Chapter 99: The Path to Blood

The wind was screaming the day I lost everything.

Sun Zhe… was gone. I never even found his body. One moment he was standing there, defying a tide of cowards for my sake. The next, silence. The kind that never leaves your ears again.

I wandered for days, not because I was lost, but because I didn't know what to do with the man I had become. Grief doesn't have a direction. It's just a storm, waiting for a place to crash.

There was only one person left I thought might believe me.

Mo Xuan.

He was my brother in all but name. A sage in his own right. He never bent the knee to any sect. Like me, he walked his own path. I thought that he would understand.

I found him in that pocket realm of his, still, serene, detached from the world.

When I told him everything, I expected outrage. I expected fury on my behalf.

What I got was silence.

"I've heard the accusations," he said. "I didn't want to believe them."

I told him they were lies.

He looked me in the eye, and asked, "Is any of it true?"

That question hit harder than any sword.

I asked if he thought I was capable of those things. Do you know what he said, Han?

"I think you're walking toward a cliff. And if you don't stop, you'll fall."

He told me to disappear. To give up. To change my name and live out my days in obscurity.

That's when I knew.

I'd already lost him, too.

So I walked away.

I kept walking. Through dust storms. Forgotten valleys. Places where even Qi was thin.

And deep in the bones of the world, in the skeleton of a temple that hadn't seen worship in ten thousand years, I found it.

The sealed texts.

They weren't just forbidden. They were hidden by people who knew they were dangerous.

The Blood Soul Essence wasn't a legend. It was real. A molten vortex sealed in an urn, buried under the roots of a dead World Tree.

It was waiting for me.

It whispered.

"You know loss. You know injustice. I offer you more than comfort. I offer clarity."

I resisted.

"You were only a man. You can be more," it said.

So I placed my hands on the urn.

And I broke the seal.

It changed me.

The essence surged into me like wildfire through dry grass. I screamed until my throat bled. Until I didn't know what time was anymore. Until I stopped being Ren Wuji.

And something else opened its eyes.

The Dragon Cloak Technique… I had found the manual of it in the ancient texts, but it had always eluded understanding. With the Blood Soul Essence inside me, it came alive. Dragon tattoos appeared on my skin. My Qi ignited. My body became the weapon my enemies had always feared I might one day become.

I didn't return to the world quietly, I went straight to the Divine Fist Sect.

Wei Duan's bastion of hypocrisy. His palace of pretense. I stood at the gates not as a petitioner or challenger, but as a sentence waiting to be carried out.

He sent his disciples to meet me.

I sent them back in pieces.

They thought they were prepared. They thought I was still just a man—wounded, maybe angry, but mortal.

They didn't understand what the Blood Soul had done to me. What it had made me capable of.

Their formations crumbled. Their talismans burned to ash before they left their scrolls. Their golden-robed elders tried to bind me with righteous light—but I had become the void between stars. Their laws meant nothing to me now.

I walked through their sect like a flame through dry grass.

I didn't spare Wei Duan.

I didn't even let him beg.

His bones still smolder beneath the ruins of his hall, and I buried his bloodline with him.

But I wasn't done.

No. The Righteous Alliance had declared me an enemy. They had put a bounty on my name, written it in the tongues of seven sects and sealed it with false virtue.

So I answered them.

Each sect that stood behind Wei Duan. Each elder that nodded along. Each voice that remained silent when the lies were told—one by one, I hunted them.

Some I cut down in open combat.

Some I shattered from the shadows.

Others… I made examples of.

The skies turned red in my wake. And they began to whisper a new name.

The Blood Demon.

They didn't know it was mine.

But I let them fear it. I let it grow.

Because I wasn't seeking justice anymore, Han.

I was seeking balance.

And for every lie they carved into history, I gave them a truth they couldn't erase—etched in blood, fire, and bone.

Now the world remembers me as a demon.

That's fine.

Because a demon doesn't need permission, it takes what it is owed.

When the sects fell silent, when their high towers crumbled, it wasn't Wei Duan's allies who stood against me in the end.

It was Mo Xuan.

He came to me not as a friend, but as a warden.

He had gathered the remnants of the righteous alliance—those still powerful, still terrified—and crafted something new. Something designed not to destroy me… but to bind me.

He created the Five Rings.

Each one forged with celestial law and elemental balance, their energies entwined to open the portal to this void realm. He recruited five guardians, masters of the five elements, each chosen to hold one ring.

He told the cultivation world that it was to protect them from me.

But I knew it was penance.

He couldn't kill me. He didn't want to.

So instead, he did the one thing worse.

He chained me.

This place, the Void Realm, is not natural. Mo Xuan built it. He used the foundations of the Celestial Eclipse realm—his masterwork of space, time, and suppression—to design this realm.

He forged this Cliff of Regrets with the same hands that once wrote poems about justice. And he anchored it with six chains of law-bound light, each inscribed with his seal.

These chains suppress my Qi. Every moment I exist here, my power is dimmed. I can't use the Dragon Cloak Technique at its full power. Likewise for all my techniques.

I've spent years staring into this sky of broken stars, knowing that my prison was built by the one man who once called me brother.

But I didn't surrender.

Even as the chains burned my soul, I did not give up.

If he could forge a prison to hold me, then I could forge a key to undo it.

So I created the pendant in the same fashion that he created the Celestial Eclipse Manual.

It is not simply a tool. It is my will, encoded into artifact form. A living talisman tied to my soul, always searching for someone who could succeed where others failed.

And I waited.

I watched.

Hundreds came.

Disciples, outcasts, madmen, dreamers. Some were bold. Others clever. Some even reached the chamber of echoes. But they all failed.

They failed and died in the pendant's realm.

But you…

You made it, you passed all the trials.

And now here you stand.

You were not chosen by fate, Han Long.

You were chosen by me.

And now I ask you…

Will you set me free?