171 The Avenger

By the seventeenth iteration, I stopped pretending this 'time loop' was a gift. It wasn’t a divine chance to correct my mistakes or a clever puzzle left by some benevolent overseer. No, this was a trap. A loop forged not in mercy, but malice. Its purpose wasn’t to save anyone. It was to wear me down until I shattered: mind, body, and soul.

Every time I tried something new, the outcome twisted like a blade in my gut. If I ignored Shan Dian completely and walked the long way around, everyone turned into black stone sculptures. No exceptions. Even the stones screamed sometimes, at least in the first few loops, before I lost the capacity to feel surprise.

If I confronted her directly, she’d self-destruct. I wasn’t even speaking yet, just standing there trying to talk things out, and her Qi would spiral inward like a collapsing star. The next moment, we were in a courtyard full of charred corpses and statues.

Divine Possession bought me a few seconds. I could calm her down, step into her memories, even feel her resolve start to crack… but every time I did, the mysterious entity would descend into my body. That thing wasn’t just watching. It was waiting. Possession created a bridge, and it took full advantage of that link to hijack me. Once it had a foothold, it pulled itself through like a rat forcing its way into a warm house.

“And here I was having a wishful thinking Jue Bu or Eldritch-chan would magically save me…”

I tried clever tricks. Divine Word: Rest was supposed to soothe the soul and put one’s turmoil to sleep. The last time I cast it on Shan Dian, she exploded into this gelatinous gray sludge that stank like rotten vinegar, and the entire Summit Hall immediately crystallized into obsidian nightmares.

I even tried bribing her attendant, cornering her in the preparation chambers, but she was just as lost as I was. Her memories rewound with mine, and she forgot every single iteration. Nothing stuck.

Now it was the seventeenth round. I was inside Shan Dian again, trying to hold off the thing wearing my face. The Summit Hall looked like a battlefield… the ceiling cracked open like a dried scab, pillars split in half, broken stone tiles, and dead bodies littering the floor. A few of them were still warm. Most were not.

I saw Shouquan standing, then blinking mid-motion before freezing in place, turned to coal-black stone. Tian En’s robes fluttered once before she followed suit. Her face was stuck in a look of absolute contempt. Even in death, she managed to judge me.

“I will slaughter you,” roared Yi Qiu, blood already soaking his chest.

“A bad dog needs punishment,” my possessed body replied with a grin too clean and too rehearsed. He brought Silver Steel down with theatrical precision, imbued with Heavenly Punishment. The blade sang through the air, and Yi Qiu’s torso split clean from his hips. His entrails flopped out like butchered meat, still steaming.

“Just a bit more,” said the entity with my voice, as he turned his eyes on me.

My legs gave out. Shan Dian’s legs, rather. I fell to my knees. My breathing hitched as I tried to form a lightning spell, but the pain inside her body, the grief, and the broken threads of her will… I couldn’t hold it all together.

“When your soul is broken,” the entity continued, stepping across the debris, “and your faith just as dead… I will take what I want. Your legacy. Your knowledge. And then, you will tell me where Earth is.”

I coughed up blood. It spilled out of Shan Dian’s lips and onto her lap, the warmth of it real enough to make me gag.

“Fuck you,” I rasped, voice barely audible over the groaning timbers of the collapsing hall.

The entity tilted his head slightly. “Let me enlighten you.”

In the blink of an eye, he stood before me. I looked up into my own face, smug and bright-eyed like I’d just finished a song I loved. Damn, I really was handsome. In the worst possible way.

Without a word, he flicked my forehead.

It felt like being shattered from the inside. Everything went white. Then black.

And then I was back.

The gate loomed ahead, same as always. I could feel the weight of the 17 deaths in my bones, even if nothing physical remained. My hands were my own again, for now.

Tao Long was beside me, ever the statue of composure.

“Lord Wei,” he said, tilting his head slightly, “you look distracted. Is there a problem?”

I didn’t answer right away. I stared at the familiar gate, the unmoved guards, the clean tiles and the untouched world right before the storm. Everything was perfect, except all of this was just one big fat lie.

I rubbed my eyes and muttered under my breath, “Yeah. I’m losing a game I don’t know how to win.”

Tao Long raised an eyebrow. “Excuse me?”

For a moment, I almost laughed. Then I straightened up, cracked my knuckles, and whispered the spell to cast Lion’s Courage again at myself. It didn’t fix anything, but at least it made me feel like I wasn’t entirely hollow.

