful in life. Even after turning demon she kept her human shape. She is the only demon in this Demon-Suppressing Stele that still puts on paint and does her hair.

But right now she could not even hold her human shape. She could barely pull herself together into a mass of black mud, and the soul fire in her sockets was jumping wildly.

“Shen… Shen Mo.” Her voice was broken into pieces, as though something had crushed it. “You came… you came at last…”

“What is down there?” I asked straight out.

Her soul fire shrank sharply, and her whole human shape very nearly broke and scattered.

“I do not know… do not know what it is… it has no shape… it is only a blackness… blacker than the Demon Abyss…”

“How did it get in?”

“Three days ago… the seal at the third Layer split open from the outside without warning… we thought the people outside had broken through, and we all rushed toward it… and then it came in…”

“It came in from the outside?” My brows drew together.

“Yes… and no.” Thirteen’s voice was coming apart more and more. “When it came through the crack, I saw… the place joined to the other side of it… it was not the mortal world… it was not any place I know… it was pure nothingness… nothingness without even light…”

My heart sank.

The seal split from the outside? Not hammered at from within, but opened from the outside?

“How did the crack open?”

Thirteen’s soul fire flickered hard a few times, as though she were remembering something beyond terror.

“It was a hand.”

“A hand?”

“A hand reaching in from the mortal world. It tore the seal open and let it in.”

The cold came up my back again.

Someone tore the seal open from the outside and let in a thing that even Old Black is afraid of. This was no accident. This was done on purpose.

“That hand. Did you see it clearly?”

Thirteen’s human shape began to shake. Her soul fire was nearly out.

“I saw… saw it clearly… there was a ring on the hand… black… with a rune cut into it that I do not know…”

“What sort of rune?”

Thirteen’s soul fire flared once and threw the shape of a pattern into the air.

It was a rune of terrible complexity. The lines twisted and wound around each other like something alive and writhing. I did not know this rune. But something in me said it did not belong to the mortal world, and it did not belong to the Demon Abyss either.

It came from somewhere older, and deeper.

Lu Qing spoke suddenly. “I have seen this rune before.”

I turned to look at him.

“In the Forbidden Ground of the Heavenly Sword Sect,” he said, and his face was very ugly. “The Sect has a stone tablet dug out of an Ancient Ruin. That rune is carved on it. The Elders of the Sect studied it for several hundred years and got nowhere. They only said the thing is older than any known cultivation civilization.”

“The owner of that hand,” I said. “Do you know him?”

Lu Qing shook his head. Then, halfway through the shake, he went still.

“Three days ago,” he said slowly. “The day they threw me in… the Sect Lord came to the Forbidden Ground. He stood in front of that stone tablet and talked to himself for a long time. I could not hear what he was saying, but I saw him…”

He swallowed.

“I saw him cut open his own palm and drip blood onto the stone tablet.”

Everything joined up.

The current Sect Lord of the Heavenly Sword Sect threw Lu Qing into the Demon-Suppressing Stele. Then he used his own blood to wake that stone tablet out of antiquity, tore a crack in the seal from the outside, and let in a thing of terror that came from who knew where.

“Your Sect Lord,” I said. “What is his name?”

“Lu… Lu Tianheng.”

The direct bloodline of Lu Changyuan. The current Sect Lord of the Heavenly Sword Sect.

What in the world is he trying to do?

From deeper in the abyss came a sound of chewing, closer than before. The whole space of the first Layer shook with it. Chunks of floating rock were shaken loose and came rattling down.

Thirteen’s human shape came apart completely. She turned back into a mass of black mud and burrowed for the corner with everything she had.

“It is coming! It is coming up!”

I turned toward the entrance to the second Layer.

The entrance was a thick darkness, deeper than the black mist around it, breathing slowly like something alive. The sound of chewing came out of that darkness, clearer all the time.

It was not the sound of chewing food.

It was the sound of chewing space itself.

It was eating this seal.

In the darkness, something opened its eyes.

Not one eye. Many. A dense mass of eyes opened all at once, as though countless dim stars had lit up inside the dark. The eyes had no pupils. Only a clouded grey-white, like the eyeballs of a dead fish.

Then those eyes looked at me.

A cold I had never felt before shot from the soles of my feet to the top of my head. It was not fear. It was something older than fear: the instinct written into your bones when something higher up the food chain has its eye on you.

It had taken me for food.

I raised a hand, and Spiritual Energy gathered in my palm into a long sword. The golden light running over the blade lit the black mist around me, and lit the countless grey-white eyes in that darkness.

Under the light the eyes did not narrow. They did not turn away.

They had no pupils, so they did not react to light.

Which means they were not for seeing with. They existed for one thing only: to make you afraid.

“Lu Qing,” I said.

“Here!”

“Behind me. Whatever you see, do not move.”

My sword light rose.

Then those eyes laughed, all together.

There is no describing that laugh. It was not a sound. It was a twisting that worked directly on the soul. Every eye bent into a crescent at the same moment, like countless invisible mouths laughing.

Then it spoke.

Not with a voice. It pushed the thought straight into my mind.

“Shen Mo.”

It knew my name.

“Demon-Suppressing Envoy. A thousand years. Forgotten.”

With every word those eyes blinked once. The blinking came faster and faster, as though it were tasting the flavor of the words.

“Anger. Grievance. Unwilling to Accept.”

It chewed those three words slowly, as a man tastes a dish prepared with care.

“The negative feeling in you,” its thought wound around my divine sense like a cold tentacle, “is far better eating than these demons.”

My sword light came down.

Golden sword qi tore through the black mist and cut toward those eyes. Where the sword light passed, the black mist hissed as though it were being burned, and split open along a long gash.

But when the sword light passed through the eyes, it cut nothing.

The eyes were not solid.

They were only a projection.

A projection cast from somewhere deeper.

“Shen Mo.” The thought came again, and this time it carried a pleasure that set the hair on my arms on end. “Your anger is delicious. A little more. Give me a little more.”

I lowered the sword.

Drew a long breath.

Then I laughed.

“You want my anger?” I said. “Then you will have to wait your turn.”

I slapped a palm down on the rock under my feet. Spiritual Energy poured like a tide into the seal structure of the first Layer and woke the formation patterns that had slept here a thousand years. Every rock in the first Layer lit with golden lines at once, weaving themselves into one enormous net.

The net began to close.

It was not sealing the demons. It was pushing every one of them deeper.

Thirteen and the lesser demons were caught up in the golden light and swept, whether they willed it or not, toward the entrance to the second Layer. They screamed in terror inside the light, but the light did not hurt them. It was only an enormous hand, pushing them down into the abyss.

“What are you doing?!” Thirteen’s voice came out of the golden light.

“Sending you down,” I said.

“Have you gone mad?! That thing is down there!”

“I know.”

The golden light swept every demon into the entrance of the second Layer. In that darkness, the countless grey-white eyes blinked once, then drew back deeper.

I stood in the middle of the empty first Layer. The light of the formation patterns under my feet slowly dimmed.

Lu Qing was behind me, and his voice had gone tight. “Senior, why push them down? Is that not…”

“Feeding it,” I said.

Lu Qing froze.

“That thing feeds on negative feeling,” I said, looking up at the entrance to the second Layer. “The lesser demons on the first Layer have no intelligence, only instinct. What they produce is thin stuff. But Thirteen is different. The hatred in her has been piling up for a thousand years. To that thing, she is a feast.”

“Then why would Senior—”

“Because while it is eating Thirteen, it stops chewing on everything else.”

I turned to look at Lu Qing. The look on his face went from confusion to dawning understanding, and then to horror.

“Senior is using Thirteen as bait?”

“Not bait,” I said. “Buying time.”

I raised a hand and closed my five fingers on empty air. The space of the first Layer began to shake. The rocks that had hung here a thousand years came flying at me, gathered in my palm, compressed, reshaped. The impurities in the rock were stripped out by Spiritual Energy. What was left, the purest quartz, melted under heat and pressure, and cooled again into a mirror of perfect clarity.

