Starting With an SSS-Rank Goddess Summon!

He released the downward pressure, stepping back to let her go.

The second the weight vanished from her spine, Rèn whirled around instantly.

Her instincts, honed by a thousand ambushes in the dark corridors of demonic sects, bypassed conscious thought.

She twisted her hips before her chest fully cleared the marble, spinning like a coiled spring released from an iron trap.

WHOOSH!

Her heavy boots whipped around with her pale toned frame launched upward, and her bare raw hands curled into rigid, claw-like talons as she drove them straight at the center of Silas’s chest, trying to tear it wide open.

CLACK!

Her fingertips struck the center of his chest though the impact was sharp and hollow.

Her fingers did not pierce through linen... They did not bite into skin, hell they didn’t even indent the flesh over his sternum.

It felt as though she had driven her bare hand at full velocity into a solid block of primeval star-steel anchored deep into the planetary mantle.

The shockwave traveled straight backward through her distal joints, jamming her fingers, bending her fingernails backward until two of them cracked down the center, sending a blinding white-hot flare of pain shooting up her carpal bones into her forearm.

”AGH!”

Rèn sucked in a ragged breath through her teeth with her fingers screaming in agony, throbbing as if she had struck an anvil with a dry reed.

Silas didn’t raise his guard.

He stood completely still, his hands resting easily at his sides, looking down at her mangled fingers with quiet gentle concern.

”Hey...” Silas said, his voice dropping into a soothing tone that carried no edge of mockery. ”It’s okay.”

The gentle tone was an insult that burned worse than an iron brand.

Rèn didn’t stop.

”SHUT UP!” Rèn roared, her crimson eyes flashing with desperate, manic fury.

She lunged again.

She drove both hands against his chest, clawing, gouging, and prying at his black tunic with tearing desperation.

She scraped her calloused palms against his fabric, her bruised knuckles pounding against his breastbone, trying to find a seam, a joint or a soft hollow between his collarbones where she could drive her thumbs in and tear the meat away.

SCRAPE! THUMP!

Her fingernails tore against his tunic, clawing and prying until her fingertips were bleeding, smearing fresh scarlet across his linen.

Her breath came in ragged wheezing sobs, her chest heaving and her knuckles bleeding onto his clothes, yet no matter how hard she strained... no matter how much she threw the weight of her five-foot-ten frame into the blows, his chest remained immovable.

Silas didn’t even shift his footing to absorb the recoil and beneath the thin fabric of his tunic, beneath the warm, living skin of his breastbone, her Primordial Blood Root suddenly brushed against something that made the marrow in her spine turn to ice.

It felt nothing like qi, nothing like the foul acidic demonic essence of the blood cauldrons, and nothing like the sterile spiritual energy of the righteous white-robed sword masters.

Behind his ribs sat a boundless sun of pure liquid golden mana unlike anything she had ever sensed in her entire life.

It hummed behind his ribs with the terrifying density of a celestial engine, turning with a pulse that made her own dry reset channels feel like dried twigs sitting beside a volcanic furnace.

The scale of the vitality humming within him was so overwhelming that her blood root trembled, shrinking back into her core like an insect curling away from an open flame.

’What is inside him...?’ Rèn thought, her breath catching in her throat, her bloody fingertips slowing against his shirt.

Rèn took a panicked uncoordinated step backward to reset her stance, intending to sweep her notched blade across his shins...

Her right heel, still bruised and cracked from the rebound against his hand, caught a slick puddle of water and wet blood that had pooled in a depression on the white marble and her footing gave out.

SLIP!

Her center of gravity, which had remained flawless across so many battles, completely deserted her.

Her ankle turned, her knee buckled, and instead of leaping clear, her tall frame tilted forward in a clumsy undignified arc.

She fell straight forward, crashing directly into his chest.

THUMP!

Silas’s hands rose instinctively, catching her by the shoulders, steadying her trembling frame so she didn’t tumble sideways onto the shattered stone dust.

