If all difficulties were known at the outset of a long journey, most of us would never start out at all.

-Dan Rather

After reading the oblivion malady chapter in Zhi’s book on catastrophes, Seph thought, “That must have been the King of Beggars revenge. His wife betrayed him with a high-ranking officer in the imperial army. The guards that beat him to an inch of his life were two, and they guarded her house, and the corrupt judge that ruled against him. He annihilated them, making sure they felt exactly how he felt when he got betrayed and abandoned by the law, and how the beating they gave him almost killed him. Their life was forfeited. That’s a scary man. I wonder if he is still alive, or any of Scorn’s friends, for that matter. My knowledge of their story is still lacking at best. I need to know more to know my next move after I get out of here. This is all so complicated. An empire I never heard of. Yin cultivators that are hunted by human cultivators. And now I am hunted too. Somewhere in the past, a team of legendary yin cultivators who should have made significant advancements to still be alive to this day disappeared with no trace. And to top it off, the new yin cultivators with me in this trial. I have to figure out how to deal with all that. Survive and thrive and protect those who I love, which is only my mother, but still. I need to learn more.”

As if on cue, the enormous book quickly flipped its pages and opened a new chapter for Seph to check out.

Day 15 of the expedition

We have been traveling for the last two weeks, trying to reach the base of Scorn in Amoria.

It’s a pretty gutsy decision to make his base in such a famous location. A vulnerable one as well!

But so far, even knowing his base, we couldn’t take him down.

But to that I say no more. Scorn is going down even if it’s the last thing I do.

Atelia Megi still scares the shit out of me and everyone else, but we still talk daily, and because of her, everyone now fears me by extension, which is honestly not a bad thing.

I enforce respect because of my position, but rarely fear, specially that I never abuse my place of power.

I also got to talking with the colonel. His name is Tan Yunyi. He is a cultivator of the golden core realm. He uses a long golden glaive as his weapon. Very formidable in a close quarters fight, I hope he cut Scorn’s head with one of his attacks.

Most of the campaign is built on his shoulders alone, as even my alchemy will never be strong enough to compare to someone at his level.

I still think with my help we are going to win this time.

The two captains are also cultivators, but of the foundation establishment stage.

Atelia’s power was of the foundation establishment stage as well.

What clenched the win for us was another mercenary, a cultivator of the wind blade. He is in the early golden core realm. He uses a pair of chakrams as his weapons.

I couldn’t wait for the moment we finally laid the beat-down on Scorn, and we were very close to Amoria now.

I will lay my writing feather now to prepare for the upcoming fight…

A sudden feeling of unfathomable danger just assailed my senses that I didn’t have time to close my book. My instincts are screaming at me, a blaring danger not only to me but the entire campaign.

Perception is the attribute that boosts our natural instincts. And mine is very high. I cultivated it with special pills. Nobody has this kind of perception without being a cultivator and a specialized one at that.

Suddenly we were bathed in darkness, an unnatural darkness, as this was high noon.

I looked up and saw a flying man with dragon wings that blotted out the sun before I could shout to alarm the others.

The man dove straight for the chakram mercenary and carried him away.

I wonder if I’ll see that cultivator again. I have a feeling that only one of them shall return.

A man then appeared in front of our campaign, donned in an ornate scarlet armor, and carrying a huge scarlet two-handed sword.

He started killing our front row soldiers, like the god of death unleashed on a bunch of weakling humans who were unlucky enough to be the vanguard of the army.

Our general thought fast and headed to the front row, and was now fighting toe to toe with that scarlet god of death.

I am ashamed to say this, but I was frozen. That wasn’t the end of our trouble, though.

A black lump of some substance came flying from our right flank and hit my partner Atelia Megi in the face. We looked alarmed to where it came from, only to find a man with a huge gourd on his back smirking at us.

At that moment, we heard the screams of our left flank as well. I looked there while Atelia headed to intercept the man with the gourd.

I saw what looked to be a team of 10 floating ghosts passing through our soldiers on the left flank, electrocuting them each time they passed through them.

Behind the ghosts there was another ghost that was dressed in a transparent ghostly attire resembling a war general or something. He had the cruelest smile on his face.

Our two captains headed to stop the ghosts. Some soldiers started panicking and were running away, then they screamed, “THEY ARE BEHIND US TOO!”