The mirror stood a man’s height. Its face was smooth as water.

“What is this for?” Lu Qing asked.

I did not answer. I walked up to the mirror and put a hand against its face.

Ripples ran across it. What it showed was not my reflection. It was another space entirely: the outside of the Demon-Suppressing Stele.

On the hillside, the tents of the various Sects had been set up again. Liu Ruyan of Biluo Palace sat cross-legged three zhang in front of the Demon-Suppressing Stele, her hands folded in a seal, spirit light turning around her. Behind her, several hundred Disciples of the Sects stood in one vast ring of a Formation, their Spiritual Energy joined into a sheet of light that covered the whole Stele.

They really were keeping watch.

I turned the mirror.

The picture shifted to the Heavenly Sword Sect, a thousand li away.

The mountain gate of the Heavenly Sword Sect was wrapped in a strange black haze. It was not Demonic Qi. It was something older, and colder. The Mountain-Protecting Formation in front of the gate had been raised, but the color of the formation patterns had gone from gold to a dark red, as though they had been fouled.

Inside the Mountain Gate, the Disciples of the Heavenly Sword Sect were still cultivating, walking the mountain patrols, doing their lessons as always. They seemed not to have noticed the change in the Mountain-Protecting Formation at all.

Only in the direction of the Forbidden Ground behind the mountain was the black haze thick as ink, pouring ceaselessly up out of the ground.

Deep in the Forbidden Ground, the stone tablet carved with the ancient rune was giving off light.

Not ordinary light. A dark light that swallowed every other light. Where it fell, grass and trees withered, rock weathered to sand, and the very air was vanishing a little at a time.

A man stood in front of the stone tablet.

The Sect Lord of the Heavenly Sword Sect. Lu Tianheng.

He had his back to the mirror, so I could not see his face, only his right hand hanging at his side. The cut across his palm had not closed. Blood was falling to the ground drop by drop, and with every drop that fell, the dark light on the stone tablet grew brighter.

He was feeding that stone tablet with his own blood.

“Lu Tianheng,” I said, speaking the name through the mirror.

In the mirror, Lu Tianheng’s shoulders moved a little, as though he had felt something. He turned his head slowly.

I saw his face.

And then I froze.

Because I knew that face.

It was not Lu Tianheng.

It was Lu Changyuan.

Lu Changyuan, the Founding Ancestor of the Heavenly Sword Sect, who had died a thousand years ago in front of the Demon Abyss Rift.

Through a mirror and a thousand years of time, he looked at me, and the corner of his mouth slowly bent into a curve.

That curve was exactly the curve of those eyes in the abyss when they laughed.

The mirror shattered.

I staggered a step backward. A shard had opened a cut across my palm, and blood ran down along my fingers and dripped.

Lu Qing caught me. “Senior!”

I got my feet under me and looked at the mirror fragments covering the ground. Every fragment held a picture: the smile of Lu Changyuan. Countless fragments, countless smiles, looking at me from every angle, the curve of the mouth not off by a hair in any of them.

“That is not Lu Tianheng,” I said.

“What?”

“The current Sect Lord of the Heavenly Sword Sect is your Founding Ancestor. Lu Changyuan.”

Lu Qing’s face went white all at once.

“That is impossible… the Founding Ancestor died in battle a thousand years ago…”

“He should have died,” I said, looking down at the cut in my palm. “I watched thirty-six demons close in around him with my own eyes. His strength gave out and he died. I buried his bones with my own hands.”

Under the old pine three hundred li east of the Demon-Suppressing Stele.

But now he was standing in the Forbidden Ground of the Heavenly Sword Sect, feeding a stone tablet from antiquity with his own blood, and putting something into the Demon-Suppressing Stele that should not exist in this world.

What in the world happened a thousand years ago?

A scream came from deep in the abyss.

It was Thirteen’s voice.

The scream lasted a single instant before it was cut off, as though something had swallowed it in one gulp. Then came a dead silence. Even the low grinding rumble that had always been there stopped.

The whole Demon Abyss Rift fell into an absolute quiet.

This quiet was worse than any sound.

Then the chewing started again.

But this time it was different. The rhythm had changed. It had gone faster, more urgent, like a man who has been starving for a very long time finally getting hold of the thing he really wanted to eat, and bolting it down.

It had finished Thirteen. It had started on the second Layer.

I could feel the structure of the seal disappearing. Not being destroyed. Being eaten. The space of the second Layer was going missing piece by piece, like wood that has been bored through by worms.

“Senior!” Lu Qing’s voice was shaking. “The seal is disappearing!”

I knew.

But I did not move.

I was waiting.

Waiting for that thing to eat its fill.

A being that feeds on negative feeling, having swallowed a thousand years of Thirteen’s piled-up hatred and anger and unwillingness to accept, will drop into a brief state of fullness. That was something I had caught in the short moment when our eyes met: behind the hunger in those eyes there had been something else, the sated look of greed that has finally been fed.

Just as a man grows sleepy after a full meal, so does it.

The chewing slowed.

The eyes appeared again at the entrance to the second Layer, but this time they were not packed together in a dense mass. They had spread out, like a fed beast blinking lazily.

Its tendrils of consciousness reached toward me again, but with far less force than before.

“Shen Mo… your anger… keep it… next time… eat…”

The thought came in fragments, with something drowsy about it.

Then the eyes closed, one after another.

The chewing stopped.

The whole Demon Abyss Rift sank into a heavy quiet with a rhythm to it. That thing had fallen asleep.

This was the moment I had been waiting for.

“Now.” I caught Lu Qing by the shoulder and leapt into the entrance to the second Layer.

The second Layer had been almost entirely eaten. This used to be a sea of magma, sealing fire-attribute demons. Now the magma had cooled and hardened into a black basalt plain. Great hollows covered the plain, as though something had licked it, and even the stone had been eaten away by a layer.

I did not stop. I took Lu Qing and kept going down.

The third Layer.

The fourth Layer.

The fifth Layer.

Every Layer had been eaten past recognition. The deeper we went, the worse the damage. By the seventh Layer only half the space was left. The other half was pure nothingness, the kind of nothingness that light cannot even enter.

What the seventh Layer had sealed was that old Demon Lord who claimed to have lived a hundred thousand years. Now he had been eaten along with his space, most of him gone.

But at the entrance from the seventh Layer down to the eighth, I saw a person.

Old Black.

He had finally pulled himself into a complete human shape: a middle-aged man in a torn black robe, his face hard, a vertical scar between his brows. Both hands were pressed against the rock walls on either side of the entrance. Demonic Qi poured ceaselessly out of him and formed a barrier, blocking the road down to the eighth Layer.

His black robe was torn everywhere. His left arm was gone. There was no blood at the stump, only Demonic Qi escaping from it, over and over.

He was blocking that thing’s path downward with his own body.

“Old Black.”

He turned his head to look at me. The vertical scar between his brows split open, and a dim red light came through it.

“Shen Mo,” he said, and his voice was rough as stone grinding on stone. “You came.”

“Your arm—”

“It took a bite.” He said it very calmly. “When it was eating the seventh Layer I got in its way, and it bit my arm off while it was at it. It does not matter. A demon’s arm. A few hundred years and it grows back.”

I looked at the barrier of Demonic Qi behind him. It had gone very thin and was covered with cracks. It would shatter at any moment. But even a barrier this thin had stopped that thing from wanting to keep eating downward. It had eaten its fill above and could not be bothered to break through.

“How many are left below?” I asked.

“It has eaten every demon from the eighth Layer to the twelfth,” Old Black said. “All that is left is the cheap rubbish on the first Layer. And me.”

He had pushed every demon below the seventh Layer up ahead of him, and had stayed behind himself to plug the entrance with his body.

