Path of the Ascendant

They parted smoothly, with Yi Wei achieving the next stage of the Hammer Semblance Art, but without making too much progress in the great art of blacksmithing. Something about it just didn’t mesh well with her abilities for whatever reason, and she couldn’t get beyond making above-average ordinary items. However, the upside of this particular meeting was that no-one died, nor was the forge burnt to the ground, meaning that it had gone better than the last attempt to meet an acquaintance.

‘So, I now have three more people to check up on, and two more places to inspect. This force, whatever it is, is unlikely to go directly after the family, meaning that I shouldn’t need to worry about the likes of Yi Kun or that tailor girl that I met from the time I had gone to make my robes and receive my identity token,’ she thought, ‘I guess the best person to check up on next would be… who were they again? There was Luo Xiuying, who taught me talismans, Ning Guanting, who taught me about blacksmithing, Great Dark and Great Light, who shared their knowledge of inscriptions, Master Yi Yi, who studied arrays, and Chu Ling and her study of pill refining… I suppose the Deadly Martial Colosseum ought to be a good place to go.’

When she managed to pull a map of the city out of the mental storm, she quickly made her way to the street on which the Deadly Martial Colosseum stood.

It was not on fire, nor were there any bodies on the front door, so she slowed down and didn’t rush in too quickly. Since she had never entered this place with her typical appearance – nor was her current bloodied robe a part of her typical appearance – she didn’t rush in straight away, but instead snuck around the back and reached out with her spiritual will, searching for someone wearing a particular set of robes and a specific mask.

To her surprise, she found her target in less than a minute.

Furthermore, this person was conveniently enough changing within a small alleyway, so she rushed into that very same alleyway.

“Excuse me, could I borrow those things from you?” she asked, appearing out of nowhere in the eyes of that poor, unprepared man. He stared at her for a few seconds before the words processed themselves in his head, then, shuddered on the spot.

“N-No!” he said immediately, his hands rising to guard his chest and crotch despite being fully clothed.

She shook her head, “Sorry, I shouldn’t have used that wording. Give the robe and mask to me. I can give it back later, though I’m not sure whether ‘later’ will be a matter of minutes or hours.”

“Can’t I still say no? I-I am a child of the Chen family!”

“That’s nice. Are you going to be buying your way into the combat arena you wish to enter?”

“It almost worked two years ago!”

‘Two years? This isn’t the same person that I had helped within the Deadly Martial Colosseum, is it?’ she frowned, though she didn’t bother pursuing that question as it did not matter to her, and would likely make the poor person in front of her a target to the ones pursuing her, which wouldn’t be advantageous for anyone, “I’m sure you can buy your way in later, then. Gimme.”

“But-”

“Remember, I’m not asking you this time, I’m telling you to give this stuff to me,” she repeated while thinking, ‘Next time I go here, I will certainly need to retrieve my original set for my disguise, both so that I don’t have to bother anyone else and because the mask, as far as I recall, was rather resilient.’

“A-Alright, here you go… Aw…” he looked incredibly saddened and ran away with tears forming in his eyes.

She watched him run away, then glanced at the robes he had thrown into her hands. To be safe, she cleansed them quickly with water-type planar energy, covered herself in them, put the simple mask onto her face, and snuck into the grounds of the Deadly Martial Colosseum.

The internal layout was unchanged, allowing her to find the small shack in which the pair resided without much difficulty. However, when she stepped inside, she did not find the familiar dark void, nor the round table that they typically sat around while discussing all sorts of inane things. There was no trace of that energy of absolute yin, nor any sign of the illusory energies that created their domain. In short, any trace of the twins was gone.

‘What is with my abysmal luck? Everyone is either intending to disappear, is dead, or has already vanished. Maybe this hut was only used as a meeting spot with me, and when I left, they-’

“Hey, what are you doing on these grounds? Identify yourself!”

Yi Wei threw her spiritual will backwards and, once she found no immediate threat, she turned around and faced the man who had approached her. He looked to be around the age of forty, in regular human years, and radiated the energy of the third realm, while being dressed in the standard guard armour of the Deadly Martial Colosseum.

She coughed to adjust her voice with Speaker’s Illusion before answering, “I am Da Gang. I work here.”

“Da Gang? Hm, I don’t know about that. Anyone can get one of those masks and robes and claim to be him. Prove it.”

