Chapter 471: Brute!
Gu Zhiwei burst into the clearing a second later, glowing with holy rage. "UNHAND HER, YOU BRUTE! I SHALL SMITE YOU!"
Hu Yanlie looked at the shrieking golden retriever. He looked back at the tiny, dead-eyed girl who had just kicked him with the force of a battering ram.
The Beast Lord’s feral brain short-circuited.
"...She is fierce," Yanlie muttered, a primal blush spreading across his scarred cheeks. He reached into the boar’s carcass, ripped out the glowing core, and dropped it into Ji’an’s hand. "Take it. You have earned my respect, fierce female. We shall wrestle again!"
Yanlie bounded away into the jungle, his heart captured by the blunt-force trauma of her rejection.
"Two," Transmigrator Ji’an counted, shaking her head as she marched through the dark corridor. "That’s two of the Vanguard boys who have imprinted on the hollow shell of a trauma victim. This timeline is literally just a collection of horrible dating choices."
But the light-hearted road trip was about to come to a brutal, catastrophic end.
The peripheral vision suddenly darkened.
The sky in the projection turned the color of dried blood. The ambient music of the corridor shifted from melancholy to a deep, terrifying, thrumming war drum.
The Great Sectarian War.
The timeline had reached its violent climax. The Demonic Palaces of the north had launched a full-scale invasion of the orthodox Azure Empire.
The original Ji’an and Gu Zhiwei were caught directly in the crossfire.
The vision shifted to a sprawling, burning battlefield in the central plains. The ground was littered with the bodies of orthodox disciples and demonic cultivators.
The sky rained fire.
The original Ji’an was fighting.
She moved with mechanical, ruthless efficiency, her white robes stained red. She didn’t fight with passion; she fought with the cold logic of survival.
Gu Zhiwei was fighting beside her, his holy light acting as a beacon in the darkness.
"Stay behind me, Sister Ji’an!" Zhiwei screamed, deflecting a barrage of demonic arrows with his broadsword, panting heavily, bleeding from a dozen shallow wounds. "I will clear a path to the treeline! We will escape!"
But there was no escape.
The temperature on the battlefield suddenly spiked.
The air grew so dense and heavy with bloodlust that it became physically difficult to breathe.
The clouds above them parted.
Descending from the blood-red sky, moving with the slow, arrogant, utterly terrifying grace of a god stepping onto an anthill, was a man.
He wore heavy, immaculate robes of dark crimson and midnight purple.
His long, untamed hair was a deep, violently striking purple. And he wore a half-face mask of forged demon-iron that obscured everything above his sharp, aristocratic cheekbones.
His eyes, burning with an intense, glowing amber light, swept over the battlefield with an expression of profound, crushing boredom.
Yan Xuanye. The Blood Sovereign.
The Demon Lord.
Transmigrator Ji’an’s heart stopped.
"No," Ji’an whispered into the dark corridor, her boots slowing down for the first time. "No, Zhaoge said Xuanye was the guy at the brothel. The one who bid on me. He’s... he’s the Blood Sovereign?"
In the Tenth Timeline, Yan Xuanye was not an undercover disciple on the Drunken Peak. He was not a bored VIP guest at a demonic auction.
He was the Supreme Commander of the demonic invasion. He was the apex predator of the continent, and he was currently looking for entertainment.
Xuanye landed in the center of the battlefield.
He didn’t draw a weapon. He simply raised his hand and casually, lazily flicked his wrist.
A sweeping shockwave of hyper-compressed demonic Qi exploded outward.
Hundreds of orthodox cultivators were instantly vaporized into red mist. The unadulterated power of the Blood Sovereign was absolute.
Gu Zhiwei was caught in the edge of the blast.
The Holy Son was thrown backward like a ragdoll, his broadsword shattering, crashing into a pile of broken siege engines, instantly knocked unconscious, his golden light completely extinguished.
The original Ji’an was left standing alone in the center of the slaughter.
She looked at the fallen Zhiwei.
She looked at the towering, terrifying Demon Lord approaching her.
