The man ran.

His feet pattered against the ground with as much strength as he could muster and his qi fueled him even more. He would have flown, but that was where the monster was.

The Unraveler.

He was coming. He had seen the blood, seen their evil and the man had not even blinked.

There had been no care in his eyes, no empathy, no disgust, and no judgment. Their sect, of which only a few remained, had believed him to be a great candidate.

He was a powerful man, he would have served the sect well. That had been their desire. He seemed unaffected and willing, and so, they had shown him their domain.

But that had been a lie. All a lie. The skies shattered and the corpses of his brethren rained from the hells above.

He ran. He even pushed on the most sacred of places, using his innate qi to push himself forward. His life for his life, yes. A strange trade, a stupid one even, but better to wither and die running than face the man above.

The screams came, one by one, and then all as one. They mixed and turned and shrilled into the sky like a choir of suffering. They begged, they pleaded, but the man would not relent.

Of course, he wouldn’t relent. He had seen their evils, their sins that they had made with pride, and he had not cared.

That had been their Dao, their way of life. The Dao of Evil, the Dao of Self, and the Dao of Death, those were the central Daos of the Demonic Heart Sect.

Each of the three leaders pursued one of these Daos and their disciples did the same. It was the Dao of Evil and the Dao of Death that fought above. Idiots. He, the leader who pursued the Dao of Self would live, he would flee.

There was a crack in the sky and one of his folk shrilled. It was the leader of the Dao of Evil. The man had a deep voice and a prideful tone. When he spoke, one could imagine it being a lion or a tiger growling in the distance.

But now he could not even recognize it. He only knew from the flare of qi that rose up in the distance. The voice screaming now had been a high-pitched squealing and it was begging.

The man was begging for death. He was pleading for it. The cultivator of the Dao of Self would not normally risk looking back, but this time, he turned, still running but using his eyes to look up behind him.

In the distance was a man trapped in a ball of qi, an array and he was being tormented. Outside of it was another man, watching with interest as the man within the array screamed.

“PLEASE!!!” His brethren begged.

The scream dug at the inside of his mind like claws scratching through steal. The observer seemed unaffected.

There was someone there, his brother with the Dao of Death, held in another array unable to move or scream.

But the fleeing man could see the dread on his face still, the horror and the fear. Something was happening to him, something the fleeing man did not want to meet.

If he hadn’t known these people then he wouldn’t have cared. But he did know them. He had fought with them for eons. He had seen them strike down their fellow eighth-rank members in wrath and power. They had withstood torture from the righteous sects and slaughtered billions. They were evil, they were death, they were suffering and pain, gods among men.

“MEEERCY!!!”

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This time the voice broke into sobbing wails and sadness left the man's lips.

Sadness, not rage, not fury, not just suffering, but sadness. The monster who cultivated the Dao of Evil wept.

Why? The fleeing man wondered.

He turned, not daring to look any longer, and kept running. And though he didn’t want to know it, he felt it. He felt the two men’s lives blink away in an instant.

Just like that, two of the strongest people within this land had disappeared. Dead. Both of them. The two men who had aided him, whom he had sided with for his own selfish gain had died.

More.

His feet pushed even harder against the ground. Strength that even he didn’t know he had poured out of him and it was all to flee.

And when he had run a million miles, when he thought the divide between him and that monster was wide enough, he crumbled onto his knees. He fell onto his chest, heaving with every breath, and saw the grassy fields of a land he didn’t know.

He could feel himself dying. He could feel his innate qi withering away after he had used it.

He was dying, he had decades, maybe a century left if he was lucky. He was an immortal but his innate qi was gone, used up in his effort to flee.

Maybe he could recoup it through some divine treasure but the chances of that happening were-

The world held still. His qi held still. The breath would not leave his lungs.

His head was still against the grass and from there he saw it. The feet of the man who had killed his brethren.

He had never left. He thought he had, he believed himself to be fleeing but the bodies of his people were on the ground once more. It had been an illusion.

The monster walked up to him.

Array Master Dane, that was his name. He was at the eighth rank, the same as them and yet he had defeated them all. He could beg and plead but he knew the man wouldn’t care. He was like them in that sense, unaffected by the people around him.

So he fought, his blade of starlight and destruction swung, aiming for the man's neck only for his technique to crumble.

The Unraveler. That was what they called him, Dane the Unravler. He didn’t have a secret technique or a divine talent. All the man did have was his arrays, his strange little enchantments.

But they were still too much.

The man could somehow see through techniques. It was his mind, yes, that was what gave him strength. Array Masters needed to know about everything, didn’t they? Bits of laws collected, clumps of dao understood? That was how they worked.

And while Dane didn’t know enough to make a divine technique, he knew enough to break them. He would tear away at his opponent's laws before they could coalesce.

The man found himself swinging furiously, his blade full of a mixture of undoing and destruction. The Life Severing Sword Technique. It would gather the essence of destruction and decay, laws that the user would have to know first and mix them into the blade. The cut would rot and run all the way through the meridians and into the dantian, rotting the dantian through and through.

But the technique would break before it could even touch Dane, it would unravel into nothing but mists of qi. He would taint the attack and corrupt it.

Decay would mix with life and become age. Destruction would mix with time and become change, and then the technique would collapse.

“Why?” He asked the man. “Why kill us? We could give you everything. We have the world at our-”

The man moved, trying to cut down at Dane from another angle, trying to surprise him.

But he failed again.

“You’re in an illusory array,” Dane stated. “Fighting is useless.”

The man struggled nonetheless, throwing technique after technique, only for it to miss Dane entirely or for the array master to dissipate it into nothing.

“Why?” The man asked.

He didn’t care to know why, he was just stalling, and Dane must have known that. But the array master took a second to think about it anyway.

“Why did you kill those people?” He asked him.

The man thought about lying for an instant, but he knew it would do him no good.

“I wanted to, and I could.”

Dane looked at him and nodded.

Then the world went black and the pain began.

Horror, horror, horror, over and over again. Pain suffered repeatedly.

He was confused at first. He had woken up as a boy in the streets crawling through the slums of a city. He thought he escaped somehow, maybe reincarnated through sheer luck. But no, a man came and cut him up into pieces mere hours later.

The next time he was a mother, a wife of a nobleman, and for a moment, he thought his previous life to have been a lie. He was a mother, not a cultivator, a jade beauty, not a vile villain.

Then he saw him. The man came and forced himself upon her daughter and cut her to bits while she watched. The next time he was the daughter. The next time he was the father. The next he was the servent and after that the servent’s brother.

Over and over, he would wake up, thinking all he had seen to be a lie. And over and over the man would come, tormenting him at every turn. He screamed and begged for mercy every time but the man wouldn’t stop, and right before his final breath, right before the end he would recognize the man.

It’s me.

His comrades, those strong men of strength and power, they hadn’t been begging Dane for mercy.

They had been begging themselves, their past for mercy.