Reforged from Ruin [Eldritch Xianxia Cultivation]

There's a certain look in a person's eyes when they decide to kill you.

Not want, not need to, but decide to kill you. There's this moment where one can see the empathy die, if one looks closely enough, where one can taste the way that everything just turns black between you and those who wish you harm. It's like being in a room with background noise, only to hear everything suddenly turn silent.

Shin Ren has heard it referred to as Killing Intent, and he admits, it's a good-enough way to phrase it. A sort of intention that supercedes all others, which places itself upon the world and shapes that which it touches to its own designs.

He has wondered before if there are other Intents, but if there are, he has not had much chance to study them. He has been busy.

The Oni-ape in front of him swings a cudgel the size of a building, close to two-hundred feet tall and a third again as thick, and even though he dodges he still has to cycle his cultivation to his feet to remain anchored. The wind from the blow is enough to throw up a dust devil all on its own, picking up the permanent debris and dust of the battlefield and flying off to impact the lines of soldiers nearly a mile behind him.

The beast swings six more times in the half-second it takes for the first dust devil to reach the trenches behind him. His blade rises to match it.

Tornado-scale winds echo across this section of the breach, the hundreds of kilometers of open space between still-standing parts of the Wall echoing with their force. Shin Ren matches them, pushing all three of his cores to manifest differing aspects of energy and Dao. Under the effects of his cultivation, the winds catch Flame, the rapid shifts in temperature and consumption of oxygen depriving them of some of their force even as they tear apart and suffocate the blazing fires. His world reduces itself to what's right in front of him, his Guandao flickering out to parry and strike at the cudgel when it appears out of the smoke and debris, the clanging of weapons echoing across the battlefield.

The Oni grunts, the sound deep and loud enough that it actually hurts Shin Ren's lungs and cracks some of the lesser bones and debris surrounding them. He has to duck back as a wall of force appears from his left, the cudgel's movement shifting into a new attack pattern. He just barely manages to flicker-step back, his movement arts keeping him mobile despite the storm surrounding them, and launch a breath of Dao-infused Flame at the weapon. Everything Burns, but not everything burns evenly, and though the flames catch, many of them are smothered by the sheer force of the weapon's movement, and what little remains can't quite dig itself into the material. Whatever wood it's made from, it's much harder to burn than stone or metal.

That's alright though. It did catch, which means his Truth holds. He just needs to be careful and play this right.

He almost misses the hand that shoots out of the dust-storm.

A good ten times his size, the hand could casually pick up a house, let alone a human, and it moves so fast that he only hears the boom of it breaking the sound barrier after it reaches him. Too late to dodge- but not too late to retaliate. His Guandao strikes like a spear, embedding into the palm a few inches deep due to just how dense it is, and he cycles his power through it, blasting heat into the hand even as he's launched backwards.

Help, he thinks, and a gilded smile grows a little wider.

His second heart demon, now a secondary "demon core", pulses, sending its relatively smaller Qi pool into a complex pattern. Shin Ren follows it, trusting his madder self and its [Gilded Smile Of Delusion] implicitly and dancing to the steps they provide. Heat haze flickers, warping the way the world looks, and he grabs and steps and winds around those ripples in the air, dissipating his momentum and pulling himself to one side of the conflict.

Another grunt, louder than the last, with hints of… something. Enjoyment? Hard to tell tone when it literally hurts to breathe around such a sound. Dimly, at the edge of his senses, Corpse Aflame giggles as people die, spirit beasts and soldiers alike getting their organs pulverized by the kinetic force of the beast. It has to be in the Warrior Realm, at the very least. That, or it's sacrificed its power, minimizing its aura and techniques to gain such power.

Risky to bet on it being better, rather than worse. Best to assume it's the former.

Shin Ren launches himself, a crater of molten orange-gold spawning at his feet from the heat and force of it, towards the center of the growing storm. The Oni-ape's power is imbued into the winds from its cudgel, obfuscating conventional perception, so Shin Ren focuses on something unconventional.

His Flame is still smoldering against the beast's weapon, and he tracks it with his Truth, keeping his eye on what is currently burning. He can't move freely, forced to grab onto the ground and land more often than he'd like- the winds are powerful enough to actively drain his cultivation to resist, nevermind to advance against. Still, he makes it a mile, then two, in two simple steps, sensing the eye of the storm from how his Flame feels in his mind's eye-

It's above him now.

Fuck, this thing is fast.

