Chapter Thirty-Seven: The Heart of the Furnace

Wind? No!

It was not mere wind, but the shrill howl of space itself being violently torn and crushed—a chorus of a billion souls eternally tormented in a molten crucible. Lin Mo and Su Li were like two pebbles cast into the depths of a vortex, plummeting madly toward that all-consuming void. The cold, heavy touch of the Sword of No Return was the only anchor in Lin Mo’s sea of consciousness. Its blade flickered with a ghostly light as they fell, each pulse of its glow accompanied by a chilling surge of sword intent through his shattered meridians, pain gnawing at him like maggots in the bone.

Below, the viscous crimson glow drew ever closer, its throbbing like the heartbeat of a slumbering beast. With each pulse, a vast, ancient, and pure hunger swept through, so intense it could freeze the soul. As this will swept past, the fragment of the Void Scripture embedded in Lin Mo’s chest writhed like a live shrimp thrown into boiling oil, issuing a silent, dying wail. The twisted, struggling shadows of ancient script within dimmed nearly to extinction. The "Reversed Seed," that emerald gleam lurking deep within the fragment, fell utterly silent; even the ripple of fear was gone.

The heart of the Immortal Refining Furnace! The true core! It had awakened—and now gaped wide in a monstrous maw!

“Aaah—!”

From the side wall came Su Li’s sharp, agonized scream. She was tossed within the chaotic suction, her body slammed hard against the mirror-smooth rock lining the vertical shaft. The gray-white crystalline sheath over her severed wrist shattered completely, exposing raw flesh to the air thick with refining power. Instantly, an eerie blue smoke billowed up, as if invisible flames were burning and decomposing her flesh. With her remaining left hand, she clawed desperately at a hairline crack in the stone, nails splitting, blood streaming, barely managing to halt her fall—she now hung from the edge, just a few dozen yards from that fathomless, pulsing crimson below. She looked up at Lin Mo, who was also struggling to right himself mid-plunge. On her face, contorted by blood, deathly pallor, and pain, only one expression remained: hollow, crushed, utter despair. Approaching the sword meant death; falling into the furnace’s heart meant the annihilation of body and soul. The mission from the Sect of Ecstasy, the sword’s insatiable greed—beneath the absolute pressure of the awakened furnace core, all became a cruel joke.

Lin Mo had no attention to spare for Su Li. His entire will was locked in battle against two forces: the terrifying suction from the furnace heart below, and the cold, raging sword intent of the Sword of No Return, which sought to seize control of his every action. His bloodshot eyes clung desperately to the ever-clearer, ever-vaster source of crimson pulsing beneath him.

It was no mere ball of light.

At its core lay a viscous, unbroken lake—a dark red pool like the coagulated blood of countless beings, thick and fetid. Its surface was anything but calm, boiling like lava, swollen with huge, venomous bubbles warped with twisted faces. Each bubble that burst released a shriek and a thicker, darker smoke of resentment. Hovering directly above this “blood lake” was a massive, slowly rotating orb of dark gold.

The sphere’s surface was not smooth but covered with a writhing web of tiny, black sigils, twisting and crawling as if alive. These sigils radiated an energy Lin Mo knew all too well: imprisonment, refining, stripping. They crazily drew up the black smoke of resentment and some pure, primordial force rising from the blood lake below, converting it into streams of pitch-black, tar-like light that radiated ultimate deathly stillness. These dark streams did not scatter, but instead threaded into the sphere’s interior like veins, as if nourishing—or perhaps imprisoning—something at the orb’s core.

The entire dark golden sphere, together with the foul blood lake beneath, formed the furnace heart—the true engine of the Immortal Refining Furnace. A monstrous creation that for ten thousand years had run on corpses of immortals and demons, on resentment and the deathly breath of the world itself!

Buzz—!

The instant Lin Mo grasped the furnace’s structure, the Sword of No Return in his grip erupted in a desperate, unprecedented shriek. The ghostly light on its blade blazed to a blinding peak.

That cold, world-cutting sword spirit flared with a suicidal madness, surging once more into Lin Mo’s battered consciousness:

“Break…the…shell…slice…the…core…”

Break the golden shell imprisoning the core? Sever the heart itself? In a flash, Lin Mo understood the sword spirit’s intent. This sword, once carried by the Void Immortal Lord, had slumbered for millennia. Now awakened, it would storm straight for the heart, to shatter the wicked furnace that devoured its master.

But how to break it? With what strength to sever?

Lin Mo felt like a ragged sack hurled into a maelstrom of destruction. The sword’s will scoured his ruined meridians, wringing out his last dregs of strength, while the sword spirit’s own annihilating edge, hoarded for ten thousand years, gathered wildly within the blade. Its tip pointed directly at the slowly rotating, blood-drawing golden sphere.

But the furnace heart seemed to sense the threat—the deadly edge gathering in that ferocious blade.

Gurgle! Gurgle gurgle—!

The vast, polluted blood lake below seethed violently. Countless blood demons, formed from viscous plasma and concentrated resentment, surged skyward like a disturbed swarm of bees. They shifted shape ceaselessly: sometimes half-formed divine limbs, sometimes raging monstrous beasts, sometimes a rain of foul blood arrows. Yet all exuded a venomous miasma so potent it could corrode magical treasures and taint a cultivator’s very soul. Their purpose was singular—to intercept the black sword that instinctively terrified them and its wielder.

