Shadows rushed past Jian’s head as she was dragged down into the Abyss.

She twisted and swung her sword down at the shape wrapped around her leg, but obsidian claws longer than her hand struck back from out of sight. They deflected her bronze blade in a shower of sparks that were smothered by the Abyss before they could illuminate more than a flash of rough black skin.

Cursing, Jian swung her sword again, but this time she aimed higher.

She sheared through her leg above the knee and finally started to slow down as it was torn away. She focused on the feeling of her body moving away from her and flexed her soul, transmuting the leg into blood. As she felt the liquid begin to slip through the creature’s fingers, drops catching in the sandpaper texture, she forged it into shards of crystal that caught on and tore the skin on the creature’s hands to shreds before it could pull itself free.

As it swam away, Jian pushed against the darkness around her to slow herself down.

The Abyss was a sea, made of a darkness so thick and cloying that it acted like water. Dense enough for anyone that could survive its pressure to swim through. With her Resonance for darkness, it was even easier. Easy enough that she’d been able to swim through its shallowest layer when she’d fled the Palace as a teenager.

She reached out to the Abyss and gripped it like silk sheets, willing it to wrap around and cradle her like the friend it had always been, slowing her down dramatically.

She looked up to see the stone building she’d been pulled from, the Patriarch’s audience chamber, looked as small as her clenched fist. Dim rays of light from the Palace above peaked around its edges, barely reaching her in isolated beams that fought through the Abyss to reveal patches of pale fog.

For a moment she floated in peace, her leg rapidly growing new flesh to cover black bones.

Then something hit her.

A piece of the darkness around her separated from the background, almost completely hidden from her senses until it was already too late. She forged blood into a wide bronze vambrace, practically a shield, and got it between them just before a fist larger than her head slammed into it.

The force knocked the edge of the vambrace into her face and chest, cutting her and cracking bone. With nothing to brace herself against, she was shot down like an arrow from a bow, the silk threads of shadow she’d caught herself with snapping and disappearing in a churn of bubbles.

The sight of the audience chamber grew smaller and the light of the palace grew dimmer as she plummeted down.

She reached for the reservoir of blood inside of herself and created a pane of blood underneath her. The platform pushed up against her back hard enough that she started to slow down, but the competing forces felt like being crushed by a giant.

She cast out with her qi, trying to feel through the darkness around her, and caught a flash of rough skin, a sensation like rubbing sandpaper, and jerked back in surprise.

When the fist appeared again, she struck first.

Her sword bounced off claws longer than her hand, throwing more sparks into the air. They died in an instant, but in that instant she saw another fist coming at an impossible angle.

She caught it on her shield, but the force of the blow slammed her down into the platform of blood she’d created hard enough to shatter it like a pane of glass.

Shards of blood fell with her deeper into the Abyss, shadows hurtling past her as she plummeted down.

She flailed, threads of shadow snapping underneath her faster than she could weave them. She reached for her shadow, but her hands passed through nothing, unable to reach it without a light to cast against herself and define the shadow as her own.

She seized the panic in her brain and shunted it to the side.

That was a fallacy.

Instead of her shadow, she reached for a Truth she’d long since accepted. Darkness was the one constant of existence. Light was the intruder, a blanket of lies that masked the reality beneath it. You could take away light, but you couldn’t take away darkness, only cover it with a layer of light. A shadow only revealed the true nature of the world beneath it, punching a hole through the quilt to reveal the truth below it. Thus, all shadows were one shadow, windows into the same darkness.

Thus, all shadows were her own shadow.

She reached into the Abyss around her and pulled out a stone the size of her torso.

She dug her fingers into the stone, bloody claws burrowing into it like clay to give her a better grip. She pushed against the Abyss and spun to face the direction she was falling.

She flooded her arm with qi and threw the stone.

The Abyss in the stone’s path compressed and shattered, the silent sound of a thousand shadows overlapping popping her eardrums as the shockwave swept past her.

Jian was wrenched to a stop, all of her downward momentum canceled out by the throw. She grabbed the fabric of the Abyss and swung herself around, forming a new platform of blood under her feet to stand on. She looked up, searching for Meng Hu. She couldn’t see him, but that was fine.

She had never once relied on her eyes to see.

