202 Death Throes

When the explosion began, it didn’t start as a thunderclap. It came as a low, droning hum. It became a tremor that crawled beneath my skin. Then came the flash. The ground beneath New Willow ruptured like a festering wound, veins of qi-laced fire erupting in coordinated bursts. Each pulse of destruction set off the next. The sky turned a blinding orange, and Ezekiel moved… his skeletal form expanding, wings arching in front of me like the last desperate gesture of a dying sentinel. The blasts didn’t stop at one; they rippled in a chained chorus, the explosions continuous for several seconds. It was as if the village itself had detonated all at once, each charge set to collapse, burn, and annihilate everything that once stood for safety.

When the final echo of destruction faded, silence took hold, a suffocating stillness broken only by the sound of crackling embers. My legs gave out, and I collapsed on my knees, half of my body seared black. The scent of scorched flesh and burnt wood lingered in my nose. Ezekiel clung to form, barely… his ribcage shattered, most of his wings dissolved into ash. Only the spectral remains of his spine shimmered faintly behind me. We were both barely alive. Or, in his case, barely un-dead.

New Willow was no more. What remained were fragments of stone, splinters of timber smoldering in heaps, and twisted bodies entangled in grotesque shapes. A breeze carried the stench of char, sulfur, and rot. I gripped my sword for balance, my skin still sizzling in places, my lips dry and peeling. If this were a game, I might have leveled up for killing so many enemies in one go. Instead, I just felt hollow. This wasn’t victory. This was attrition in its rawest, bloodiest form.

Then I saw him emerge from the heart of the ruins.

The Yama King stood among the ashes, his golden robes long reduced to dust, revealing a scorched, skeletal frame. His skin was gone, melted off by the blaze. What remained was charred bone, cracked and blackened, showing hints of his former grandeur in the way his spine stood upright and defiant. His four ghoul guards, those once-mighty Grand Masters, were nowhere to be seen. Their power and posturing had turned into so much debris under my feet.

But of course, it wasn’t that simple.

The Yama King raised his hand with eerie calm. Then, like a serpent shedding its skin, he stripped the rest of himself bare… flesh, or what remained of it, peeling off in writhing coils of ash and blood. He wasn’t dying. No, he was changing.

“Look,” I muttered inside my head, speaking to Jue Bu. “A fellow boner. Maybe the two of you can bone together.”

“This is a serious situation,” Jue Bu grumbled, bone-dry in tone. “Are you really fine with continuing your quips?”

“It shows just how unserious the situation is,” I replied flatly, even as I clutched my side, praying my organs stayed where they belonged. “I am going to win, just you watch…”

“You’re insufferable,” he groaned.

Ignoring him, I pressed my palm to my chest and invoked the light. “Blessed Regeneration. Great Cure.” A warm sensation surged through me, and my skin began to knit together slowly, flaking away charred flesh and revealing red, angry tissue underneath. It wasn’t comfortable, but it was progress. I would need every ounce of strength for what came next.

The Yama King’s scream tore through the air like a banshee’s dirge. “MARVELOUSLY DONE!” he bellowed, his voice no longer that of a human. “YOU’VE DONE ONE THING FEW RARELY SUCCEED TO DO, AND THAT IS TO PISS ME OFF!”

Qi swirled around him, violent and fetid. Dead tissue, insects, worms… flesh that should’ve stayed buried… coalesced into a swirling storm. The Yama King’s body regenerated from his fingertip up, sinew forming over bone, skin dark and rubbery, sagging and cracked. His new form was a grotesque parody of life, somewhere between zombie and god. His eyes were voids, his face sunken, his nose completely gone. Whatever this was, it wasn’t rebirth… it was corruption personified.

A smarter man might’ve tried to stop the transformation early, but I was still healing. I needed time, and time was never free.

I continued to spam healing spells like a desperate gambler throwing coins into a cursed well. “Cure. Great Cure. Sacred Mending.” My strength trickled back, but slowly. Too slowly.

When the Yama King’s transformation finally finished, what stood before me could barely be called human. He was a black mass of rotting meat in the shape of a man, taller than before, broader, and almost grotesquely regal. His wings, forged from countless splintered bones, jutted from his back like knives. They dripped with green pus, sizzled where they touched the air. His head bore a white crown, delicate and cruel, made entirely of polished skull fragments. Within his hollow sockets, two green orbs burned like twin will-o’-wisps on crack.

This was no longer a mere cultivator. This was something… different.

Something wrong.

And I was supposed to fight that thing.

I gritted my teeth. “Right,” I muttered under my breath. “This is going to suck.”

Not for me, though.

I stood up with all the ceremony I could muster, brushing ash from my face, and leveled my sword toward the grotesque king of rot and bone. The blade hummed slightly with residual qi, as if it, too, recognized the finality of the moment. I braced myself for a dramatic charge.