“Alright,” I said, lifting my chin. “Eighteenth time’s the charm.”

…

Nope. Eighteenth time wasn’t the charm.

If anything, it was the worst one yet.

I managed to avoid petrification this time... not because of some divine insight or careful planning, but because I snapped and cast Judgment Severance mid-loop. It worked. Sort of. The divine ripple burned through the curse. The creeping black stone around my limbs cracked and fell off like eggshells. But then came the cost.

My soul split down the middle like rotting wood.

I collapsed to one knee, breath caught somewhere between a scream and a sob, and before I could even crawl toward help, Shan Dian stepped forward… not as the grieving girl I remembered, but as something else entirely.

There was no grief in her eyes. No fury. Just hunger.

She whispered a technique I didn’t recognize, “Soul Rendering Mandala,” and then reached into my chest. Literally. Her hand passed through bone and flesh like mist, and I felt the tether between my body and spirit snap. The world went white.

So yeah. Eighteen times in, and now I’d died by soul extraction.

Nineteen wasn’t much better.

I decided to play smart. Finally, I tried calling Nongmin using Voice Chat… a move I should’ve thought of earlier. But of course, the world was never that kind.

I reached out. Pushed my will through the spell. Felt the threads of connection stretch across the realm… then hit something solid. Not a wall. Not even a formation. It was like trying to shout through a glacier made of silence.

“Nongmin,” I muttered, eyes closed, teeth clenched. “Come on. Pick up.”

Nothing.

Whatever surrounded the fortress, it wasn’t natural. It wasn’t magical either. It just was. A reality shift that cut off communication as neatly as a scalpel. I tried escaping instead. Fought my way through the western wing. Killed three ‘corrupted’ guards. Used a dozen potions. Just when I saw the outer walls… when freedom looked possible… they came.

Angels. Or at least, things that looked like angels. Wings of molten gold, halos like spinning rings of scripture, voices like fractured bells. There were dozens of them.

It wasn’t the same as the low-level angels I knew….

I fought. Hard! My Paladin Legacy lit up my veins like wildfire, and my Spirit Mystery Realm cultivation turned every strike into a sermon of vengeance. I tore through the first wave.

Then the second wave came.

And Tao Long, suddenly possessed, vacant-eyed, and mechanical… drove a spear through my spine. Nineteen ended with my own light fading from my ribs.

By the twentieth time, I had completely lost it.

No strategy. No restraint. No diplomacy. I activated every buff, downed every potion that wouldn’t instantly kill me, and turned the entire Summit into a battlefield.

I killed Yi Qiu first.

Then Tian En.

Then Shouquan.

Even Shan Dian.

I stood alone in a ruined city with blood on my hands and ash in my throat.

Then time looped again.

Everything rewound.

Again!

As if all I did, every desperate choice, and every kill, meant absolutely nothing.

So, of course, I tried to talk to the bastard.

This time, I possessed Tao Long. His body held together better than most. I used a reinforced spear just to keep upright, leaning on a cracked column as I stared across the hall at the entity wearing my face. Half of the Summit Hall was gone. Again. Torn away by Tao Long’s transformation into a divine dragon moments before. The rest flickered between ruin and illusion… like the world couldn’t decide whether it wanted to end or pretend.

The entity looked at me and smiled.

I hated how good I looked in his skin.

I spat blood onto the floor. “Seriously,” I steadied my breath. “What could a bastard like you want with Earth?”

He laughed. Genuinely. The sound bounced off shattered stone like broken bells.

“Oh, Da Wei,” he said. “Your ignorance is almost charming. Almost.”

“Try me.”

“Fine,” he said. He strolled forward, body loose and casual, like he didn’t just survive Tao Long turning into a mountain-sized dragon two minutes ago. “The ideals you cling to: righteousness, sacrifice, and harmony… they’re relics. Artifacts of a dying design.”

I felt Tao Long’s rage boil under my skin, and I shared it.

“Perfection,” the entity continued, “is flawed in its very conception. Because anything perfect must be whole. And wholeness requires everything. The heavens. The hells. The dead realms. The little blue dot you call Earth. I will take it all, and only then will the design be complete.”

His voice cracked with intensity, but then calmed. As if he had just preached his gospel and found peace in the madness.