Normally, Jian could feel everything the shadows around her touched as if they were her own hands, mapping the textures and placements the way she’d once crawled through the tunnels she’d grown up in. But that wasn’t enough to see Meng Hu. He took the same shadows she would use to see and wrapped them around himself, never quite touching, causing her qi to slide off without finding him. He hid from her touch the same way the wolves on the Shallow Sea had, enough that she could only get flashes where the pressure of her qi overpowered his technique.

But that was fine too. If her old tricks wouldn’t work, she would just make new ones.

She cut her wrist with a quick jerk of her blade, pushing the blood out to mix with the shadows of the Abyss. It spread out and seeped into the world, swirling through the darkness like a cloud of blood in the water.

Blood was a Connection, a Conduit. Most importantly, it was Hers.

She pulled deep from the reservoir of blood within her, feeling the sea level fall even faster than when she healed herself, and the cloud of blood swelled. The blood spun and stretched into gossamer threads that filled the space around her for a dozen meters. Then two. Then three.

She felt her connection begin to waver and stopped.

Three dozen meters of warning would have to be enough.

Inside her web, Jian pulled Shen Hui’s severed hand from the shadows.

The cross-section of his hand revealed flesh made of marbled stone, with a column of thick jade where his bones should be and thin veins of bronze in place of blood. In places, the bronze was flecked with a golden hue. Proof of the weight of his cultivation.

She brought the hand to her mouth and bit down. Blood sheathed her teeth in the shape of fangs, crunching through the thick stone with ease as she channeled the Truth of her Domain through them.

He didn’t have blood, but the veins of metal would do just as well.

She inhaled, sucking the fragments of soul Shen Hui had left behind down her throat.

The severed hand crumbled to dust as new power surged through her. Even a fragment of a Second Pillar Immortal was significant.

She felt the sea of blood inside her soul swell with the storm of power, waves crashing against the Pillar she’d erected to enshrine her Heart. The black vines twisted and grew thicker, a violet hue shining on the tips of their thorns as they scraped against the Pillar.

New power thrummed through Jian’s veins, her blood quickening as it shot through her body. She gripped her blade with both hands, the pressure of her grip warping the hilt to fit the shape of her hands.

She bit the inside of her mouth to let the iron taste of blood coat her tongue and spread her feet. She set her stance and waited.

She didn’t have to wait long.

She felt something invisible snap the threads above her head.

She swung her sword.

***

Jian groaned and pulled herself free, shards of rock and grit falling off of her as she lifted herself out of the indent she’d made in the ground. She reached out to grab the edge of the crater and heaved herself to her feet.

She looked up.

The light of the Palace was barely a pinprick in an endless field of black, like a single star in an empty sky.

The dark felt tighter than before, the shadows pressing down on her more violently, more incessantly, than she’d ever felt. For a moment, she felt like she was being crushed, a phantom pain sweeping through her body and making her jerk in place before she forced it down.

Jian frowned. Something about the sensation didn’t feel natural, but she didn’t have time to dwell on it.

She swept the area around her with her qi, feeling the shape of it under her fingers. She was still in the Abyss, but she’d landed on a large shelf of rock covered in crumbling stone buildings next to a vast drop-off. It almost felt like it had been a town square, but the arrangement was haphazard, with nothing ever quite lining up.

An empty well. A fallen clock tower. A great domed roof that had caved in. Slabs of stone crushing rotting tables. Cracked cobblestones underfoot. A bridge that connected two buildings, but with no doors to reach it. Windows that smeared together and poked into empty space.

There was no hint of Meng Hu.

Jian clicked her tongue and left the crater behind, walking through the ruins of a civilization that had never existed.

She Who Slumbered dreamt myriad dreams, and those dreams bubbled up from the core of the world where she slept, overwriting reality with a new one. The worst of those dreams were Nightmares, the worst of those Nightmares were the Hells, and the worst of the Hells were the Four Greater Hells.

They were the worst of the worst, the title shared between the four only because the Prime Hell no longer existed.

But a nightmare was not a consistent thing. Like all dreams, Nightmares were fluid things. Pockets of new possibilities often bubbled up from the depths of the Abyss and stuck to its sides. Shades of what could have been. Often empty, but not always.

Above her, Jian felt movement. Not Meng Hu, but almost worse.

A wall of scales, wider than the Palace was tall, crossed overhead.

Jian held still, clinging to a crumbling stone wall, as the False Leviathan passed by. False, only because even She Who Slumbered could not capture the full might of Her most ill-begotten child in Her dreams.

