Twenty-four years. Forty-two thousand kilometers of travel beneath the surface of the earth. Eighteen hidden lands. Nine steps further on the path to the Heavens she could never finish.

But there was one more step, the most important step of all, that she could take, and it stood before Scoria Scorn now.

It was not a new doorway, this one, not to her. Sixteen years earlier she had taken exactly four steps through it. Enough to recognize that the small space on the other side served as the residence of an immortal. There were only two such places beneath the surface of the earth.

She had found one three years earlier. The home of the mighty formation master whose skills and knowledge-sharing were responsible for so much of what had been built beneath the surface following the demon war's brutal end, it had been defended by supremely potent formation traps, a barrage powerful enough to almost kill her in three steps. Only carefully crafted armor and a stubbornly swift retreat had spared her.

That bastion lay completely beyond her power to assault. The other immortal abode, however, had presented neither defense nor pursuit of any kind upon entry. It tantalized her, the potential and possibility waiting there. Twenty-four years, the final quarter of nearly a full century of effort, and she had fought, slain, and drained her way back to the very edge of immortality. The seventh layer of the soul forging realm, a considerable expression of growth, but one that had reached its end. A barrier lay before her, one that remained crushingly difficult even with the plague's aid.

To cross the gulf and move into the celestial ascendancy realm required an immense outlay of qi. Orthodox cultivators acquired the necessary power for their transformations from the very heavenly lightning that sought to erase them. Demonic cultivators had no access to such an ironic store of resources. They had to rip the required qi out of the bodies of others.

It would take numerous cultivators, including powerful elders, and a huge mass of mortals, to supply that qi in the requisite burst. Such a force was normally overcome through the aid of an immortal ally. Even if Scoria Scorn had possessed such a thing, the requisite victims no longer remained.

But a single immortal's qi would more than suffice, and one waited on the other side of the shimmering distortion in space before her. One fight, one kill, that was all she needed to achieve to become immortal once again.

It sounded so simple, so easy.

It was supposed to be impossible.

One against one, immortals simply did not lose to those in a lower major realm. There were, as far as she knew, no recorded cases of it happening, ever. Not even Bloody Roam, who had supposedly completed the seemingly almost equally impossible achievement of defeating a soul forging elder while in the spirit tempering realm not once but three separate times, could lay claim to that feat.

During the demon war those demonic cultivators in the soul forging realm who slaughtered immortals, and there had been many, did so in mass attacks. The very first battle of the war, when the seven Great Betrayers surrounded and slew their master, was the perfect example of such methods. The qi an immortal possessed was immense, enough that such a victory could propel many over the wall at once. Scoria Scorn had seen that happen herself, when she guided the battle party through the halls of the Myriad Blessings Sect to cut down her own father.

They had been fifteen, up against one man in the fifth layer of the celestial ascendancy realm. Unprepared, taken by surprise amid the endless debauchery he never ceased even as the chaos of the war enveloped the sect, and betrayed by his own flesh and blood such that he took an initial wound unaware, and still only three of fifteen survived. Bloody Roam had told her the next day, on one of the few occasions she had spoken with him in person, that her tactics had produced a great victory.

The foe awaiting her now was not the canny monster her father had been. He was not even a match for the blue-white swordsman of the Twelve Sisters who had dared to block her retreat from that disaster. Four steps beyond the gateway had sufficed to let her recognize the qi, and the name, of the coward who took refuge here. An immortal she had seen from afar long ago, a man whose story had been famous throughout the old world in a tale lamented since long before she was born.

The Broken Hermit had achieved immortality by sacrificing his ambition, hopes, and dreams to ward off the obliteration of Heavenly Lightning. His was a dao of cowardice, stagnation, and disappointment. Truly, it was evidence that were infinite paths to the heavens, but this wretched man had been completely and totally bottlenecked since that fateful day nearly five thousand years ago.

Scoria Scorn had thought the man long dead, for he had vanished long before the demon war began. She, like most, had believed some prideful immortal had stumbled upon the unlucky one in a moment of vulnerability and slain him as an offense against the proper way of all cultivators. To find him now, hidden beneath the earth below the lands that had once been ruled by her father, a man who had long succored the Broken Hermit out of some perverse amusement in observing an immortal utterly without any ambition, remained a surprise.

But she realized it was the very first place she ought to have searched.

