The moonlight over the sect's ruins was as cold as a burial shroud draped over broken tombstones.
Zhao Hu's grip was like an iron vise around Jiang Li's throat. "You wretched beggar," he spat, his voice trembling with a mix of greed and malice. "How did a piece of gutter trash like you make the Saint Beast submit? Tell me what treasure you're hiding, or I'll crush your throat right here. I possess a Crimson-Gold Fate Wheel—killing you is no more than stepping on an ant!"
Jiang Li's face turned a frantic crimson from the lack of air, her thin legs kicking uselessly. But beneath the matted hair covering her eyes, there was no fear—only a gaze as frigid as the abyssal void. Her right pinky pulsed with a violent, hidden rhythm. It was the Primal Void Qi she had scavenged from the highest level of the Void Mirror—an ancient, turbulent current that no mortal vessel was ever meant to contain.
"No... please..." Jiang Li wheezed, the sound like dry leaves scraping against a grave.
Zhao Hu sneered, tightening his grip. "So you do know fear. Show me the artifact, or die!"
In that heartbeat, Jiang Li's right finger snapped forward like a coiled viper, striking the vital pressure point on Zhao Hu's wrist. She didn't use physical strength; she acted as a conduit, letting that sliver of Void Qi pierce through his flesh and strike the very foundation of his soul.
BOOM.
Zhao Hu's world shattered. His Crimson-Gold Fate Wheel, the pride of his thirty-year cultivation, dissolved like parchment in acid the moment it touched the black mist.
Crack.
The Wheel stalled. His life force snapped. With a final, desperate savagery, Jiang Li locked her claw-like fingers around his windpipe and twisted with the weight of her entire body. The "genius" of the inner sect died without ever knowing how a beggar had unmade his very existence.
Zhao Hu's corpse hit the mud like a sack of stones. Jiang Li collapsed beside him, her right arm twisted at a grotesque angle, her fingertips shredded to the bone.
Yet, as the darkness of unconsciousness closed in, a searing heat erupted from her ankle—the spot where the Void Sapling had scratched her. A wave of crystalline vitality surged from the wound, flowing through her ruptured meridians like silver thread. In mere breaths, the bleeding stopped. This was a higher mechanism of repair, holding her broken body together through sheer, ancient will.
In the shadows, a pair of violet eyes as large as millstones opened. The Suanni. Stirred by Jiang Li's killing intent, the beast cast an icy glare. Its mere presence crushed the lingering stench of blood into nothingness, erasing the evidence of her sin before drifting back into a slumber—waiting for the day its master would truly ascend.
"Li'er!"
A frantic cry shattered the silence. Cang Yaochen rushed forward, his face turning deathly pale at the sight of the corpse and Jiang Li's mangled arm.
"I am too late... to let such madness haunt this place and hurt you so."
He knelt, his hands trembling. Ignoring the heaven's warning about his status as "Calamity Ash," he forced a spark of pure Buddha-light into his palms to warm her shivering body. Jiang Li leaned into his chest, letting out a weak, practiced sob. "Brother... I'm scared..."
Cang Yaochen's hands stiffened. As his Buddha-light probed the air, he sensed a violent, unstable distortion. Deep within Zhao Hu's cooling chest, he glimpsed a shard of "Chaos Jade"—shattered and hemorrhaging Black Sands of Time.
If he didn't act, this breach in reality would swallow the entire sect.
"Don't move," he whispered, his voice vibrating with a sudden, terrifying gravity.
When Lin Yuan and the Hall of Discipline arrived, Cang Yaochen stood as a silent monolith before Jiang Li. He knew Buddha-power would only illuminate the murder. In an act of desperate sacrilege, he plunged his consciousness into his own soul, reaching for the "Calamity Ash" that acted as his shackles.
He unleashed a swirl of ashen mist, swallowing the leaking Time Sands and grinding them into nothingness. He disguised the bloody scene as a horrific, natural collapse of the local laws.
"A Time Rift!" Lin Yuan shrieked, skidding to a halt. "That fool Zhao Hu... he must have triggered an ancient rift and been devoured by the backlash!"
Lin Yuan's eyes flickered with deep suspicion as he looked at the monk and the girl, but the sheer terror of the "rift" forced him to retreat. "Leave this place at once!" he barked, though he secretly vowed to investigate their true identities.
Cang Yaochen nodded silently, picked up the unconscious Jiang Li, and walked away. Back in the silence of his hut, he didn't pray. Instead, he sat in the dark, his eyes fixed—sharp and unblinking—on Jiang Li's still-trembling right hand.