Accurate enough, behind us was a skeleton warrior that was over two meters tall. His eyes shone like two purple hellish flames.

When he saw the soldiers stop advancing on him, he rushed them instead and started cutting them down with a chain made of bones.

You might think how I can write all this mid-battle. It’s because I ran away and took cover. We won’t win this fight. I feel it in my bones, but I thought that if I am lucky, and you find my diary, you will learn the compositions of Scorn’s army.

The only problem is, who is Scorn? Is he the scarlet one, or the gourd user or the ghost, or the skeleton behind our army?

Or maybe he is none of them, and he is the one with the dragon wings who kidnapped our other golden core fighter?

I have an identical diary to this one in my workshop back in the capital. That diary immediately copies the one I carry on me.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

The emperor will learn anything I write here if he orders a search of my workshop, since he knows about my diary.

Please, your highness, if we don’t return. Please Goddess Karma, let him see this diary, so that he knows how to beat Scorn after learning the composition of his army.

I am not a defeatist, though. I have never been. I could wait for our fighters to lose, but I won’t and I’ll join the fray.

Luckily my feather isn’t a normal one, it’s a magic feather that I bought to write notes when my hands were busy.

When I get busy with fighting, the feather will write exactly what I think about.

I just need to hide it, so that Scorn’s warriors don’t learn of the fact that the emperor will be onto them.

***

image [https://imgur.com/GCoiLPW.jpg]

I have already hidden my diary and feather, rushing now towards the ghost warriors. I have the right weapon to beat them.

Meanwhile, the colonel is locked in battle with the scarlet fighter. Both of them look to be equals on the battlefield.

The colonel did a whirlwind move with his glaive that was too hard to follow for my eyes.

And it looked like the scarlet warrior had blocked all hits. As I saw red sparks inside the whirlwind, I assume they had come from each time both their weapons clashed.

Suddenly, the colonel was pushed back, and I saw the scarlet warrior with his leg raised in front of him. He had kicked him with enough force to push him back five meters.

“You are a worthy enough opponent to learn my name before I kill you,” spoke the scarlet warrior in a loud enough voice for a quarter of the battlefield to hear, “My name is the Scarlet General. You were unlucky enough to be sent by your emperor to fight us, but we are unstoppable. We are unbeatable. You were sent to your doom. So, let me make your death swift, worthy fighter.”

“My name is Tan Yunyi. Colonel of his majesty’s imperial army. You have caused your first grief in this life when you killed those vanguard soldiers. You and your accomplices signed your death warrant when you cut our path to Scorn. Say your prayers, General, for you now draw your last breaths.”

The Scarlet General just smirked, and two blood arrows floated beside his head, before they shot fast and killed two more soldiers immediately before he spoke again. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep the colonel. We are indeed unstoppable, and you are as good as dead.”

He finished his speech and blinked out of existence, only to appear next to the colonel. Drops of blood were marking the distance between where he was and where the colonel was.

A lot of blood dropped from where he had come to a stop. His sword lodged inside the chest of the colonel, who looked at his opponent with disbelief before coughing a mouthful of blood.

“How?!” said the colonel.

“We might be at the same stage of cultivation relative to our different paths, but you are not on my level, I am afraid, colonel. I reached this stage by being in constant battles. You reached the golden core realm by meditating and popping pills. We are not the same.”

With that, the Scarlet General pushed his sword even deeper, which made the gap in the colonel’s chest even wider because the sword got wider the closer it got to its base.

He pulled his sword clear of the colonel’s corpse and stood still, watching the battlefield.

I watched him warily, fearing that he might interfere in my fight, but he didn’t.

The soldiers we had with us were useless, though. As they just froze, looking at the General with fear stricken faces.

I looked over at Atelia Meji and found that she did one of her horrible spells again, as all the soldiers that fell in this battle so far rose from the dead, and were all rushing toward the gourd user.

He threw his black lumps at them. And blocked their various attacks with his gourd. Even smashing their heads with his gourd to finish them. It was both a defensive and an offensive weapon.

That wasn’t Atelia’s only trick, though. She performed another spell that stripped the soldiers that got killed again by the gourd user of their bones and she used them for armor.

The woman was already freakishly tall. The bone armor just made her stand a head taller.