This ten-thousand-year-old demon I gave the name Old Black, the demon that swore a vicious oath to wash the mortal world in blood, was holding up a barrier of Demonic Qi with the one arm he had left, protecting whatever lay at the very bottom of the abyss.

“What is at the bottom?” I asked.

Old Black’s vertical pupils looked at me. The red light inside them jumped once.

“You do not know?”

“I helped build the seal core. But whatever is at the very bottom, those three Immortal Lords never told me. All they said was that I would handle the outer seal, and the three of them would deal with the core themselves.”

Old Black was silent for a long time.

Then he said something that went cold through my whole body.

“Those three Immortal Lords did not die.”

“What?”

“They did not burn their Souls. What they did was offer their Souls in sacrifice to the thing at the bottom. They used their three Souls as a soul chain and locked that thing to the very floor of the seal.”

My mind went blank.

A thousand years ago I watched with my own eyes as the Souls of three Immortal Lords burned inside the seal core and turned into the strength that built the seal. The light lit the whole Demon Abyss Rift and did not go out for three days and three nights.

And now Old Black was telling me it was not burning. It was sacrifice.

“How do you know this?”

“Because the thing locked at the very bottom,” Old Black said, and my face was mirrored in his vertical pupils, “is my true body.”

On the barrier of Demonic Qi, one crack ran from the top to the root.

At the same moment a crack appeared in Old Black’s body, running from the scar between his brows down to his chest.

He and that barrier were one thing.

“Ten thousand years ago cultivators surrounded me and attacked. My physical body was destroyed. My Soul was split in two,” Old Black said, and his voice was flat, as though he were telling someone else’s story. “One half was suppressed here, bound with the Souls of three Immortal Lords as its soul chain, never to get free for all time. The other half of my Soul escaped, pulled itself back together, and became what you see in front of you now.”

“So I did not turn demon because I could not stand cultivators crushing Mortals. I made that up.”

“I was not hammering at the seal to get out. I wanted to go down. I wanted to fuse back together with the other half of myself.”

“For a thousand years I wanted to go down every single day. But I could not get down there. That soul chain of three Immortal Lords is not something I can break.”

Another crack appeared on the barrier.

Old Black’s body swayed hard, and the crack in his chest widened a little more.

“Later I stopped wanting it,” he said. “Because I found out that if I really went down and fused, what came out would not be me. What those three Immortal Lords locked away with their own Souls was the oldest, rawest, hungriest part of my Soul.”

“It has no consciousness. Only instinct. The instinct to devour.”

“Exactly like the thing you saw just now.”

It came to me all at once.

“That thing—”

“Yes.” Old Black laughed, and there was a resigned exhaustion in the laugh. “I did not let it in. But the reason it could find this place is that it and I are the same kind of thing, at bottom. Things out of the same place. Things that should not exist in this world. Things that eat everything.”

“It came following my scent.”

The cracks on the barrier were multiplying, spreading like a spiderweb.

Old Black’s body was breaking apart in the same pattern. Pieces flaked off him, turned into black Demonic Qi, and scattered into the air.

“Lu Tianheng. No. Lu Changyuan. That stone tablet he is feeding fell into this world from the Outside, back in ancient times. He is using his blood to wake the tablet, and the tablet is calling to the things Outside. This one is only the first.”

“There will be more.”

His vertical pupils were fixed on me.

“Shen Mo, you have to get to the bottom before I come apart completely.”

“To do what?”

“To eat the other half of my Soul.”

I thought I had misheard.

“What did you say?”

“Eat it,” Old Black said again. “I felt your Spiritual Energy just now. It is not ordinary Spiritual Energy. It has been tempered for a thousand years by the Demonic Qi of the seal. If you can digest Demonic Qi, you can digest my Soul.”

“Eat it, and you will have my strength. And then—”

His body shuddered hard, and a great piece flaked away from his shoulder.

“Then eat that thing up above.”

“After that, get out, and eat Lu Changyuan.”

“And after that—”

In his vertical pupils, the red light jumped for the last time.

“Help me eat that stone tablet of the Heavenly Sword Sect too.”

The barrier shattered.

Old Black’s body turned into countless fragments in that same instant and scattered into the void. When the last fragment drifted in front of me, it turned into his last words.

“Shen Mo. For this thousand years. Thank you for the roast chicken.”

The road down to the eighth Layer was open.

I stood at the edge of the entrance, looking down at a darkness with no bottom to it.

Down there was the place where the other half of Old Black’s Soul lay. The raw part of him that had been split off ten thousand years ago, with nothing left in it but the instinct to devour.

Three Immortal Lords used their own Souls to chain it. They chained it for a thousand years.

And now Old Black had used the other half of his Soul to hold that thing back. He held it for three days.

Lu Qing was behind me, his voice shaking. “Senior, are we really going down there?”

I did not answer.

I took one step and fell into the darkness.

There is no light at the very bottom of the abyss.

Not darkness. There is no such thing as light down there. I hung in an absolute nothingness, and even my own existence began to go vague. If the Spiritual Energy turning inside me had not kept telling me I still had a body, I might have forgotten my own shape.

Then I saw the chains.

Three soul chains, made of nothing but Soul, ran in from three directions of the void and met in the middle. The far ends of the chains sank into a great mass of darkness, darker and thicker than the nothingness around it, as though every night there had ever been had been pressed together into something solid.

That mass of darkness was breathing.

With every breath the chains drew tight once, with a grinding of metal on metal that set your teeth on edge. Three human faces rose out of the chains, each turned a different direction, eyes shut tight, lips moving, as though they were reciting some incantation.

Three Immortal Lords.

Their Souls were still here.

A thousand years of wear had left these three chains very thin. At their thinnest they were no thicker than a little finger, and they were covered with cracks. Every time that mass of darkness breathed, the cracks grew.

At this rate, a hundred years at most before the chains break.

But there are no hundred years left.

Because that mass of darkness had felt me arrive.

It stopped breathing.

Then an eye opened in the darkness.

Not a vertical pupil like Old Black’s. Something older: a whirlpool made of pure hunger. There was no feeling in that eye at all. No anger. No hatred. No curiosity. Only an eternal hunger that could not be filled.

It looked at me as though I were a piece of meat.

The chains snapped tight. All three human faces opened their eyes at once. Their lips moved hard. A soundless incantation turned into golden ripples that struck that mass of darkness layer after layer. The darkness hissed where the ripples hit, and the eye squeezed shut in pain.

But only for an instant.

The darkness swelled violently. The cracks in the chains ran wild. Pain came over all three faces at the same moment, and the thinnest of the chains gave a groan, the groan of something carrying more than it can bear.

It was hammering at the seal.

And it was stronger than it had been a moment ago. Because the thing above was eating the seal. Every piece of the seal it ate, the strength of the chains dropped by that much.

“Shen Mo.”

Of the three chains, the face turned toward me opened its mouth.

It was the face of an old man, hair and beard white, the features lean. I knew him. Immortal Lord Qingxuan, the highest in Cultivation Base of the three Immortal Lords. He was the one who led the burning of their Souls back then.

No. Who led the sacrifice.

“Senior Qingxuan,” I said.

His lips moved, and the golden ripples carried his voice into my divine sense.

“You should not have come.”

“Old Black sent me.”

Something complicated came over Immortal Lord Qingxuan’s face.

“He sent you… to eat it?”

“Yes.”

“He is giving up a great deal.” Immortal Lord Qingxuan gave a bitter laugh. “This other half of his Soul has been suppressed here for ten thousand years. Every day he thought about how to fuse back with it. Now he has sent you to eat it. That means he has already…”

“He has already come apart,” I said.

Immortal Lord Qingxuan was silent for a moment. Then he sighed.

“So be it. If it was his decision, we will not stand in your way. But Shen Mo, think this through. Eating its Soul means you inherit its nature. That eternal hunger will become part of you.”