Rèn froze.

Her forehead was pressed against the soft linen of his collar, her nose filling with the scent of him and the warm living heat of his skin.

Her dark crimson eyes widened until her pupils were tiny pinpricks as the air in her lungs stopped.

’This...’

A cold shudder ran from the base of her black horns all the way down to her heels.

’I know this feeling...’

The phantom memory of nine failed hunts tore through her mind with terrifying nauseating clarity.

She remembered the narrow gorge outside the White Jade Pass, where a rockslide had buried the road at the exact instant her blade was descending.

She remembered the tea pavilion where Bai Chen had dropped his jade pendant, bending his neck beneath her poisoned needle.

She also remembered the loose stone, the sudden gust of wind, the wandering immortal who had dropped from the clouds to pick wild plums.

...It was an accident.

A stupid impossible accident that made zero sense in the middle of a life-or-death martial exchange.

The Heavenly Fortune she had torn from Bai Chen’s dying throat, the stolen luck she had carried through the slaughter of thirty sects, was no longer hers.

...It was his.

The Heavenly Dao had bound her fortune to this young man, and fate was already stepping in for him, bending the dampness of the floor, the slickness of the blood, and the angle of her own heel to ensure that her blade never touched his skin.

The realization brought no rage.

Instead, a sudden bottomless exhaustion hollowed her chest out from the inside.

Rèn did not pull away.

She stayed there, holding onto his shirt with her bloody trembling hands, her forehead resting against his breastbone and her knees trembling beneath her weight as the strength drained from her limbs.

The wild fever that had driven her across the burning plateaus of Jiuxiao Xing finally cracked, leaving behind only the small filthy stray who had crawled out of a bone pit twenty-five years ago.

She looked down at the dark stains her knuckles had left on his clean shirt.

”Why...?” Rèn asked quietly.

Her voice was barely more than a dry rasp, stripped of all demonic cadence and trembling with the fragile broken confusion of a child lost in a foreign forest.

”Why... why did you bring me here...?”

She didn’t lift her head.

”I’m a demon...” she murmured, her knuckles tightening into the linen until her joints ached. ”I’m the Heavenly Demon of Slaughter... I tore the hearts out of three thousand cultivators... I burned the eastern provinces to ash... Who... who would ever want a demon around...?”

In her world, demons were cattle to be bled into bronze bowls, or monsters to be hunted down with celestial chains and primeval crucibles.

Righteous men spat on their corpses, and demonic elders carved their marrow for pills.

Nobody had ever reached out a hand to a demon unless they held an obsidian lancet in the other. Silas looked down at the wild tangled mess of black hair pressed against his collar.

He looked at the two sharp petrified black horns curving back from her temples, noting the delicate glowing red runes etched into the ancient bone.

His fingers twitched.

Silas had always had a terrible incurable weakness for ears, tails, and now horns.

’Just a single touch... no?’

Without thinking and without considering the fact that the woman had tried to decapitate him two minutes prior, Silas reached up with his right hand.

He gently placed his palm against the smooth cool curve of her left horn.

His thumb lightly stroked the ridge of the bone, feeling the faint pulse of demonic mana humming deep within the petrified structure.

Rèn’s entire spine snapped rigid.

Her jaw clenched so violently that her back molars clicked, her crimson eyes bulging in pure, paralyzed shock as she gritted her teeth.

Her horns were extensions of her cranium, rooted directly into the primary spiritual meridians of her upper brain, sensitive to the slightest fluctuation in temperature or pressure.

To have a man casually lay his bare warm palm against her horn was an intimacy so startling that every nerve ending in her skull buzzed with static.

Silas blinked, suddenly realizing what he had just done.

He pulled his hand back quickly, surprised at himself, and apologized immediately while rubbing the back of his neck with an embarrassed sheepish grin.

