Myriad Rivers to the Sea

Li Yu narrowed his dual colored eyes as the geyser of black energy coalescing in the dirt slowly took a distinct shape. The entity did not form into a beast or a humanoid figure. It twisted and folded upon itself to become a complex object that radiated a suffocating aura of madness. It manifested as a dense sphere of rusted iron chains and jagged black thorns.

The rusted links endlessly coiled around one another without a clear beginning or end while the jagged thorns dripped a foul ink onto the ground. A shard of dark glass rested at the very center of the tangled knot and the smooth surface reflected a pair of crazed bloodshot eyes that darted around the spiritual domain in a panic.

Li Yu stared at the twisted entity and his rage quickly found a new target as this thing came out of Guizhong so it must be part of him somehow. The dark creature had been hiding inside the man who dared to attack his family so it was equally guilty in his eyes. The Fisherman Soul stood quietly by the edge of the rushing water and the dark seal he had planted on the ancestor flared with a sudden light. Since the ancient entity had bound Guizhong upon his arrival, the restrictive power extended naturally to the parasite that shared his spiritual vessel.

Dark tendrils erupted from the seal on the old man and whipped through the air to wrap tightly around the sphere of rusted chains. The jagged thorns sparked against the bindings but the entity found itself firmly pinned to the ground alongside its former host.

Li Yu did not wait for the creature to offer another pathetic plea. He gripped the hilt of his weapon and stepped forward with a murderous intent rolling off his shoulders in thick waves and did not care what the thing had said to him. He raised the blade high and brought it down directly upon the dark glass resting at the center of the iron knot.

The sword shattered the rusted links and bit deep into the core of the entity. A sound resembling a thousand shattering mirrors echoed across the island as the creature shrieked in agony.

"Please have mercy!" The entity cried out while the chains writhed like a pile of dying snakes. "I am not the one you want!"

Li Yu ignored the desperate words and pulled the weapon free to strike again. He slashed and hacked away at the dense sphere of thorns while unleashing a fresh wave of violence upon the parasite. The blade tore through the iron chains and sent shards of dark glass flying into the dirt only for those bits and pieces to come flying back towards the entity after a short time. The entity wailed and begged for a reprieve but the young lord offered nothing but the cold edge of his sword.

The dark creature was a being born from negative emotions and it was accustomed to causing pain rather than feeling it. The torment inflicted by Li Yu struck directly at the core of its existence. It had felt the same kind of pain that Guizhong had felt all this time but it had been able to dull it slightly. Even when slightly dulled, the pain was too much for anyone to bare.

Just like Guizhong, the entity found itself pushed to the very brink of destruction. The rusted chains shattered into dust and the dark glass cracked until it was barely holding together. The creature felt the comforting embrace of oblivion approaching and welcomed the end of its suffering.

Yet the release of true death never came. The ambient laws of the soul space dragged the entity back from the edge of the abyss and forced the broken sphere to mend itself. The rusted chains forged themselves back together and the cracked glass fused in the blink of an eye. The entity was violently yanked back into consciousness and forced to endure the agony of the descending blade all over again.

The creature was thoroughly bewildered by the situation before when it was in Guizhong’s body but now experiencing it on its own was even more devastating. Everything was going so well for it not that long ago. It had been resting comfortably inside the foundation of a powerful expert while gorging itself on a steady diet of dark desires and grand ambitions. Now it found itself dragged into a hellish nightmare where a young boy subjected it to an endless cycle of butchery. It could not comprehend how its fortunate life had spiraled into such a disaster.

Li Yu continued to hack at the tangled thorns for a long time before the burning exhaustion in his mind finally forced him to slow down. He took a step back and let the tip of his sword rest against the dirt as he rested. Li Yu took several deep breaths to calm the frantic beating of his mind and allowed the red haze clouding his vision to recede just a fraction.

He looked at the weeping sphere of chains and then turned his gaze toward the ruined soul of the ancestor. Li Yu could not help himself. He walked over to Guizhong and drove the blade deep into the thigh of the glowing spirit just to hear the old man scream once more time. The sound brought a dark satisfaction to his troubled mind.

Li Yu pulled the weapon out of the ancestor and began slashing and hacking once more. It wasn’t until the ancestor had gone through another renewal cycle that Li Yu stopped. He then pointed the bloody tip directly at the dark glass core of the new entity.

"Start talking," Li Yu demanded with a cold voice that carried the lingering sound of the Fisherman. "Tell me exactly what you are and what you were doing hiding inside this bastard. Was it partly because of you that he did it?! If you lie to me I will spend the next century cutting you into pieces."

The sphere of chains trembled against the dark bindings and the bloodshot eyes in the mirror darted nervously toward the glowing sword.

"I will tell you everything!" The entity pleaded with a multitude of overlapping voices. "I came from the treasure that Guizhong found during his travels. I am a Heart Demon that has taken a physical manifestation. My nature is to eat negative emotions and I survive by enhancing the dark desires and paranoid thoughts of those around me."

Li Yu narrowed his eyes and pressed the tip of the sword against a rusted link. "So you are the reason he went crazy and attacked my mother in the garden. You twisted his mind to feed yourself."

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"No!" The entity shouted while shrinking away from the sharp blade. "I swear on my existence that I am not the root cause of his madness! He was an incredibly easy target for me because he was already obsessed with many dangerous things. Many of those things long before he ever encountered the treasure."

"Explain," Li Yu ordered while keeping the weapon steady.

