The salty sea breeze now carried an even stronger scent of rust and gunpowder, filling Cen Qing's lungs.
She stood atop the crest of a surging wave, her slender body taut as an arrow about to leave the bow.
Behind her stood the Shark People's last remaining fighting force. Hundreds of warriors held tridents forged from Water Soul Essence and Millennial Cold Iron, their deep-blue eyes reflecting the towering Langya Terrace in the distance. It bore the Emperor's deluded dream of immortality, and buried the endless cries of her people.
Every flickering flame in the Eternal Lamps inside the Mount Li Mausoleum had once been the blood-weeping soul of one of her kin.
Today, they would either have their revenge or be wiped out.
When Xu Fu's signal came, when those three thousand boys and girls burst one after another into fireworks of flesh and blood before the First Emperor's crown, she knew the time had come.
"For our people sleeping in the Mount Li Mausoleum! For our kin whose bones were extracted and rendered for oil!" Her shrill, anguished cry pierced the raging waves.
It was the charge, the eruption of grief and fury that had built up over countless years.
"Boom—!"
Dozens of enormous waterspouts surged into the sky, driven by her and her people's combined strength. Bearing the force of ten thousand jun, they slammed into the Black Birds overhead, wreathed in eerie blue flames as they gazed down upon all living things.
The ultimate clash of water and fire erupted in a deafening roar. White mist billowed across the sky in an instant, as if it would drag all creation into chaos.
Cen Qing led the charge, shooting out of the waves like a streak of pale-blue light.
Her movements were as graceful as a dance in the deep sea. Each turn and slash sent towering waves surging forth.
Her blade flashed, and the Qin Elite Soldiers' heavy black armor tore like paper. Their wounds froze in the extreme cold before blood could even spurt out.
She could feel the faint vibrations as her blade sank into flesh and severed bone. The sensation made the flames of vengeance burn even hotter inside her. Every pang of pain brought back the sight of her people dragged away in fishing nets, wailing as they were reduced to smoke in the pill furnace.
Hatred was the only thing keeping her from falling apart.
Amid the chaos of battle, her gaze occasionally fell on the man named Chen Jin.
She had carefully plotted to foist the hot potato of the Mohist Grand Master's Token, Mo Mei, onto him, hoping to divert trouble elsewhere. She had also secretly driven the Qin Mohists to hunt him down relentlessly.
Now, watching him contend with the enemies around him with astonishing tenacity, Cen Qing's frozen heart rippled with a feeling she could not quite name.
But the battle took a turn far worse than she had ever feared.
High in the sky, Jiang Yan, the Libationer of Jixia Academy, spoke through his vast, godlike apparition.
"Heaven and Earth as a furnace—Creation as the craftsman—Yin and Yang as the fuel—All things as bronze—"
As he chanted, all of Langya Mountain came alive. No—died.
The mountain groaned as it softened and collapsed, turning scarlet as it transformed into a furnace so vast it defied imagination.
At the center of the altar, the golden fungus Xu Fu had hailed as the "Heavenly Dao Purple-Veined Ganoderma" spewed billions of golden spores. Its hyphae spread in every direction like a living golden tide, devouring and corrupting everything indiscriminately—the Qin Army, Alchemists, Shark People, Black Birds, even plants and stone.
After years of painstaking schemes, Lord Xu Fu had ended up making a wedding dress for someone else.
She saw one of her Shark Person attendants, who had followed her for years, caught off guard as a strand of golden hyphae wrapped around her tail.
The hyphae slithered upward like a living snake. Wherever they passed, her scales lost their luster and her flesh was assimilated. Within a few breaths, an eerie golden cap burst through the skin of the beautiful forehead she once had, forever freezing her final look of terror and youth.
Cen Qing slashed at the hyphae and severed them, but they grew back. All her continued hacking did was cover her in spores; it accomplished nothing.
Despair seized her heart like a freezing current in the abyssal depths, nearly suffocating her.
Just as she thought all was about to end, that the last of the Shark People would become fuel for the pill furnace, the man she had regarded as both a pawn and a wild card stepped forward. He did something that left every survivor, herself included, dumbfounded.
He abandoned every trace of human form. His body swelled, twisted, and expanded as if being inflated, until at last it became an immense mound of pale flesh, throbbing and growing without end.
More unbelievable still, this mass of flesh—so wicked, chaotic, and terrifying in appearance—showed a mercy that seemed almost miraculous.
Thousands upon thousands of arms of every shape burst from the mound's surface, shielding everyone.
Cen Qing deflected a blast of searing fire that had been sent flying by the furnace's turbulence, and gazed at the "monster" protecting all living things with its own flesh. Her expression was complicated.
An overwhelming sense of absurdity struck her.
Her Shark People were sworn enemies of the tyrannical Qin. Yet now, because of this incomprehensible fleshly deity, they were forced to share the same precarious refuge in this desperate hell.
In the face of indiscriminate destruction, hatred seemed somehow... insignificant.
"What... is he, exactly?" The question weighed heavily on Cen Qing's mind.
Next, the domineering Bronze Mecha, steeped in war and slaughter, was forcibly stripped away by the mass of flesh, devoured, and fused into it.
She could feel the mound of flesh Chen Jin had become growing stronger, gaining greater control over the wind, thunder, water, and fire around it. It seemed they might yet survive.
But that seemingly reversed turn of events shattered under a single lash from Jiang Yan, delivered from afar.
The thousand-armed fleshly deity let out a shriek so agonized it could not have come from a human throat. Its massive body convulsed and spasmed as if every support had been ripped away, then lost all vitality. Like a sandcastle crumbling in the wind, it cracked and peeled apart piece by piece.
Hope went out once more.
Cen Qing quietly lifted her head, ready to face the inevitable end of herself and her people.
Perhaps this was for the best. At least she could reunite with her people in another world...
Then she saw the scene she had once dreamed of.
The sky shattered, and thick, scarlet blood rained down.
The colossal flesh-mound and mecha fusion began disintegrating far faster, countless fragments turning to ash.
And as it crumbled away, no pill took shape as she had expected.
Only an intact human figure slowly floated out.
It looked like Chen Jin.
But it was definitely not him!
Even from far away, even at the edge of the energy storm, Cen Qing felt her soul instinctively tremble, unable to stop itself.
The difference between them was absolute, a difference in very nature and in their standing.
Dense black mist, seeming to devour all light, coiled around him.
He slowly opened his eyes.
They held nothing but indifference.
He hovered there quietly, as if he stood apart from this furnace of Heaven and Earth, apart from all rules and causality.
He spoke. His calm voice echoed in the hearts of every living thing, including hers.
"Was it you who wanted to ascend?"
"To ascend, you must undergo tribulation."
"That way, it makes sense."