Since the man had a point, she raised her hand and willed for the initial energy of the Elysian Palm to manifest around it, before dispersing it and transforming it into twin gold and purple lightning.

The man nodded, “It is you, then. You’ve not come at the best of times. I’d recommend that you get out of here while you’ve not been found by anyone other than me. There’s been a slight change in the leadership around here, and they’re not exactly favourable towards the old employees.”

“Are you saying that Great Light is no longer here?”

“Unfortunately, he had gone just a few days ago, and you just happened to miss him.”

“That is truly unfortunate. Did they not provide any explanation for this, and why do the new leaders have an issue with those that came before them?”

“I’m afraid that I’m just a guard here, so you won’t get all of the details from me. Furthermore, I have to remain brief, or else someone is certain to notice my absence. The basic story is one that has been talked about for quite some time, so you might have heard about Great Light and his mysterious brother were being chased by someone or something. Apparently, that force has caught up recently, forcing them to depart yet again,” the guard informed her, “As for the reason that the new leaders dislike the old… I’m afraid I can’t say much. Maybe they’re jealous of their success?”

“That could be… Have they left anything for me? I got through quite a lot of their pagoda and have studied quite a number of techniques under their tutelage. I had intended to resume it upon my return, as did Great Light, I am sure, so has he made any preparations for my inevitable return?”

The guard considered things for a moment, “As I said, I don’t know much, but there is a hidden spot that he used for keeping things for himself and his friends. Anything belonging to him should have been cleared out, so you can have a look there and see if you find anything of use. It’s at the back of the Colosseum, to the left and in a shack besides a small well.”

“I see. I’ll take a look there. One final question: would it be safe for me to go to other combat arenas in the area, or do the new owners have some influence over those as well?”

“They may bother you a bit, but if you’re still as good as you were the last time, our new employees wouldn’t dare to let you get harassed,” the middle-aged man said, before adding, “Of course, you’ve gotten even better, haven’t you? There’s no way a powerful man like you can sit still, right?”

Yi Wei’s face twitched beneath the mask, ‘Oi, don’t compliment me so readily, and not like that!’

“No, naturally I’ll keep improving. Now, so that I don’t disturb you any further, let me leave,” she said, turning around without giving him a chance to argue, “Thank you for your time.”

She disappeared through the back door within the wall of the Deadly Martial Colosseum, and followed the instructions given by the guard to locate the small wall described by him, as well as the shack that stood beside it.

Within was a great pile of damaged and outright destroyed furniture and random pieces of wood that might or might not have been furniture, in addition to simple pieces of logs that clearly had no relation to furniture in their present state. That pile utterly covered any ground surfaces within the shed, and at the back of it, the pile reached all the way up to the admittedly low ceiling. To the average person, there was almost nothing they could do to locate something within this building, but there were few circumstances in which Yi Wei could be called average or ordinary.

‘Thanks to my mental cultivation, my spiritual will has slightly greater reach, so if there is something within, I will find it,’ she though to herself, reaching out with her mind.

Her spiritual will sank into the wood and through it, and at first she found nothing but more pieces of former and future furniture, not beyond her expectations. She took a step into the shed and sank her spiritual will into the ground as well, to scan through as much of the debris as possible, as quickly as she could.

It took a couple of minutes, but she eventually located something buried within that pile, and excavated it via tossing out everything else that she didn’t really care about in order to allow her spiritual will to get close enough to it.

Once she did, she enveloped it with her spiritual will and found that it was a small manual.

‘Earthen Heart Inscription,’ the front of the technique manual read in simple, hastily scribbled letters that had been smudged during the writing process.

Within, the characters were similar, nearly damaged to the extent of being unreadable, but they were still comprehensible. She read through them quickly, and figured out that, as implied by the name, this was a crafting technique focused on inscriptions, and spoke about all sorts of methods involved within that process. When she completed her reading and stored it within the Gilded Library, she formed a flame atop her finger and lit the remnants of furniture within the shack, departing as the inferno slowly grew and consumed the building in its entirety.

The plumes of smoke from the shed joined those of the servant-class area streets and the shop of Luo Xiuying, as well as a number of other, unrelated flames. Together, they filled the skies with smoke, obscuring both the setting sun and rising moon with darkness.