Too late to dodge, too unsteady with the winds. He braces himself against the ground, melting it into a cushion of liquid stone, and lifts his blade to parry.

The world explodes.

Somehow, the cudgel is heavier than it looks. There are towers smaller than the carved wooden weapon, and the thickness of one end of it makes for a whole building-scale in and of itself, and yet somehow, it's heavier than it looks. The impact shatters part of the battlefield, deepening the breach by carving a crater into the mountain-sized hill of stone and debris that was once the Wall. The winds are blown away, some tornado-scale dust devils remaining coherent long enough to be launched into the horizon-spanning trench structures, others bursting apart and launching debris and Flame in every direction haphazardly. Weaker entities that have carved bunkers, launched personal armies, skittered and crawled and marched into and against the breach, all are torn asunder and made into nothing, coloring the falling dust red and purple and a hundred other colors of viscera.

It has been approximately six seconds since the beginning of the fight.

From beneath the cudgel's massive frame, the debris begins to glow and bubble.

Feeding on the death and destruction, on the way that the battlefield has been irrevocably altered yet again, [Burning, Grasping Ruin] emerges from the molten gold of death and damage.

The Corpse Aflame's Soul roils and blisters as it moves, biology made into running wax made into kindling and then into naught but flame reaching out and grabbing the cudgel. It rises up, carbonised flesh and melting matter conjoined into a single self and grabbing hold with a hundred arms emerging haphazardly from it.

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Shin Ren's secondmost Soul is a horrific thing of death and destruction above all. It screams and gibbers and coughs and laughs at a volume that can break glass and make stones bleed, and every movement is accompanied by the sound of crackling meat and tearing tissue. From within the ruined expanse of the breach rises this leviathan, tall enough to appear as dog rather than insect to the Oni-ape, strong enough to dig broken hands into his weapon and force cracks to spasm into being across it.

The beast grunts, a third time, louder again than the first two. Like a rhythm, slowly building. Having blasted away its storms, Shin Ren can see the way its many-tusked mouth smiles.

He stands in a pool of lava, glowing with six of seven colors of Dao, and Cuts.

A Soul is more than just a powerful creature or strange spirit. It is a play on the rules of reality itself, a collection of concepts shaped by personal experience and raised to divinity, then given an avatar. They have their own rules, even as they are still partially bound to the rules of the world around them.

How can a Cut meaningfully harm a [Burning, Grasping Ruin]? It is already ruined. It cannot be killed by ruining it more.

His Soul screams in agony and delight as Shin Ren's nascent expertise with the Blade carves through it and out the other side, forming a scalpel-sharp furrow into the Oni-ape's cudgel and then racing through that furrow out and into the world.

A fourth grunt begins, and then is stopped as the spirit beast gives off a distressingly human scream, one of its eyes split open vertically.

It is already closing, but it has been Cut, and such wounds take time to be disproven.

It is still the first true wound of the battle.

The Ape gives a smile as vicious as it is ugly, and Becomes.

Its Domain writes itself upon the world, proclaiming to all with eyes to see and ears to hear the nature of what has come.

[Domain Of Gibbering Chaos Strikes The Earth]

And of course, it is its name.

The world cracks under the pressure of its arrival, a previously suppressed aura from the beast suddenly born into the world. The very nature of the Domain makes it difficult to track and understand- earth and wind and movement are all intermixed, like the aftermath of an explosion in permanence, always reborn instantly as it is expressed. [Burning, Grasping Ruin] weathers the storm, its nature shifting to accommodate the newest form of ruin all around it, but with two out of three parts of itself under assault, it struggles, unable to hold onto the cudgel as it is pulled back and away, the cracks already healing. Shin Ren feels cuts open in his robes, his armor and talismans flaring with Qi to block a thousand-thousand impacts large and small.

Where is-

Above.

Nothing so big should move so freely.

A mountain that is a beast that is the Oni-ape is flung through the air, hooting joyously as its Domain batters it about without ever seeming to harm it. One blow comes from above, another to the left, then behind, the position of the beast and its weapon moving as freely and randomly as the Domain's name suggests.

Shin Ren is battered, slammed into the ground, bones broken, armor and arrays overloading, his Soul able to withstand the Domain for now but barely, his Flames snuffed out or absorbed into the nature of this changed battlefield.

He does not bend. He does not break. Even as he feels his bones creak and his body rebel against every impact, even as his meridians ache with the strain of the Qi he's moving through them, he does not move. To move would be to get caught up in the chaos, his bubble of lava and magma the only think keeping him stable.