At the same moment—

Buzz—!

The dark golden sphere shuddered. The crawling black sigils across its surface suddenly blazed to life. Without warning, a beam of pitch-black, viscous light shot from the orb—not at Lin Mo, but at the dying Su Li clinging to the side wall.

The furnace possessed a will! It sensed the fragile link and latent threat between Su Li and Lin Mo, and saw her utter weakness in this moment. It would refine this “impurity” first, to replenish itself, and unsettle the sword-bearer’s mind.

The black beam moved faster than thought, laced with annihilating death. In an instant, it spanned the void and engulfed Su Li.

“No—!” Su Li screamed in despair. Her left hand flared with a final, faint pink light—a cracked pink jade ring appeared, palm-sized, attempting to shield her.

Sizzle!

Like snow thrown into boiling broth, the pink jade ring lasted less than a heartbeat before turning ashen and dull, then dissolving into a cloud of dust. The black beam did not falter, crashing into Su Li’s body.

“Aaah—!!!”

Indescribable agony swept through every fiber of Su Li’s flesh and soul. She felt herself—body and mind—like a wax figure plunged in acid, rapidly dissolving and peeling away. Life, cultivation, memory—everything that made her “Su Li” was being ruthlessly refined and drawn out by that ultimate force of death. She could see, with horrifying clarity, the flesh of her left hand melting away in the beam, revealing bare bone that swiftly blackened and charred. The grisly wound at her brow, now fed by the deadly energy, erupted in reverse, devouring half her face in an instant.

Even more terrifying was the stripping of her very soul—countless memories torn from her: the mist-shrouded gate of the Sect of Ecstasy, her master’s stern, expectant gaze, the envy and admiration of her peers, the cold calculations of her missions, and her greed for that terrible sword. Each was wrenched out, shattered, and sucked into the black beam, flowing toward the icy golden sphere below.

Death! True death, annihilation of body and soul, loomed before her.

“Help…me…” A fragmentary, barely audible consciousness, saturated with pain and abject plea, flickered like a guttering candle through the refining force and crashed into Lin Mo’s chaotic mind.

It was Su Li! She was begging him for help. Faced with the ultimate refining power of the Immortal Furnace, sect missions, legendary blades—everything became illusion, leaving only raw terror of oblivion and the desperate instinct to grasp at any hope.

Lin Mo’s body convulsed violently.

The ghastly vision of Su Li’s torment, suspended by the shaft wall, seared his eyes like a branding iron: her body melting in the black beam, the bones turning to charcoal, half her face consumed by death, and those eyes, filled with terror and despair, locked on him. This scene overlapped with a broken memory raging in his consciousness.

A burning celestial hall! The same viscous, scalding, golden liquid (divine blood?)! A blurred figure struggling and dissolving in golden flames, shrieking in silence, gazing at him—at the Void Immortal Lord?—with the same mixture of defiance, hatred, and final supplication as Su Li now wore.

“Hao…Tian!!!”

A roar of boundless hatred and wrath erupted—not from the sword spirit, but from Lin Mo’s own throat, mingled with blood and fragments of entrails, exploding forth in madness. This cry seemed to ignite a dormant fuse within him.

Boom—!

The fragment of the Void Scripture, which had been suppressed and nearly shattered by the sword’s raging intent, now surged with an unprecedented, desperate rebellion, set ablaze by the overwhelming hatred and the horror before his eyes. Ashen light burst from Lin Mo’s chest. The twisted shadows of ancient script no longer wailed, but screamed, whirling and colliding in fury. A cold, pure force—the power of the Void, harbinger of annihilation and the dissolution of all things—poured out from the fragment, more clear and violent than ever before.

This force no longer sought to merge with the sword intent. Instead, with reckless abandon, it smashed against the Sword of No Return’s will, which sought to dominate Lin Mo entirely.

At that instant—

The “Reversed Seed,” which had lain dormant and silent in the script’s depths, seemed to stir—spurred by Lin Mo’s soul-deep hatred and the fragment’s desperate rebellion. It throbbed, weak but wicked, and a greedy, sinister suction, like a snake’s first strike after waking, silently locked onto the viscous, deathly beam that was devouring Su Li.

“Slash—!!!”

Lin Mo’s eyes blazed with a ferocity never seen before. Deep within the red, the sword spirit’s chilling gleam and his own burning hatred fused wildly. He was no longer a mere puppet to the sword’s will. The Void Scripture’s rebellious force erupted like a volcano within him, granting a fleeting chance to break free and assert his own will.

With a roar infused with all his hatred, pain, and desperate will to live, Lin Mo gripped the Sword of No Return, his right arm covered in gray-black ice crystal, muscles bulging with resolve. But instead of stabbing at the golden sphere, he swung down—down at the black refining beam devouring Su Li.

The sword seemed to sense its wielder’s seething hatred and sudden rebellion. It shrieked even higher, sharper. Its icy, annihilating intent did not withdraw, but, guided by Lin Mo’s will and the Void force, condensed to its sharpest peak.

A slash—darker, more condensed than the one that had cut through the blood sea, its edge traced with hairline cracks of fractured space—ripped through the howling downdraft, ignoring all distance, and struck toward the viscous, deathly black beam.

But the sword’s true target was not the beam itself.

It was the invisible “nourishing” node where the beam connected with the golden sphere below.