The sword Scoria Scorn had left buried in a pool of mud at the bottom of a cave for twenty-five hundred years had a black blade forged not of iron or bronze but instead worked out of the strange and curious metal called titanium. Only the most elite smiths knew of the substance, for advanced alchemy was needed to even acquire the material and it was, in comparison to steel, inferior for many uses. Despite this, it possessed one critical property that made it extremely valuable when considering leaving a blade in the bottom of a cavern for an indeterminate amount of time.

  Titanium did not rust or corrode. The black and hard sword blade was as sharp as the day it had been deposited in this hidden hole. A careful grayish inlay written in complex geometric patterns using metals even rarer and more obscure than the core of the weapon conveyed the thickly layered qi imbued within its confines. Qi tilted towards sharpness, destruction, and the perfect killing edge.

  Not a weapon suited to battles between immortals, something its wielder knew well. Though strong, it was brittle. Prolonged exchanges would see it chip and shatter, and battles between those in the celestial ascendancy realm would stretch long indeed. No, this was a blade designed to cut flesh, over and over, in a campaign of systematic butchery. A blade designed to kill demons.

  The irony of wielding such a weapon offered Scoria Scorn a modest amount of amusement. Its efficiency was, in the present moment, far more significant. Specifically, the extremely hard titanium had the power to cleave through thirteen bronze coffins using well-chosen heavy descending strikes.

  Delay could not be tolerated. She was weak and injured. Trapped by the meager cultivation of her half-sister in a state barely more potent than a mortal’s. It was intolerable and crippling. Worse, she recognized that her mind was not adjusting to such limitations readily, and a prolonged sojourn in such a state, where she had to endure the misery of feeling cold and wet and disgusting, would shortly drive her mad.

  More practically, her current strength, combined with a broken right hand and the complete absence of ropes, was insufficient to escape the confines of this cavern system.

  She had not prepared her rebirth with such care only to remain trapped in a state of infantile weakness.

  Simik Chan had converted to demonic cultivation in the very final years of the war. Only after the coming onslaught moved over the mighty mountains and unleashed its power upon the great heartlands of the eastern continent did she perceive the doom of their father’s empire. The Myriad Generosity Sect had never been intended to endure without its ludicrously fecund patriarch, and though that man, whose name Scoria Scorn had purged from her mind entirely, had been mighty indeed, he had not been a match for Bloody Roam.

  The black-armored warlord seemed to find some sort of amusing irony in allowing Scoria Scorn to lay waste to the harem state that was her homeland after its father figure perished. In doing so, she had secured a critical supply of resources, one hidden away against this very special need.

  The occupants of the thirteen other coffins were, like Simik Chan, all her relatives to some degree. That made what was to come quite a bit easier than if they had been perfect strangers.

  Raising the titanium sword high overhead with all the strength her good left hand and ravaged right could summon, Scoria Scorn curled her toes deep in the icy cold mud, bent her knees, and drove the blade down with all the might her new body could exert.

  Bronze shattered, thin metal collapsing before the onslaught. Tendrils of smoke filled the lightless air as the embedded formation disintegrated.

  The blade kept going, held steady using all the power that could be forced through body refining realm muscles and tendons. The cultivator lying within the coffin, abruptly freed from stasis, lacked the time to even regain consciousness before the razor-sharp titanium edge slashed through the rib cage and split the heart and lungs in twain. Death arrived at the same moment as waking.

  Simultaneously, the plague surged into the space now vacated by the shattered shielding formation. Even as the cultivator perished, it rushed into the body. Flesh, bones, brain, meridians, and even the dantian itself, all of these were grasped and surrounded by the overwhelming embrace of the plague. When life came to an end, that red haze sucked up every drop of essence, letting nothing free.

  Power that Scoria Scorn tapped into, linked soul to scourge. As the plague fed, so did she.

  Qi flowed into her, essence flooded her body and soul on every level. In a single stroke it reshaped her from scalp to toes. The remaining meridians were forced open. Excess qi flooded her chest and skull, annealing them in a blood-burning flash. In mere moments she jumped from the fourth layer of body refining to the second layer of vitality annealing, years of cultivation compressed to fractions of a second.

