Amami Yoko led sixty-one survivors through the sea toward the gateway and the endless ocean that existed beyond the bounds of the Nine Peaks Range. Thirty-three cultivators in the body refining realm, seventeen in the vitality annealing realm, nine in the thought weaving realm, and a single fellow cultivator in the awareness integration realm. She knew them all, having worked alongside them for decades at least. None of them knew if there was any hope to be found beyond the gateway in the expanse of plague-infested waters they'd spent their lives avoiding save at great need. Only two, including Amami Yoko herself, had ever so much as passed through that twisting window of space and sea. The few journeys undertaken into the dark and open waters beyond had been short and directed indeed.

Legends from olden times existed that told of other sects, other hidden lands, but they were almost as ancient and distant as the tales of the old world from before the demon war, in a time when there was no plague. Stories told to children, nothing anyone trusted or had ever seen. Even if they were true, and other people had founded their own refuges in a world filled with demons and traitors, the chances of finding such a place were minimal.

Amami Yoko knew that she and all who followed her faced nearly certain doom. Despite such knowledge, she swam ahead anyway, fighting with all her strength. Behind, there were only icy demonic cultivators possessed of overwhelming power. Ahead, a ruined sea full of demons. Demons were an enemy she could fight, could kill. They might still die, beyond the gateway, but they could strike a blow before they were done. That thought, the meaningful sacrifice that waited ahead, was enough to keep her moving.

A chance to do more than simply die, to fight and cross blades with the foe, that was enough to sustain her through overwhelming sorrow.

Wounds, however, only continued to accumulate. Far below, near the very bottom of the Nine Peaks Range, the demonic cultivators brought the elders to bear. The grim feast that followed was one all could feel as qi fountained through the waters. The two ladies of the Azushi lineage fell first, struck down in swift and overwhelming blows. Itsuki Kazuto endured barely any longer, slain in less than five passes. Wave Sword held on much longer. Whichever of the four icy monsters challenged him clearly did not expect his consummate skill with the sword and had little experience in the peculiarities of underwater combat. The sect leader held out for many minutes before he was finally overcome.

Tears fed the sea when the fleeing sect members felt the death of their leader. The only patriarch they'd ever known, the architect of their entire constrained watery world, was gone forever.

Yet this was far from the end of the crisis. In the very instant Wave Sword's qi was lost, consumed by his killer, the four baleful powers below turned their attention to the other survivors. They rose up, moving with immortal swiftness, and converged toward those who fled. Though their movement techniques, being based in icy winds, were poorly suited for powering through the deep waters, raw power counted above any other factor. Though the survivors had amassed a substantial lead upon their pursuers, it was nothing close to sufficient.

It took Amami Yoko no effort at all to diagram out the effort in her head. The initiates had no chance to escape. They simply were not fast enough. Only she and the other disciples had any possibility to reach the gateway before the enemy caught up.

This left her, now the highest-ranking member of the Great Waves Sect, with a single terrible order to give. "Initiates," she called, loosing her voice beneath the waves at a sacrifice of precious qi. "Two choices remain for you. Scatter and seek in fate's grace to escape alone or make an end now and seek whatever blessings the next life brings. I leave the choice to you and the dao. Disciples, on me!"

She did not wait, did not look back. The party of eleven, including her own life, could still be saved. Wave Sword had imposed that duty upon her, and no matter the cost, no matter how much it hurt, she would fulfill it.

Eleven disciples shot forward toward the gateway, swimming with all the prowess they possessed. Nine others, a bare majority of those in the vitality annealing realm, scattered to the depths in the faint hope of doubling back and escaping later. Forty-one others, more than a full third of the sect's strength mere minutes before, drew their swords and fell upon them.

To those who saw no possibility of survival, this choice offered them the only means of harming the enemy. The denial of their qi, the effort of their lives, to the predation of the demonic cultivators.

