Ascension of The Unholy Immortal-Chapter 371: Shadow Master Return

Zi Er’s fan froze mid-swing. The air tasted wrong.

A tremor rippled through Li Song’s Crushblades. "Sister… the planet."

Below them, the dead world’s shadow pulsed. Jagged fissures split its surface, vomiting geysers of black flame. Yang Wu’s true form knelt at the epicenter, palm pressed to the crust. Veins of crimson light spiderwebbed outward from his touch—an ancient, half-shattered formation flickering to life.

"Borrowed Blood Art: Nine Hells Chain Array."

The technique’s name wasn’t a lie. Yang Wu he’d ripped it from a screaming devil general’s soul three decades ago.

Zi Er lunged with her fan carving a screaming arc of violet lightning. "Destroy the formation!"

Too late.

The dead planet detonated.

Not in fire, but in hunger. A thousand chains of crystallized voidshot upward, each link etched with the faces of devoured cultivators. The chains ignored flesh, ignored armor—they tore through spiritual meridians instead. Li Song’s roar shook the stars as his dantian flared visible through his chest, a nascent divinity ensnared by blackened links.

Yang Wu flickered behind Zi Er, his right arm disintegrating to the elbow. Blood and shadow swirled around his remaining hand, forming a jagged dagger of condensed karma. "You wanted a blow, Senior Sister."

The strike wasn’t aimed at her body.

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It pierced her timeline.

Zi Er’s eyes widened as fractured memories flooded her—a childhood vow broken, a lover’s betrayal, the first life she’d ever taken. The dagger’s edge found the weakest thread of her destiny… and plucked.

Her scream wasn’t sound. It was a rupture in causality.

Yang Wu collapsed as the backlash hit. His remaining arm crumbled to ash. The chains disintegrated, taking half of Li Song’s cultivation with them. But the blow had landed.

Zi Er stared at her trembling hands. A single gray hair fell across her vision—then another. Wrinkles spidered across her skin as her lifespan unraveled. "What… what did you DO?!"

Yang Wu grinned through bloody teeth. "Love tap."

The void shuddered. A portal ripped open beneath him—a final trigger woven into the formation. As he fell backward into the screaming rift, he spat a glob of blackened blood at their feet.

"Tell your Pavilion…" The portal swallowed him whole. "…next time, send real cultivators."

The chains vanished. Silence reclaimed the void.

Zi Er collapsed, her hair now snow-white. Li Song stumbled to her side, His own wounds were catastrophic, his cultivation base in tatters, but he was alive. Zi Er, however, was now a withered husk. The price for underestimating a cornered beast was steep indeed.

Suddenly violent ripple abruptly disturbed the void.

Reality split like rotten fruit, From the rift stepped a man clad in liquid starlight, his silver hair thrashing as though charged with storm winds. His Void Transformation Realm pressure enveloping the space.

"Who."

The man voice wasn’t a question. It was a guillotine blade hanging above causality itself. The single word flayed Li Song’s remaining spiritual energy, leaving raw meat weeping beneath crumbling stone armor.

Zi Er choked on a half-laugh, half-sob. " Big Brother Ren ! You—" Her skeletal hand grasped at air where smooth skin had been hours before. "The brat... Yang Wu... he..."

Ren Shui moved.

Not through space, but past it. One heartbeat he stood amid swirling diamonds, the next he knelt cradling Zi Er’s crumbling form. His flawless jade features cracked—a single hairline fracture splitting his brow as spiritual inkblots spread through the whites of his eyes.

"Essence necrosis." His thumb brushed Zi Er’s sagging cheek, catching a tear that hissed like acid against her paleskin. "Such a ruthless method."

Li Song crawled forward "Senior Brother... her lifespan...!"

"Quiet."

Li Song’s jaw snapped shut with tooth-shattering force as the void itself pressed down. The silver-haired cultivator’s gaze never left Zi Er’s aging face.

Zi Er’s milky eyes widened. "No... wait! You can’t—"

Ren Shui’s hands became conduits of violent light, veins of liquid starlight pulsing up his arms as he pressed them against Zi Er’s collapsing chest. The air screamed with the scent of burning peaches—the fragrance of a Void Transformation cultivator burning millenniums of accumulated lifespan.

"Brother... your dao foundation!" Li Song choked on blood and awe as cracks spread through Ren Shui’s jade-like skin. The silver-haired cultivator’s hair darkened to stormcloud gray strand by strand.

Zi Er’s skeletal fingers clawed at Ren Shui’s wrists. "Stop! The Pavilion Lord forbade—"

A thunderclap of released energy silenced her. Ren Shui’s eyes had become twin supernovae, pupils replaced by rotating mandalas of ancestral debt and stolen time. The withered flesh under his palms began plumping like overripe fruit, Zi Er’s screams rising in pitch as newborn skin crawled over exposed bone.

When the light died, he turned around and stared at the fading portal residue where Yang Wu had escaped.

"Senior Brother..." Zi Er touched her rebuilt face with trembling fingers. "That brat’s methods..."

"Quiet." Ren Shui’s voice carried the weight of dead stars. He raised his hand, catching strands of dissipating portal energy.

Li Song staggered upright. "You mean to pursue? But your cultivation—"

"Quiet"

Ren Shui’s laugh cracked the dead planet beneath them. "The mouse thinks it outran the sun, I will catch this bastard and make him wish he died the day he was..."

Ren’s laughter died mid-chuckle, strangled by the sudden tension that gripped him. His hand flew to the spatial ring on his finger, retrieving a jade token that pulsed faintly with red light, As his eyes skimmed the content, his eyes widened in shock.

"We must return to headquarters—now. The Pavilion Lord has halted all active missions and issued an immediate recall for every operative."

Zi Er gripped his sleeve, "What crisis could demand such an extreme measure ?"

"The edict mentions an unprecedented catastrophe, I fears it may be an external invasion or a rebellion from within."

Li Song’s eyes flared with alarm. "Invasion from outside? But the Astral King exact location is unknown even to us."

"The details are scant," Ren Shui replied solemnly. "But the Pavilion Lord has summoned every available elite cultivator for an emergency council. We must depart immediately."

Ren Shui turned toward the fading portal residue. For a heartbeat, Zi Er saw it—the hunger in his eyes, the way his qi vibrated toward Yang Wu’s escape vector like a hound straining at the leash.

Then it vanished.

He clasped hands behind his back, "We return. Now."

"But Yang Wu’s trail—" Zi Er began.

"Quiet"

With a swift move, Ren Shui tore a rift in space," Come now, We have much to explain, and a storm to weather."

The world folded around them as they vanished into the void.