“I know.”

“You do not know.” Another face spoke, and it was a woman’s voice. Immortal Lord Honglian. “You cannot imagine that hunger. The three of us have chained it for a thousand years, and every day we endure that hunger eating into us. Do you know why we still hold on, why we will not let the chains break?”

She paused.

“It is not because we hold all living things under heaven in our hearts.”

“It is because we are hungry too.”

All three chains shuddered at once. In the golden light the three faces twisted for an instant, and what came through was a look I knew far too well. Greedy. Starving.

They had chained that thing with their Souls for a thousand years, and that thing’s hunger had been eating back into them the whole time. A thousand years of it, and their Souls had already begun to change into the same thing.

They could still hold on to their minds because the chains were still here.

The moment the chains break, they will become three more of the same thing.

“So,” said the third face, and it was a middle-aged man’s voice. Immortal Lord Baihe. “When you eat it, eat us as well.”

“What?”

“We cannot hold on.” Immortal Lord Baihe’s voice was very calm. “Better to be eaten by you than to wait for the chains to break and become that thing. At least this way our Souls go on existing in another form.”

All three chains lit with golden light at once. It was no longer the light of suppression. It was a light that reached out, a light that invited.

They were inviting me to eat them.

The eye in that mass of darkness began to shudder violently. It had felt the threat, and it started hammering at the chains in a frenzy. The cracks in the three chains spread at a speed you could watch. Pain came over all three faces at once, and all three of them kept a smile at the corner of the mouth.

“Now,” Immortal Lord Qingxuan said. “We will open the road for you.”

The three chains drew violently tight and throttled that mass of darkness. The darkness let out a soundless roar. The whole abyss shook. The golden light of the chains and the darkness twisted together, like three red-hot wires cutting into a piece of cold meat, hissing.

The three faces kept shifting between pain and hunger, and never once did the smile at the corners of their mouths go away.

“Shen Mo,” Immortal Lord Honglian said, and her voice had begun to shake. “Remember this. When you eat, do not fight the hunger. Let it become part of you, rather than trying to ride it. You are the Demon-Suppressing Envoy. You have kept this watch for a thousand years. You know endurance better than anyone.”

“So you will be able to endure this hunger too.”

The thinnest of the chains snapped.

It was Immortal Lord Baihe’s. In the instant the soul chain broke, release came over his face. The whole face turned into a beam of golden light and shot into the space between my brows.

A vast power of Soul poured into my Mind Platform, and with it a hunger I have no words for.

Like a man who has been hungry for a hundred thousand years suddenly seeing a table full of food.

My stomach cramped. Saliva came into my mouth and I could not stop it. It was not hunger. It was something deeper, a craving out of the soul itself. To eat everything. To devour everything. To take the whole existence of the world, cram it into my mouth, chew it, and swallow.

This was what the other half of Old Black’s Soul felt.

Eternal hunger.

The second soul chain snapped. Immortal Lord Honglian’s face turned to golden light and sank into the space between my brows. The hunger doubled again.

The third.

In the instant Immortal Lord Qingxuan’s Soul entered my body, every soul chain broke.

Freed of its bonds, that mass of darkness swelled up violently. It did not flee upward. It came straight at me.

Because in its eyes, at that moment, I looked more like food than anything else.

Three Immortal Lords’ Souls, plus my own Spiritual Energy. To it, that was a feast such as it had never had.

It opened that enormous eye. A gash split open in the center of the pupil. Inside were teeth, layer upon layer of them, running from the eye socket back into the deepest part of the darkness.

It bit down.

I raised a hand.

Not with Spiritual Energy. With my mouth.

I bit back.

The instant my teeth went into the darkness, a cold beyond cold spread from my mouth through my whole body. Not a cold of temperature. The cold that belongs to nonexistence. It has no temperature, because it is nothingness itself.

But my teeth held it anyway.

Because the Souls of three Immortal Lords were burning inside me, and they had turned my teeth into something that can bite nothingness.

I bit off a piece and swallowed it.

The darkness let out a scream loud enough to split the ear. The whole abyss shuddered. It struggled to get away, but I caught its edge with the chains the three Immortal Lords had passed to me. Three golden chains shot out of my palm, drove into the darkness, and pinned it fast.

I bit down a second time.

Hunger churned in my soul, but this time the hunger was not coming from the thing I was biting. It was coming from me. As I ate it, its nature was going into me.

Eternal hunger was becoming part of me.

A third bite.

A fourth.

The darkness grew smaller, and dimmer. That enormous eye began to come apart. The teeth at the center of the pupil fell away piece by piece, and turned to black dust in the void.

The last bite.

The moment I swallowed the last piece of darkness, the very bottom of the abyss lit up.

It was not light. It was a pure emptiness.

The space that had been taken up by the darkness now held nothing at all. I had eaten even the nothingness. The soul chains of the three Immortal Lords drew slowly back into my palm, settled inside me, and became three masses of warm golden light.

And that eternal hunger had gone into every inch of my flesh and blood.

I closed my eyes and felt what had been added to me.

It was not power. Or rather, not only power. It was a new instinct, as natural as breathing, as natural as a heartbeat. I could eat anything. Spiritual qi, Demonic Qi, seals, space, light, dark, existence, nothingness.

Anything that exists, I can eat.

But at the same time, that eternal hunger was telling me something. From this moment on, I will always be hungry.

Immortal Lord Honglian was right. Not riding it. Becoming it.

I opened my eyes.

There was nothing left at the very bottom of the abyss. The other half of Old Black’s Soul had been eaten by me. The Souls of the three Immortal Lords had gone to rest inside me. All that was left here was a hollow. A hollow that once held something sealed for a thousand years.

I turned and flew upward.

Through the eighth Layer. The seventh. The sixth.

Every Layer was empty. The thing that had come from the Outside had eaten its fill and was sleeping on the first Layer.

When I flew back to the first Layer, it was still asleep.

The shapeless mass of darkness was curled in a corner of the first Layer. The countless grey-white eyes were shut, and an even breathing came from it. It had eaten every demon from the twelfth Layer down to the second, and now it was sunk in the deepest sleep of fullness.

I walked up in front of it.

Every one of those eyes snapped open.

It had felt what was on me. A scent out of the same source as its own. And in those grey-white eyes, for the first time, something other than hunger appeared.

Fear.

It tried to run.

I opened my mouth.

A storm rose inside the Demon Abyss Rift.

That thing shot desperately upward, trying to get out of the Demon-Suppressing Stele, but the three golden chains on me lashed out and pinned it where it was. It screamed without sound. The countless eyes blinked in a frenzy. Every one of them was weeping, if black liquid like that can be called tears.

I ate it, bite by bite.

This was different from eating the other half of Old Black’s Soul. This time I had no hesitation at all. Because this thing was not Old Black. It had no consciousness. No story. No ten thousand years of waiting, no thousand years of company. It was only a mass of hunger.

When I swallowed the last bite, those grey-white eyes finally closed, all of them.

All the Demonic Qi inside the Demon-Suppressing Stele was gone.

Not sealed. Eaten clean.

Even the lesser demons had been eaten up by that thing, and that thing had been eaten by me. What is inside the Demon-Suppressing Stele now is only an empty shell of stone.

I landed on the rock of the first Layer and looked down at my hands.

On my palms, three golden soul chain markings sank slowly into the skin. The mark the three Immortal Lords had left inside me.

Lu Qing came out of a corner. He had watched all of it, watched me eat that thing on the first Layer, and his face was white as paper.

“Se… Senior. Are you all right?”

“Something is wrong,” I said.

His face went whiter still.

“I am hungry.”

Lu Qing froze.

I meant it. After eating that thing, the eternal hunger had not grown weaker. It had grown stronger. Because in eating it, I had also eaten everything it had eaten. The weight of twelve Layers of demons, plus the thing itself, and all of it had turned into hunger.