It turned, and for a moment Jian felt fear seize her like a vice. She would fight if she had to, maybe even win, but there was a primordial fear that gripped her when facing something so much larger. But, while she stood paralyzed, it merely curved around the edge of the stone shelf and continued, diving deeper into the Abyss.

It took several seconds for the serpent’s entire body to pass from Jian’s senses, and the wake of its passing swept through the ruined town like a sandstorm. The shadows surged past Jian, pulling stones free from piles of rubble to tumble through the streets and lifting Jian off her feet. Only her grip on the wall kept her from being swept over the edge.

Jian waited several seconds longer before she crept away from the wall.

She was far deeper in the Abyss than she’d ever wanted to go. She needed to find Meng Hu before he found her, or at least get to somewhere safer where she could prepare to-

“There you are.”

Jian whipped her head towards the voice, unable to believe her ears. She regretted it an instant later as a flood of light seared her open eyes and blinded her. It washed over everything, covering the ruins in a sheen of muted gray and blazing white. The pressure on Jian’s body lessened as the Abyss was burned away, black wisps evaporating and lifting from her hand like smoke as she covered her eyes.

The Pillar in Jian’s soul trembled, violet cracks dancing across its surface.

Something was wrong.

Jian pulled her hand away, looking into the light.

Something was impossible.

“Wei?”

He floated in the void, the boy from her memories now a man. Wings of fire stretched from his shoulders, casting a halo of light around him. Two swords, shining so bright she couldn’t look directly at them, floated on either side of him. His hair was longer, his skin was smoother, his body was taller, but it was still unequivocally, unmistakable, Zhou Weisheng.

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And he was wearing the robes of an Abyssal Palace Elder.

Jian’s sword slipped from her hand, clattering against the cobblestone road.

“Wei?” She asked again, as her sword melted into a red puddle at her feet.

“Did you think I was dead?” He said.

Jian didn’t say anything. She couldn’t.

“You would. You left me there, dying on the floor.”

No. She’d felt him die.

“I lived.”

No. She’d felt his body shudder with his last breath.

“Elder Morgan saved me, cleared my throat and lungs of the blood you’d put there, but you weren’t there to see it. You’d already left. You’d already discarded me, the way you discard everything that gets between you and your empty Hunger.”

No. No. She’d felt his soul slide down her throat when she ascended, carried with her the long years in-between. This was a trick. A lie.

“You discard an arm to make an advantage. You discard your leg to escape a trap. You discard a brother to take what he was given.”

The Pillar in Jian’s soul shuddered, spilling violet light as the cracks widened. How could she refute that? She’d admitted as much to herself already.

Where was the lie?

“They gave me a choice, after you left. To wait for another Life Resonance Gem, or to take up the Sword. I should have been a healer, a man of compassion, but you took that from me.”

He lifted his hand above his head and light pooled in his palm.

“Instead, I have become a weapon. A weapon of Justice. Take solace in knowing you aren’t even the worst creature I’ve seen in the decade you left me behind. Whether it’s the Hell of the Palace or the city above it, both are rotten to their core. I will free everyone you left behind. I will bring Justice, to the people you discarded. I will be their lone guiding light. I will be the Morning Star of a people who have never known the light of an open sky.”

Jian fell to her knees, her body trembling as violet light leaked from her eyes.

“The Abyssal Palace raised me to be their tool, but they are too blind and arrogant to see they have raised the tool of their own destruction. However, before I can turn to them, there is something I must do first.”

Jian stared into Wei’s eyes as the light in his hand lengthened into a sword that blazed with white fire. She felt the skin on her face tighten and burn from the heat.

“First, I must close this chapter of my life. First, I must slay the monster of my past. First, I must kill you.”

Wei met her gaze, but it was as if he were looking straight through her. His eyes held nothing but Justice. There was no room for her in those eyes.

She’d thrown that privilege away a long time ago.

“You can’t.” She croaked, her throat dry and parched. “You can’t harm me while my match-”

Wei interrupted her with a flick of his wrist, a round shape flying from his hand to hit the ground in front of her. It bounced once with a wet splat and rolled to her feet.

Meng Hu’s dead eyes looked up at her, his neck still smoking along the blackened and burned cut.

“The Laws said we could not harm you while the match was ongoing. It said nothing of your opponent.”

Oh.

Wei’s hand swung down, his blade pointed at Jian, light building at its tip like a star.

