RUMBLE!
The sky groaned, not just from thunder or clouds, but from the echo of two apocalyptic titans clashing in the realm of mortals. The world itself seemed to hold its breath.
A silence settled. Not peace. Never peace.
The dust slowly began to settle over the vast ruin that was once a desert. The Southern Vast Desert, a land known for its boundless expanse, was now reduced to an unrecognizable wasteland, cratered and sundered, etched with the scars of a battle too great for even the heavens to contain.
Amongst the fractured earth, in the eye of annihilation, a single figure remained standing.
Diteyi.
Bathed in the dying embers of chaos, his form flickered with residual infernal energy. His breath came in uneven, thunderous waves, like a beast refusing death. Blood trickled from his mouth. His body—a gruesome meld of man and serpent—trembled violently. Blackened scales glimmered with an eerie iridescence, shifting and pulsating like something alive and cursed. Twisted horns jutted from his temples. His eyes, once regal and proud, were now bloodshot, rimmed with madness and desperation.
The twelve Hell Serpent Zodiac orbs that once circled him were gone—shattered in the cataclysmic exchange. With them, his stability vanished. What remained was a war machine fueled by wrath, stripped of morality, mercy, or mind.
Diteyi was no longer human. No longer a proud heir. No longer even Diteyi.
He was war incarnate.
And he was still standing.
But then, From beyond the shattered horizon, another figure emerged.
He moved with a slow, deliberate grace, each step causing the earth to moan beneath him. His body, bare from the waist up, was marked with gashes and bruises, and yet it looked almost divine in its suffering. His once-radiant silver robes were reduced to flowing tatters, hanging loosely like ethereal shrouds.
But it wasn't the clothing that captured attention. It was the transformation.
His skin, once warm with celestial light, now pulsed with an obsidian hue. Golden veins shimmered beneath it, like molten rivers of fate, coursing with barely-contained chaos. His aura no longer radiated balance. It was domination. Corruption. Power beyond sense or scale.
The silver halo above his head was now jagged, cracked like a broken crown. And the six elemental orbs—Water, Metal, Space, Light, Darkness, Lightning—hovered around him in dissonant, erratic spirals, corrupted and tinged with darker hues. The Chaos Body had changed. No longer balanced between Light and Dark. No longer tranquil.
This was something else.
A Semi-Perfect Chaos Body pushed into awakening. Not through enlightenment, but wrath.
Dao Wei was becoming the Dark God.
Where before he carried the calm arrogance of a rising prodigy, he now bore the stillness of something far more dreadful. His expression was blank, eyes unreadable. There was no rage. No fury. Only inevitability.
Diteyi tried to speak—his voice croaked like a dying fire. "You... you're not supposed to be alive..."
But Dao Wei said nothing.
Howl!
The wind screamed past them.
Boom!
Dao Wei advanced, taking a single step.
Diteyi flinched. Not from pain. But from the weight of that step. It was like a mountain had moved. As if destiny itself was rewriting.
Dao Wei raised his hand.
Rumble!
Skyfall responded. The blade, chipped and dulled, floated beside him, its flames flickering with voidfire. It, too, was breaking apart—and yet it pulsed in time with his soul. It was no longer a sword. It was a judgment.
Diteyi fell to one knee. The cost of his fused form, of shattering the twelve Zodiac orbs, was catching up to him. His body convulsed, his breath rattling in his chest.
Still, he lifted his spear. With both hands.
He screamed. More beast than man. "I WILL NOT DIE LIKE THIS!"
Dao Wei was calm, cold, and indifferent when he stopped walking.
His voice came low, deeper than before, like it came from a place beneath the soul. "You already have."
Boom!
In that moment, the entire world bent.
A rift tearing across the sky, and thunder cracking while the winds reversed.
Time... slowed. Dao Wei's silhouette became distorted as shadows bloomed around him like wings. A second pair of eyes opened vertically on his forehead—an eerie mark of the Dark God's descent.
He was no longer walking the path…
He was the path.
The remaining onlookers—hidden far in the distance, buried in protective barriers, all felt the chilling sensation. The Sect Leaders, the rogue cultivators, the divine clans watching through mirrored lakes or mirrored realms—all felt the coming end.
This was no longer a duel.
It was an execution.
And as the two titans faced each other, bleeding, broken, and more beautiful than anything the martial heavens had birthed in centuries, there was one final truth that could no longer be denied:
There would be no retreat.
There would be no redemption.
Only one of them would leave this battlefield.
And for the first time in the entire duel, Diteyi looked honestly afraid.
RUMBLE!