“And when that moment comes,” he added, “you’ll thank me for it. You’ll finally understand what it means to be free.”

I didn’t reply.

Because he used Tao Long’s spear and stabbed me straight through the chest.

The pain came quickly. Then nothing.

Death, again.

Loop, again.

And now? I was waking up. Again!

Tao Long stood beside me. The sky was clear. The gates loomed ahead.

“Lord Wei,” he said, brow furrowed. “You looked distracted. Is there a problem?”

Yes. I had a problem.

I had twenty of them.

And none of them made any damn sense.

The loop continued. Every time, it found a new way to punish me. Some days I thought I could get ahead of it… Save a few more lives, shift the sequence by a few minutes, bait a different response… but no matter how clever I tried to be, it always ended the same. Worse, actually. More miserable than the last. A kind of despair that snowballed, iteration after iteration, until even the smallest hope felt like betrayal. I wasn’t just losing. I was being hollowed out.

I tried everything. Once, I coordinated the entire Summit to evacuate, convinced the major sects and roaming cultivators to flee with me the moment I said so, whether it be by brute force or eloquence. We ran. And yet, right as we reached the outer gates, the sky ruptured and a second sun swallowed half the realm.

Another time, I stood on the central dais, tore open my robes like a mad prophet, and screamed, “The Summit is canceled! Go home!”

I could see the doubt in their eyes, the nervous shifting of stances. Then the palace walls cracked open and black flames poured out. Screams filled the hall, and my voice drowned beneath the sound of dying cultivators.

It was madness! I am going crazy!

I even tried warning Shouquan in advance and told him everything I knew… about the loop, the massacre, the stone petrification. He listened, quietly, as if weighing truth against absurdity. And then, right when I thought he might actually intervene, he crumbled. Turned to black stone mid-breath, as if some divine mechanism had marked him for silence.

I wasn’t above desperation. I tried using Divine Possession on him, a last-ditch gamble to merge our thoughts and force a shared understanding. We walked through memories together. I begged him to help me find an answer. But the next iteration, he simply never appeared. His presence was erased, as if the world itself had decided he was too dangerous to be part of the script anymore.

Most of the time, I fought back. I tested every combination I could think of. Skills, items, and even teamed up quite a lot, really, though convincing them was quite challenging… nothing worked. No matter how much power I poured into my fists, how clever my plans were, I couldn’t make a dent. It was like throwing stones at a collapsing mountain. The weight of inevitability always crushed me.

Eventually, I snapped. I cast Divine Possession on every person in the Summit Hall from each iteration, spamming the Ultimate Skill like crazy as I embraced each death.

It was cathartic…

I let myself be drowned in their lives. Their memories, their regrets, and their convictions. Anything, I told myself. There had to be something buried inside them. A hidden variable I missed. A secret pain, a hidden debt, a suppressed memory that would explain this madness.

I started with Tian En. Her life was long, longer than most, and steeped in hardship. I saw her when she was just a mortal girl, before cultivators became common. A time when spiritual energy was scarce and the world was harsher. She met Shouquan when he was still wandering aimlessly, long before anyone called him the Supreme Leader of Ward. He taught her to breathe the light of the heavens and to listen to the silence of the stars. Her cultivation was born from stillness, from carrying loss in her hands like prayer beads. She rose through the Heavenly Temple not because she sought power, but because no one else had survived long enough to stand beside her. Even at her peak, surrounded by reverence, she carried the loneliness of a forgotten era.

Then I lived Yi Qiu’s life. He had fire in his veins and mud on his boots. Born to a crumbling clan, he trained not for legacy, but for vengeance and pride. He wandered from duel to duel, every victory another brick in the temple of his ego. But somewhere along the way, it stopped being about him. He began to protect villages, slay beasts, and fight tyrants. He didn’t become the Alliance Master because of virtue… it was necessity. The people needed someone, and he was simply the last one still standing. He ruled like a warlord but thought like a brother. When his decisions cost the lives of thousands to save tens of thousands more, I felt his heart splinter. He never forgave himself, even as the world called him a hero.

From one cultivator to the next, I lived their stories. Some were kind, others cruel. Some were petty, some noble, some boring as dirt. But none of them were hollow. Even the worst among them had purpose, pain, and a reason to move forward. In their minds, they were all the protagonist. And in those moments, so was I.

