It felt as if the world was ending. In fact, it reminded Bai Ning of the time four Nascent Soul cultivators had clashed over the gui, a distant battle she had once witnessed from this very place. That fight had been almost inconceivably vast, unfolding across multiple layers at once, of which the physical spectacle she could see had been the simplest and most comprehensible part.
Not that it had changed anything then, or now. Whether she understood it or not, the truth remained the same: she would be crushed like a bug underfoot if she so much as tried to watch too closely, let alone interfere. And yet, Master Mo Jian was fighting. He was doing something that should have been impossible.
So she had to do her part as well. She had to accomplish something “impossible” too.
Thankfully, it was beginning to look promising.
The cave shuddered again as the almost-but-not-quite torn film of light covering it – the tattered remnants of the Grand Effervescent Formation – flickered once more. For a heartbeat, Bai Ning felt herself lift from the ground. Around her, loose objects began to drift upward as though gravity itself had been briefly dismissed. Then something immense detonated in the distance.
The shockwave slammed her down, table and chair alike crashing with her as she grit her teeth against the impact.
The flickering dome of the formation reasserted itself, weak light spilling into the cave as it stabilized.
Bai Ning immediately straightened, righted the table, and returned to work on the Netherworld Map. That had been an attack, she was certain; something with such mass, such qi, and such overwhelming pull that it had nearly torn her from the ground even across multiple li and through a protective formation. She wondered, briefly, how Mo Jian was faring.
Then she shoved the thought aside.
Focus, she chided herself.
She dragged a squirming golden character from the edge of the “map” toward its center, adding it to the fragment she had already assembled. It slid into place, curving faintly along a shape she was only just beginning to perceive. A circle. No, she corrected herself: something circular. She would have to see the completed whole before knowing its final form.
In a way, she was shocked both by how quickly she was completing it now and by how much she had struggled with the map before. She didn’t know where her current certainty came from, but she knew, absolutely and utterly, that she could do it right now. She could decipher the map and open the passage to the Netherworld Domain.
Was it because failure meant that everything she loved and cherished, everyone she cared about, would die?
There was a stark simplicity to that. If you fail, you die. With no other option, there was nothing left to do but succeed.
Or was it something else? Something ineffable, something she could neither name nor sense nor even truly feel, guiding her hand now that things had grown so dire?
At this point, she didn’t care. All such questions could wait. If she survived – once they survived – then she could waste time pondering them.
Another character followed, this one harder to hold, slick as a writhing eel. She trapped it between two fingers and slowly dragged it toward the next place along the circle. It resisted, then reluctantly settled into position. Already she was moving on, searching for the next.
She still didn’t know and couldn’t tell what any individual character meant, let alone the circular sentence she was assembling. But instinct guided her hand now. She knew what came next.
Faster, she thought. I have to do it faster.
She drew her attention inward, focusing with every ounce of her mind, shutting out everything else. Even as the ceiling shifted, even as dust fell in pale ribbons, even as the island groaned and one of the surrounding mountains crumbled into the sea, she focused.
There was only the map and herself now, spiraling toward the end, one golden character at a time.
…………………………………………….
Everything was on fire.
Under most circumstances, that would have been an alarming statement. But when the observer was a cultivator – and more than that, a cultivator with command over fire – it usually came with an unspoken addendum: Yes, everything is on fire, but don’t worry. Mo Jian has it under control.
Not today.
The world itself had been remade into a hellscape, and Mo Jian would have wasted precious heartbeats staring in disbelief at its scale if he had been engaged in anything less consuming than a battle that tolerated not even the briefest lapse in focus. Fire dominated that hellscape in obscene abundance. The seas burned beneath towering pillars of crimson and cerulean flame, while above them the clouds wept embers shaped like wailing faces. The air itself seemed alive with soot and smoke, rising from everywhere and nowhere at once. Random blazes flared and died in scattered pockets, following no discernible rhyme or reason.
