Several hours passed.
The mountain range was a scene of devastation.
The range, stretching for a hundred miles, had been severed down the middle.
More than a dozen peaks had been sheared flat.
Blade energy still lingered in the air, refusing to dissipate.
A man stood blankly in the snow.
Great swaths of blood covered the ground beneath his feet.
Only the man's rapid breathing broke the silence of the empty mountains.
"Let me out. Heh heh, whoever it was, just kill them first."
"Don't you care about these brothers more than anything? They're all dead."
"Stop lying to yourself. You can tell by the smell that this is your brothers' blood, can't you? With this much blood, they must be dead."
"Look at the break in the mountains. Someone cut through them. Your brothers couldn't have escaped such fierce bladework."
The voice in his mind kept tormenting Old Ninth's nerves.
His eyes turned from hazy gray to blood-red.
His brothers had died horribly.
There were no bodies, but the blood beneath his feet seemed to tell him how brutal the battle had been.
The cracks in the ground had already closed. Gazing out at the boundless snow, Old Ninth sank into self-reproach.
If only I hadn't sent Hi Dog on this trip...
These were brothers he had grown up with.
The voices and faces of Hi Dog and the others kept surfacing in his mind, gradually eroding what little reason he had left.
"Gu Feng..." Old Ninth's throat worked as he forced out the words. "Deserves to die."
"Heh heh, I can help you."
A wisp of black energy slowly crawled over Old Ninth's face.
In an instant, one side of his face was white, the other black.
The divide was stark.
Black Old Ninth greedily inhaled the scent