Chapter 34: Burn the Heavens Slowly
The battlefield no longer resembled a valley.
It was a furnace.
Mountains had collapsed. Spirit trees lay charred to their roots. The skies were dyed violet, as if the heavens themselves bled ink.
And still, the chain came.
Seven links remained.
Each one now moved with eerie precision — like it was thinking. Remembering.
Adapting.
---
Ranyi crouched beside a wounded disciple, her blades humming with spirit energy. She looked up at the storm overhead and saw Liun hovering in the air, fire swirling around him.
"He's pushing beyond Soulwalker stage," she murmured.
Yan Wudi stood beside her, arms crossed, his robes scorched.
"No," he said grimly. "He's becoming something else."
---
Within Liun, the Cindervow flame roared.
Aoshen's voice was ragged, strained.
> "Liun… this much power… it's not meant to liberate. It's meant to annihilate. Even I… was afraid of it once."
Liun's eyes flickered gold, then black, then clear again.
"I'm not using it to destroy the world."
> "I'm using it to unchain it."
---
As the third link surged forward, it suddenly stopped.
Hovering just above the ground, its shape began to shimmer.
And then — it changed.
It became a man.
Tall, robed in tattered red, his eyes empty sockets glowing with blue fire.
The chains around him formed a twisted halo. But his face—
Liun's breath caught.
"…Wen Kairo?"
Ranyi's head snapped up.
"That's impossible. He died during the Great Sect Purge…"
Wen Kairo, once a rebel prophet, once a cultivator whose words had nearly toppled the Empire a century ago.
And now — part of the chain.
---
The figure spoke.
> "We were you once, Shen Liun."
His voice was both thunder and memory.
> "We rose. We fought. We bled. And we were bound."
> "This chain is not just metal."
> "It is us. Every failed rebellion. Every voice that rose too soon. Every soul that burned too bright."
Liun's flame flickered with doubt.
> "You became a weapon for the Empire?"
Wen Kairo shook his head.
> "We are the price of defiance."
> "You will join us… unless you end us."
---
The words struck harder than any sword.
Behind him, the valley forces struggled to hold their formations. The earth groaned. Spirit beasts fled. Some lesser cultivators were already collapsing from soul pressure.
Liun hovered, suspended in light and ash.
He clenched his fists.
"I won't just win," he said softly. "I'll free you."
> "Every one of you."
---
He dove into the third link, fire bursting from his shoulders.
The spectral Wen Kairo met him mid-air, their fists clashing like twin suns colliding.
Memories tore open.
Liun saw fragments — a boy reciting forbidden scriptures, an old man cradling his dying daughter as the Empire's enforcers burned their village, a girl leaping from a cliff rather than wear a slave collar.
He screamed through it.
Burned through it.
> "You weren't failures," he whispered.
> "You were warnings."
With a final cry, he slammed his palm into Kairo's chest.
> "Ashen Verdict: Hearts Unbound."
The third link cracked.
Then shattered into stardust.
---
For a moment, there was quiet.
Three down.
Six to go.
But now… he knew what he was really fighting.
Not weapons.
Not soldiers.
Legacies.
---
Back at the camp, the old scrollkeeper — the man who once wrote the original Ashen Verdict — knelt before the broken chain fragments.
He placed one hand on the dust.
And wept.
"These were my brothers," he whispered.
Ning'er knelt beside him. "Can they be saved?"
He looked to the sky.
"I don't know. But he's trying."
---
In the distance, the fourth and fifth links began to merge.
They pulsed with red light.
A massive figure emerged.
Clad in bronze armor, bearing a great blade of bone.
And carved on his chest was a sigil none dared utter aloud.
> The First Rebel.
> The man who tried to slay the Emperor ten thousand years ago.
> The man whose name had been erased from history.
---
Liun turned to face the growing storm.
His flames dimmed for just a breath.
Not in fear.
In respect.
> "If I fall to you," he said, "let it be the end of all chains."
He drew a burning line in the air.
His voice was steady. Cold. Determined.
> "But if I stand… you'll burn with me."
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