Then the sword crumbled into dust.

The blade gave way with a brittle snap, fragmenting midair like glass struck by a hammer. Splinters of sacred steel scattered into the wind. For a second, I stared at the hilt in my hand, dumbfounded.

“Well,” I muttered to no one in particular, “so much for acting cool.”

The Yama King didn’t laugh. He watched me through the twin orbs of viridescent flame in his hollow sockets, expression unreadable on his eyeless, noseless, waxy skull.

“Any last words, Da Wei?” he asked, his voice like oil poured over broken glass

I coughed into my palm, trying to clear the ash from my lungs. “Yo mama must be sad,” I said flatly.

“Your irreverence in the face of death is… astounding.”

“I get that a lot.”

He circled slightly, the bone-scattered wings on his back stretching wide and trembling with unholy power. “Your trap was clever. A masterpiece of desperation. But desperate nonetheless. You knew you were doomed from the start. The explosion, the strange weapons, the misdirections… In the end, it was just a man buying time against the tide.”

While we talked, I fed my dwindling lifespan into Ezekiel or what remained of him. His wings, once fraying, now shimmered faintly again. I didn’t speak. I let the silence bait the Yama King into his own arrogance.

The Yama King’s wings beat once, and in a single soundless instant, he closed the distance.

In that same breath, I cast Compel Duel and Designate Holy Enemy. My words cracked reality for a second. A golden halo circled the Yama King’s head, followed by a reversed red cross that hung like a divine sentence over him. The moment it landed, Ezekiel’s form flared, his wings no longer skeletal, but feathery, resplendent and renewed, brimming with the light I poured into him.

The Yama King snarled and conjured his weapon… a jagged, obsidian scythe with an arc wide enough to cleave anything in its path and infect it with death. He swung, and I saw death bloom at its edge.

And then Wen Yuhan appeared behind me.

I didn’t hesitate. “Castling.” In that flicker of time, we swapped places. Her robes fluttered where I had stood, her stance sure and unflinching. My voice echoed in Jue Bu’s skull. “I really hope I don’t regret this.”

“That makes two of us,” he sighed.

I placed my palm against her back and activated Divine Possession. It cost me a lot… a good chunk of my lifespan gone in a breath… but her body shimmered with divine light, and I slipped into her form like falling into a dream. Her memories… vivid, boundless, filled with scents, sights, and secrets… sought to overwhelm me, but I resisted. This wasn’t the time to unravel her mysteries. I had a job to finish.

“I will trust you,” came Wen Yuhan’s voice, echoing in my skull now. “My fate is yours. Don’t waste it.”

“Leave it to me.”

“Then take my Destiny-Seeking Eyes. See through the filth.”

A surge of qi erupted from her dantian. My senses exploded outward… sight, sound, and sensation multiplied. Everything sharpened. I could feel the sickened heartbeat of the Yama King, the exact timing of his breathless rage, the microscopic twitches in his decaying muscles.

My limbs were leaner than I was used to, my center of gravity lighter. Wen Yuhan’s body moved like silk, with no wasted motion, and every step was balanced. I performed Flash Step, vanishing from the spot, and reappeared directly behind the Yama King. We were back-to-back.

I felt danger swell behind me.

I ducked low. The scythe hissed overhead, barely missing my skull. Before he could pivot, Ezekiel’s hand gripped my waist and lifted me away like a phantom knight sweeping up his ward. We soared backward as the Yama King lunged in pursuit.

I waited until the last possible moment. Then I launched Zealot’s Stride, turning in mid-air and reappearing behind him again. This time, I grabbed him, arms locked around his waist, his necrotic skin burning through parts of Wen Yuhan’s robes. Pain licked across my hands and arms, but I held tight.

“Blessed Regeneration. Armor of the Indomitable. Shield of the Eternal.” I stacked blessings on blessings, forcing divine energy to contain the backlash of the contact. I clenched tighter, denying him movement.

“Why so intimate, Wen Yuhan?” the Yama King sneered, attempting mockery even as his arms spasmed in resistance. “I know your eccentricities, your weird little words and dances, but this is a bit much, no?”

I leaned forward and whispered into his non-ear. “I’m not Wen Yuhan.”

For the first time, the Yama King stiffened.

“No,” he growled. “No. One of the Seven Sages would never… You—you let him—”

“Believe it,” I said grimly.

His aura flared with a furious green glow, burning with rage and disbelief.

I smiled despite the searing pain.

The Yama King’s aura faltered, no longer the suffocating tide of necrotic malice it had once been. I held him locked in place with Divine Might, arms coiled around his putrid torso, the holy spells still clinging to my borrowed limbs like armor. The stink of him… of burnt rot, old metal, and something deeper, something ancient… fought with every breath I took. Still, I didn’t let go.

He squirmed in my grip, his voice barely a rasp, “What… what’s happening to me?”

