Chapter Twenty-Seven: The Terrifying Blood Letters

“Defy! Immortal! Slay! Sovereign!”

Four enormous ancient characters blazed before Lin Mo’s eyes, as if seared there by blood-soaked branding iron. Each glyph was carved deep into the stone beam, every stroke infused with a savage and eternal intent to kill—a venomous, unyielding hatred so thick it could not be dissolved. It coiled around his heart like a cold, poisonous serpent, squeezing until he could scarcely breathe.

He had only glanced at them, yet an indescribable chill shot up his spine and numbed his scalp. It was not fear, but something deeper—an instinctive trembling from the depths of his bloodline. Lin Mo tried, by reflex, to look away, but his eyes were pinned to those four dreadful, bloodthirsty words as if nailed in place.

A piercing shriek split his mind—like a thousand heated steel needles stabbing into his temples.

Everything before him twisted and blurred. The cold stone beam, the ashen bones, the thick, deathly mist—all whirled and churned as if flung into a furious vortex of color.

Chaos! Nothing but endless chaos!

Fragmented visions crashed through Lin Mo’s sea of consciousness like a flood breaking a dam—so swift he could grasp no clear outline.

He glimpsed a sky ablaze, gold and crimson intermingled like spilled molten lava. Blinding light tore at his sight, only to be swallowed at once by a deeper tide of blood-red.

Deafening thunder raged in his ears, riddled with countless distorted, desperate screams—anger or despair, he could not tell. The cacophony layered upon itself, a billion vengeful souls shrieking beside his ear.

An inexpressible pressure, heavy as the heavens collapsing, swept over him with the breath of annihilation. He felt himself a mere ant in a storm, about to be ground to dust in an instant.

A cold sensation—was it the sharpness of metal piercing flesh, or some viscous, scalding liquid splashing his face, reeking of iron and blood?

“Slay… Sovereign…” A syllable, blurred to the point of dissolution, carried the taste of hatred across mountains and rivers, flickering through the chaos.

And… a blurred silhouette? Standing atop mountains of corpses and seas of blood, raising something high, its brilliance dazzling, proclaiming to the heavens and earth… The voice seemed to burn with zealous fervor, yet for no reason, Lin Mo felt only a cold surge of revulsion.

“Ah—!” Lin Mo groaned in agony, clutching his head as if it might explode. Those broken images, sounds, and sensations came and went in a flash, leaving behind only splitting pain and a wreckage of confusion—like a mad, fleeting nightmare, upon waking, only the palpitations remained, with no clear memory of the details.

He staggered back a step and his foot struck something cold and hard with a sharp crack. Looking down, he saw it was a bleached forearm bone—who knew to which unlucky soul it had belonged—now crushed to powder beneath him. The chill of the bone and the brittle sound yanked him savagely from the maelstrom back to reality.

Cold sweat drenched his tattered clothes, stinging the wound along his back. He gasped for breath like a fish out of water, his heart pounding so violently it threatened to burst from his chest. His gaze fell once more on the four blood-red characters, but this time he dared not look directly—only stealing a glance from the corner of his eye.

Where was this place? Who had carved these words? Were those chaotic fragments hallucinations, or lingering resentments haunting this wretched place?

Just as Lin Mo’s mind reeled and his temples throbbed with pain—

A low hum!

The icy “stone” in his chest—the fragment of the Void Heaven Scripture—seemed to be utterly infuriated by the killing intent woven into those blood-red words. It began to throb violently. A torrent of cold, ferocious rejection erupted, like a beast provoked to rage, rampaging through Lin Mo’s fragile meridians, trying to expel the discomfort left by the chaotic mental imprint.

“Hiss—!” The pain made Lin Mo suck in a sharp breath, his body curling involuntarily.

But the strange “Reverse Seed” attached to the icy stone now flared with a completely different reaction. A piercing emerald glow burst forth! A suction far more ravenous and urgent than ever before surged from Lin Mo’s chest—

Its target: the ashen, pallid remains scattered across the stone beam—ancient bones of immortals and demons!

Thin wisps of aura—feeble, yet so pure they made the heart race—each tinged with a faint golden halo, were forcibly drawn from a few of the “freshest” bones (relatively speaking, fresh for ten thousand years) by that greed. The aura brimmed with ancient, boundless life-force, yet was also steeped in a cold resentment that had endured for millennia. It was… the last vestiges of primordial immortal essence within the ancient remains!

The Reverse Seed’s emerald light pounced on the immortal essence like a starving wolf on prey. The glow surged in intensity, its color deepening with eerie brilliance. A vitality ten times stronger, purer, and more sinister than ever before flooded into Lin Mo’s body, mingled with the lingering hatred of the bones.

“Ugh!” Lin Mo’s body went rigid.

The power was overwhelming—so strange and mighty that it swept away the Void Heaven fragment’s cold rejection like a torrent breaching a dam, brutally scouring his battered meridians. Agonizing pain tore through him, yet the force, in its predatory way, forcibly repaired his damaged organs and the ruptured wound on his back. Muscle and flesh visibly twisted, grew, and healed. An icy, alien will, like maggots burrowing into bone, tried to entangle his chaotic soul, bringing with it a perverse sense of “satisfaction.”