And as if that weren’t enough, gigantic masses of molten rock occasionally punched through the clouds overhead, plunging toward the sea below and making everything worse for a few infuriating moments.
Dodging them wasn’t difficult. That wasn’t the point.
It was insult layered atop injury, and Mo Jian was beginning to suspect that this, more than anything else, was the hallmark of Old Devil Fu’s style. Conjuring a hell and trying to kill him was one thing. But what was with the gratuitous additions; the attacks that served no purpose beyond driving the point home?
Regardless, Mo Jian could not afford even a breath of respite. He had to keep attacking, keep pressing, keep acting, all so that his opponent never had the chance to gather himself. Because if that moment ever came, Mo Jian knew, with absolute certainty, that he would lose.
He gestured upward.
The Heaven Enshrouding Ding hovered above him, already swollen to the size of an island. It spun slowly, inexorably, then tilted forward. The lid flew free, and from within erupted a roaring river of fire. That was no exaggeration. The mouth of the ding gaped wider than Cloud Veil Ridge itself, and from it surged a true river of cerulean flame, igniting the air as it flowed and roared toward Old Devil Fu with unstoppable momentum. Within the blazing torrent swam beasts wrought from silver lightning.
Electric-blue sharks cut through the surface, their fins crowned with snapping arcs of power. A titanic whale breached the river like a thunderbolt cast down by the heavens, its incandescent body illuminating the battlefield before crashing back beneath the flames. A giant crab of crackling fulmination rose amid the inferno, clacking its massive pincers together with a shrill, buzzing shriek that pierced even the roar of fire.
The river roiled, surged, and twisted upon itself as it tore through the sky, a deluge of annihilation vast enough to scour islands from existence and leave only silence in its wake.
It never reached its target.
The Hell Reflecting Mirror stood in its path, as vast as the Heaven Enshrouding Ding itself. Upon its immaculate surface lay a reflection of the world around them, but utterly reversed. Where there had been fire, there was frost. Snow fell from iron-grey clouds overhead, and the seas below were an unbroken expanse of crystalline ice. Only Cloud Veil Ridge remained untouched, green and living, a lone, flickering ember of color in that frozen hell.
An instant later, reality obeyed the reflection.
The fires vanished, snuffed out entirely as though it had never been. The roaring river pouring from the Heaven Enshrouding Ding was erased mid-surge, its fury cut short. The churning black clouds overhead flattened into dull sheets of lead-grey slate. Snow drifted downward in slow, lazy spirals, and a pale mist seeped into the air, its icy fingers slicing through flesh and bone alike. The furious seas were gone, replaced by endless ice stretching in every direction, cold and absolute.
Mo Jian exhaled, watching his breath bloom and coil before his face. Even through the barrier of his qi, the cold crept inward, gnawing at him with quiet persistence.
It was beautiful, he thought, gazing upon the utterly transformed world, like a scene torn from a winter painting. A shame it was wasted on such a man.
Old Devil Fu hovered behind the mirror, unchanged. The abrupt shift from fire to frost had not affected him in the slightest; he looked exactly as he had moments before, watching in silence, as though content to wait while Mo Jian exhausted himself and exposed his next move.
Mo Jian understood at once.
He was being cautious. Old Devil Fu was holding back, refusing to commit to a true attack, wary of whatever remaining trump cards Mo Jian might still be concealing. In his mind, this was a battle of attrition, and one he was certain to win. Mo Jian’s strength was finite. However, his time was not.
And that assumption was precisely what Mo Jian needed.
Every moment Old Devil Fu lingered on the defensive was a moment Mo Jian survived. Every exchange that remained cautious and reactive delayed the kind of direct confrontation Mo Jian could not afford. To Old Devil Fu, the fight was slowly, inexorably closing in his favor. To Mo Jian, it was time painstakingly purchased, breath by breath.