Right now I am very, very hungry.

But I cannot eat anything of this world. The words Immortal Lord Honglian said to me at the end were still turning in my head. Let it become part of you, rather than trying to ride it.

If I let this hunger run and start eating the things of this world, then I really will become the same kind of thing that thing was.

So I have to endure it.

The same as I have endured this thousand years.

“Come on,” I said. “Out.”

Outside the Demon-Suppressing Stele, the cultivators of the various Sects were still keeping their watch.

Liu Ruyan of Biluo Palace sat cross-legged at the very front. The spirit light around her had dimmed a great deal, but she had not moved at all. Behind her, the great ring of a Formation made of several hundred Disciples was still turning, and the sheet of light their Spiritual Energy made still covered the whole Demon-Suppressing Stele.

They had kept the watch for three days.

When I walked out of the Demon-Suppressing Stele, Liu Ruyan’s eyes snapped open.

“Senior!”

Everyone’s eyes came to me. Black mist from the depths of the Demon Abyss still clung to me, and my robe was torn everywhere, but I seemed to be in fair enough condition. Apart from being a little hungry.

“What of the seal?” Liu Ruyan asked urgently.

“Gone,” I said.

The color drained out of her face.

“Gone… gone?!”

“Every demon inside has been eaten,” I said. I paused. “Most of the seal itself has been eaten as well. What the Demon-Suppressing Stele is now is an empty shell of stone.”

Everyone fell silent.

They were probably wondering what it means for demons to be eaten, and what it means for a seal to be eaten.

But I did not feel like explaining.

“The seal ends here,” I said. “I have something else to deal with.”

I raised my head and looked in the direction of the Heavenly Sword Sect.

A thousand li away, the mountain gate wrapped in black haze was giving off a scent I knew all too well.

The scent of the stone tablet.

Lu Changyuan was still feeding it with his own blood.

“Lu Qing,” I said.

“Here!”

“Your Founding Ancestor is still alive. He is in the Forbidden Ground of the Heavenly Sword Sect. But he is no longer the Lu Changyuan of a thousand years ago.”

Lu Qing’s face changed.

“I am going to the Heavenly Sword Sect,” I said. “You lead.”

The mountain gate of the Heavenly Sword Sect was wrapped in a dark red Mountain-Protecting Formation.

From outside, this Sect of the Sword Dao, with a thousand years of Inheritance behind it, still had all its grandeur. Seven Sword Peaks stood like seven sharp blades driven point first into the sky. The Sword Palace at the summit showed and hid among the cloud. In front of the Mountain Gate, the Ten Thousand Sword Stone was packed with the swords left behind by generations of Disciples, and the sound of them rose on the wind, clear and far-carrying.

But all of it was only a surface.

In my sight, every inch of the ground of the Heavenly Sword Sect was sweating black haze. The haze welled up from deep underground, through rock and soil, through halls and roads, through the body of every Disciple of the Heavenly Sword Sect.

The Disciples had not noticed a thing. They practiced their swords as always, sat in Meditation, talked and laughed. The light of their Spiritual Energy turned over them and wove together with the black haze into a strange greyish color.

They had already been polluted.

Not by Demonic Qi. By the scent of the stone tablet. That thing from the Outside, that thing that should not exist in this world, was seeping through the stone tablet into every inch of the Heavenly Sword Sect’s ground, and into the body of every person in it.

And they had not the least idea of it.

“Senior.” Lu Qing stood beside me, watching the Disciples come and go at the Mountain Gate, and his voice had gone tight. “Are they… still alive?”

“Alive,” I said. “But if that stone tablet keeps being fed, there is no saying whether they will still be themselves.”

I walked toward the mountain gate.

The Mountain-Protecting Formation felt the presence of an outsider. The dark red formation patterns flickered violently, and a screen of blood-colored light rose in front of me. Countless sword shapes appeared on the screen, points aimed at me, humming.

A guard Disciple poked his head out from behind the Ten Thousand Sword Stone. He saw Lu Qing and froze.

“Senior Brother Lu? Were you not sent to the back mountain by the Sect Lord to reflect on your faults?”

The corner of Lu Qing’s mouth twitched. So what the Heavenly Sword Sect had told people was that he had been punished with reflection, not that he had been thrown into the Demon-Suppressing Stele.

“I want to see the Sect Lord,” Lu Qing said.

The guard Disciple’s face went difficult. “The Sect Lord has ordered that he sees no one while he is in Closed-Door Cultivation—”

I put out one finger and touched it to the screen of the Mountain-Protecting Formation.

The dark red formation patterns flickered violently once. Then, from the spot my fingertip had touched, the red drained away fast and went back to the gold the Mountain-Protecting Formation had been at first. The gold spread outward like a tide, and in the space of a breath the whole Formation had been restored to what it originally was.

Then I gave it a light push.

The golden screen shattered like glass and fell across the sky as a rain of light.

The guard Disciple’s mouth hung open wide enough to push a fist into.

“You… you you you—”

I ignored him and stepped through the Mountain Gate.

The several hundred swords thrust into the Ten Thousand Sword Stone cried out all at once. Not in attack. In mourning. They had felt what was on me, the scent of something that had eaten a thing from the Outside. The oldest of those swords had already grown a vague sentience of their own, and they were afraid.

I walked past the Ten Thousand Sword Stone. All seven Sword Peaks shook at once.

Sword light without number rose from every peak. The Disciples of the Heavenly Sword Sect had felt the change at the Mountain Gate and were coming by sword flight, one after another. The sword light wove into a dense net in the air, drawing together toward the Mountain Gate.

The first to arrive was the Discipline Elder of the Sword Palace on the main peak, a middle-aged sword cultivator at Spirit Severing, his face full of anger.

“What madman dares to force his way into the Heaven—”

He saw me.

To be exact, he felt what was on me.

His sword light stopped dead in midair. The anger on his face froze, and then, bit by bit, turned into fear. That fear did not come from a gap in Cultivation Base. It came from something deeper in the bone: the same instinct that freezes a rabbit when it catches the scent of a tiger.

His sword was shaking. Not his hand. The sword itself.

“You… you are…”

I walked past him without looking at him.

More sword light came down. More Disciples of the Heavenly Sword Sect arrived. And then more of them froze where they stood, ten zhang away from me, and more swords began to tremble on their own.

Nobody dared to stop me.

I walked toward the main peak.

In front of the Sword Palace on the main peak there was a great plaza, and in the middle of the plaza stood a statue. The statue was cut as a white-haired old man standing with a sword, his robes streaming, his gaze like lightning. It was Lu Changyuan, the Founding Ancestor of the Heavenly Sword Sect.

I stopped in front of the statue.

A thousand years ago, Lu Changyuan looked exactly like this. Sword in hand, his gaze like lightning, and on his face, always, that smile that said this old man is number one under heaven. What he liked best was to curse the other side’s ancestors back eighteen generations before the fighting started, and when he had finished, to add: though your eighteen generations of ancestors put together still would not be worth one hand of this old man.

That was real arrogance.

But it was real strength too.

Of the seventy-two Immortal Lords, his fighting strength ranked in the top three. In that last battle he held thirty-six demons by himself, buying time for three Immortal Lords to make their sacrifice. I watched from the outer seal as the demons swallowed him up, and the last thing I heard was his voice, laughing in the middle of the pile.

“Shen Mo! This old man has someone to carry on after him. He is not afraid of his line ending!”

Now he was standing in front of me. Only a statue of stone.

But the corner of the statue’s mouth held exactly the same curve as the man’s.

“Lu Changyuan,” I said to the statue. “I am here.”

The eyes of the statue lit with a dark red light.

Those two beams fell on me with something examining in them, and looked me up and down once. Then the mouth of the statue opened. What came out was not the sound of stone grinding on stone. It was a real human voice.

“Shen Mo.”