"There was already something very wrong with this man before he brought me to this mountain," The Heart Demon explained frantically. "He was studying a fractured method of cultivation that was rotting his reasoning from the inside out. He possessed a very strong inner world but his bloodline was decaying and he was desperate to elevate his cultivation. The things he was practicing created a well of dark ambition within his soul. I only fed on the feast he provided as anyone would with free food in front of them. Perhaps my presence escalated his downward spiral because I naturally enhance negative thoughts by simply existing in a host but I did not plant the seed for his actions!"

Li Yu processed the information and thought about what was said. If the Heart Demon was telling the truth then the ancestor was involved in something far more sinister than trying to obtain more knowledge or figuring a way to break through a bottleneck.

"Please! Just let me die." The entity begged while the bloodshot eyes in the mirror filled with dark tears. "I have told you the truth. I swear on it with my being. Just destroy me and end this torment you are making me endure."

"You said you are a Heart Demon," Li Yu said with a mocking sneer. "Your kind thrives on driving cultivators to suicide and madness. It is pathetic to see you begging for the same release you deny your victims. Why are you so eager to perish?"

The entity let out a long sigh that rattled the rusted chains binding its form. It was utterly stunned by that question, how could the person standing before him not understand the kind of torture he was inflicting. It thought about how miserable its current life had become in such a short span.

"My name is Zaal," The entity confessed while the eyes stared up at the dark sky of the soul space. "I was incredibly lucky in the beginning. I started out as a formless Heart Demon tormenting a powerful cultivator long ago, so long ago in fact that those times were probably long forgotten by the modern realms. In some random stroke of fate, that cultivator found a legendary treasure capable of separating any entity out. He used the artifact to extract me from his own mind and sealed me inside the treasure."

Zaal shifted the jagged thorns to rest closer to the ground in a posture of defeat. "That extraction was a terrible event for me at first but in return it gave me something my kind can never achieve on our own. It allowed me to survive and possess a real physical manifestation outside of my original host, effectively being freed. I became an independent creature but I was still anchored to that treasure."

"I lived my life within the treasure as it was passed down through the tides of time," Zaal continued with a tone of nostalgia. "I grew a bit stronger with every new owner. Sometimes I grew a lot stronger and other times I barely made any progress. It completely depends on my luck with the host.”

“I became a part of the lives of greedy kings, desperate warlords and paranoid sect masters. I increased their desires, obsessions and fed on their negative thoughts just like a normal Heart Demon would do but I was never bound to their specific fate. I only focused on harvesting the emotions they freely produced for me."

The rusted chains clinked together as Zaal looked up and once more trembled under the gaze of the young lord.

"I have lived for so many lives and I have seen so many empires turn to dust," Zaal continued while the voices overlapping in the air grew weaker. "I had to suffer sometimes when waves of bad luck hit my hosts. I was buried under collapsed mountains, sealed in dark vaults for centuries and tossed into oceans or flew through the void. It was uncomfortable and boring but it was never truly bad."

The bloodshot eyes focused on the sword resting on Li Yu's shoulder and a shudder ran through the jagged thorns.

"Until today…" Zaal whispered in horror. "The amount of pain I suffered in this short time is more than I have endured in my entire lifetime multiplied many times over. Your freakish techniques cuts deeper than any physical blade and the laws of this place deny me the mercy of fading away. I just want to escape. I just want to run away and hide in the dark. Please, I beg you again. Please let me die."

It was truly a sorry sight to see Zaal just begging for the sweet release of death. Li Yu looked at the twisted object of obsession and found irony in the situation that brought back some of his own normal senses. It was ridiculous that a creature born to inflict mental anguish and harvest despair would beg for death because it could not handle the pain it received. The Heart Demon had feasted on the misery of others for ages and now it broke down after experiencing Li Yu’s torture.

"Your history is barely interesting." Li Yu said with a cold indifference. "You enhanced his desires and pushed him further down the path of violence. A path that eventually caused my mother pain and suffering. Something that deserves to be repaid many times over!"

Speaking about it again reignited Li Yu’s rage and he began slashing and hacking once more at both Zaal and Guizhong. Guizhong could barely be considered alive as his mind was completely broken. There was no thought left as the only thing his mind could do now was process the pain of Li Yu’s attack.

"Please stop! I am begging you, it was not me! I am but a parasite!" Zaal cried out in defense. "A beast must eat meat and I must eat obsession! You are punishing me for existing as the heavens have made me!”

Li Yu thought about those words and while it sounded not bad. A lion had to eat meat to survive while an elephant ate leafs. That was the way they were born and to hate it for being itself seemed wrong. However, Li Yu was in no condition to process the philosophical nature of such things right now. He raised his sword again to attack.

“I have valuable information regarding the secrets he was hiding! I can tell you what he was doing and who he was meeting that all led to this. I know the source of the fractured teachings that rotted his mind. It was that group that really drove him to his current state!"

Li Yu pondered the offer while tapping his finger against the hilt of his sword. The Worldheart Clan elders outside knew nothing of value. If this Heart Demon truly held the answers to the mystery as what had happened with this damned old man, then its knowledge was worth more than the satisfaction of endless torture. At least that’s how Li Yu felt now after his rampage. If this was brought up at the very beginning, Li Yu would have not even considered it and would have slashed and hacked.

"I can consider letting you die," Li Yu said while lowering the blade so the tip hovered just an inch above the dark glass. "If the information you possess is actually good and leads us to more of the people responsible for this mess then I will grant you the release you seek. But if you try to negotiate or withhold a single detail, I will ensure you stay alive in this space until the end of time."

Zaal stared at the sharp edge of the weapon and the eyes widened in desperate agreement. The entity had no desire to bargain and it had no loyalty to the dead ancestor who brought it here. It only wanted to step into the sweet release that only death can bring and escape the monster wielding the sword.