His survival was as annoying as it was glorious. The old fool ought to be dead. He had no business outliving so many who had dared to reach further. The chance to feed him to the plague, and to reclaim immortality in the same moment, it was as if her father had left behind one final prize for her to snatch. Amusing and infuriating all at once.

One critical question remained. Could she do it?

No choice existed save to make the attempt. Any other demonic cultivator would kill her for this prize.

She resolved to claim the Broken Hermit's qi or die in the effort. But that did not mean she would be fighting alone. The deep reaches offered no natural access to a demon horde. In this absence, Scoria Scorn created a horde herself, manually.

One precision pickaxe blow at a time, she hollowed out a vast cavern in a space separated from the critical gateway by no more than a few meters of solid stone. Then, one by one, she filled that immense empty chamber with two hundred and fifty thousand ghouls, one thousand ogres, and one hundred giants. These last she had to bind and restrain to prevent them from smashing their way through the barrier.

It took years of constant effort, snatching up the demons one by one from across a vast expanse of land in order to avoid the notice of her peers.

It was incredibly tedious labor, but she intended to win, not die, and her dedication to that essential goal propelled her past previously accepted limits of diligence. Ennui was the great weakness of immortals, a truth widely recognized but little combated. Death, however, had proven greatly freeing from that indulgence.

The specter of possible aging, even the minute amount inflicted by a century upon her stolen soul forging realm frame, supplied all the motivation she could ever need. She fashioned a small hand mirror; one she carried constantly. A single glance at the weak flesh and blood body to which she remained confined rather than the immortal iron-blooded form she deserved, that she was, provided a perpetual source of motivation.

Scoria Scorn believed the Broken Hermit lived alone. Her carefully assembled horde would not serve to slay him, but in the confined expanse of his hidden land, a zone not even one kilometer in diameter, he would be forced to engage. Even immortal qi was not limitless. If the demons could wear him down, and if the vast array of talismans she'd acquired through a long century of scavenging sufficed to ward off a few desperate final strikes, then she could seize victory from an exhausted and battered opponent.

She believed it. It had to be possible. Otherwise, she was doomed.

Two hundred and fifty thousand, that was the benchmark she'd set. Anything more was unlikely to make a difference, and the danger of someone noting her appropriation grew day by day. If there had been more eyes it would never have been possible. It was not lost on her that, had the Twelve Sisters not slain so many of her fellow demonic cultivators, her resurrection would not be concievable at all.

She would enjoy drinking their qi when the time came.

Garbing herself in a set of deep ochre-shaded armor made of overlapping mail layers forged of stained chrome steel taken from the vaults of a hidden land with no name, Scoria Scorn took the blade of the dead flame priestess in hand and shattered the restraints holding back her demons from afar through a trick of masonry. Swollen water-filled spikes cracked apart and destroyed the stone wall in the way.

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A quarter of a million expressions of living hunger surged forward as one, vanishing into the gateway as fast as the twisted space allowed. Over one thousand were trampled by their fellows in the rush. They continued as the horde passed over, dragging their broken bodies forward using shattered limbs even now beginning to recover.

Scoria Scorn stood in the darkness of the deep caverns at the edge of the shimmering gateway with blade in hand for ninety excruciating minutes. The longest, most brutally tormenting exercise in patience to be found in a life stretched across millennia. It was horrendous, the desire to charge forward, to claim her prize. It drove ten thousand hooks into her skin and pulled with every breath.

Only one thing, one single property, made it bearable. Every second that passed brought her victory closer.

A coward and a fool, in those traits hope kindled. Had the enemy charged forth he would have, at the very least, escaped. Instead, he sat pat, a bar trapped in the forge even as the temperature slowly rose to the point that iron could no longer resist.

Finally, when she dared to wait no longer, the demonic cultivator threw herself forward in the great gamble.

The Broken Hermit lived in a simple place. His hidden land was little more than an eight-hundred-meter-diameter sphere half-filled with earth and with a formation attached to the ceiling that provided light. A small stream fell down from the empty center of the ceiling, pooled, and drained its way out below. The ground, save for a small wooden hut at the center, had been given over entirely to gardens.

Scoria Scorn's nose wrinkled at the scent of broken mint stalks as she stepped through the gateway. All the plants once arrayed in neat rows and upon earthen platforms were now gone, trampled utterly beneath thousands of clawed feet. Only mud and wreckage remained. The wooden hovel in the center, once pedestrian but solid, had been reduced to a mound of shattered splinters.