”Ah... sorry about that,” Silas apologized quickly, his dark blue eyes crinkling with genuine, slightly guilty regret. ”I didn’t mean to do that... I’ve just never seen horns like that before, and I honestly wondered what having horns felt like... Are they heavy when you sleep?”

Rèn slowly lifted her head.

Her cheek was smeared with red dust and her own dried blood, her long black bangs hanging in wild tangled curtains around her face.

She stared at him as she was in bewilderment.

Nobody had ever asked her that.

...In thirty-five years of breathing under the sky of Jiuxiao Xing, no living human had ever looked at her black horns with simple innocent curiosity.

The righteous had called them marks of the nether hells, the demonic elders had called them proof of ancient ancestral bloodline awakenings, the cultists of the Red Heaven had fallen on their faces and worshiped them as holy omens of doom.

Nobody had ever wondered what having them felt like.

’Who is this man...?’ Rèn thought, her breath trembling in her throat as she stared at the soft warm curve of his lips.

’Where am I...? What kind of realm has white marble towers and clean night air without the reek of burning tallow...? A Lord summoned me... so is he... is he my Lord...?’

Questions piled up in her head like an avalanche of loose shale.

He didn’t have the cold righteous detachment of the Heavenly Sword Court... He didn’t have the greasy hunger of the Blood Demon Sect either.

He looked at her with an open easygoing warmth that held zero fear, zero hatred, and zero disgust.

He seemed so innocent that she could not make herself hate him.

She had spent her entire existence justifying the endless butcheries of her life by a single, unshakeable law... She only killed the people she hated.

She hated the elders who sold children... She had hated Wei Heng for his thirty pieces of silver... She had hated Bai Wujian for the Master’s head, and she had hated Bai Chen for the golden luck that mocked her... She also hated the guy she fought for not hating her...

Hatred was her fuel and hatred was her blade so she searched the dark bruised corners of her soul, looking for a reason to hate the young man standing before her.

...Could she hate this man?

She looked at his gentle blue eyes... She looked at his tidy dark hair... She felt the protective grip of his hands on her shoulders, holding her up when her own broken ankle could no longer bear her weight.

She couldn’t.

There was nothing there... She couldn’t find a single drop of hatred to grasp. The well was dry, and without hatred, the blade in her mind refused to turn.

Silas smiled, a small welcoming curve of his lips that chased the shadows from the Dawnspire Gateway.

”Welcome to Blessed Land, Rèn,” Silas said warmly, his voice carrying clearly across the quiet courtyard. ”I know everything probably feels completely sideways right now, and I know you’ve been through hell to get here but the war is over... This is a safe place. We have orchards down in the valley, we have warm hearths in the Keep, and we have enough food to feed an entire army... Nobody here is going to hurt you, and nobody’s going to chain you. You don’t have to fight anymore.”

He started telling her about the territory, explaining the quiet valleys, the mountain orchards, and the peaceful daily life in the Keep.

The words washed over her like warm spring rain, but to a soul that had known only the dark, the light was terrifying.

It felt like a trap. It felt exactly like the Heavenly Demon’s crooked, welcoming grin as she’d stepped into his hall, right before he’d tried to drink her dry.

”No...” Rèn choked out, pulling away from his hands.

She stumbled back onto the white marble with her boots skidding across the grit, her dark crimson eyes wide and wild with cornered terror.

”This is no place for a demon,” she rasped, her hands shaking as she clutched her notched iron sword to her ribs. ”You don’t know what I am... You don’t know what walks behind my shadow... I bring only slaughter... I bring only ruin...”

She leaped up into the cold night sky before Silas could reach out a hand.

She twisted mid-air, landing lightly upon the high stone balustrade of the Keep’s outer perimeter with her wild black hair whipping in the mountain wind like a tattered battle standard as her black horns cut against the silver moonlight.

She looked down at the courtyard, her voice ringing out in a harsh trembling command that tore across the valley.

”DO NOT FOLLOW ME!”