"May the sages guide them swiftly to the next life and bless their paths," Amami Yoko whispered the prayer as she held back the urge to empty her stomach. Proper though it might be, she hated to see lives sold at such a cheap price.

After that, there was only the race to the gateway and what little hope it held.

The demonic cultivators felt those deaths, that dissipation of qi into the inky midwaters, and responded with fury. They rushed forward at maximum speed to hunt down and consume all those who dared to flee from their rapacious existences. Several of the vitality annealing cultivators pursued in this way took their own lives before they were caught. Others were overcome before even that desperate final act was concluded.in either case, qi presences vanished one by one from Amami Yoko's awareness as the demonic cultivators destroyed the sect one member at a time.

This included nearly half of Amami Yoko's party. The five weakest disciples, all in the first and second layers of the thought weaving realm, were caught by a swirling, blood-stained monster of rippling ice and torn to shreds before they could reach the gateway. Nothing but smears of blood and echoes of consumed qi were left behind.

In the end, only six survived to reach the shimmering distortion hanging in the waters. All were distraught and swimming with bare swords in hand. Acting without hesitation, they plunged through without even a moment's pause. Amami Yoko had moderated her pace at the end, keeping the tiny remnant of the sect together in the hope that they might escape into the world beyond as a unit capable of united action. A sect rather than scattered individuals.

This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

This proved a prescient choice, for doom's final emissary waited on the other side of the entrance to the Nine Peaks Range.

Passing through the gateway, Amami Yoko's eyes landed upon the flesh of a demonic cultivator for the very first time. She was a monster cast in metal, but not a thing refined and perfectly polished in the manner of the swords on the water cultivator's hip. Instead, she was crushed, fragmented, and fused into a repugnant mixture of substances that defied the natural sorting patterns of nature. Clad in a layered battle robe, her hands were wrapped in cloth and a mask formed of overlapping metal strips coated her face. A massive curving blade, single-edged and easily double the length of those the Great Waves Sect utilized, waited in her hands.

That weapon descended in a killing stroke even as the water cultivators blinked once to adjust for passage through the momentary interval of space that was not space.

Swords in hand, Amami Yoko performed the greatest maneuver in her entire life in the next moment. Placing both swords before her, perpendicular to the line of her spine, she expended all the qi she could force through her body, bone, muscles, and nerves aligned, to parry that casual flick of the immortal's blade.

Metal struck metal with an ear-shattering clang.

Forged by Wave Sword's own hand, the paired swords held steady even as the shock of impact ripped through muscles, tendons, and bones. Everything from fingertips to toes was left aching, numb, and strained to the breaking point. Bruises erupted all along her arms. Her vision swam and she lost all recognition of up and down. Had she been on land the force of the impact would have smashed her legs flat against the earth. Floating in water, she was instead driven down into the black. Her body tumbled hundreds of meters into the depths in seconds.

A descent that spared her and her alone.

"Scatter!" the remaining five members of the sect shot apart at once, dashing aside in completely different directions even as the immortal's massive weapon reaped its way through them. Upward, forward, backward, north, and south, they struggled to evade. The metallic demonic cultivator, far weaker than the icy ones who had attacked the sect, was startingly fast by comparison. She moved like a streak through the water, as if pulled on a string held by some almighty existence far above or below. One by one, she caught and slaughtered the last disciples of the Great Waves Sect, though each pursuit extended out, longer and longer, as she was forced to turn and overtake every new target.

Amami Yoko dove, using the initial force of impact to carry her down deeper and deeper. Kicking with all the potent strength her legs possessed, she swam faster than she ever had before. Down, down, plunging into the crushing depths near to the bottom of the sea. Strange creatures surrounded her, and bizarre gelatinous bodies clung to numb arms that hung limp at her sides after a brutally extended struggle to successfully sheath her swords.

Even as she descended desperately, she oriented her body as she'd learned to do as a child and swam steadily to the north, ever further from the Nine Peaks Range and the last of her dying comrades.