  Agony and ecstasy drowned her. The rush of qi reforming her being brought with it a deluge of pain and pleasure. The fountaining power changed her tissue on every level, from the skin to the nerves to the dantian to everything in between. This metamorphosis, a change usually measured in years accelerated thousands, millions, of times over, scourged her. It was as if she’d been flayed down to the base and then replaced, layer by layer. No pain, not even the brutality of consuming her half-sister’s soul, could possibly compare.

  At the same time, the rush of power, of growth, of input, threatened to bury her beneath overwhelming pleasure. Health, renewed vitality, filled her cell to cell, invigoration that left her stronger, tougher, more sensitive, and more aware than she’d been mere moments before. A surge that not even the most potent alchemical narcotic could even possibly provide. It left her drooling from pure passion, quivering as her overwhelmed body surrendered to the orgasmic siphoning the plague empowered.

  Footing failed. The blade dropped from her hands as she collapsed down into the mud. She rolled and thrashed about in that cold goop as one pulse after another swept through her.

  It took long minutes to regain control of her will, and close to an hour to assert proper mastery of her body and stand up once again. Even breathing normally was hard, the new lungs had a capacity that the nerves had not yet adapted to accept.

  Despite the hardships, she could feel the strength filling her core, the steps of added cultivation that pushed her further along the road to immortality.

  A desperate hunger surged through her, demanding that she repeat the process, that she drain away all the remaining imprisoned cultivators in one titanic slurp.

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  Scoria Scorn, mastering herself, crushed that impulse beneath a will iron hard and centuries cold. She forced her body, now aching and sore, to adopt a proper meditative posture atop the slick and cold muck. There, seated in darkness, she looked inward.

  New qi flowed through her, disordered, messy, and fragile. Working steadily, she bent it into alignment, into patterns formed long ago but forever burned into memory. Steadily, she organized her cultivation and form to regain herself, remaking her being in the image of her past, in an echo of her first journey into the vitality annealing realm over three thousand years before.

  Hours passed. How long she did not know. In the lightless abyss of the cave there was no means to tell time. The temperature never changed, it remained bitterly, but not murderously, cold throughout. Hunger grew in her stomach, the only sign that time was passing at all.

  When she decided she was ready, she stopped and checked again. Only after confirming that all was right a third time did she pick up the black blade once again.

  The downstroke was far stronger this time. With the bones on her right hand knitted back together, it sliced clean through the edge of the coffin and the body imprisoned beneath. That was essential, for this next target was considerably sturdier than the first and would wake with equally greater speed. Nothing could be spared. She channeled all of her new strength, held nothing back.

  Another kill followed, and with it the brutal and beautiful surge of power. Once again, the plague allowed her to steal the essence of the imprisoned cultivator and rise to renewed heights. More time in the dark was needed after that, more sorting and sifting and strengthening her new cultivation. All to make the stolen power hers, truly hers.

  This cycle repeated until all the coffins were empty. The last few were cut clean through, lid, body, and bottom all in one stroke, perfectly severed. The process accelerated towards the end, as the gains reduced until, in the final three deaths she advanced no more than a single layer at a time.

  A week, perhaps longer, lapsed in the darkness as she murdered thirteen cultivators. In the end only broken coffins and shattered corpses drained of qi lay in the little chamber as her companions. The last remnants of the Myriad Generosity Sect, held by power against the onslaught of the ages, had been erased.

  Only Scoria Scorn remained of that lineage.

  This carefully planned ladder of murders had sufficed to restore her to the third layer of the spirit tempering realm. It was, she suspected, the most rapid rise in cultivation that had ever happened. Anything faster or further would have killed her from the overload.

  Not that it was enough. Not even close to enough.

  She would not even approach satisfaction until immortality was hers once more. Despite that, she could take pleasure in this accomplishment, in this vital and careful beginning.

  The new growth pushed her past the limits of the human body. Hunger, the need for food, had ceased to exist. She could draw all the sustenance she required from the plague and an occasional supplement of water. Even the muddy wretched deposit at the bottom of the sump sufficed. Her lips filtered the slurry perfectly through a gauze of qi and trickled only pure liquid down her throat.