‘With this, I have one more person to see… Out of all the people that I have studied under, I cannot possibly imagine Master Yi Yi surviving any sort of confrontation with a powerful force, especially due to his rather lacking cultivation. He was at the sixth stage of the Emergent Anchor realm last I recall, so I might be able to defeat him if I catch him without giving him any time to set up his arrays,’ she thought, recalling the man’s rather cowardly behaviours, ‘I hope he’s not dead yet…’

Before going to him, she returned to the place where she met Brother Chen again, but he had not returned, so she instead went towards the shop that sold the robes and masks.

Her intention was to return the items, maybe to get a few coins back as a result, but rather than finding the storekeeper that she had interacted with last time, she found that the member of the Chen family that had previously ran away from her was standing in the back of the shop, with the original storekeeper discussing something with him.

“Excuse me, I’d like to return this stuff to you,” she said, dropping the bundle of clothes at the front, “However, before I go, could you tell me what’s happening here?”

“We’re so sorry, custome- eh?” the child of the Chen family stopped mid-sentence as he saw who he was speaking to, “It’s you? You have actually brought this stuff back to me?”

“Did you want me to run off with it?”

“No, uh… Give it to me, then,” he said, taking the mask and robe from her, “If you don’t mind me asking, what were you intending to do, and did you fail in it, seeing as you came back so soon? You… You didn’t try to play at being Da Gang, did you?”

‘Obviously, you wouldn’t know this, but I am Da Gang… the fact that I am mistaken for a man rather frequently, but then am not mistaken for the mysterious fighter of the Deadly Martial Colosseum who has an absolutely excessive amount of yang is beyond mystifying,’ Yi Wei thought, “That doesn’t matter. I haven’t gotten your things dirty, and they’re in perfect condition. Meanwhile, you seem to have acquired a shop?”

“I had seen that it was incredibly popular amongst people like me, so I invested in it.”

She nodded in acknowledgement and turned around before walking away, leaving the child of the Chen family to manage his own business in peace.

Her destination was the home of Master Yi Yi, whose residence was only a few minutes away.

Every few seconds, she glanced upwards, unsure whether she did or didn’t want to see a pillar of smoke rising into the air. If it did appear, she would have been certain that something had occurred in his location, but it did not, somehow making things even more nerve-wracking. All along the path, there was no trace of unusual activity occurring in his location, forcing her to put up her defences.

She channelled her planar energy to her skin, prepared a number of defensive techniques to deal with whatever element the mysterious threat might use, and carefully examined her surroundings to prepare a number of escape routes for herself.

When she saw the array master’s home, she knew that something was wrong, and not because there was some unusual, contradictory element within the scene – instead, there was a far more obvious problem. The door had been broken into, with the force of the method of entry leaving it hanging on only a single hinge. With the reinforcement of cosmic energy, Yi Wei saw a trace of blood on the door frame.

Naturally, after she activated the Aeon of the Endless Dark, she ran into the house.

A trail of blood led her from the door to one of the rooms of that floor of the building, through another damaged door.

Yi Yi lay bleeding within, his arms wrapped around a tome that is stained with both red and black, presumably with the former being his blood and the latter being ink, though with the various materials and liquids that exist within the Planar Continents, it isn’t always easy to guess exactly what one mysterious vial of liquid might contain.

“Master Yi Yi!” she exclaimed – rather quietly – and rushed to him, kneeling down beside him.

With her spiritual will, she felt that his heart was still beating, but his cultivation was not as fortunate. Although traces of the ninth stage of the Emergent Anchor realm were present, the actual anchor was broken, and his dantian was actively bleeding planar energy.

He coughed up a mouthful of blood and raised his head with great effort. His eyes looked dim and lifeless, mirroring his planar aperture, for they also contained a shadow of his outbursts of pride.

“You… my student, you’ve returned… I… I am sorry, Yi Wei…” he muttered, loosening his grip on the tome at his chest, “Listen, my student… do you recall what I was attempting to do… How I was attempting… to perfect the Excellence Art? This book… this tome… is the essence of the Excellence Art… that I have written… so far… it is… imperfect… but I cannot let it be lost with me… Take it, and… remember…”

As he spoke, his expression became even paler, forcing Yi Wei to reach for a nearby bottle of healing pills.

“Master Yi Yi, take these-”

“No! There is… no point… They will find me again… and kill me…” Yi Yi shook his head feebly, “Listen to me… One cannot succeed with a satisfactory item… It must be perfect, in every way! The technique… must be made whole with the Prime Star Arts!”