Because in a true, all-out battle, stripped of patience and pretense, Mo Jian knew the truth. He would lose.
Which meant he could not afford even a single moment of hesitation. His cultivation had already slipped below Mid Core Formation and was steadily sliding toward Early Core Formation. It did nothing to his immediate combat power; as long as he maintained the technique, he remained half a step into the Nascent Soul realm. But the decline was a warning all the same, an unmistakable sign that his borrowed height was collapsing beneath his feet.
Time was running out.
Undeterred, he gestured to the Heaven Enshrouding Ding once more.
It still lay on its side in midair, as gargantuan as ever, but now something different churned within its depths. A storm began to take shape. Pitch-black clouds coiled inside the ding, threaded with veins of blue flame and rimmed with restless silver lightning. Then the clouds boiled over.
They poured out in a sudden deluge, swelling as they spread and swallowing the sky whole. As they expanded, they condensed, gathering into a single, unmistakable form: a colossal humanoid silhouette forged from living storm. In its grasp lay a black saber, its edge alive with blue fire and snapping arcs of lightning. A thin tether of roiling cloud still bound the figure to the Heaven Enshrouding Ding, as though it were born from the artifact.
Absurdly, the sight reminded Mo Jian of a djinn, those smoke like spirits he had seen in films back on Earth, emerging from a lamp at their master’s call.
He could only hope, that in thematic accordance, this time, his wish to drive back his opponent would be answered as well.
The titan formed from the living storm closed the distance in an instant, swinging its saber with enough force to cleave the heavens themselves. The Hell Reflecting Mirror responded. Within its depths, the same image appeared, yet twisted into something monstrous. Where the original was condensed from storm and lightning, the reflection revealed a demon wrought from bloody crimson fog, long horns curving from its skull. Fangs lined its gaping maw, and a sickly, furious fire burned within its eyes. In place of a saber thrumming with celestial power, it wielded a pitchfork whose three cruel prongs gleamed with bloody light.
The storm-born apparition reached the mirror, and its strike met that of its warped reflection.
Light and fire consumed the sky. The collision unleashed a shockwave that sent visible ripples tearing through the air, qi erupting so violently that both the clouds above and the frozen sea below were blasted away. Mo Jian reacted a heartbeat before the force reached him, hurling himself backward as his body dissolved into lightning. The Divine Water Lightning Technique, always so difficult to use for him, came as naturally as breathing in this moment. He turned into a bolt of silvery-blue lightning, flashing across miles of sky in mere moments.
He reformed above Cloud Veil Ridge, lightning collapsing back into flesh. From there, he looked out with both his eyes and his spiritual sense, taking in the result.
The Hell Reflecting Mirror had been driven back. Its immense form had shrunk to a more conventional size, orbiting Old Devil Fu in a tight defensive pattern. Old Devil Fu himself had retreated as well, though his expression and bearing remained unchanged, his body entirely unscathed. It was as if the cataclysm had passed around him rather than through him.
Mo Jian raised his hand and gestured a third time. The Heaven Enshrouding Ding responded, shrinking as it streaked toward him until it too circled his body at a normal size, radiating restrained but terrifying power.
All around them, the world continued to come apart. Land and sea groaned beneath the lingering violence of their exchange. Space itself felt bruised, heavy with unleashed qi, and every living thing within reach had either fled in blind terror or been snuffed out entirely, unable to endure the aftershocks of such a battle.
And still, there was time to go.
Ignoring the mounting agony twisting through his dantian, Mo Jian steadied himself and prepared to continue the fight.
……………………………………………………..
Bai Ning could now see the shape she was forming: a spiral. She had completed the outermost loop, and it now wound inward, following the same perfect curve. From what she understood, the passage to the Netherworld Domain would open only when the spiral was complete.
Her fingers flew over the golden characters, dragging each into place with feverish precision. One by one, they snapped into alignment, and with each stroke, her hope surged.
