The courtyard of the Hidden Dragon Faculty was no longer a place of meditation and refinement; it had been transformed into a charnel house of pulverized obsidian and frozen blood. The air was thick with the scent of ozone and the heavy, suffocating pressure of Nascent Soul Qi, which felt like invisible mountains pressing down on every inch of the shattered marble floor.
Yin Shen stood in the center of the devastation, his breath coming in ragged, wet hitches. His silver hair was matted with dust and crimson, and his magnificent golden-dragon overcoat hung in scorched tatters.
His left arm remained a mangled mess, held against his torso only by the sheer stubbornness of his will and a few threads of hardening Qi.
Across from him, the two assassins—the vocal one with the corrosive aura and the silent one with the void-daggers—were no longer laughing. Their masks were torn, revealing eyes that burned with a mixture of frustration and a creeping, ancestral dread.
They had expected to snuff out a flickering candle; instead, they had found themselves trying to extinguish a black hole.
"How... are you still... standing?" the vocal assassin spat, his voice trembling with a hint of hysteria.
He clutched his side, where a grazing strike from Yin Shen's earlier Ruination's Edge had dissolved a chunk of his Shadow-Veil cloak and the skin beneath it.
Yin Shen didn't answer. He couldn't. His throat was partially constricted by a hematoma, and every drop of his remaining focus was dedicated to one thing: Survival.
The fight resumed not with words, but with an explosion of violence.
Yin Shen moved. Despite his broken frame, his Flash Step allowed him to blur into a silver streak. He surged forward, his right hand—his only functioning weapon—clenched into a fist that shimmered with the dark, entropic light of Ruination.
BOOM!
He collided with the silent assassin. The void-daggers met his fist in a spray of sparks that lit up the night like a dying star. The shockwave of the impact leveled the remaining stone lanterns in the courtyard. Yin Shen was fighting toe-to-toe with monsters who were three major realms above him, a feat that should have been impossible.
He was bridging the gap by burning his very life essence, forcing the Chaos Meridian to pull energy from the ambient air with such ferocity that the atmosphere around him began to whistle and crackle.
But the gap was a chasm that even a genius could not leap forever.
The silent assassin twisted his blade with a sickening efficiency. As Yin Shen overextended his strike, the second assassin—the vocal one—materialized behind him.
"Die, you freakish brat!"
A palm strike, saturated with corrosive poison, slammed into Yin Shen's back.
CRACK.
Yin Shen felt his spine groan and his right shoulder blade shatter. The force of the blow sent him skidding across the yard, his boots carving deep furrows into the ground. As he tried to stabilize himself, the silent assassin followed up with a brutal kick aimed at his right wrist.
SNAP.
The sound was sickeningly clear in the quiet of the night. Yin Shen's right hand—his primary limb for martial arts—dropped limply. The bones of his forearm had been ground into splinters by the Nascent Soul pressure.
He was now effectively armless. His left was broken from the start; his right was a dead weight. He stood there, swaying, his head lolling. His Dantian, once a swirling nebula of power, was now a parched, cracked wasteland. He had less than one percent of his Qi remaining. His Eye of Insight flickered, the gold turning to a dull, dying bronze.
The two assassins closed in, their footfalls heavy and deliberate. They were panting, their own reserves taxed by the sheer effort of pinning down a target who moved like a ghost and struck like a god.
"No more tricks," the silent one finally spoke, his voice deep and devoid of emotion. "No more miracles."
They stood on either side of him, raising their weapons for the final execution. The vocal assassin aimed his jagged blade at Yin Shen's heart; the silent one leveled his void-dagger at Yin Shen's throat. They moved simultaneously, a pincer strike that left zero room for evasion.
Yin Shen looked at the cold steel descending toward him. Time seemed to slow, not because of a skill, but because his mind was beginning to detach from the physical realm.
'Is this it?' he thought. 'Nineteen years of waiting, a few days of glory, only to end in the dirt?'
Suddenly, a semi-transparent blue screen erupted in his field of vision, glowing with a frantic, pulsing light.
[WARNING! WARNING!]
[Host's Life Signs: CRITICAL (0.4%)]
[Probability of Survival: 0.00001%]
[EMERGENCY PROTOCOL ACTIVATED: SYSTEM INTERVENTION]
[Notification: The System has detected an existential threat to the Host. A temporary 'Forbidden Skill' has been unlocked for immediate use.]
[Skill: TEMPORAL FAUX]
[Description: A high-dimensional interference that suspends the flow of causality within a 200-meter radius.]
[CRITICAL WARNING: The use of this skill will result in a SEVERE BACKLASH. The Host's Dantian will be sealed, and Qi usage will be IMPOSSIBLE for seven (7) days. Physical trauma will be multiplied by the mental toll of the suspension.]
[Do you accept the terms? (Y/N)]
'Do it...' Yin Shen's thought was a snarl of pure defiance. 'I don't care about a week... give me their lives!'
"DO IT ALREADY!" he roared, blood spraying from his lips.