  Darkness too, had ceased to be an impediment. She could see in the lightless space with excellent resolution, though for now color remained lost to her eyes. Even the cavern’s bone-chilling cold, which had threatened to kill her in the moments following her rebirth, ceased to have any meaning.

  Had she wished, she could have remained in this place indefinitely.

  If orthodox cultivation was still her path, or even possible, that would have been an ideal choice. At the height of the old world many deep caves had been turned to such purposes. Long ago, the woman who would become Scoria Scorn had spent two centuries doing just that, only to hit an absolute bottleneck she struggled for four more in vain to surpass. Trapped and blocked and infuriated as death crept closer and closer.

  Until the plague found her at last and granted her the freedom she’d been so unreasonably denied.

  That path was no longer an option. There was no taking back the choice once made. The plague offered much, but it was a jealous master indeed.

  Scoria Scorn did not regret her choice. Without the plague she would have perished long ago, another one of the endless failures in her father’s mad quest to breed an immortal successor. Instead, he was long dead, and she had outlived not only that foul man but her entire legion of half-siblings. For her, the choice had paid off long ago.

  But she was not satisfied now. She could not be, not with any restoration short of immortality. And that served as the least foundation of her ambition. Spirit Tempering, imposed on a physical form as youthful as that of Simik Chan’s, offered many centuries of life, but one who had tasted immortality could never be satisfied by a limited span, no matter how substantial. She would return to the heights. The many deaths required were no obstacle.

  Artifacts were the first provision she secured. From a bronze chest buried deep within the cavern mud she extracted a tight-fitting battle dress, a golden circlet, and a series of jewels strung about her waist. Though not warm, this mixture of black, silver, and gold offered a modest measure of protection. It was greater than that which would normally be available to one in her present stage, but far less than she was used to carrying, than she needed. Enough to provide advantage in a fight with a peer, nothing capable of matching the immortal monsters that now wandered the world above.

  The titanium black blade she retained as a weapon was similar. It would serve the needs of killing and would likely survive a single battle with a peer, but nothing more than that. Nothing suited to the real needs of combat, but she had no access for better. Thankfully, engaging in mortal battle was no part of her immediate plans.

  Vengeance against the Twelve Sisters would come. She would not forget those who had trapped and killed her, ever. Yet it need not be now. Like the titanium in her hands, the desire to inflict that doom would never decay. She would wait until she was duly ready.

  For now, she needed to avoid not only orthodox immortals, but also her nominal peers. Naivete had been beaten out of her in her youth. Scoria Scorn knew exactly how her fellow demonic cultivators would treat her in her weakened state.

  She would not be used as a doll to slake the lusts of another.

  Bloody Roam would not commit that atrocity, he was not the sort to indulge in base carnality. Instead, he would simply kill her. That was the price he would demand for the deaths of Black Howl and the Fuming Shade. Whether he truly believed in such punishments for failure made little difference, the others would demand it as the price of his position as war leader and demon general.

  “All the world is my enemy,” she mused in the darkness. Then she laughed uproariously.

  Nothing had changed. This had always been true. It was the very nature of cultivation. Death had simply opened her eyes to see it with true clarity. To survive, to reclaim the promise of immortality, the others must die. Not only the vicious and miserable remnants of the Orthodox Alliance, but her fellow Demonic Cultivators as well.

  The purge the plague had begun long ago must be finished at last.

  A task that demanded great strength. She was left facing the far more difficult question as to where such might could be acquired. Dim recollections, drawn from the horrid period she’d spent as a disembodied shadow, offered a singular, critical, new discovery. The deep places of the world were full of qi. Even in this cave, seven hundred meters below the surface, she could feel that truth. Schemes churned through her mind as she considered this, as she felt the essence boil off from the destroyed cache she’d left behind.

  Surely it had not been the only depository buried far below the surface. This place was remote and far deeper than most, but the world contained many caverns; pits and voids beyond counting. Others would have hidden resources within them, perhaps even legacies from long before the war. There might even be, she dreamed with sudden avarice, other cultivators locked away in stasis in such places. Lost heirs, punished traitors, cowards who sought to wait out the war, many reasons were possible to try and bypass the turning of time.

  They could be given to the plague, feeding her growth. She was a single cultivator, not a demon army. It would not take many.

  She just had to find them.