Outside, the world screamed. Moments ago, a sudden chill had slithered through the cave, frost tracing jagged, almost imperceptible lines across the walls. She barely noticed. It didn’t matter. Her body was unharmed, and her mind could stray nowhere else. Only the map mattered. She had to complete the path to the Netherworld Domain.
Time was running out.
She worked relentlessly. The inner curve of the spiral filled itself, inching closer to the heart, another layer forming swiftly beneath her fingers. The more she worked, the faster the characters seemed to fall into place, as if the map itself were now eager to be understood. Only a few golden symbols remained, skittering across the page, and one by one, they obeyed her touch. Just a few more-
Then the entire cave shuddered, longer and more violently than ever before. The dome of the Grand Formation flared, blooming into brilliant, bruise-colored trails of light, flickering like veins across the ceiling. Bai Ning nearly lost the character she was dragging into place, the golden script wriggling like a living thing before she caught it.
Gritting her teeth, she pressed on. She was almost there. She lost herself entirely to the work, ignoring everything else. When the last character finally slipped into place and the spiral locked, it took her a full heartbeat to blink, to realize what she had done. The map had been deciphered.
Bai Ning shot to her feet, staring as the golden spiral bled and blurred together, collapsing into a single, perfect circle of light. She touched it, and the knowledge bloomed in her mind like something she had always known: this was the gate to the Netherworld Domain.
It required only a thought to use. It would carry her, and anyone she chose, inside. But it could only be used twice: once to enter, and once to exit. After that, the map would exhaust its energy, falling apart into nothing.
Relief and triumph surged briefly through her, tempered by the knowledge of how dire her world had already become. There was no time for reflection. She swept the map into her pouch, already stuffed with everything of value she had gathered in the cave.
Qi flooded her limbs. In barely a second, she reached the entrance. She ran outside and then had to pause. The sheer scope of what lay beyond the cave stole her breath.
The air was thick with frost and mist, curling in ghostly fingers around her arms and legs, sharp enough to bite through the warmth of her qi. The sea around the island was gone, replaced by an unbroken sheet of crystalline ice stretching to the horizon. Snow swirled in lazy spirals from iron-grey clouds above, drifting in patterns almost unnaturally precise. Everywhere, the world was fractured. The island groaned under invisible pressure, and cracks spiderwebbed across the frozen surfaces, glinting faintly with residual qi.
And-
High above the frozen sea, two figures clashed like living storms. Lightning split the air, illuminating a tableau of impossible scale: Master Mo Jian, a blur of silver-blue light, darting across the sky, his Heaven Enshrouding Ding now circling him like a whirling halo of fire and storm. Opposite him, a figure she had never seen, but could only be Old Devil Fu, stood calm and unshaken, his mirror spinning beside him, reflecting and twisting every strike into something more terrible.
The impact of their battle rippled through the frozen world. Sheets of ice cracked beneath invisible force, and snow erupted into tempests from nowhere. The echoes of clashing qi made the air vibrate, a low, constant roar that resonated in Bai Ning’s chest. Each strike carved the sky into jagged flashes of fire, lightning, and crimson energy, leaving afterimages that shimmered against the white wasteland below.
Poking a finger into such a battle was liable to cost her that finger, but she had no choice.
Bai Ning threaded her qi through her voice and shouted, “Master!”
Even at her loudest, reinforced by qi, her words dissolved before they could truly matter on the scale of the battlefield. Yet these were no ordinary men. She was noticed instantly. Even across the divide, she felt Old Devil Fu’s gaze like a brand searing her skin.
Master Mo Jian’s spiritual sense reacted just behind, his form blurring into a bolt of lightning flashing across the sky. Old Devil Fu responded in kind. The mirror orbiting him grew, its surface suddenly clear even to her, and the image within twisted.