The Oni-ape gibbers alongside its Domain, grunting and hooting loud enough that battles being fought miles away are interrupted by the damage. The sound is magnified, turned into a genuine attack, forcing blood from Shin Ren's orifices and death from most others it reaches.

The beast is in the Warrior Realm. Capable by definition of beginning and ending battles of almost infinite scale.

Shin Ren is in the Nascent Soul realm.

It is only common sense that such an existence could never measure up. Even an exceptional prodigy, born once every hundred years and a half-step past the Nascent Soul realm already, cannot compare. Peerless in his own realm, to face the realm above is to be less than an untrained child facing an adult.

Logic dictates that in a battle of Domains, whosoever's Domain has a greater reach and scale will win. Logic can be co-opted by possessing a Domain with unique rules and mechanics, but it is not easy to do.

A battle of any single Domain against a being a full realm above him would be absolutely stupid.

So he uses more than one.

Thirty seconds into a battle that will bring about storms for hundreds of miles in all directions, Shin Ren calls upon all three of his cores, his Souls, and the heart demons that reside with and within each.

The world transforms as three different semi-divine avatars begin to stir, the well fed crackling and weeping of [Burning, Grasping Ruin] suddenly backlit by a greater glow, glinting off of strange jewels and gold and teeth.

His eyes begin to bleed. His organs begin to fail. In spite of his Dao, his comprehension, every resource he's poured into his body, Shin Ren begins to burn, his cultivation and physical form both unsuited to wielding so much power at once. Reality itself buckles, like a bubble trying to form within a bubble and setting the whole to quaking, as he begins to manifest.

Tinged in Blue, Purple, Gold, Black, Red, Orange, three different avatars of transcendent nu-reality reach out of him and pull with him the world as it should be.

The Oni-ape's eyes widen, its Domain sharpening inwards as it begins to take the fight seriously, its free hand forming a symbol that begins to pull at the Qi and chaos around them-

And then the storm stops.

Shin Ren blinks, almost losing control of his emerging techniques and killing himself in the process. He forcefully halts the emergence of his selves, pulling them back in by the skin of his teeth, feeling his Dantian spasm in agony at the sudden inversion.

The cudgel lands, its inherent weight enough to cause a minor earthquake.

The two halves of the Warrior Realm beast land on the ground, launching dust clouds of their own.

A moment after, it begins to rain red.

It takes him a few seconds to get himself back under control. His skin has started to char in places, the Corpse Aflame's core and his own techniques demanding fuel for the fire- but he is in control. He has, if not complete balance, then enough that the agony is bearable and his will is enforced.

He loses the top few layers of skin. He feels an eye burst. His lungs glow with fire from the inside.

But he lives.

He pulls himself up and back together, [Grasping, Burning Ruin] glutting itself on the corpses and debris before he forcibly drags it back into himself. The Corpse Aflame pouts at the corners of his vision, but considering she has no lips or face to speak of, it's not particularly effective, and she's already eaten well today. Feeding one's Soul and Dao comprehension at once is no light meal, even for a being such as her.

It's ok. He's had practice, and their agreement stands. It'll be fine. The aborted revelation can wait, though, he needs to finish healing and-

"Hey! You ok?"

He sighs. The sound crackles in his throat.

Of course it's her.

He looks up, his one good eye finding a small, petite woman wearing robes of all white running at mortal speed towards him, waving an arm.

"Oh! Oh, that's a no. Alright, um-"

She reaches him and pulls out a bag of pills, handing him one. It is dripping in concepts, the idea of healing and wholeness and restoration oozing from it to flavor the sheer weight of its Qi. It's enough to kill most Nascent Soul cultivators off of the sheer volume of energy it possesses alone.

He gulps it down his shattered throat, cycling it through his meridians and grunting as he feels his body reforming in real-time.

"That was great work! I mean, that was a really big beast, and you were doing so well! Sorry I interrupted! Sorry! It just got really loud and messy and I was waiting for big bro to step in but he didn't and then everyone was running around and I couldn't just stand back and-"

"It's fine," he rasps, standing upright at last. Then, he bows, deeply and at the waist.

"This Shin Ren greets the Fifth Blade, and is honored by her assistance."

The young woman giggles, blushing and waving a hand.

"Oh come on, you know I hate that stuff. Just call me Yula, silly!"