Each possession left a residue… emotions not fully mine, and regrets I couldn’t forget. I wept at a child’s grave I never dug. I craved revenge for a sister I never had. I stood before sect leaders and begged for justice in a language I didn’t know how to speak. And still, none of it gave me an answer.

But I wasn’t just looking for an answer anymore. I was trying to understand the weight of what I was trying to save. These weren’t just cultivators with nice robes and long titles. They were lives. Stories. Each of them deserved more than the nightmare we kept waking into.

And yet, something was still missing. A piece of the puzzle that refused to be seen.

And then I reached her—Zai Ai.

I hadn’t known much about her before this. The first time I met her, she didn’t posture or declare her realm. She didn’t need to. Even in the haze of Divine Possession, her soul felt layered, folded a thousand times like the edge of a masterwork blade. Her memory was shorter than most, only a few centuries, but even in that span, she had risen to become one of the best artisans known to the world.

Her memory opened over a ruined realm. I stood beside her, more specter than man, and watched as the sky wept ash over the broken bodies of the dead. Long-eared people with fine-boned faces lay scattered across a blasted land… elven, or something like it, now extinct. The whole scene carried that too-crisp sharpness memories sometimes had, where the silence felt louder than screams. Zai Ai stood at the edge of it all, her expression brittle, and her shoulders shaking. Through Divine Possession, I didn’t just see her pain… I felt it blooming in my chest like thorns. She was crying.

“This was my first time,” she whispered, voice distant even within her own memory. “The first time I joined a Cleanse.”

I didn’t need her to explain what a Cleanse meant.

Zai Ai’s ghost stood beside me, turning her gaze to the bloodied horizon. “And that… was when I met him. Nongmin.”

Her breath hitched slightly, somewhere between a laugh and a sob. “He seduced me, you know. Not with smiles or touches. No. He used ideals. Promises. Said the Temple was rotten, and that I should leave it before it devoured me too. I didn’t know who he really was. I thought… I thought he meant it.”

The memory shifted again. The same ruined realm, but earlier this time. I watched as a younger Zai Ai stood across from Nongmin… except he wasn’t the version I knew. This Nongmin was cold. Still regal, still brilliant, but utterly devoid of warmth. I recognized that look in his eyes. The same one I’d seen when he buried Xin Yune and pretended it didn’t break him.

He didn’t ask Zai Ai to leave the Heavenly Temple. He cornered her. Spoke softly, moved precisely, and painted her into a prison made from her own doubts. “You’ll leave,” he said, “or I’ll make sure the Temple thinks you already have.” And then, without fanfare, he sealed a portion of her cultivation… enough that even at Tenth Realm, she would fall before the others if they turned on her. The seal came with a promise: he’d release it if she left quietly.

I flinched watching it. “What the hell, Nongmin…” I muttered, though the memory couldn’t hear me.

“Such a bastard,” Zai Ai muttered to herself. “A hypocrite. Trying to play savior while twisting knives behind backs. And because I trusted him, I managed to get out...”

The memory jumped again. Time slipped forward like pages turning in a storm. Zai Ai had deserted the Temple. She never returned. Instead, she leaned on the clout of other great powers, the Martial Alliance, the Union, even the Empire, to keep herself safe. Her skills as an artisan brought her relevance. Her status as a Tenth Realm cultivator brought her grudging acceptance. She drifted between factions, always alone, and always guarded.

Another Cleanse came. A different place, different people… mountain dwellers, this time. Their homes were burned, their sacred peaks razed, and their stories dissolved beneath tectonic spells. Terraforming, they called it. Evidence removal, really. The Heavenly Temple had agreed to forget her betrayal if she returned, just once, and contributed to this final act of erasure.

She did. She floated at the edge of the battlefield like a ghost, eyes hollow, heart heavy. She didn’t cast spells. She didn’t give orders. She simply watched. And then, amidst the smoke and cinders, she found a boy.

“I don’t know why I did it,” she said, more to herself than to me. “Maybe guilt. Maybe I just couldn’t bear it anymore. But I took him.”

The boy had survived by hiding beneath the corpse of his older sister. Barely alive. Barely conscious. Zai Ai took him, concealed him in her pocket dimension, and carried him away from that place like smuggling fire from the ashes.

“I named him Mao Xian,” she whispered.