‘Did he have his own enemies, or did they happen to be after both me and him at the same time? Or, perhaps, did those people attack him and led him to misunderstand their intentions?’ she wondered, but as she had no method of confirming either guess, she placed the pill bottle back on the table and reached for the technique manual with her spiritual will.

“Is that… your spiritual will?” he asked, surprising her with his sensitivity, “So strong… and stable…”

She ignored his muttering and scanned the book in its entirety, forcing her way through the mental storm to place it into the great arts shelf of her library, before removing the Minute Star Arts that she had previously practised.

The two techniques had similar functions and intentions, but a major difference between the Minute Star Arts, which were presumably similar to the Prime Star Arts of the older Master Yi Yi, and the Excellence Arts was the way in which they created the arrays. Based on what she knew of the Prime Star Arts, they were incredibly capable in creating one to three-star arrays that could overpower most four-star arrays created by others, but there were no stories of Master Yi Yi using four-star arrays and above despite being in the fifth realm as of his last appearance.

A theory that a few had as a result of this was that Master Yi Yi could not, or would not, use arrays of that level, and one of the most common ideas regarding the reason for this was that he could not display the same prowess with higher star arrays. However, the current Excellence Art, albeit not complete, looked to be focused on preventing such a scenario by raising the stability of all levels of arrays.

Without the Prime Star Arts, she could not integrate the Excellence Art with any other technique fully, but she could still contribute segments of it to the Minute Star Arts for great effect.

At the back of the technique manual, there was also a small piece of paper stuck onto the page, with a faint map of a location alongside a few instructions regarding how to navigate the area once someone arrived there.

“Master, is the map at the back-”

“You will need to go there… if you can complete… my technique…” he said, “My grandfather… left it for us… it should be… the location… of the Prime Star Arts…”

He coughed out even more blood, which left his body just as the last echoes of his cultivation vanished.

“Go now… don’t let yourself get involved… please…”

‘Whether or not I get involved, I’m already dealing with my own set of problems… I won’t bother him with this, though,’ Yi Wei decided as she stood up and bowed to him, “Thank you for all of the guidance you have given me in the past, and for trusting me with the Excellence Art. I will do my best to complete it, or to find someone trustworthy who can assist me with it. Goodbye, Master Yi Yi.”

He did not reply, simply nodding in acknowledgement of her words.

As she returned to the front door of the residence, Yi Yi reached out with his hand and clicked his fingers. An array that had been embedded beneath the floor lit up, bursting into life, and simultaneously engulfing the room in flame.

Yi Wei had noticed the array while she had been scanning the Excellence Art with her spiritual will, but she ignored it in favour of getting out with greater haste.

Unfortunately for her, when she left the door, she immediately felt a gaze aimed directly at her, so she glanced back at it out of the corner of her eyes. It originated from the very middle of the street, where two red-haired, grey-eyed people stood beside one another. One was male, with broad shoulders, sturdy frame and what would undoubtable be described as handsome features, while the other was clearly a woman, with an endowed chest and lithe body.

On the surface, they did not appear threatening, though both seemed to be athletic and strong. However, every one of her senses was screaming that these two were a threat beyond any she had ever faced. On top of that, something about them, or their energy, or perhaps their very existence, seemed wrong, to the point that the very heavens would reject them.

To make things even worse, they weren’t staring at the slowly burning house behind her, nor something to her side – their pupils were focused directly on her face.

She instantly turned away and walked off, her destination being the Timeless Grove.

Those two continued to follow her with their eyes but did not walk after her after she disappeared behind a building on the nearest turn she could find. Nevertheless, she still felt as if they were watching her, either through the nearby walls or from some other position.

After a while of experiencing that sensation, she could not bear with it any longer and sped up, using the combination of Storm’s Edge Dash and the Endless Dark Movement, the technique she had obtained from Fen Zhi, to go as fast as she could and evade the attention of those observing her. She expended over five percent of her energy, vastly more than she had expected, but eventually the feeling of being observed disappeared.

Conveniently enough, she ended up in the street that led straight to the grove.

In the distance, she saw a bright orange light, closer to flame than the setting sun, and then, after a painfully long and unpleasant delay, she realised what she was seeing.