Before, it had reflected the frozen world around them, but now it showed nothing. The sky vanished, replaced by an endless void. Dim white light filtered from all directions, sourceless and diffuse. The frozen sheets of what had been the sea dissolved into mist, leaving Cloud Veil Ridge suspended above a churning ocean of fog, a bottomless drop surrounding it. And everywhere in that reflection hovered specters. That was the closest way she could describe them: wraiths of black cloth, hollow and dark beneath.
An instant later, reality obeyed.
The world itself changed. The sky was torn away, replaced by pitch-black nothingness. Dim, bleached-white light filtered from all around, the contrast sharp and painful. The ocean had vanished, replaced by thick, rolling mist, and a million, or no-an endless host of specters drifted through the air.
They all turned to her, an army of darkness bearing down.
Strangely, it calmed her. This was not the first time she had faced something like this.
Before she could act, lightning flashed, striking the ground right beside her. Bai Ning shielded her face and stepped back, even as the lightning reformed into Mo Jian. He was panting, a wide, exhilarated grin on his face, the Heaven Enshrouding Ding burning brilliant blue at his side. His gaze was fixed on where Old Devil Fu hovered in the sky above.
“Mistake,” her master said, the grin evident even without words.
Then his hand reached out, and she took it without hesitation. Even that was enough to make the old devil react. His mirror flared, and a beam of light erupted from it, slamming across the island. It was not a damaging attack, but a purifying beam, like sunlight intensified, illuminating everything in its path.
Whatever the light touched froze. Errant snowflakes hung motionless in midair. Mist became solid, locked in place as if trapped behind invisible glass. The island’s tremors ceased where the light passed, and even crumbling fragments of stone poised to fall into the misty abyss halted mid-descent. Time itself seemed suspended within the golden beam.
Bai Ning and Mo Jian did not move. Their hands had touched, and the map in Bai Ning’s hand reacted. Gold flashed, and then they were gone, vanished into nothingness.
Old Devil Fu froze. The mirror’s light intensified, and its reflection shifted. It showed the island, and then zoomed in on the spot where Mo Jian and Bai Ning had vanished. Even frozen, the crumbling island trembled under strain, but no matter how he searched, there was nothing to find.
They had escaped.
Slowly, something stole over Old Devil Fu’s features. His expression, already hard, hardened further. Anger sharpened every line of his face, spreading outward like poison through the air. Even as the hell he had conjured vanished and the sea and sky returned, his fury only grew.
“No,” he said, a furious command. “You cannot escape. I will hunt you down, no matter where you have gone.”
That scroll in the girl’s hand must have been a rare and valuable spatial treasure. Nothing else made sense. They had stalled, waited, and then deployed their trump card, and he had let it happen, wary of other traps. That knowledge inflamed him the most: that had he not been wary, he would have won. No matter; he would find them, and then he would kill them.
A blast of power erupted from the mirror, striking the island. It shattered. The already crumbling stone fractured into fragments, raining debris into the sea. The remaining mountains collapsed, and slowly, inexorably, the entire island sank beneath the waves.
In moments, there was nothing left of Cloud Veil Ridge, except a patch of smoking sea.
..................................................................................................
AN: So many people have already guessed the outcome of this fight that I briefly worried it might feel a little… predictable. But honestly, that’s fine, because the Netherworld Domain section is about to begin.
Calling it an arc might be a bit generous. It’s only three chapters long and sits right in the middle of the Old Devil Fu antagonist arc (we'll finish this fight, one way or the other; it's not going to be left hanging for long). Still, I can say with complete confidence that no one has guessed what’s coming next. These are some of my favorite chapters in the entire story.
I’m really looking forward to posting them. (No, this does not mean I’m about to cave and release another double chapter. I only have so many chapters in reserve😝)
In unrelated news, the second bonus chapter is finished. However, I’ll have to wait until every tier has seen the conclusion of the tournament before releasing it, otherwise it would spoil a pretty big moment.
Thanks for reading!!