Black vines surged around the Pillar in Jian’s soul, holding it together and pressing the cracks closed. She refused to die here.

She threw out her hand, reaching into the shadows that Wei’s light cast behind her, pulling free the last mirror shield she’d stolen from Erichthonius’ corpse.

A ray of light shot from Wei’s sword.

The mirror blocked and reflected the ray, but the ray was wider than the shield and it spilled around its edges, swallowing the world around her. Her legs disappeared in the light, burned away where the shield’s shadow couldn’t reach.

The pain swept through her mind and the smell of burning flesh and blood filled her nose, but she survived. She would always survive.

She’d killed her brother once.

She could do it again.

She had no other-

Jian coughed, blood splattering against the cobblestones.

The light around her was gone. She was standing in the dark again, her feet planted firmly on the ground, whole and unburnt.

Meng Hu’s hand was buried in her lung, Sword qi rippling around his fingers as they poked out of her back.

Jian’s mind reeled, unable to understand, but her body reacted on its own. A knife found its way into her hand even as the blood inside her body bubbled and bloomed into dozens of barbed thorns, piercing Meng Hu’s hand and holding it in place.

He jerked backward, ripping his hand free of her chest in a spray of blood, but he was too slow. Her knife carved through his neck, cleanly parting flesh and bone to sever his spine.

Meng Hu’s body flopped to the ground as Jian staggered back, clutching the hole in her chest. Something was still thrashing inside her, noxious green qi tearing her body apart and leaving it numb.

Poison. It was weaker than the Heart-Seeking Venom, but it spread through her like a wildfire instead of concentrating around her core. A week ago, it might have even been enough to kill her.

Instead, she scooped out the strongest concentrations of poison and vomited it out, a small river of green-flecked blood pouring from her mouth to splatter on the ground. The remaining poison, the wisps too thin and diffused for her to catch in her net, were quickly subsumed as her blood turned on it. She devoured the green qi, breaking it down and adding to what she had already taken from the Hydra’s Venom.

Her blood likely qualified as a poison of its own by now.

Jian coughed out the last surviving drops of Meng Hu’s qi, her mind racing to catch up with what had happened.

Wei had never been there, had never been real. The phantom pain in her legs was already rapidly fading, the sensation of having them seared away another lie. It had all been in her head, or maybe her soul, but how? How-

Her thoughts froze.

Meng Hu’s body was being dragged, a thin cable of flesh sprouting from his ankle to reel him away, stretching into the dark beyond her sense of touch. His head bounced on the cobblestones, straining the flap of skin that barely kept it attached.

From the edge of what she could sense, layers of shadow began to unwrap, falling to the ground around Meng Hu’s body like sheets of silk. The beast that had ambushed her stepped forward, dropping the camouflage that had hidden it.

Her qi brushed over it, finding claws like swords and skin like sandpaper. It was almost shaped like a human, but with four powerful arms and a warped head somewhere between a shark and a snake. It had no eyes, but sprouted two pairs of thin horns where the ears would be on a human, each curving back to end in wicked points.

It was a monster, but it wasn’t unscathed.

One arm had been severed at the elbow. Another at the shoulder. A line of thinner and smoother skin stretched from its shoulder down into its chest, evidence of a wound that had only just been healed.

Evidence of their clash higher in the Abyss.

It reached down and grabbed Meng Hu’s body, claws as long as her forearm delicately wrapping around his torso to lift him up. It placed Meng Hu on his feet, a second hand pulling his head up from where it flopped against his back and setting it back on the stump of his neck.

Meng Hu blinked, his hands pulling a needle and thread from within his robes. He pushed the needle through the rubbery flesh of his neck, sewing his own head back on.

The creature behind him opened its mouth while he worked, revealing a jaw with row after row of jagged and irregular teeth. A susurration of whispers crescendoed to a deep growl as it spoke.

“Thank you, small abomination. Our contest was brief, but fulfilling.”

“Meng Hu.” Jian spit, “I assume that’s also you.”

It wouldn’t have been allowed to attack her otherwise. A single Immortal with two bodies, bait and hunter both.

The Immortal of the Hunt laughed, a sound like bone knives scraping against each other.

“Too clever and too strong for your standing. You survived longer than I thought you would, but it’s over now. Shen Hui’s tricks were too much for you, and a decision has been made.”