Her cracked, hollow soul did not feel fear. It only felt a deep exhaustion.
"Another roadblock," the original Ji’an muttered in her monotone voice.
She raised her sword.
She channeled every last remaining drop of her spiritual energy into the blade, and she charged the Blood Sovereign.
Yan Xuanye stopped walking.
He looked at the tiny, blood-soaked girl charging at him.
He didn’t see the woman who would one day hit him with a rolling pin. He didn’t see the beautiful dancer who would captivate him at a brothel.
He just saw another orthodox ant trying to bite his boot.
"Boring," the phantom Yan Xuanye sighed, his voice echoing with god-like apathy.
Ji’an leaped into the air, bringing her sword down in a desperate, final strike aimed directly at his neck.
Yan Xuanye didn’t dodge. He simply raised two fingers.
CLANG.
He caught her sword between his index and middle finger. The blade stopped dead, unable to penetrate his demonic aura.
The original Ji’an’s blank eyes widened slightly.
Yan Xuanye didn’t even look at her. He casually twisted his wrist.
The sword shattered into a hundred jagged pieces.
With his other hand, the Blood Sovereign executed a lazy, backhanded strike, driving his palm directly into the center of the original Ji’an’s chest.
CRACK.
The sound of her ribs shattering echoed across the silent battlefield.
The impact was devastating.
The demonic Qi invaded her already fractured meridians, completely destroying her internal organs in a fraction of a millisecond.
The original Ji’an was thrown backward. She hit the blood-soaked earth, sliding for twenty feet before coming to a complete, broken halt.
She lay on her back, staring up at the blood-red sky.
She couldn’t breathe.
The pain was absolute, but her hollow soul processed it as a distant, clinical data point.
’I am dying,’ she thought in the vision, her dark eyes slowly losing focus.
Yan Xuanye didn’t spare her a second glance.
The Blood Sovereign stepped over her broken body and continued his casual, bored stroll across the battlefield, unaware that he had just casually murdered the only person in the universe who would ever make him feel alive.
Transmigrator Ji’an, watching from the dark corridor, let out a raw, furious scream of agony.
"YOU EDGY, PURPLE-HAIRED PSYCHOPATH!" Ji’an roared, swinging her spatula at the peripheral vision, tears of sheer, helpless rage streaming down her face.
"YOU KILLED HER! YOU JUST SWAT HER AWAY LIKE A FLY! I AM GOING TO POISON YOU! I AM GOING TO FEED YOU GLASS!"
The vision of the original Ji’an’s death was playing out in agonizing slow motion.
Her vision in the projection was blurring. The sounds of the battlefield faded into a muted, ringing silence. She was bleeding out, the life draining from her shattered core.
But as her eyes began to close for the final time... a figure dropped from the sky, landing heavily in the mud beside her.
The figure fell to his knees.
The original Ji’an forced her heavy eyelids open one last time.
She saw dirt. She saw blood.
And she saw hair.
A cascading, shimmering waterfall of pure, luminescent silver hair, completely stained with mud and gore.
It was Xie Wangchen.
The servant boy.
He was fully grown now.
He had tracked her across the continent, followed the invisible pull of the Red Thread, abandoning the Lin Estate, fighting through demonic hordes as a mortal with no cultivation, driven solely by the magical, obsessive mandate to be near her.
He was too late.
Again.
Wangchen pulled her broken, bleeding body into his arms. He didn’t have pristine white robes in this timeline. He wore coarse, ruined servant rags.
He looked down at her face.
His ruby eyes were wide, dilated, and completely shattered.
He didn’t scream. He didn’t speak.
He just held her, trembling so violently his bones rattled, rocking back and forth in the mud as the life left her eyes.
The original Ji’an looked up at the shimmering silver hair.
For the first time in her entire, emotionally hollow, apathetic life... a tiny, microscopic spark of genuine feeling flickered in her chest.
"Shiny," the original Ji’an whispered, a faint, ghost of a smile touching her bloody lips as she raised a trembling, weak hand, her fingers brushing against the silver strands.
Her hand fell limp.
Her eyes closed.