Ghouls howled and screamed as they rampaged around that ruined structure. Out of the quarter of a million comprising that vast horde that had entered, less than ten thousand now remained. Even as her eyes adjusted to the brightness of this space, lit by an artificial sun, the demonic cultivator watched as the last of the giants was hurled down from above, a crimson boulder that crushed over one hundred of the ghouls that remained back into red dust as it splattered against the earth.

The Broken Hermit stood in the air above his blasted domicile. A bent and broken staff lay clenched between his gnarled fingers. Those limbs, and the rest of the immortal's thin frame, had previously been clad in dark green silk robes. Now, he wore only disintegrating rags barely held together by straps of rope and a blood-red sash wrapped around the waist. The old gardener's straw hat had been knocked from his head and trampled and the long white beard that reached to his waist was stained, torn, and filled with clods of dirt. His tightly muscled form, wiry and corded, leaked blood from dozens of wounds.

Most important of all, his qi, a bizarre mixture that felt like a granary struck by lightning, flickered and sputtered. Though the orthodox cultivator still fought, he stood at the end of his endurance.

Scoria Scorn gathered her qi, fresh and iron-tinged, and attacked without hesitation in the fullness of her might.

Iron Splitting Blade Arts, Forth Form, Steel Whirlwind.

Qi exploded from her blade. Countless black iron-soaked blades launched into the air. Directed by the motion of her wrists, this deluge churned and wrapped into a seeking spiral, a howling vortex of knives. This funnel cloud of razor edges sought out the flesh of the Broken Hermit with unerring accuracy. All edge and fury, the dark storm of metallic power advanced and severed as one.

The immortal did not scream defiance. He did not move to counter nor race to dodge. He simply raised his staff, spun it like a lady's fan, and blocked.

Thousands of qi blades clattered against the wooden wheel, seeds thrown against a board. Tiny nicks, so small only immortal eyes could resolve them, came to coat the bandaged hands of the Broken Hermit, but there was no blood, no real damage. Dark eyes, tired but contemptuous, stared down at Scoria Scorn.

Refusing to reconsider, committed entirely to the assault, the demonic cultivator stepped forward. Pulling hard upon her stores of qi, she raised the blade, flexed her arms, and detonated a second whirlwind.

This time, the Broken Hermit grunted as he blocked. Against the third attack he gritted his teeth and visibly strained. When the fourth howling blast of steel slammed into him it carried away the remainder of his rags and left him bleeding from a thousand tiny punctures. The fifth assault eroded the staff down to almost nothing, shaved away the hermit's beard, and left him coated in a reeking mix of blood and sweat. The sixth whirlwind shattered his staff and drove him down to the ground, collapsed to one knee.

Scoria Scorn, wheezing and gasping for air, her qi channels burning with liquid metal agony, charged forward. Her hands were burned red and blistered, but she gritted her way through the pain and held fast to the blade in hand. With her own qi all but gone, she could do nothing more than trust in her intuition and charge. Magnetic field-empowered movement carried her to her quarry swift and sure. The Broken Hermit looked up with wide eyes as the great sword swept down.

But whatever his weaknesses, his wretched and cowardly dao, the old man remained an immortal. Dark eyes narrowed. He reached down to the ground and snapped loose a sprig of mint trapped beneath his knee. With the last of his qi, he coated the meter-long bit of greenery in power, turning it into a deadly spike. Then he lunged forward.

The gold and silver blade met that furious counter with incredible force, but the Broken Hermit was swift as a snake and skitter-stepped snappier than any crab. His left arm snapped out and caught the descending golden edge in his bare hand. Metal cleaved through four fingers and all the bones of the hand before lodging deep in the base of the wrist. Bones and tendons cracked like brittle wood, but red blood flowed from the severed stumps.

In the same moment, the strengthened stem came up as the immortal stepped inward. A green point stabbed though mail armor as if it were paper, empowered by the perfect edge of pure qi. It pierced the flesh beneath, sliced between the ribs, and struck Scoria Scorn in the heart. A dozen protective talismans flared and failed in the effort to protect the demonic cultivator from this improvised thorn.