She made a place in her bone armor for her book. I assume so she could hold it constantly. It sure feels like if you strip the book of her hands or in this case armor. Atelia Meji will cease to exist.

She also carried a bone shield and a long mace with a human skull at the top. She sauntered towards the gourd user.

“You are good, but are you good enough? Are you capable of beating the supreme necromancer of the entire world? With your little gourd and your ridiculous mud.” Atelia spoke to him condescendingly.

“Oh! So you fancy yourself a supreme necromancer? Woman, you haven't any idea what you got yourself into. Pray for your god of death to make your death swift. Because dying at the hands of Dante is anything but. In the meantime, can your zombies stand up to these skeleton warriors that I got from a friend of mine?”

Dante threw a bunch of bones on the ground right after he finished his taunt.

The bones he threw became skeleton warriors in a few breaths, and were already advancing towards the necromancer’s zombies.

A fight ensued between the two dead armies, but it was clear the skeleton warriors were superior, while the zombies needed their heads intact to fight the skeletons. The skeletons didn’t have this problem at all.

Each time one of their skulls got knocked over, they would just retreat, look for it, grab it, and cork it back on their heads, and after turning it from side to side a little, they would get back into the fray.

The zombies were immune to all injuries except head injuries, while the skeletons were immune to all injuries except if their entire body got smashed in fast succession.

“HAHAHAHAHA. You are only making this fight easier for me, by providing me with more bones.” Atelia’s laugh was horrifying and demented.

She renewed her spell as soon as she said that, and her body grew even larger with the bones of the dead.

“Did you ever hear of the saying the bigger they are, the harder they fall?” Dante spoke in an amused tone, before he ran towards her legs, and a maw opened in the palm of his hand. That regurgitated copious amounts of the black substance.

Atelia wasn’t alarmed by what happened, because the initial lump that hit her did nothing to her face. But in a few seconds, her bone legs that raised her significantly off the ground got eaten through by the black substance, and her humongous body started falling to the ground, before she could rise to her legs again after reforming her bone armor.

Dante shouted, “Gigante Mort.” His gourd swelled to a gigantic size and fell down hard on the head of Atelia Meji. The fight was over, and Dante also stood still and didn’t move from his place.

These fights were so fast, by the time I think of what’s happening for my feather to write the entire happenings of the battlefield. They were already over.

The ghosts had fried ten soldiers or more to death, and I had to stop them. But I had to check our last front, or rather the back, of our formation.

The skeleton warrior was going to town on our soldiers, killing them left and right with his chain of bones weapon.

At one point, the weapon broke after clashing with the skull of one soldier while the soldier died. The skeleton warrior didn’t seem fazed that his weapon got smashed, and pulled his backbone mid battle and lunged at our soldiers again.

Meanwhile, the two captains reached the ghosts and started blasting them with red and blue orbs.

They were orbs of fire and water. The two captains weren’t picked randomly, they were a team. Their powers complimented each other, and it was rumored that fighting together made them handle any warrior of a realm higher than them.

The orbs were doing minor damage to the ghosts as they just stopped them in their tracks for a few seconds. The captains looked at each other and nodded.

They each raised an opposite hand facing each other and shot the orbs at each other’s hand.

The orbs merged on impact and then flew, directed by the will of the two officers at the ghosts.

Not all orbs were accurate, though. It seemed their minds had to be in sync for the orbs to shoot at the right ghost.

They communicated without talking to keep everything a surprise, but it was enough to annihilate all the minor ghosts.

Their leader remained, though. He started floating towards the captains, but they stopped him by launching orbs at his oncoming body. All orbs were accurate now, because there was a single target.

The only issue with their fighting prowess is the combined orbs did minor damage to the ghost leader. He stopped for only a second after each impact before floating the rest of the way towards the captains.

After he reached them, he extended both arms towards their throats as if he was choking them, but he wasn’t really touching them. His hands passed through them.

That wasn’t an issue for him though, because his electrocution power was much more severe than that of the minor ghosts and the two captains died immediately.

I found myself along with some surviving soldiers that were frozen in place by the horrifying opponents, just standing there looking at how we were flanked by scary individuals from each cardinal direction.

Before I could compose myself, the sun got blotted out again, and darkness fell on us. I looked to the sky and found the dragon winged warrior descending on me like a death incarnate...