The Bishop’s fury had no voice, yet it rang through the cavern like a bell struck without end.
The attacks he had unleashed should have ended it. The intruders should have been scattered like insects before fire, their bones left shattered upon the lakebed while he returned to his true task: the vigil over the Phoenix Tears, the final hour of perfection. But when the smoke cleared, they still stood, bloodied and defiant.
And the child still breathed.
'He is not what he appears. And if left unchallenged, he will be a thorn in our god’s path.'
The boy the Envoy had whispered of, moved within their ranks like a spark refusing to die in the wind. Each second that he lived was a blasphemy. Each strike of his fist, each flare of unnatural flame, was a desecration against centuries of devotion. The Bloodsoul Bloom was sacred, a vessel meant for devotion and sacrifice. And yet here it was, clinging to a human host, devouring his qi, feeding his strength to another. Perverted. Defiled. Mockery given form. Worse still, it worked. With every clash, the boy’s aura grew thicker, sharper, brighter; as though nourished by the Bishop’s very hatred.
It should have been simple. His fist should have reduced the boy to ash. His palm should have collapsed his chest. Instead, every strike met interference.
The cripple with the hookswords appeared where death should have landed, his broken body wielding curved steel imbued with the power of hurricanes. The swordsman in white and green, turned aside blow after blow with infuriating grace, diverting the killing edge by the width of a hair. The two in purple robes moved as one, weaving their arts together to blunt his techniques before they could land, pushing him into unfavorable positions.
And always, the pests.
The serpent darting low, scales flashing like silver lightning, striking at his legs, his arms, his sides. The butterfly above, wings cutting arcs of blue radiance that tore at his vision, his concentration, his every attempt to deliver a decisive strike. They swarmed him without end, dragging his attention in a dozen directions until there was no clean path to crush the ones who mattered.
His rage deepened. His aura thundered.
And yet—
They did not falter. Each exchange should have broken them further. Each impact should have slowed their movements, dulled their reactions, widened the gaps in their defense. Instead, the opposite unfolded. The longer the battle dragged on, the more cohesive they became. The more precise.
The boy remained at the center of it.
Not striking the hardest, but simply enduring. With every failed killing blow, with every technique forced aside or blunted, the child’s presence swelled; subtle at first, then undeniable. His aura thickened like blood congealing around a wound, brightened by energy that was not his own.
Understanding crept in, slow and poisonous.
The boy was feeding on him.
The Bloodsoul Bloom did not merely cling to the boy, it drank. Each clash siphoned remnants of the Bishop’s unleashed power, each wasted strike bleeding qi into the boy’s orbit, where it was seized, refined, and returned to the pests sheltering around him. The longer the Bishop pressed, the more strength he poured into their hands.
A blasphemous cycle.
The conclusion settled like frost in his thoughts.
'Very well.'
His gaze lifted to the blue-winged pest harrying his sight. The butterfly spirit hung for a fraction too long in the air, wings flaring as she gathered herself for another disruptive pass.
The Bishop shifted his stance. Power condensed, narrow and absolute. His palm rose, qi collapsing inward until the air screamed under the pressure.
'This one would end cleanly.'
"NO!"
Flames roared.
It struck from below in a violent surge of color; gold shot through with blackened red, bright enough to scar the eye. The boy stood between them, one arm raised, fire spilling from him in a torrent that had lost all pretense of restraint.
The Bloodsoul Bloom on his shoulder convulsed.
Its tendrils dug deeper into the boy’s flesh, drinking greedily as the Bishop’s condensed strike bled power into the flames. Qi vanished into the inferno, devoured, twisted—claimed—until the fire burned with a hunger that was not human.
The Bishop’s attack unraveled before it pierced the butterfly spirit's heart. The boy did not retreat. He burned brighter. Then the truth locked into place, final and undeniable. The others were nuisances. Delays. Distractions.
But the boy was the mouth of the cycle.
And so long as he stood, every blow would feed him.
My body felt like it was splitting apart at the seams. As soon as his gaze lifted toward Tianyi, I threw myself into the path of his attack.
Every motion came with a tearing sensation, as though my muscles were unraveling thread by thread. The Dawnsoul Bloom coiled tighter around me, tendrils burrowing into my skin. It constricted when I faltered, loosened when I pushed forward—keeping me upright through sheer parasitic instinct, feeding on me even as it kept me alive. My meridians burned. Demonic qi poured into them in greedy torrents, siphoned from the Bishop’s own eruptions and converted into something my body barely recognized as usable. Every breath I dragged in tasted like iron and ash.
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I knew that we wouldn't last much longer.
The Bishop was bleeding, his flesh torn, his robes shredded; but he was not broken. Despite our best efforts, our attacks only resulted in surface-level cuts. And unless we changed something, we'd be the one to fall first. That truth thrummed through the lakebed louder than the thunder of qi. With every moment the Dawnsoul Bloom had to feast on the Bishop's energy, the scales of battle creaked, grain by grain, away from our deaths. It was not spoken, yet every one of us understood it instinctively.
'I was the key.'
And so, without words, they formed around me. Yong Jin unfurled his cyclone, a storm given shape. Blades of wind screamed against stone, diverting the Bishop’s wild swings just enough to carve me a pocket of air, a heartbeat of breathing room. The gale was meant to protect, to buy me space I couldn’t claim on my own.
Tian Zhan hurled himself forward with reckless brilliance. His cheek split open under a backhand, blood streaking across his face, but his eagle-like eyes burned with a clarity I’d never seen before. His movements shifted. Rough edges smoothed. Mistakes corrected themselves mid-strike. It was as if the fight itself was remaking him, dragging him into a state beyond talent or training. Flow.