The Broken Hermit sighed, black and rotten teeth revealed, as he drove the death blow home. At the same time, the shine of qi vanished from the sprig, the last of the immortal's qi and strength expended.

Scoria Scorn felt the pain of the killing blow strike home and ignored it. To one who had died already, a stab to the heart was not enough to overwhelm. Nor would it suffice to kill instantly.

She looked down at the Broken Hermit and smiled in horrible triumph.

Puppeteering talisman's bound to her arms activated even as her heartbeat failed, qi stimulated the motion of the muscles for a single critical second, long enough to make one last strike before death grabbed hold. A suicidal final technique developed long ago by those who indulged in puppetry. One motion, all she needed against a defenseless enemy.

The great blade passed through a single flat cut and swept the Broken Hermit's head from his shoulders.

"You are still dead," the words passed the lips of the cowardly immortal as his cranium flew through the air.

His remnant soul left his body and raced upward.

Shock ripped through Scoria Scorn as she felt death creep into her core. One prize, one critical element, forgotten. The stab wound meant nothing if she could drain the immortal's qi and reshape her body. Qi did not reside in the flesh but was held deep in the soul. Dying, motionless, unable to unleash even a single blade of power, she could not claim that prize. Her vision blurred as she tracked the bodiless ember rising into the air, and she screamed out a final explosion of rage and fury, unwilling, unable, to accept this ignominious end.

There was no one to hear, no one to feel, no one to answer.

No one save the plague.

And the plague knew its price.

Two hundred and fifty thousand demons had perished within the tiny space. The plague, the power of that red wash, positively saturated the cavern. Red mist filled the air and hungry crimson qi coated everything from walls to dust.

Power that Scoria Scorn could touch, could invoke as her own.

Severed from conscious thoughts by the swift oncoming creep of death encasing her limbs, only the absolutely primeval need to live, to feed, to survive, propelled Scoria Scorn. That was all the plague was, all it needed, all it wanted. In that desperate moment the two daos, the woman of discarded slag and the alien amalgamation of endless hunger, were perfectly aligned. Aligned, and therefore connected through the mirror of the infinite dao.

For one critical instant the strength of the plague, the impossibly vast reservoirs of unceasingly hungry qi that truly deserved the label demonic, was hers to wield.

Commanded by subconscious need, by animal drives to seize, consume, and live, the plague grabbed, entwined, and hauled down the remnant soul of the Broken Hermit in a web of unbreakable red ribbons. It drew him into the embrace of Scoria Scorn's dantian, her core, and then, with a clenching exertion that carried the power of oceans, crushed.

The immortal's existence came to an instantaneous, irrevocable end. Power flooded Scoria Scorn. Qi rippled through her. It filled her dantian, her meridians, and every channel in her body all at once. Overflowing all these, it drilled into the flesh itself, through the thoughts within her skull, and further still until it exploded across the surface of her soul. This, the link between mind, body, and spirit, hardened, metamorphizing from diaphanous and tenuous to impossibly solid in an instant. In the next the echo of this power discharged. Rebounding backward, it transformed her utterly.

Flesh hardened, coated and invested with iron. Her blood ran gold as electrum filled her veins and all that she was reformed, clad now in glorious metal. The softness of mortality evaporated, leaving a leaking, burning, mingled creation of countless overlapping composites without rhyme or reason behind. Not a perfect iron statue, no, she was Scoria Scorn, the bountiful beautiful chaos poured out of the dregs of the crucible and cast into feminine form. She leaked and absorbed gold and lead upon the edges of her skin with every motion, and her hair twisted into wire nettles.

Her heart, healed perfectly, beat with furious fire as she reveled in the restoration of her immortality. She was herself again, and though not precisely as she was before – it seemed a century and a half as a mortal had shifted her dao on a level even the plague acknowledged – she, of course, preferred this new version of her immortal self. Satisfied, she collapsed to the floor in the center of the cavernous hidden land and slowly worked her qi back towards stability.

She had done something no other demonic cultivator had done, and even if it required the plague's aid – she would not forget that moment of intoxicating connection, though it remained far too terrifying to explore yet – and was immortal once more.

Survival secured; her thoughts turned swiftly towards vengeance. It was time, she decided, to return to the surface and discover how those wretched star witches faired. Time was no longer a limit she must race against. She would destroy them, no matter how long it took.

That would be her crowning glory.

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