The scorched sky above the Southern Vast Desert groaned as if the heavens themselves were protesting the carnage below. Cracked earth, sundered dunes, rivers of glass from molten sand—the duel between Sword Childe Dao Wei and Demon Childe Diteyi had reduced the once-sacred battlefield into an apocalyptic wasteland.
Lightning coiled around the ruptured clouds. Blood had painted the desert in war's most intimate hues.
But far away, hidden atop a distant mountain, veiled in spiritual sigils and protective arrays, three figures observed the carnage through an ethereal projection—like gods peering through a silken veil of fate.
"Ha! Look at that strike!" Swordswoman Mei leaned forward, her robes fluttering with excitement, her voice sharp as her twin sabers. "He cleaved through the air like the wrath of the heavens themselves! That's Diteyi's 'Twelve Zodiac Spear Tempest!' No one survives that twice."
Swordsman Feng nodded, arms folded, calculating. "Indeed. His spear movements have been refined over the years. That technique wasn't just raw power—it was orchestrated annihilation. Sword Childe's slowing. Bleeding. Every breath he takes is labored."
"He's done," Mei scoffed. "He fought well—admirably, even. But this? This is the Demon Childe's dominion."
"Perhaps," came the measured voice of Sect Leader Tian Xu, his gaze still on the mirror. His eyes were calm, ancient, yet disturbed. "But look deeper."
Mei blinked. "Deeper? You see the same thing we do. Sword Childe's barely holding together."
Feng squinted at the projection. "Are you sensing something?"
Tian Xu's voice lowered. "There's a change in the wind... the Qi. Look at his stance. The way he shifts his weight. Sword Childe's wounds should have broken him—but instead, he grows still. Focused. His sword—did you see? It didn't swing. But breathed."
Mei frowned. "You're waxing poetry."
"No." Tian Xu's eyes narrowed. "I'm recognizing evolution."
Earlier…
The battle's early stages had been a massacre. Diteyi's demonic Asura form tore through the dunes with unrelenting fury. His Hell Serpent Zodiac orbs had rained destruction across the sky, and for a time, Dao Wei was barely surviving—dodging, parrying, retreating.
But bit by bit, step by step, breath by breath…
Dao Wei had begun to dance.
Now, through the projection, Dao Wei stood bruised, blood streaming down his side, chest rising in slow cadence. Yet something ineffable shimmered about him—like an idea not yet born, like the weight of unspoken thunder.
"He's adapting," Tian Xu whispered. "No—he's awakening."
Feng frowned. "You're saying he's growing stronger in the middle of this battle?"
"No one grows in the middle of death," Mei snapped. "This is desperation. A final flicker before he burns out."
Tian Xu's eyes glinted. "Desperation... is the birthplace of transcendence."
Dao Wei moved, and the mirrored projection trembled as he dodged a piercing strike—not with speed, but with inevitability, like he had stepped out of time itself. Diteyi's spear missed by inches that felt like universes.
Dao Wei's blade responded—not swung, but released, as though the desert had agreed to be cut.
Feng leaned forward. "That's not luck."
"No," Tian Xu replied. "That's clarity. Sword intent becoming form. Form becoming law."
Mei's lip curled. "So what if he's improving? Demon Childe still has his final technique. He hasn't even tapped into his full power yet. This little flame won't last."
"No." Tian Xu turned, his tone firmer. "He is burning his strength. Sword Childe is becoming strength. One decay while the other unfolds."
Rumble!
Dao Wei's sword shimmered black and gold. His veins pulsed with chaos—no longer light and dark in balance, but darkness embodied with flecks of godly radiance. Every breath he took warped the space around him, his presence absorbing the world's silence.
A low hum echoed through the projection.
Every distant observer across mirrored realms and hidden temples heard it—the subtle death knell of the duel's balance.
In the divine realm, mirrors cracked.
In rogue mountain halls, seers shivered.
In the Demon Sect's ancestral cavern, an elder snapped to his feet.
Meanwhile, back in the present moment, Feng backed away from the mirror. "What… what is this?"
Mei's face paled. "T-That's an Immortal's Qi..."
Tian Xu stood slowly, folding his hands behind his back. "This is no longer a duel. This… is divine judgment."
The mirrored image panned to the battlefield. Dao Wei now walked, not rushed, not chased, each step resonating like a funeral drum. His eyes, once calm pools of thought, now glinted with quiet fury, fathomless and divine.
Diteyi stumbled, his body in ruin, spear held like a crutch more than a weapon.
Mei whispered, shaken, "He's… He's going to lose."
Feng said nothing. His breath was caught somewhere between fear and reverence.
Tian Xu's voice was soft. "The one we deemed the underdog… was the storm we failed to name."
The mirror flickered as a sword rose.
Rumble!
The entire screen went dark.