Jian’s grip tightened on her knife. She could have forged it into a sword, but the reservoir of blood she relied on had dwindled an alarming amount. She needed to save what she could.

“A bold statement from someone in pieces. You have no tricks left.”

“You misunderstand.” The creature sighed, wrapping his hand around his smaller body. “I am not boasting when I say it is already over. It is a shame, but my claim to your life has been denied. I am not the one with the right to take your head.”

He stepped back, pulling his smaller body with him, and the shadows of the Abyss wrapped around them both in turn.

As he disappeared, Jian tensed. The sound of blood pounded in her ears like a waterfall as violet-tinged Fear seized her.

It should’ve been easy to dismiss him as lying. It didn’t make any sense. She hadn’t lost yet. She was still alive. She was still-

“A failure.”

Jian spun, her knife swishing through nothing.

The Deicide’s violet eyes pinned her in place. Jian watched, helpless, as a jade sword slipped out through the skin of the woman’s palm, her fingers wrapping delicately around the hilt.

“If you cannot serve as an apprentice, then you will serve as a sword.”

Jian cringed away, grabbing the mirror shield from the floor and swinging it between them.

The polished bronze parted cleanly without a sound. The jade sword swept through it and her arm without slowing down.

Jian felt the blade slide through her neck, like scissors gliding through silk.

She felt something like vertigo as her head fell from her shoulders, spinning on its way to the ground.

She panicked, trying to shoot blood from her neck to grab her falling head, but something blocked it, a pressure building where her neck had been cut. Black thorns wrapped around her limbs, moving her like a puppet, as she spun and tried to catch herself. If she could just reattach her head quickly enough, maybe, maybe-

Jian swept her knife to the side, blood erupting from its edge to extend its reach and biting into Meng Hu’s chest.

Meng Hu's monstrous body leaped backward from where it had been about to strike her, laughing. Her cut had been too shallow.

Jian lifted her hand to her throat, feeling the smooth and unbroken skin beneath her shaking fingers. Her head was still in place. The Deicide was not there.

Another lie. Another Fear.

She’d misunderstood something.

She turned her gaze inward, to the Pillar she’d erected in her soul. She traced the hair-thin cracks and scratches that danced over it, feeling the shape of them. She found the thorns that had left those scratches, cradling one in her hand as she looked at the violet hue that shimmered on its point.

She’d taken this power from Shen Hui, but she hadn’t understood what it was.

She had felt it resonate with something, but she had assumed it was the crushing pressure of the Abyss. The deeper she’d fallen, the more it had pressed against her, and the more she’d had to fight to push back against it, controlling her fear and panic to stay calm.

But it hadn’t been resonating with the Pressure.

It had been the Fear.

An unnatural fear, not her own. Shen Hui’s fear, maybe his greatest fear. The fear that defined him and guided him.

The Fear of being crushed by someone greater.

Her heart was already too close to Fear, her own domain a single step away from it, a cowardly Hunger born from fear.

Close enough that she’d been more vulnerable than she’d realized.

Illusions must not count as violence.

“That won’t work anymore, Shen Hui.” She said into the darkness.

Meng Hu laughed from out of sight.

“That’s fine.” He hissed, a drawn out sound like knives scraping against each other. “That wasn’t the only trick our dear Shen Hui gave me.”

Jian lifted her knife as Meng Hu tossed something toward her from out of sight. It hit the ground and bounced, rolling to a stop at her feet.

Jian’s hand shook.

“Another trick.”

Meng Hu’s laughter echoed through the Abyss all around her.

“You’re the one that left her with Shen Hui. Did you think the Deicide would bother to protect her?”

Striga’s vacant eyes stared up at her.

“Did you think that violence was the only way to kill someone?”

She wasn’t breathing.

Jian dropped to one knee, her knife still held out at the darkness around her. She reached for Striga with a trembling hand.

Jian gently touched Striga’s neck, felt the cold flesh beneath her fingers.

There was no pulse.

A trick. It had to be another trick.

She turned her gaze from the corpse, hand tightening on the hilt of her knife.

She couldn’t waste her time on another lie.

She bit her tongue and spit out a glob of blood. She spun it into a thread and threw it out into the darkness, sweeping through the Abyss as she searched for Meng Hu. She tensed her legs, ready to move the instant she found something.

She felt the thread brush against something in the distance.

There-

Striga’s hand jerked up, a golden knife slipping between Jian’s ribs.

