Alex stepped forward, his presence a fracture in the flow of time, and his blade appeared within the Little Demon’s chest, embedding itself into the grotesque crystal that encased the demon’s spirit core. There was a sickening crunch as cracks formed across the hardened core, the fracture lines branching out like veins through glass. A sound pulsed from it—not a noise for the ear, but a resonance felt in the bones, a shudder through the Qi that connected them. To Alex's senses, time stood still- all things halting from one moment to the next as the fracture deepened, the force emanating outward in rippling waves that met Alex’s own energy as a section of the little demons beast core was forced to vacate the space his blade now occupied.
He had blindly and wholly entrusted himself to the Dao, regardless of where it would take him. His choices had been deliberate, immediate, and absolute.
And it had worked.
It was not controlling fate- that was impossible. It was simply offering himself to his Dao and to flux. To time. Letting it take him along its threads.
And time had delivered his step 0.5 seconds into a position where he held his blade within the same space occupied by the Little Demon’s core of beastly Qi.
The Little Demon’s form froze mid-motion, a momentary stillness overtaking the fury, his bloodshot eyes shifting with utter shock as he turned his gaze upon Alex, fixed with an intensity that held nothing short of a raw and violent disbelief. His lips parted, but no words came immediately; he seemed to wrestle with the impossibility of the attack, his eyes widening in a flicker of something alien to his face—a brief, dawning recognition that somehow, against all odds, Alex’s blade had reached him.
His mouth twisted, a sneer forming as the rage within him twisted, doubling over itself, each layer more venomous than the last. “What… do you think you’re doing?” The question was a growl, barely words, spat through clenched teeth. The syllables came out in waves, each one edged with malice and incomprehension, as though the very notion of being touched, let alone harmed, was an affront that cut to his core. His body contorted, the muscles beneath the crystallized blood flexing, readying to unleash the storm building in his chest.
Jin, mere feet away, flinched visibly. His jaw dropped as he took in the reality before him—a disciple far weaker than him doing what should have been impossible, in far more ways than one. "Wh-what did you just do..?" He took an involuntary step back, his hand loosening on the hilt of his crimson weapon. Alex’s action had carved a line in the reality Jin barely understood, and he struggled to reconcile the sight before him.
The Little Demon’s limbs, extended and sharp, crystallized into a dense array of scythe-like edges, its movement precise, driven by a viciousness honed over years of life in the harshest of places. His arm moved in a swift motion, his entire body coiling as he swung, every fiber of his twisted form aligned to rip Alex to pieces. The fury in his eyes burned, not merely a need to win, but a need to annihilate, to tear down the very fabric of this challenge to his existence.
Alex felt the shift of time within him, a slowing that allowed him to see the full breadth of the attack, each sharpened edge bearing down with the weight of Qi-infused power. Yet even with his senses heightened, his vision sharpened, he knew there was no evading it. He was far too slow, without the temporal awareness granted by his Sword Saint's Domain, he would have died before even realising what had hit him. But with it, Alex had the misfortune of witnessing the unavoidable blow descend like an exocutioners axe. The limbs sliced into him. Painfullly. Cleaving through his torso with brutal efficiency. Pain detonated in his mind, a sensation that clawed through nerve endings, tearing apart every shred of his awareness. His muscles tensed under the impact, a raw, instinctive reaction, but the attack was unyielding, disassembling his body with a precision that could only come from the Little Demon’s mastery of his craft.
Alex’s vision dimmed, color washing out into a harsh red, his surroundings fading as his own blood pooled and his form gave way beneath the assault. His thoughts fractured, torn apart as his mind slipped, veering dangerously close to a dark edge he could not come back from. The world shrank, narrowed to the single, overwhelming sensation of destruction.
But even as the last fragments of his thoughts began to splinter, he let himself fall backward, his consciousness sinking into the recesses of his Dao. With his dying breath, Alex searched for that infintesimal truth it had shown him. The thread. His awareness fragmented further, but Alex allowed himself to sink into the sensation, searching for the single thread that tied him to his last unbroken second of possibility. His mind latched onto a singular truth within his Dao: that each moment existed not alone, but as one of countless intertwined possibilities, each with its own resonance. Alex’s understanding allowed him to perceive reality as a boundless network, a multidimensional lattice in which the present and the past lay side by side, each moment an individual point, but each moment connected.
Alex steadied his breath, grounding himself within the lattice of possibility he sensed all around him. The moments appeared infinite and beyond reach, as far away as the Earth or the Sun. A distant thread woven through an infinite realm of layered reality. He tuned into the closest point of the intricate weave, where every choice, every fraction of time, hummed with a resonance that connected it to the present. Each path existed side by side- some overlapping-distinct outcomes waiting to be embodied. He reached into this realm with his intent, searching for the single thread of his past self-a self- existing a half-second prior. If this failed, he would die.
But Alex didn't care, to entrust himself to the Dao was to risk death.
In that moment, Alex realized that his inability to see where the thread of his future path lay allowed him to entrust himself wholly to it, without a single iota of doubt. This trust, born from surrender, ensured that the thread would receive him, guiding him seamlessly into the actions that awaited him just beyond the veil of uncertainty. With a single breath, he felt the weight of that understanding settle within him, solidifying his connection to the path ahead.
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Without knowledge of the nature of the threads possibility, and with no knowledge of the future, Alex threw himself wholeheartedly into its depths.
He stepped again.
As he connected with that specific thread, he aligned his awareness with the essence of that past outcome, grounding himself fully into the presence of that past. 0.5 seconds, thats all he could take. He could already feel the strain, like trying to fit the ocean in a plastic cup. His intention sharpened, and his being shifted as he committed to this one, chosen moment, refusing to relent to the strain. The instant took hold around him, crystallizing into reality as he anchored himself to its resonance, fully embodying the exact self from that interval.