The voice was exactly what it had been a thousand years ago.

“You came at last.”

Countless fine cracks appeared across the surface of the statue. Stone dust pattered down. Dark red light came through the cracks, brighter and brighter, and in the end the whole statue split down the middle.

Lu Changyuan walked out of the stone.

He looked exactly as he had a thousand years ago. White hair, white beard, all in white, his gaze like lightning, and that signature smile on his face. The only thing different was his eyes. The pupils had been black. Now they were a clouded grey-white.

The same eyes as the thing I had eaten inside the Demon-Suppressing Stele.

“You committed Body Possession on Lu Tianheng?” I asked.

“No Body Possession.” Lu Changyuan worked his wrist, as though getting used to a new body. “Lu Tianheng was made by me in the first place, from a wisp of my own soul, through Rebirth. He is my descendant, and he is me. A thousand years ago I split off a wisp of soul and threw it into Reincarnation. It was reborn into the bloodline of the Lu family and passed down generation after generation, all for this day.”

“All for what?”

“To make me whole again.” He raised a hand and pointed at his own chest. “In that battle back then I really did die. But before I died I left a wisp of my soul in trust with that old pine. When you buried my bones, that wisp of soul was up above your head, watching you.”

My back went numb.

That old pine. Every year I would go and sit under it, take a flask of wine, drink half myself, and pour half out at the foot of the tree. Because Lu Changyuan had loved his drink when he was alive.

He had been watching from the tree.

For how many years?

“When you buried me, you said one thing. Rest in peace, Old Lu.” Lu Changyuan laughed once. “I did not rest in peace. I stayed in that pine for five hundred years, watching you come every year to drink, watching you pour half out for me every year. Shen Mo, to tell you the truth, it moved me.”

His smile widened a little.

“But being moved is one thing. What has to be done still has to be done.”

“Done about what?”

Lu Changyuan did not answer. He turned and walked toward the Sword Palace.

“Come with me.”

Deep in the Sword Palace. The Forbidden Ground.

That stone tablet from antiquity stood at the very center of the Forbidden Ground, three zhang tall, black from top to bottom, its surface carved thick with runes. The runes were the same as the one I had seen from Thirteen: twisted and wound together, like something alive and writhing.

On the ground at the foot of the tablet, a pool of dark red blood had collected. It was what Lu Changyuan had left behind, feeding the tablet with his own blood. The blood had not dried yet. He had fed it again not long ago.

“Do you know what this is?” Lu Changyuan patted the stone tablet.

“Something from the Outside.”

“That is right.” A flicker of surprise crossed his eyes. “You know more than I expected. This stone tablet fell from beyond the sky in ancient times. It struck deep in the Eastern Wastelands, and the predecessor of my Heavenly Sword Sect, which was not called the Heavenly Sword Sect back then, found it and took it in. Every Sect Lord since has studied it. Not one of them could make it out.”

“Until me.”

He stroked the runes on the tablet. Where his finger passed over those twisted lines, the runes would light with a brief dark red glow.

“After I failed Tribulation Transcendence, I got blood on the stone tablet without meaning to. And then I saw the truth.”

“What truth?”

Lu Changyuan turned around. His grey-white eyes mirrored my face.

“The truth of this world.”

He spread his arms.

“Shen Mo, have you ever stopped to ask yourself this. What is it we are actually cultivating? We draw in the Heaven and Earth Spiritual Energy, we temper our Physical Body and refine the Soul, we chase Longevity and a long view of the world. But where does all that Heaven and Earth Spiritual Energy come from?”

I said nothing.

“It comes from the Outside.” He pointed at the stone tablet. “This stone tablet is a passage. It joins this world to the Outside. The Heaven and Earth Spiritual Energy comes seeping in from the Outside through passages exactly like this one. The truth of what we cultivate is this: we are absorbing things from the Outside.”

“And the things you call demons came from the Outside as well. They are not evil. They are only another form of existence. The cultivation world calls them demons and seals them away, and what it is really doing is sealing away the truth of this world.”

He was speaking faster and faster. The grey-white light in his eyes was growing brighter.

“After I touched that truth, I spent a hundred years learning how to open the passage. The Demon Abyss Rift opening a thousand years ago was no accident. I opened it.”

My pupils contracted sharply.

“What did you say?”

“The Demon Abyss Rift. I opened it.” Lu Changyuan said it very calmly. “That war of seventy-two Immortal Lords and thirty-six Sects was planned by me, every piece of it. I needed the Souls of a great many cultivators to wake the tablet. But I could not simply kill them. So I opened a rift and let the things from the Outside in.”

“Then, as the Founding Ancestor of the Heavenly Sword Sect, I called on the cultivators of the world to resist together. All of it went as I had planned. Great numbers of cultivators died in battle, and their Souls were gathered by me in secret to feed the tablet. The burning of the three Immortal Lords’ Souls, as it was called, was my work too. I tampered with their Cultivation Techniques, so that they believed they were offering a sacrifice, when in truth their Souls were being absorbed by the tablet.”

His smile grew brilliant.

“After that war, the tablet was half awake. But there was one last step left. Someone had to stand guard beside the rift for a long time, feeding the seal with their own Spiritual Energy, over and over. On the surface it looked like reinforcing the seal. In truth, the Spiritual Energy would travel through the structure of the seal into the tablet, feeding it without stop.”

“So you put me forward,” I said. My voice was very calm.

“That is right,” Lu Changyuan said, nodding. “You were the best choice. Your Cultivation Technique is the most unusual of any. You can sit beside the Demon-Suppressing Stele for ten years without food, without water, without moving, and your Spiritual Energy still flows out steady. No one was better suited to being the feeder.”

“For this thousand years you reinforced the seal once every hundred years, and each time burned ten years of your Cultivation Base. None of that was lost. All of it went through the seal into this stone tablet. Nine hundred years. Nine reinforcements. Ninety years of Cultivation Base. Add the Souls of three Immortal Lords, add the Souls of every cultivator who died in that war, and it came out exactly enough.”

He patted the stone tablet. Every rune on it lit up.

“Shen Mo, do you know why I chose today for the last step?”

He turned around. In his grey-white eyes a light was burning, a light very close to madness.

“Because today is the one thousand and first year of your watch over the Demon Abyss. The negative feeling you piled up in front of the Demon-Suppressing Stele for a thousand years, the anger, the grievance, the unwillingness to accept, the loneliness, all of it peaked in the moment you checked out. That feeling went through the link between you and the seal and poured into the stone tablet.”

“The tablet has eaten its fill.”

“Now it is going to open.”

He pressed his palm against the tablet. Dark red light poured out of his palm and into the stone. The runes on the tablet began to flow, like snakes coming alive, crawling and winding across the black stone.

The whole Sword Palace began to shake.

No. Not only the Sword Palace. All seven Sword Peaks were shaking. The whole Heavenly Sword Sect was shaking. Outside the mountain gate, on the Ten Thousand Sword Stone, several hundred swords cried out shrilly all at once, and then shattered, one after another.

At last the Disciples of the Heavenly Sword Sect noticed that something was wrong. They saw a black pillar of light pour out of the depths of the Forbidden Ground and drive straight into the sky. The pillar of light was not flying upward. It was eating the sky. Wherever it reached, blue sky and white cloud were all dyed the same chaotic grey-white.

That was not light.

It was the Outside, pouring into this world.

Lu Changyuan stood in the middle of the pillar of light. His white hair streamed backward in the surge of force, and the smile on his face was bright enough to hurt the eyes.

“A thousand years!” His voice was still clear through the roaring. “It took me a thousand years, and I have opened this door at last! Shen Mo, do you not want to see what the Outside looks like?”

I had not spoken this whole time.

From the moment he started telling me those truths, I had been silent through all of it. Standing in silence. Listening in silence. Feeling in silence as the hunger inside me grew stronger and stronger.