Thousands of meters down, her lungs burned and she struggled to move as oxygen fled her blood and her depleted qi struggled to fill the gap. That might well have been the end, but she had prepared to hunt beaked whales this day and had brought with her provisions in case of an emergency in the deep waters. Taking a talisman from her belt, one meant to protect one of the now lost thought weaving realm disciples, she slapped it onto the skin of her neck. Alchemical ink embedded in the rectangle of layered seaweed and refined algae began to burn away even as tendrils of qi filtered into her blood. Oxygen, boiled out of the water, flooded her tissues and restored her ability to continue exertion.

Deep, dark, and cold, wrapped in a shell of despair, she pushed onward until the pressure supplied by the horrific qi of the demonic cultivator faded away in the distance. The pursuit she feared never came. Apparently, she'd managed to open a gap sufficiently substantiative that the water served to obscure detection of her location.

Alone in the lightless waters meters above the abyssal plain, with the mountains of the only home she'd never known receding far behind, Amami Yoko swam ever onward.

The talisman, applied to one of her strength, gave her several hours of additional undersea endurance. Even so, she waited until the last possible moment, with her vision red and her skin itching everywhere, before she dared to surface and fill her lungs. Remaining above the waves for no more than a few seconds, she dove again thereafter, knowing that qi was far more challenging to detect through water than air. The untrained, especially, found attuning their senses to the needs of the medium challenging.

She repeated this cycle for several days, until she no longer had the strength to swim and was forced to float on her back at the surface in order to recover.

Exhaustion forced her to come face to face with the crushing weight of grief.

Ten thousand mortal lives, lost to the last. A great tragedy, though a distant one. It had been over a century since she'd had more than perfunctory dealings with anyone not a cultivator. One hundred and two cultivators, every one a name she knew, including close friends and former lovers, slain. She had not felt every death, but the chances that any of the other five had managed to escape the iron-faced traitor were so long as to crush any possibility of hope. Only one conclusion remained. She was the last member of the Great Waves Sect. All others had perished.

One lone cultivator lost in an empty world that contained nothing but demons, plague, and traitors.

She could feel those enemies. Ghouls were found on the bottom of the ocean. Few of them, and scattered very widely, but the dots of crimson power sufficed to reveal their presence. The plague itself was both vastly more obvious and incredibly insidious. A layer of red oil, laid atop the water; it was easily blocked out and ignored, but its presence was a constant, a continual drain upon her qi. Forced to fight it in perpetuity, she felt diminished simply by existing within its grasp.

Worse, she found herself lost in the middle of the ocean. In an immediate sense this was not significant. She could catch fish effortlessly and use her qi to filter saltwater into fresh. Constant immersion would damage her skin, but there were means to repair the tissue that she had learned many years before. The demons, trapped beneath thousands of meters of liquid, represented no threat. However, the open ocean provided neither protection nor prospects. Eventually, if she remained in place in open water, the demonic cultivator would return, fly over, and kill her.

Find refuge, that was the command she been given. Having nothing else left, she strove to obey. The means to accomplish that goal, to fulfill the last wish of Wave Sword, eluded her almost entirely. Instead, she swam north, slowly, rebuilding strength in her ravaged limbs. Her training offered no means to search out the existence of hidden lands, and the ocean offered no options. It was too large and too empty to rely upon.

If other hidden spaces where humans still lived existed, she eventually decided, they would lie upon the land. More importantly, on land the ghouls would walk about, enemies she could strike with her swords. Perhaps, should she manage to kill enough of the demons it would draw the attention of observers. Any such watcher would most likely be a demonic cultivator, but to face the end surrounded by fallen foes was a conclusion she examined and found she was content to accept.

The old tales said that her ancestors had once lived on lands to the northwest. Turning in that direction, Amami Yoko kept on swimming. Seeking the end.

Next chapter will be updated first on this website. Come back and continue reading tomorrow, everyone!

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.