In the instant the assassins' blades were a hair's breadth from his skin, the universe went silent.
It wasn't just the absence of sound. It was the absence of everything.
The Temporal Faux activated with a silent, invisible ripple that expanded 200 meters in every direction. Within this sphere, time didn't just slow down—it died.
The wind froze in its tracks, the swirling dust motes hanging in the air like fixed stars. The fire from the burning pavilion was caught in mid-flicker, its orange tongues turned into rigid glass sculptures. Even light, the fastest thing in existence, was trapped. The world turned into a monochrome landscape of greys and blacks, as if the color had been drained out by a cosmic sponge.
To the two assassins, the world simply ceased to be. They were frozen in their killing lunges, their eyes wide, their hearts stopped mid-beat. They couldn't move, they couldn't feel the ground beneath their feet, and they couldn't even process the thought of fear. They were statues in a museum of the Void.
But for Yin Shen, the world was alive.
He was the only entity within the 200-meter radius permitted to move through the frozen causality. He looked at the blades inches from his flesh. He could see the microscopic serrations on the metal, the way the air was displaced by the edges—a displacement that was now a solid wall.
He felt a searing, agonizing pressure in his skull. His brain felt as if it were being squeezed by a giant, trying to process the data of a world where time didn't exist. This was the "Temporal Faux"—a false reality that Yin Shen had to sustain through sheer mental willpower.
He looked at his broken right hand. Under the influence of the skill, he didn't need Qi to move; he was moving through the idea of space.
He reached out and grabbed a shard of a broken practice sword—a piece of cold-forged iron that was frozen in mid-air. He gripped it with his broken right hand, the pain dulled by the mental overload of the time-stop.
He walked past the silent assassin, moving through the air as if he were walking on solid ground. He stood behind the vocal assassin—the one who had mocked his sister.
"You said... I looked like a doll." Yin Shen whispered, though his voice made no sound in the frozen air.
He swung the shard of iron. Because time was stopped, there was no resistance. The metal moved through the assassin's torso like a hot wire through butter.
Slice.
The vocal assassin was cut into two equal halves, the separation so clean it looked surgical. But because time was frozen, the body didn't fall. The blood didn't spray. The two halves simply hung there, separated by a microscopic gap of void.
Yin Shen turned his gaze toward the silent assassin. The man who had aimed for his throat.
Even though the assassin was frozen, his pupils seemed to vibrate—a sign that his Nascent Soul was desperately trying to comprehend the impossibility of the situation. He couldn't move his eyeballs, but he was aware that Death was standing in front of him, wearing the face of a bloody youth.
Yin Shen raised the iron shard once more. He didn't rush. He savored the terror he saw reflected in the man's frozen, dilated pupils.
With a single, horizontal motion, he carved a line through the man's neck.
Behead.
The head of the silent assassin sat perfectly atop his neck, separated by a thin line of darkness.
Yin Shen's vision began to blur. His nose was bleeding profusely now—not from a physical hit, but from the mental strain of holding back the universe.
'Done...' he thought. 'Release... it...'
The Temporal Faux lifted as abruptly as it had begun.
The monochrome world vanished. Color, sound, and light slammed back into reality with the force of a tidal wave.
SQUELCH—THUD!
The silence was shattered by the simultaneous sound of bodies hitting the ground. The vocal assassin fell in two separate pieces, his internal organs spilling out onto the marble as the blood finally realized it was free to flow. The silent assassin's head rolled across the courtyard like a macabre bowling ball, his body collapsing into a heap of black silk.
Then, the backlash hit Yin Shen.
"AAAAAAGH!"
He fell to his knees, but his knees gave out, and he collapsed face-first into the dirt. It felt as though every nerve in his body was being flayed by a hot iron. The "multiplied trauma" mentioned by the system was no exaggeration. Every bruise, every cut, and every broken bone now felt ten times more intense.
His right arm, which he had used to strike during the time-stop, felt as if it had been dipped in acid and then shattered with a hammer. His left arm was a numb, distant memory. But the worst was his head.
It felt as if a thousand needles were being driven into his brain, his consciousness splintering under the weight of the high-dimensional data it had just processed.
[NOTIFICATION: BACKLASH IN EFFECT]
[Dantian Status: SEALED]
[Qi Availability: 0.00%]
[Duration: 167 Hours, 59 Minutes]
Yin Shen lay in the ruins of his courtyard, surrounded by the corpses of two Nascent Soul masters—a feat that would go down in the legends of the continent, though he currently lacked the strength to even celebrate.
He was a mess of stabs, cuts, and bruises. His skin was a tapestry of purple and red. He looked toward the gate, his vision fading. He thought of Yin Xue in the forest, and Yin Yue in her pavilion.
"Stay... safe..." he whispered into the dirt.
The "Child of the Abyss" had survived his first true assassination attempt, but he had paid a price that left him utterly defenseless in a house full of vipers. As his eyes finally closed, the last thing he saw was the silver moonlight reflecting off the pools of blood spreading across the Hidden Dragon Faculty.
The world went dark.