And now he was asking me whether I wanted to see what the Outside looked like.

I raised my head and looked at the black pillar of light driving into the sky.

Then I laughed.

“Lu Changyuan,” I said. “Have you ever stopped to ask yourself something?”

His smile faltered for a moment.

“Ask myself what?”

“You planned for a thousand years. You calculated everyone. Seventy-two Immortal Lords, thirty-six Sects, three Immortal Lords, me. Every piece ran exactly to your plan. But did you ever stop to think that the last piece might go wrong?”

“What do you mean?”

I lifted a foot and walked toward the stone tablet.

“You had me keep watch in front of the Demon-Suppressing Stele for a thousand years. You had me pile up a thousand years of anger and grievance. You say all that negative feeling went through the seal into the stone tablet, and helped the tablet finish its last step.”

“But did you ever stop to think—”

I stopped in front of the stone tablet and pressed a hand against the flowing runes.

“These things have been inside me for a thousand years. They are not the stone tablet’s anymore.”

“They are mine.”

My five fingers closed and gripped the edge of the tablet.

The light of the runes went suddenly dim, as though something had its hand around their throat.

The look on Lu Changyuan’s face finally changed.

“What are you doing?!”

“I am eating.”

I opened my mouth and bit into the stone tablet.

The instant my teeth went into the black stone, a scent older and stronger than the thing in the Demon-Suppressing Stele came pouring into my mouth. It was not a taste. It was a blow landing directly on the soul: countless years of hunger, countless years of waiting, countless years of devouring.

This stone tablet drifted in the Outside for who knew how many ages, devouring who knew how many things, before it finally fell into this world.

And now it is being devoured by me.

The light of the runes flickered in a frenzy, as though they were screaming. The cracks on the surface of the tablet spread outward from the place I had bitten, crawling thick across the whole stone. Lu Changyuan was smearing his own blood onto the tablet desperately, trying to steady it, but the moment the blood touched the stone it was sucked in. Not by the tablet. By me.

“No! Impossible!” For the first time there was panic in Lu Changyuan’s voice. “I spent a thousand years! A thousand—”

His words stopped dead.

Because he had seen my eyes.

As I devoured the tablet, my pupils were turning a deep black. Not the black of Demonic Qi. A purer black, an older black. A black that light itself cannot escape from.

It was the color of the Outside.

“Lu Changyuan,” I said, and the voice that came out of my throat carried an echo that did not belong to this world, “you planned for a thousand years, and you used me as a tool to feed the tablet. But you forgot one thing.”

I bit off another mouthful.

“Use a tool long enough, and it learns how to use itself.”

A third bite.

The runes on the tablet began to flake off, drifting down like dead leaves. Every rune that touched the ground turned into a thread of black smoke and scattered. The tablet was shrinking. From three zhang to two zhang. From two zhang to one zhang. Until all that was left was a black core half the height of a man.

It was the heart of the stone tablet.

And it was the passage to the Outside itself.

Lu Changyuan fell to his knees in front of the tablet. He wrapped both arms around the core and held on with everything he had. His ten fingers drove into the stone. His nails tore back, all of them, and the blood ran. There was fear on his face for the first time. Real fear. Fear out of the soul.

“You cannot eat it!” His voice was raw. “If the passage closes, I will never again… I waited a thousand years…”

“I know,” I said. I crouched down so that we were at eye level.

His grey-white eyes mirrored my face. My eyes had gone entirely black, but in the deepest part of that black, three masses of golden light were burning quietly.

Immortal Lord Qingxuan. Immortal Lord Honglian. Immortal Lord Baihe.

The Souls of the three Immortal Lords were still inside me.

“Lu Changyuan,” I said. “Everyone you betrayed is inside me, watching you.”

His pupils contracted sharply.

“Immortal Lord Qingxuan’s soul chain. Immortal Lord Honglian’s hunger. Immortal Lord Baihe’s endurance. All three of them asked me to pass one sentence on to you.”

“What sentence?”

“Your Sect’s Spirit Wine is fucking undrinkable.”

The look on Lu Changyuan’s face froze.

A thousand years ago, on the night before the last battle, the seventy-two Immortal Lords gathered to drink together one last time. The wine was Spirit Wine Lu Changyuan had brought from the Heavenly Sword Sect. Qingxuan took one mouthful and spat it out. He said the stuff was sour as vinegar. Lu Changyuan turned on him on the spot and said this old man’s wine, drink it or leave it. The two of them very nearly came to blows.

In the end it was Honglian who pulled them apart, saying they could settle the matter of the wine after the battle was fought.

When that battle was done, the three Immortal Lords ’burned’ their Souls, and Lu Changyuan ’died in battle.’

The matter of the wine was never raised again.

Now, across a thousand years of time, across the three golden Souls inside me, that sentence had finally reached him.

Lu Changyuan’s hands let go.

It was not that he wanted to let go. It was that after hearing those words his hands had no strength left in them.

I reached out and picked up the black core, half the height of a man. It beat in my palm like a heart still fighting. The other end of the passage was joined to the Outside. I could feel the endless hunger coming from that side, and the existences without number that wanted to pour into this world.

All of them were waiting for the passage to open.

I opened my mouth.

The black core broke between my teeth like a fruit bitten open. The juice came flooding into my throat, cold to the bone, carrying the void and the hunger of the whole universe. My stomach contracted hard. In that moment the eternal hunger was satisfied for a little while. A very little while. Like a drop of water falling into a desert.

But it was enough.

The black core broke apart inside me, dissolved, and was digested. The passage it was joined to lost its anchor and began to collapse into the void. The black pillar of light that had driven into the sky began to break apart from the top down, like a pillar with its foundation pulled out from under it, collapsing section by section.

The fragments fell into the mountain gate of the Heavenly Sword Sect and turned into black rain.

The raindrops fell to the ground and did not water it. They erased whatever ground they touched. Not corroded. Erased. As though those places had never existed at all.

The Disciples of the Heavenly Sword Sect scattered and ran.

Lu Changyuan knelt in the rain, head raised, watching the pillar of light collapse. The rain passed through his body and left hole after hole in him. He did not run. He did not cry out.

He only watched.

The last fragment of the pillar of light fell out of the sky and struck the roof of the Sword Palace on the main peak, erasing half the palace. Then the sky came out again. Blue. Clean. As though none of what had just happened had happened.

The passage was closed.

I stood where I was, eyes closed, digesting what had been added to me.

With the heart of the stone tablet eaten, everything it had ever devoured, the Souls of cultivators from antiquity, the fragments from its fall out of the sky, the countless existences it had swallowed while drifting in the void, all of it had been turned into part of me. My Cultivation Base was climbing at a speed that could not be calculated. But I felt nothing like a Breakthrough.

Because what I cultivate now is no longer a Cultivation Technique of this world.

What I cultivate is devouring itself.

“Shen Mo.”

Lu Changyuan’s voice came from behind me.

I turned around.

He was still on his knees. The black rain had eaten his body full of holes. He looked like a stone statue left out in the weather. But his eyes had gone back to black. Not grey-white. The ordinary black of a human eye.

With the tablet eaten, the influence that had been laid on him was gone as well.

“That sentence you said,” he said, and his voice was rough as sandpaper, “did Immortal Lord Qingxuan really say it?”

“Yes,” I said. “His Soul is inside me. He said it himself.”

Lu Changyuan was silent for a long time.

Then he laughed.

Not the mad certain smile from before. A very light, very faint smile, the smile of a man who has finally set something down.

“That old thing,” he said. “His mouth is as foul as ever.”

His body began to come apart.

Not the kind of breaking the black rain had done to him. It was a light starting from deep inside him. With the tablet eaten, his Soul had lost its support and was scattering on its own. He should have died a thousand years ago. It was only the strength of the tablet that had kept him here until now.

“Shen Mo.”

“Yes.”