Jian dropped her knife and wrapped both her hands around Striga’s wrist, gasping as she struggled to stop the knife from being driven any deeper. She tried to pull it away, but Striga sat up and pushed harder, her features melting away to reveal Meng Hu’s face, stitches still tight across his neck.

He was stronger than her, and slowly, the knife slipped further into Jian’s chest.

“Just die already.” He spit.

“No.”

Jian let go of his hand, letting it surge upward to shatter her ribs and plunge elbow deep into her chest. The knife, and the hand holding it, hit the hole in her chest and kept going, disappearing into the world of her soul.

It appeared there, piercing the sky like the hand of a giant, reaching for the Pillar where she’d enshrined her heart.

Great vines lifted from the shallow sea of blood to wrap around Meng Hu’s wrist, thorns digging into it to gain purchase, the vines snapping taught to hold it in place.

In the world above, Jian fell down on Meng Hu, one hand wrapped around his elbow and the other pushing his head up to bare his neck.

Finally close enough, her teeth plunged into his throat.

The piece of Meng Hu screamed.

Blood fell from the sky within her soul like a curtain, pouring into the sea to replenish it. The giant hand thrashed, golden knife cutting through vines to free itself, only for more to sprout from the sea below it and take their place.

Meng Hu’s larger body shot from the darkness towards them, his claws aimed at Jian’s neck, but he stumbled. Black veins stretched from his smaller body’s neck, down the length of his body and along the umbilical cord that sprouted from his ankle.

The two bodies were Connected, and as long as Jian could devour one, she could devour them both.

Black vines sprouted from the veins covering Meng Hu’s larger body, wrapping around him and anchoring themselves in the stone beneath him, slamming him down as they pulled taut. He struggled forward anyway, vines snapping under the strain as quickly as they could grow. He took a step toward her, and then another.

Jian pulled on the Connection harder, dragging his soul out, devouring it faster and faster as the power thrumming in her veins swelled.

The number of vines holding down doubled and Meng Hu screamed, his claws gouging through stone like tofu as he was slammed back down onto the ground.

His scream morphed into a howl, rising in intensity until the entire Abyss seemed to Resonate with him. Even as his soul slipped away, he pulled out more, spreading it through the darkness around them, tinging it in his own shade of black.

Through her Connection, she felt him establish a new Connection with the Abyss, felt his sense of self begin to diffuse and slip into the world around them.

The ground around her began to disappear and reappear in waves as the darkness started to ripple, blocking her out as his claim ripped away her ability to see through it. Claws the size of swords sprouted from those empty shadows all around her, spearing her body in a dozen places.

As another ripple passed through the world, most of the claws melted away, leaving holes in her body that poured blood like water. When the next ripple came, a dozen more sprouted, the number increasing each time, stabbing into her like a pincushion.

But Jian ignored it, ignored the pain, and bent everything she had toward eating Meng Hu alive faster than he could kill her.

And, as she fed, Meng Hu began to die.

The third wave of claws came slower than the ones before and left less swords behind. The fourth sputtered halfway through, fading as quickly as it appeared.

The fifth never came.

Jian lifted her mouth, razor sharp fangs sliding out of Meng Hu’s neck with a wet squelch.

The human body’s eyes were vacant, empty white orbs that stared into nothing.

She stood up, covered in her own blood, the wounds already healed and her clothing reknitting itself from threads of shadow.

She staggered over to where Meng Hu’s monstrous form was wrapped in black vines, his hands still weakly scraping against the stone. She’d left him just enough of his soul to survive, barely enough to avoid being crushed by the pressure of the Abyss.

She kicked his head to the side to look at his face.

His mouth moved slowly, pushing the words out with ragged breaths.

“Before you kill me, you should realize. You’re dooming that child to die. As soon as the match is over, Shen Hui will kill her.” He laughed, devolving into a wet cough halfway through and stopping to take in another ragged breath. “If you care about her, I’d suggest just killing yourself now, but I know you won’t. You’re more a monster than I am.”

“I won’t be killing you.” Jian said coldly. “As long as you live, the match isn’t over. You should survive being stuffed in my shadow long enough for me to kill Shen Hui. Then, I’ll let you die.”

He laughed again.

“Stupid child. Did you already forget? You’re the only one they aren’t allowed to kill.”

Jian lunged toward him. Too slowly.

His skull crunched as his head imploded, crushed by an invisible Pressure.