The Bishop snarled as Tian Zhan’s fist hammered his jaw sideways. He was getting weaker. Strikes that would’ve left him unscratched now left their marks.
I staggered forward, every nerve on fire, my fists trembling not from fear but from the strain of holding together a body that wanted to collapse. The Bloom pulsed against my shoulder, ravenous, insistent—reminding me that this was my moment.
That I had to be the one to end this.
Ren Zhi’s hooks flickered in arcs of steel, their crescent edges weaving a net around the Bishop’s limbs. For the barest fraction of a breath, they bound wrists and ankles, dragging his movements off rhythm, just long enough for another blow to land. Shaotian Ye’s sword never left my sightline, intercepting black lances of qi that would have annihilated us whole. His blade became a wall, every motion a deflection that turned fatal strikes into glancing blows.
Tianyi’s wings burst wide, each sweep scattering radiant shards that cut through the gloom and revitalizing us. Windy’s coils lashed out with brutal precision, his body intercepting cultists who had slipped past the coalition’s line in desperate flanking maneuvers., sparing us from attacks we could not afford to split focus toward.
Each contribution was small. Insignificant, even, when weighed against the immensity of what pressed against us. A half-second stolen here. A single strike landed there. A flash of light that drew the Bishop’s eyes just a hair off course. But together those fragments aligned, like strands of a web woven around prey too vast for any one hunter to fell. We kept one another alive, as if all had surrendered their individual wills to a single, unspoken purpose.
And at the center of it all, I drew my strength inward.
The Dawnsoul Bloom writhed against me, every tendril a reminder of what I was risking. My body felt like a cracked vessel straining against collapse, every motion threatening to split me open from the inside out. Demonic qi burned through me, too sharp, too wild. It wasn’t meant for me. It was poison, power, and sustenance all at once.
But it held me together.
It fed me the Bishop's own essence, pulling tighter with every heartbeat. My blood boiled, my bones screamed, yet still I stood. My vision blurred, the edges of the cavern running like wet ink. My heartbeat hammered so loud it drowned the clash of steel and qi.
My legs bent. I leapt.
The world dropped away beneath me, allies and enemies alike shrinking into blurred fragments of light and shadow. For a heartbeat, the suffocating battlefield shrunk underneath me, and all that existed was my body straining against its own limits.
I raised my leg high, every tendon screaming, every vein alight with flame. The Rooted Banyan Stance unfurled within me, roots digging through marrow and muscle alike, locking me into the immovable solidity of the earth even as I hung in the air. The paradox of it nearly broke me apart; immovable yet descending.
The words became a roar, not with my throat but with every inch of me, with every tendon and bone straining to hold together against impossible weight.
FIGHT!
The Dawnsoul’s tendrils constricted, drawing my cracked vessel into cohesion for one final moment. Fire burst through my limbs, qi igniting until my entire body was a torch set to fall.
I came down.
The Bishop braced, his body hardening like forged steel, black qi wreathing him in a shroud of annihilation. His stance promised inevitability: no strike would pierce him, no flame would mar him, no boy would unmake him.
But I had anticipated this.
The instant my heel connected with his arms, I rooted. My stance sank deep. Taking the blow of his stolen energy head on, it took less than a heartbeat for the Bishop’s counterstrike to surge into me like a flood meant to tear me apart. Yet instead of resisting, I let it in. I drew it down, through my bones, through the Dawnsoul’s parasitic grip, forcing his strength into the same vessel he sought to shatter. My body split—ribs cracking, skin tearing, blood flooding my mouth—but the Bloom bound me tighter, stitching me together with its writhing tendrils, a grotesque imitation of wholeness supported by the very attack that tried to unmake me.
And in that moment, the world slowed.
I saw everything in fragments of perfect clarity. Shaotian Ye’s sword raised not for himself, but angled subtly to deflect the next blast away from me. Yong Jin’s cyclone turning, every current pulling the Bishop’s focus an inch aside. Ren Zhi’s hooks, bent and battered, glinting faintly as they bound the Bishop’s wrist long enough for a heartbeat of stillness. Tian Zhan’s fist, broken and swollen, crashing against the Bishop’s sternum in reckless defiance. Tianyi’s light falling like a star across the Bishop’s vision, Windy’s scales striking at the tendon of his leg.
And me.
I remembered Xu Ziqing’s words on that rain-soaked day in Gentle Wind, when he spoke of how he had survived the swarm at Qingmu: when body, mind, and world align in perfect resonance, even the weakest strike becomes something transcendent. Where his sword strike became able to rend cultists in a single strike.
True Alignment.
And now, against this impossible enemy, in this moment between annihilation and resolve, I felt it.
My fractured body no longer fought against itself. Every tendon, every vein, every breath synced into a single rhythm. My flame blazed with me. The Dawnsoul’s parasitic hunger no longer drained me, it became my armor, my marrow, my skin. The world bent into a singular, unbearable focus.
I threw a punch. The most perfect strike I'd ever thrown in my life. It was something given, something fleeting, like lightning caught between breaths.
My fist met his sternum.
And for the first time, the Bishop reeled.
The battlefield rang with the impact, stone cracking as shockwaves tore outward. His body, so unyielding that it had mocked every other strike, bent. Black qi screamed away from him in waves, the sputtering as though smothered by the force. His feet slid across the blood-slick floor, gouging trenches where none had been before.
A sound escaped him—a ragged exhale, the sound of something immense forced to acknowledge pain.
My vision swam, blood roaring in my ears, my body fracturing all over again now that the moment was gone. But even through the agony, even through the Bloom’s tightening grip as it tried to hold me together, I knew the truth.
I was dust before him.
But dust, given time, can accumulate into a mountain.