And then time rushed forward again. I watched the boy grow up. Clumsy, wide-eyed, and always asking questions. Zai Ai, awkward in the role of master, softened as he called her shifu, and later, mother. The boy grew into a young man, talented beyond reason, startlingly charismatic, and full of boundless ambition. He started wandering, taking odd jobs, and mapping ruins. His fame spread. His drive became legend.

Eventually, Mao Xian founded the Adventurer’s Guild… not out of greed or hunger for power, but because he needed a structure that could support those like him. Explorers. Seekers. Dreamers. The Guild began as a courier outpost, a shack in the countryside with too much hope and too little funding. But under Mao Xian, it transformed. It dared to chart the unmapped lands and built its legacy not on conquest, but curiosity.

Zai Ai’s memory lingered on him. Not her Cleanses. Not her guilt. Just that boy, standing atop a wind-worn cliff, sketching maps by moonlight with a crooked grin.

“I betrayed my Sect,” she said. “I helped commit sins I can never cleanse. But… I raised him. And for all I’ve done, I think he’s the one thing I don’t regret.”

When the memory faded, I found myself kneeling on the cold stone floor of the Summit Hall, sweat slicked across my back, my heart thundering like a war drum.

So many people here carried blood on their hands. So many wore masks, clutched grudges, and made decisions I could never justify. And yet, they all lived their lives like they mattered. Like they were the center of the story. Like they were the only ones hurting.

“FUUUCK!”

I stared at my main body.

It felt like looking into a mirror that wasn’t quite right. The posture was too stiff, the face too calm, and worst of all, I wasn't the one breathing in that skin.

I was still inside Zai Ai, still buried in her lingering memories and the faded regrets echoing through her soul. I hadn’t expected to find anything more than sorrow and secondhand trauma. But instead, I found him.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” he said, standing there in my body, glaring back at me with eyes that used to be mine.

But it wasn’t an entity. Not in the way I feared. No Eldritch nightmare, no parasite, and no demonic possession pulling the strings. There was never an ‘entity’ to begin with, except the one outside the Hollowed World,

In front of me was just another person. Just a soul. A really clever, and really angry soul. One with too many pent-up feelings and nowhere safe to place them. A soul shaped by rejection, sharpened by grief, and left out to rot in a world that made no space for him.

After what I saw in Zai Ai’s memories… after watching her cradle a broken world, break ties with the Heavenly Temple, take in a child out of guilt, and try to raise hope from the ashes… it made sense.

There was no greater puppetmaster behind all of this. No divine conspiracy to unravel.

Only one question remained, and I already knew the answer.

“How does a Seventh Realm cultivator, someone barely strong enough to be noticed, get invited to the Summit Halls?” I asked quietly. “How does a ‘nobody’ build an entire Guild in under a century, one that dares compete with Sects and Empires?”

He smiled, lazy and crooked. My smile, but crueler.

“Are you Mao Xian?” I asked.

“Cat’s out of the bag, I guess,” he said, shrugging. “Took you long enough.”

My breath caught.

I had braced for an invasion. A takeover. I thought Dave or Jue Bu would have noticed… raged, fought, and screamed to reclaim my body. I thought the Eldritch thing buried deep in me would have devoured him on contact. But none of them had done a damn thing. Not even a flicker of resistance. That frightened me more than I wanted to admit.

“You’re lucky I don’t throw you out myself,” I whispered.

“I’m ‘in’ already,” he said, tapping his temple with a grin. “And your body likes me, Da Wei. We’re not so different.”

“That’s a lie,” I snapped.

“Is it?”

He stepped forward. I couldn’t move.

“You talk about justice like it’s something real,” Mao Xian said. “But we both know what kind of world this is. You’ve seen the Cleanses. You’ve felt what Zai Ai felt. Don’t talk to me about what’s right. You can’t even bring back your friends, unless the old man helps you.”

The words stung. But not because they were wrong.

I stared at him and said softly, “Revenge isn’t the answer. You should know that.”

His expression darkened.

“You think this is about revenge?” he scoffed. “No. Revenge is personal. This is correction. This is what the world needs.”

“And whoever or whatever you’re shaking hands with, they aren’t the answer either.”

His eyes flickered. There was a twitch in the jaw. A sign that I’d touched something he didn’t want touched.

“You’re delusional,” he said. “Still playing hero in a dying play.”

He turned away, but not before offering me a final smirk.

“See you again,” he said.

Then he killed me, together with Zai Ai.

It only took him a single strike…