I almost felt sorry for him. Almost.

“It’s called Compel Duel,” I replied evenly, tightening my arms just enough to make him squirm. “It’s a crowd control ability I cast from my main body. The effect is simple: you're compelled to fight the caster… And where is that ‘caster’ right now? Far away from here!”

His scythe clattered to the ground, wings twitching erratically. The mark above his head, the red, upside-down cross, and the golden halo, continued to shine faintly, pulsing with a divine rhythm. “Penalties,” I added. “Your stats drop, your aura weakens. And the farther the ‘caster’ gets, the worse it becomes for you.”

That part wasn’t entirely a lie. The catch was, the skill would cancel if he were attacked by someone else… or if I accidentally hurt him in this situation. That was the risk. Ezekiel must’ve been dragging my body as far away as possible, racing across the mountains and clouds like a desperate courier on fire. I just needed to hold out a little longer.

The Yama King’s power frayed visibly. His jagged wings snapped off in pieces, brittle bone flaking like ash. His oily black skin cracked and crumbled, revealing dry sinew beneath. His flames dimmed in his hollow sockets until they were more ember than fire.

And then I saw it. Through Wen Yuhan’s Destiny Seeking Eyes, I watched as his inner qi spiraled violently inward… he was going to blow himself up. Desperation bled from every pore of his decaying frame.

“He’s going to escape,” Wen Yuhan’s voice echoed inside me, clear and grim. “He always keeps a reserve body. He can sever the soul and flee through death. That’s how he’s survived every time. Moreover, his Spirit Mystery realm allows his body to carry the weight of hundreds of thousands of souls. He uses them as buffers, hosts… and fuel.”

“Then I need access to quintessence.”

“I have little left,” she said. “But I’ll give you what I can.”

I reached inward, drawing on the strange light bleeding from her dantian… a glimmering, ethereal force different from qi or divine magic. It was denser, more primal, something I could feel resonate in my bones. I pulled.

The Yama King burst.

Gore erupted in every direction, covering me in necrotic viscera. Blight raced across my limbs, carrying curses, fevers, soul rot… ailments designed to fell armies. Wen Yuhan moved fast, her spiritual sense flooding the body we shared, washing away the worst of it. While she worked, I gathered the quintessence and shouted, “Divine Word: Raise.”

The body before me twitched, then stood upright… fresh, unblemished, and horrifyingly whole. The Yama King stared down at his own limbs in disbelief. But his aura was dim. The Compel Duel still clung to him, sapping him of power even in this new form.

He dropped to his knees with a thud, falling onto his rear like a child caught stealing.

“Please… please don’t,” he whispered, voice trembling. “She’s using you. Wen Yuhan—she’ll discard you the moment she’s done. Don’t let her manipulate you like she does everyone else. I’ve seen what she does to those she ‘trusts’…”

“He lies,” Wen Yuhan cut in sharply, her voice steel. “He’ll say anything to live. He’s pathetic. Don’t listen.”

I wasn’t listening anyway.

The ground cracked beneath our feet. Ghostly claws burst upward, dragging themselves free… souls malformed, mutated into wraiths and shrieking horrors. The Yama King’s soul magic writhed beneath the surface, preparing something large and wrong.

“Don’t let him use his Immortal Art!” Wen Yuhan warned. “He’s close!”

It was time.

The inverted cross still hovered over him… Designate Holy Enemy. I drew deeply from the quintessence flowing through Wen Yuhan and roared, “Holy Sword!”

The sword manifested in my hand, a blade forged from light and will, crystalline and searing, humming with divine resonance. It pulsed in tune with my heartbeat. I cast Exorcise, chaining it with Wen Yuhan’s Destiny Seeking Eyes and my own Divine Sense to locate the core of his soul.

His body convulsed violently. Black froth spilled from his lips. A putrid shape tore free from his chest… a twisted soul sewn together by thousands of lesser ones, a monstrous abomination with no face but unmistakably him. Its form was writhing, bloated, seeping foulness.

It was… Tainted.

I reached forward and grabbed it by the throat.

He shrieked, his voice both human and otherworldly. “I’ll take you with me! IF I DIE—YOU’RE COMING TOO! IMMORTAL ART—KING OF THE UNDERWORLD!”

The entire world trembled.

A rift split open beneath us. Evil poured out like a tide… vengeful spirits, bone dragons, banshees, and cursed monks. The sky turned black. My Compel Duel had ended, but the reversed cross still marked him.

“I don’t think so, buddy,” I muttered.

I brought the Holy Sword down, divine energy screaming through the blade, slicing through the soul like it was made of rotten silk. The Yama King’s screech shattered the air. Light engulfed him, searing away his corruption, his schemes, his ambitions… everything!

When the glow faded, there was nothing left.

Just silence, the stench of ash, and a grave big enough to swallow an empire.