The Void Heaven fragment, enraged by the Reverse Seed’s brazen plundering, suddenly grew even fiercer. Its cold pulses became a storm, and a force of destruction lashed back—not merely to drive out this foreign presence, but to annihilate the sinister vitality outright.

A violent clash erupted within Lin Mo’s body—a battlefield of cold, ruthless Void Heaven power and the Reverse Seed’s devouring, alien life-force. Two venomous dragons, snapping, devouring, erasing each other.

“Pfft!” Lin Mo spat blood, his body slammed backward by invisible force, crashing hard into the slick, cold stone wall. Pain raked his flesh, his skin alternately blooming with ashen frost and twisted emerald veins. He felt like a ragdoll, stitched together only to be ripped apart again, on the verge of collapse.

In this excruciating torment, as he hovered on the brink of ruin—

A deep, nearly imperceptible pulse—a resonance of ancient, unyielding will—suddenly drifted from the depths of those four blood-red words carved into the stone. Faint, but with a strange rhythm, like the last echo of a war drum in endless darkness.

It was like a drop of water falling into a cauldron of boiling oil.

The two raging forces within Lin Mo—the cold flood of the Void Heaven Scripture and the sinister vitality of the Reverse Seed—both faltered for one-thousandth of a second.

Not merging, not calming—but something else, something higher—a mutual instinctive wariness.

As if both rebellious powers sensed a remnant of ancient will within the blood-red words, something that unsettled even them. Especially the Reverse Seed; its greed seemed to shrink ever so slightly.

It lasted only a moment.

Then, the two forces clashed again, fiercer than before. But in that instant of suspension, Lin Mo, lost in a storm of pain and chaos, felt as if he had grabbed hold of a piece of driftwood in a raging sea—his mind cleared for a fleeting second.

Escape!

That word split the confusion like lightning.

He could not care about the warring powers inside him, nor the ominous will lingering in those bloody words. Instinct overruled everything. He bit his tongue hard, the sharp pain snapping his gaze into focus. With his functioning left hand, he clawed at a jagged protrusion on the slick stone wall behind him, his fingers breaking and bleeding. Using the spasms from the internal conflict as momentum, he hurled himself away from the blood-marked region, rolling desperately toward the shadows near the rock wall.

His body tumbled over slick moss and shards of cold bone, crushing brittle remnants, leaving a trail of dark blood. Each turn wrenched fresh pain from every wound, but he did not care—he only wanted to put distance between himself and those sinister blood-red words, to escape the deathly maw lurking below.

He didn’t stop until he collided with a massive, half-buried stone pillar and came to rest in the shadowed hollow it formed.

“Ha… ha…” Lin Mo collapsed into the chill, curling up like a dying beast, each breath wet with blood and the agony of torn organs. The struggle inside him raged on, but compared to the brink of explosion just moments before, it seemed a shade gentler—perhaps the blood-lettered dread had cowed those powers, or perhaps the exertion had drained their fury.

He forced his head up, peering through a crack in the pillar at the bone-strewn region. The corpses from which the Reverse Seed had devoured the last traces of immortal essence now lost all pale luster, withering to ashen tinder, crumbling in the mist.

And those four massive, blood-red words still sprawled across the center of the stone beam, exuding their chilling, savage aura. Yet now, to Lin Mo’s senses, the ancient, unyielding will within them seemed a touch clearer—a trembling flame in the wind, faint but stubborn, resisting the abyss’s eternal silence and decay.

At that moment—

Lin Mo’s ears twitched.

Not the howl of wind, nor the hiss of drifting death, nor the thunder of struggle within his body.

But something else—a faint, intermittent scraping, like metal grating on rock.

It came from above the stone beam, from the densest, darkest shroud of mist—where vast shadows lurked.

The sound was soft, halting, interspersed with labored, agonized breaths.

Someone was there.

Lin Mo’s heart clenched, every muscle tensing. The fragile sense of “safety” he’d felt a moment ago vanished instantly.

Was it another unknown terror lurking within the Abyss of Buried Immortals?

He fought past his pain and weakness, holding his breath, curling himself up in the pillar’s shadow, using moss and stone to hide his form. His left hand fumbled on the cold, slick ground, closing around a sharp-edged black shard of bone—perhaps the remnant of some powerful beast—and gripped it tightly. Its chill carried a faint, savage aura.

He fixed his gaze on the source of the sound, the roiling depths of the mist, eyes unblinking. The turmoil within him, too, seemed suppressed by this new threat, leaving only heavy pulses and a sinister warmth, like vipers poised to strike.

The scraping of metal on stone grew closer, louder, accompanied by the stifled, tortured breathing.

The mist churned violently, as if stirred by unseen hands. A hunched, limping figure—its outline wavering—stumbled and struggled into view at the edge of the fog.