Without any input from her, her body broke into a sprint towards the light, though she did retain enough control over herself to prevent her precious planar energy from being wasted, for she that whether or not she understood the sight correctly, she would not have the ability to stop or interfere with it.

When she neared the orange glow, it became clear that she was right in her initial conclusion.

The spot that should have been occupied by a great, seemingly endless forest was consumed in flame, but it wasn’t just a portion of the forest that burned. Instead, the entire Timeless Grove was absolutely devoured by the inferno, and despite it seeming to have started only recently, none of the tall trees still stood. From somewhere deep, deep within the grove, she heard a scream that only faintly reached her, before being silenced as one of the few trees that still stood split mid-way up its trunk and fell into the fire, throwing up a great cloud of ash.

In her ears, Chu Ling’s voice echoed, though this time it did not come from the grove, but from her own mind, ‘So long as the Timeless Grove stands… so shalt my body…’

That thought had added itself to the mental storm, for she knew that if that statement was true, then it also meant that if the Timeless Grove had burned, so would Chu Ling. That scream, that distant scream of pain and anguish, would have naturally had been hers.

Yi Wei heard her breathing quicken, and suddenly felt her entire body tremble. She tried, desperately, to stop herself, but she had lost even more control over herself than before. Even in the Gilded Library, the besieged bastion of her mind, the place where all of her thought and memories were stored on shelves both material and otherwise, the quaking caused the mental storm to further grow, severely obfuscating her visibility until she could not see further than a metre in front of her mental self.

Meanwhile, her eyes could see much further, but they were not showing her the sight she wanted.

And then, that feeling – the feeling of being looked upon by two pairs of eyes – returned as well, with both gazes focused on her head, standing far closer than she was comfortable with.

“So, you are the person we are looking for.”

“Thank you for revealing yourself.”

The man spoke first, and then the woman, with both of them standing only a few metres behind her, still standing right beside one another. For a second, she considered how to act, and then forced herself to turn around to face them.

Now that she saw them more closely, she confirmed that the strangeness around them was not just a part of her imagination. Indeed, the very air around them warped like a distant mirage, with vague shapes floating within, though no matter how much she strained her eyes, she could not determine what they were, not even what shape they resembled.

Perhaps as a result of that energy, or due to the killing intent-filled glare that she was sending towards them, the people that had initially filled the streets quickly left, emptying the area around them in less than a minute.

At that very moment, Yi Wei had finally concluded upon a path of action.

Without any warning, she threw her hands up and shouted, “Ancestral Call! Ancestral Eyes!”

In one instant, two groups of a dozen totems burst out of the ground, the torsos above them glowing with dawn light that was quickly surrounded by gold and purple lightning.

‘Yang Elysian Storm!’

Pure white, gold, sunlight and cosmic light wrapped around her and the ancestor’s palms, before exploding outwards into a great storm. All of the colours and energies mixed with one another, instantly colouring the street and the three combatants standing within with the wild cacophony of brilliant light. In a single heartbeat, the energies surged out to the mysterious pair, reaching their flesh and skin without any clear obstruction from them.

Before it could do anything to them, a comparable force burst out of both of them, combining into energy that easily wiped away the nearby storm and grew, slicing like a sharpened blade through the entirety of the Yang Elysian Storm and the ancestral totems.

That energy stopped just an inch from her, and receded, allowing her to discern that it was nothing but raw planar energy, without any technique to strengthen and refine its form.

The man retracted his planar energy, but the woman did not, instead forming it into the head of an enormous wolf, large enough to consume Yi Wei in a single bite, with every tooth being as large and sharp as a short sword.

Its jaws opened, and it surged forward without so much as a twitch from the woman controlling it.

Unlike Yi Wei’s storm, this wolven head was slower, but to her, that only amplified the threat. Had it been a fast attack, it could have easily been weaker, reliant more on the effectiveness of surprise or the inability of the target to dodge rather than the attack power of the jaws themselves, but that was not the case. She wrapped herself in defensive energy, bringing up every technique she could.

All of a sudden, a thick bolt of golden lightning shot through the air, flying right through the wolf’s mouth. The moment that it entered its jaws, it snapped shut, that very movement causing a great shockwave to fly through the air and knock Yi Wei back a few steps, then vanished.

“Ha! I won’t let you lot hurt her, you… eh, you!”

Both turned to face the voice, and Yi Wei recognised her immediately. She was Yi Yaling, naturally, and she did not seem to understand the true danger of those she faced.