“At the Demon-Suppressing Stele… did nobody ever come to see you?”

I thought about it.

“Someone did,” I said. “That roast chicken in the five hundredth year. Where did it come from?”

Lu Changyuan’s smile widened a little.

“That was my Rebirth as the second Clan Head of the Lu family. I flew to the Eastern Wastelands on purpose to leave it. I watched from a distance until you had finished it, and then I left.”

“And the jar of Spirit Wine in the seven hundredth year?”

“Me as well. The third Clan Head.”

“The robe in the eight hundredth year?”

“The fifth.”

“The bottle of Medicinal Pills in the nine hundredth year?”

“The seventh. That time you very nearly caught me. You looked up, straight in the direction I was hiding.”

“I knew it was you,” I said.

Lu Changyuan’s smile stopped.

“You knew?”

“The taste of the Spirit Wine,” I said. “Every time you brought Spirit Wine, it was brewed by the Heavenly Sword Sect. That sourness. I could smell it from a hundred li away.”

Lu Changyuan froze for a moment. Then he roared with laughter.

The laughter rolled across the broken front of the Sword Palace and startled a few birds hiding in the ruins. He laughed, and as he laughed the light in his body grew brighter, and fragments peeled off him and flew up into the sky as points of light.

“Shen Mo.”

“Yes.”

“For this thousand years. That was hard on you.”

His smile disappeared into the light.

When the last fragment flew up into the sky, I saw that it was a drop of wine.

Clear as glass, carrying that sourness particular to the Spirit Wine of the Heavenly Sword Sect.

I put out a hand and caught the drop of wine. It rolled in my palm once, then turned into a thread of grey smoke and was gone.

The rain stopped.

I stood in the ruins of the Heavenly Sword Sect. Around me were panicking Disciples, broken Sword Peaks, a Sword Palace with half of it erased. Lu Qing came running from a distance, and on his face there was no telling what was rain and what was tears.

“Senior! The Sect Lord, he—”

“Gone,” I said.

Lu Qing opened his mouth. In the end nothing came out.

I patted his shoulder.

“Before your Founding Ancestor left, he asked me to pass one sentence on to you.”

“What sentence?”

“He said the Heavenly Sword Sect is not to brew wine that sour ever again.”

Lu Qing froze.

Then he laughed. He laughed, and as he laughed he began to cry.

Three days later, what had happened at the Heavenly Sword Sect had gone through the whole cultivation world.

The Sect Masters and Elders of the various Sects gathered at the Heavenly Sword Sect again, and saw the Sword Palace with half of it erased, three Sword Peaks collapsed, and the fragments of the stone tablet, which had already turned into ordinary rock.

They asked me what should be done with the Heavenly Sword Sect.

I said to ask Lu Qing.

Lu Qing was the highest in seniority the Heavenly Sword Sect had left. The Sect Lord Lu Tianheng was dead. Half the Elders had been polluted by the stone tablet past any recovery, and the rest had been badly hurt in the black rain. A Disciple just past twenty, Foundation Establishment in his Cultivation Base, had become the acting Sect Lord of the Heavenly Sword Sect overnight.

He stood in front of the ruins of the Sword Palace, facing the Sect Masters of the various Sects. His lips were white, but his back was straight.

“The Heavenly Sword Sect closes its mountain from this day, for a hundred years. For a hundred years we take no part in any affair of the cultivation world. We will give ourselves to cleaning the pollution inside the Sect, and rebuilding the mountain gate.”

Nobody objected.

Liu Ruyan of Biluo Palace stepped forward and said Biluo Palace would give every resource needed to help the Heavenly Sword Sect rebuild.

Then Xuantian Sect, Wanfa Sect, Danxia Valley. The Sects stated their positions one after another.

I watched all of this from the back of the crowd and said nothing.

Liu Ruyan walked up in front of me and bowed deeply.

“Senior, in the matter of the Demon-Suppressing Stele, Biluo Palace owes you an accounting. This old woman has already given the order to rewrite the records of Biluo Palace, to write the office of Demon-Suppressing Envoy into the histories, never to be forgotten for all time.”

“There is no need,” I said.

Liu Ruyan froze.

“But, Senior—”

“Being forgotten is not so bad,” I cut her off. “Some things are too heavy to keep remembering.”

I turned and walked toward the mountain gate.

“Where will you go, Senior?” Liu Ruyan called after me.

I stopped for a moment.

Where to go?

For a thousand years I had stayed beside the Demon-Suppressing Stele, and I had never once asked myself that. Now the Stele was empty. The demons had been eaten. Lu Changyuan was gone. The tablet was broken.

At last I could go wherever I wanted to go.

But that eternal hunger was still inside me. The heart of the tablet had only satisfied it for a while, like a drop of water falling into a desert. The desert is still a desert. The hunger is still hunger.

I cannot stay in this world too long.

Because sooner or later I will be hungry enough to start eating the things of this world.

“I am going Outside,” I said.

Liu Ruyan did not understand. “Outside?”

I did not explain.

As I walked out of the mountain gate of the Heavenly Sword Sect, Lu Qing came running after me.

“Senior!”

He ran up in front of me, breathing hard, and pulled a wine gourd out of his Storage Pouch.

“I hid this one away. It was not brewed by the Heavenly Sword Sect. I bought it outside. It is not sour.”

I took the wine gourd, pulled the stopper, and smelled it.

It really was not sour.

I threw my head back and drank, then hung the wine gourd at my waist.

“I am going.”

“Take care of yourself, Senior.”

I walked out of the mountain gate, past the Ten Thousand Sword Stone. Most of the swords on it had shattered in the black rain, and the rest had lost what sentience they had and become ordinary iron swords.

I walked the mountain road. I walked past the stream. I walked past the old pine I used to sit under once a year.

Under the pine, Lu Changyuan’s grave was still there. His name was cut into the tombstone. I had cut it myself, a thousand years ago.

I stood in front of the grave for a while, then poured half the wine from the gourd out in front of the tombstone.

Then I kept walking.

When I had walked to somewhere with nobody in it, I raised my head and looked at the sky.

Blue sky. White cloud. The same as always.

But I knew that Outside this sky there was a bigger world. In it there are passages without number, all of them like that stone tablet, joining together worlds without number, all of them like this one. In it there are hungry existences without number, existences as hungry as what is inside me now.

That is where Old Black came from.

Where the stone tablet came from.

And the source of that eternal hunger.

I raised a hand and drew my five fingers through the air.

The sky split open along a seam.

The other side of the seam was not black. It was a chaos of color with no describing it. Light without number, dark without number, existences without number and nothingness without number, all of it tumbling in that world, colliding, devouring, being devoured.

Eternal hunger came pouring out of the seam, and it answered the hunger inside me.

My stomach contracted hard.

It was not fear.

It was anticipation.

I took one last look at this world. A thousand years. I guarded it for a thousand years. Now I am leaving.

Not because I was forgotten.

Because I have found something I would rather do.

The seam widened in front of me, and I stepped in.

A voice came from behind me.

It was Old Black’s voice. Not from the seam. From inside me. After I ate the other half of his Soul, the fragments of his consciousness had been sleeping inside me all this time. Now, with the Outside close, those fragments trembled, just a little.

“Shen Mo.”

“Yes.”

“The Outside is very hungry.”

“I know.”

“There is a great deal out there to eat.”

“I know.”

There was a thread of a smile in Old Black’s voice.

“Then go and eat.”

The seam closed behind me.

The sky was whole again, as though nothing at all had happened.

Only the Demon-Suppressing Stele, deep in the Eastern Wastelands, standing empty, had a new line of characters cut into its body. The writing was careless, as though it had been scratched in with a fingernail.

“Demon-Suppressing Envoy Shen Mo kept this Stele for a thousand years. Now the Stele is empty and the man is gone. Do not think of him.”

There was no date under the signature.

Only a roast chicken, drawn in.