Zeng Fei, frozen in place, watched as the spirit adviser directed a sliver of qi into the floor ahead of him. It spread across the ground in thin, well-defined lanes, spreading within seconds to the corners of the empty half-hall.

Only now could Zeng Fei see what the spirit adviser had been inspecting earlier on, for it turned out there had been an invisible ritual diagram drawn on the floor.

Now activated, the diagram glowed bright azure and revealed itself to be exceedingly complex, composed of a dense scatter of wayward lines that didn’t appear to amount to anything further.

Zeng Fei held this thought for half a dozen beats, when suddenly the lines began to squiggle as though alive. With jerky motions they were moving closer, fusing together, standing up, circling him.

Astonishment filled him at the sight of these finger-sized figures that’d taken on recognisable forms.

Amongst them were countless penguins of different species, their flippers raised towards him as though they were worshipping him (or, alternatively, requesting alms); over there was a polar bear stood upright on its hind legs with its arms crossed and giving him a look of contempt; in the air flew a parliament of graceful snowy owls; closer to him, two arctic foxes cackled to themselves over an inside joke, most definitely concerning his big toe; and onto his feet came boinging a pod of walruses who promptly laid down.

And these were merely the ones he could see; he could sense many more entities out of view.

This was when he heard a voice resound in his head, its sheer presence threatening to make him fall unconscious.

“Unto my successor, I leave the culmination of my life’s workings: the Heavenly Demon Divine Art. Truth be told, I did not know what to name my technique when I first came up with it, hence the somewhat unfitting name that I chose, connected more to my Daoist name than anything to do with the technique itself.

You see, long before I had become the enemy of the world, people used to mock me by calling me the Heavenly Emperor due to the fact that I led around Emperors and Kings, beings that were sovereigns in their own right.

Some detractors went even further then by slanderously claiming I was a Demon, using the company I kept as proof while wilfully ignoring the fact that I was as human as any of my detractors. All the same, this was how my - then shameful - identity as the Heavenly Demon Emperor came into being.

Their mockery abruptly stopped, however, once they experienced the power of my Heavenly Demon Divine Art firsthand. Ever since then, they only ever uttered my name with the gravity it deserved.

Still, these small-minded folk feared my speed of growth and soon had the entire world rallied against me using a myriad lies.

Even with my loyal companions by my side, I was nonetheless one man against the realm, and so I was unable to achieve my potential.

But blessed are you, my successor, for you shall inherit everything that was mine and more. Let the entire realm tremble under your name, for you are my successor, the new Heavenly Demon Emperor!

In return for my power, all I demand is that you never hide your identity as my true successor, my revenge come incarnate, so that all those who shamefully slaughtered me may feel the same terror that once plagued me.

(The one exception is if my creditors are still kicking around and come knocking. In that situation, please inform them you have no connection to me, and that you are merely a fan who made up these grand claims to convince the public you are my true successor. A fool is he who underestimates the marvel of compound interest, I tell thee.)”

The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

The last word hung in the air for a moment, acting as a signal for the ritual to start in earnest.

Zeng Fei’s very cultivation base began to seep out of his body towards the waiting animals, causing their forms to solidify. His cultivation rapidly fell from the fifth layer of Qi Refining to the very start of the first layer, his body weakening as the animals feasted on him.

Yet still the penguins continued to wag their open bills towards him as though demanding more; the polar bear snorted and refused to even look at him anymore; the owls pecked at his shins; and the foxes nibbled on his toe; as for the walruses… well, the walruses continued to lie there, but if you looked very closely, you could see they were not best pleased about the shoddy room service.

The animals’ collective suction force was so powerful it seemed Zeng Fei’s entire life force would be drained by their voraciousness, devouring him before he ever got the chance to practice the technique.

What saved him from this fate were a few uttered words.

“Take the rest from me.”

The countless critters snapped their heads as one to register the spirit adviser’s presence for the first time, lips being figuratively licked.

No further encouragement was needed for them to start absorbing the spirit’s cultivation, the effects of which were visible from the way the spirit’s figure faded with each passing beat, reflected in reverse in the animals.

As for why this technique needed to cannibalise its practitioner’s cultivation base, it was a fundamental rule in the universe that the more powerful a technique was, the more difficult it would be to cultivate it - this was why the most powerful techniques were always reserved for characters with protagonist-like traits as only they possessed the borderline masochistic levels of pain tolerance to be able to cultivate them.

The Heavenly Demon Emperor had not been about that life (he was more of a vanilla guy himself), so he’d gone with a different design philosophy from the start. Instead of having insane difficulty during cultivation, he’d moved as much of it as possible into the entry requirements.

The result had been a one-of-a-kind technique that required you to sacrifice a Nascent Soul’s worth of cultivation base in order to reconstruct your body into the sole Immortal Physique capable of cultivating this technique.

When the animals’ hunger was finally sated, their glow had grown so radiant that their original forms could no longer be distinguished in the blinding azure glare.

The animals waddled, bounced, and skipped into Zeng Fei’s body, each entrance adding another pang until he was under pain so excruciating that his brain was forced to shut down.

Each entrance also caused his body to inflate more and more as it absorbed spiritual energy multiple times its maximum capacity.

An indeterminate amount of time later, his innards had been thoroughly shredded, bones shattered into thousands of pieces, and his body was ripping at the seams everywhere, on the precipice of bursting like a flesh balloon. But it didn’t, held together in one piece by a mysterious force.

And finally the absurd amount of spiritual energy inside him began to expend, his body deflating as organs were reformed, bones recast and hammered, blood vessels and meridians relaid over flesh like gory circuitry.

With the bodywork complete, every bit of remaining spiritual energy was directed towards a microscopic hole that had formed in Zeng Fei’s lower dantian. This appeared no different from any other imperfection in his body given he was only a Qi Refining cultivator who hadn’t practised body refining techniques.

Yet, with each passing beat, this hole expanded, only stopping when it’d requisitioned half of his lower dantian for its purposes.

Here, it stabilised into a transparent bubble, and then clouded over until it became impossible to perceive what was going on inside.

By this point in the ritual, Zeng Fei’s body had returned to its original human form and lay still on the cold stone floor. His gentle frown seemed to indicate he was going through restless dreams.

The spirit adviser made a gesture and caused the scrolls on one bookshelf to float towards Zeng Fei, where they waited for their turn to go up and touch his sleeping body like they were paying respect to a deceased relative.

Whenever they made contact with his body, the information stored inside them in the form of ink was slurped up like noodles by the cloudy bubble, at which point the scroll would spontaneously combust into ashes.

The spirit adviser mediated this process and cleared the ashes in between each turn. The ritual would continue until it had gone through every scroll on every bookshelf - although each scroll took a second at most, the entire process would last hours from the sheer number of scrolls stored here.

The information stored in them made them the most valuable thing the Heavenly Demon Emperor had owned and, indeed, the the very reason he’d become public enemy number one.