Reality shifted, the agony fell away, and in an instant, he re-emerged, whole again, a half-second behind the catastrophe that had torn him apart. The searing pain faded into memory, erased as though it had never been as the flow of time reversed, restoring his form to the split second before the attack.
Thats the third time, he thought, realising that each step taken in faith was simply a surrender to possibility, weaving the very fabric of his reality.
Everything that's ever happened and could happen is all around us, and it exists all at once, huh. And blind surrender to flux allows you to embody it... He realised, Who knew?
[Dao: ‘True Immortality’ - Progress 3 > 3.01%]
So i moved 0.5 seconds into a possible past state... Why did that bring less progress than- Wait, hold up- why did that even bring any progress at all? is it because i reversed only myself this time? and intentionally? He thought, feeling reality settle around him.
He opened his eyes, feeling the renewal, the sensation of wholeness that filled him. There was no time to pause, no second of reprieve—he lunged forward again, his blade materializing into the opposite side of the Little Demon’s chest. The strike emerged within the demon, deep into the fractured core, its new existence overlapping, displacing, and rearranging the demonic cultivators interior. It met the resistance of compressed energy before the structure within cracked, crumbled, and then shattered.
The moment seeped into the environment, suspended between breaths. There was a release, an eruption, as raw Qi poured forth, uncontrolled.
The core had shattered.
The little demon’s life force, his Dao, unravelled in the very act of release. Alex felt it—the power surging to inevitably explode, broken into shards that would scatter and disintegrate as the spirit within the core inevitably vanished.
The instant the core shattered, a torrent of Qi exploded into his Domain, sending jolts across every fiber of his perception. The Qi rupture carved through his awareness in piercing waves, the energy splintering into his heightened senses, each fragment resonating with a raw, primal force that flooded his mind’s view like a landscape crumbling into fragments. He felt the rupture as vibrations tremored across the ground and air, the broken energy pulsing in his mind with blinding intensity. Through his inner vision, he saw the shattering energy patterns, raw currents of power breaking into fractured streams that poured out from the core, each resonating with the exacting brutality of a weapon’s strike. The chemical scent of the demon’s dissipating Qi stung the air, lingering as an acrid remnant of destruction, while time itself stretched within his perception, each moment of dispersal etched into the boundaries of his mind with brutal, unrelenting clarity.
Alex breathed it all in, cultivating his enemies dispersing Qi and feeling his pathways burn with pain as foreign power coursed through them.
The Little Demon staggered, a guttural scream tearing from his throat, not merely a cry of pain but a roar of despair, guttural and primal, born from the very depths of his being. He fell to one knee, his hand reaching up to his chest, fingers clawing desperately at the hollow cavity left by the shattered core, as if he could somehow force himself back together, as if by will alone he could reassemble the power he had spent a lifetime cultivating.
The fury in his eyes turned cold, his gaze a sharpened blade of loathing fixed upon Alex, his breath ragged, uneven, each inhalation trembling. “You have destroyed everything,” he rasped, his voice a hollow echo, the bitterness laced into each word thick, potent. “I'll kill y...” He choked on the last word, his voice cracking under the strain, his hands still clutching his chest, bloodied fingers pressing into flesh that no longer held strength.
Each syllable hit with the weight of his loss, his words spilling out, fractured, the remains of a man who had known greatness, only to be reduced in an instant. There was no laughter, no twisted grin—only the empty, burning eyes of a man robbed of everything, his body trembling under the weight of his own hatred. His breath heaved, rattling with a fury so deep it seemed to resonate through the air around him, filling the space with a tension that hung, thick, almost tangible, even as his Qi faded.
"Just die," Alex muttered, watching the demonic cultivators end without remorse.
They had gathered Qi from life; they shattered minds for power; and twisted souls for blood. He had no sympathy to offer him.
Jin watched in silence, his own face a canvas of horror and awe, understanding that this was no victory. This was the destruction of something unstoppable, a creature that had become a force beyond any one life, and here it lay, broken by the most improbable of means. He took a hesitant step forward, his hands clutching his weapon, though no longer with intent but with the need for grounding, for the feeling of something solid amidst the chaos of what he was witnessing. The dissected corpse of the phoenix began to kindle, smouldering with embers. Jin observed the phenomenon; the phoenix, would be reborn and untouched by death; but they were still mortal and breakable. "We... We need to leave, Alex."
Alex couldn’t respond. Something was wrong, pulling at the edges of his mind, an emptiness growing inside him that gnawed and tore with a ferocity he couldn’t contain. He felt his connection to the Dao snap, like a thread severed, leaving a void that filled with darkness, an overwhelming weight pressing down on him.
The sensation of his overutilised Dao clawed at his skull, tearing at his mind. A sensation unlike anything he'd ever experienced, save for what he'd felt in the endless library, appeared. But deeper than anything physical. It felt as though something ancient, vast, had latched onto his consciousness, ripping into the very core of his being. He couldn’t think; his thoughts scattered, slipping through his grasp like sand through clenched fingers.
His fingers dug into his scalp, as though clawing at the skin would somehow release the entity that engulfed them all. Alex forced himself to fight back with desperation even as the world dimmed, and with a force of will, he removed himself completely from the Dao's grasp.
As the last of his consciousness faded, that thought lingered, a faint murmur swallowed by the expanding abyss within him. The world dissolved around him, his mind slipping into the embrace of darkness and his body falling limp as everything faded to black.
He had shattered the demon’s core, and had accomplished the impossible. Yet the price had been greater than he’d anticipated. The cost of severing that connection, of reaching so far into the unknown that the unknown had tried to claim him, consume him from the inside out.
He managed one final thought, faint and wavering, adrift in the haze of of the fading world.
Heh. Got that fucker.