“Girl, under the request of your family, we were going to leave you alone,” the strange woman said.

“However, now that you have interfered, you shall be purged as well,” the man announced.

They raised their hands – the man raised his right and the woman raised her left, while placing their other hands into the other’s – and channelled their planar energy through the raised arms, causing them to glow with a wondrous crimson and orange light, before, within a single instant, that light burst out of their bodies, came together into one bright sphere that shot out a thick beam of flaming energy, which pierced Yi Yaling’s body and instantly turned half of her flesh to naught but ash.

It disappeared afterwards, leaving the remnants of the girl’s body to drop to the ground.

This all happened before Yi Wei had so much as a chance to leap to the rescue, to raise her hand in protest, or even cry out.

When her hand did come up, it shut into a fist against her will. Within the depths of her mental world, a certain flame that had been growing ever since she witnessed the first trace of blood within the Kong Holy Grounds suddenly burst out within the library, devouring a quarter of the mental storm in seconds. The rest withstood it easily, the pages and scraps of paper simply floating around the great flame of anger and hatred, but this action also meant that this flame occupied a great deal of her mental avatar’s vision, flooding it and the entire Gilded Library in red.

That same light burst out of her eyes, alongside planar energy and True Ascendant physique energy.

She let out a cry of pure fury as she charged forward, a storm of energy in liquid form materialising around her. The stray violent energies split the earth and the buildings around her, regardless of the material they were made from, but the two were completely unphased.

With all of the energy that she could control being channelled to her arms and legs, she bombarded the two with attacks. Elysian Palms and Fists, Dawn Slicing Beam and Flowing Light, Violet Kicks and Storm Blade Wreathing were combined and executed flawlessly, with certain elements of formation arrays being incorporated when possible to maximise the destructive potential of her every movement.

Even while certain buildings behind the two were annihilated with every few strikes, some due to the residual energy continuing to travel past her attack, and others falling after an instance of a dawn light beam cuts through its support, the two remained unmoved. When an attack could be dodged by retreating, both of them jumped back at the same time to traverse the exact distance that they needed to clear, and when that was not the case, they simply thrust their combined planar energies forward and crushed her attack.

For a short while, no more than a single minute, they tolerated her strikes without any sign of retaliation, but then they suddenly stopped retreating.

They stopped in place and prodded at her with a single finger each.

All of the mysterious power around them condensed into one point before shooting forward, through her chest, the flesh and bones within, and even touched the edge of her heart. However, Yi Wei did not attempt to retreat, only pushing forward, through that energy, transforming her planar energy into the pure, absolutely destructive form. All of the light around her changed into pure violet, and then exploded without any order nor logic.

It threw her backwards, with her only barely managing to land on her feet.

Slowly, the light faded from her eyes and the wounds within her body were healed once she had transformed the violet energies back into cosmic energy. The raging mass of crimson in her mental library had lost some of its intensity, so she straightened her back and focused to observe the impact of her actions thus far.

‘How-’

The two were almost unharmed, with the only visible damage being a small scratch on the woman’s face, and a similarly small tear within the man’s robes.

Nevertheless, their expressions conveyed a rage even greater than her own. Without another word, they separated from one another and placed their own hands together, as if to pray to the heavens. The energy around them congregated around Yi Wei, surrounding her in a great circle. Red and white symbols and shapes burst out of the ground, in the same size and shape as the mirage-like circle, and then pressed down upon her.

For a brief second, she remained standing, but the very next breath she collapsed onto the ground, falling face first. The pressure from the mysterious array – for it was an array, at such a high level and complexity that she could not assess its nature immediately – was far greater than anything she had experienced within the pagoda of the colosseum and with her training set, and it grew constantly, tearing her skin, flesh and bones as easily as a man could tear paper, or a sword might cut through a taut blade of grass.

At the same time, she felt herself being pulled away, forced into a realm other than this one.

With her consciousness seemingly intending to go with it, she forced her head up from the ground and asked, in an unsurprisingly hoarse and rough voice, “… WHY? WHY ARE YOU-”

“Blame your parents, silly girl,” the man said, his visage beginning to twist and distort in her eyes.

“They should not have given birth to you,” the woman stated, her features becoming vague and distant.

With her last word entering her ears, her consciousness finally collapsed beneath the pressure.

 

END OF VOLUME 1