The world shaped itself around him once again as Ye Jun stood on red earth beneath a sky the color of dried blood.
The horizon stretched in every direction without any end, an ancient wilderness that felt older than anything he had ever stepped on.
Gigantic skeletons rose from the ground at intervals, ribs the size of mountains, skulls with teeth longer than his body. So of the bones were embedded so deep into the earth that they had beco part of it, fossilized into the bedrock itself.
The mountains in the distance bore deep claw marks down their faces, each one wide enough to swallow a city whole.
Even the air around him felt wrong. It pressed against his skin like sothing was watching from every direction at once, and the space itself carried a faint tension, like a held breath waiting to be released.
’...This is the Hunt Trial?’ he thought.
Ye Jun’s hand moved to his hip on instinct. He had his own Ember Sword this ti, not a borrowed one, the familiar weight grounding him slightly.
He probed inwardly and found that his cultivation was back to its actual level. No more artificial boost, no more king’s robes. Just him as he was, standing in a world that felt designed to eat him alive.
Ye Jun frowned. ’Different from the others. The previous ones tested how I thought. This one feels like it’s going to test how I survive.’
That wasn’t a surprise considering this was the Trial of Hunt.
He took a careful step forward, and that was when he heard it.
He froze, sensing breathing behind him. It was slow and deep, seeming to fill a chest the size of a hill. Each inhale tugged faintly at the air around him, like the world itself bent slightly toward the source.
Ye Jun didn’t turn imdiately. His body had locked into stillness instinctively. His Threat Assessnt fired automatically and gave him nothing. The feeling it returned felt wrong, as if whatever stood behind him existed beyond his ability to read.
’...What even is that?’
He turned his head slowly.
The creature stood perhaps two hundred ters behind him.
’The hell?!’
He wouldn’t have called it a beast. A beast had a shape his mind could hold. This damned thing had a body that was probably sothing between a great cat and a serpent and a hunting bird, but none of those shapes settled properly in his mind.
Its limbs were long and built for closing distance. Its head had no obvious eyes, only a wide flat plane of dark bone with shallow grooves where eyes should have been. Its mouth was a horizontal slit that ran the width of its face.
It was staring at him...without any eyes.
The grooves on its head shifted almost imperceptibly, and Ye Jun felt sothing pass through him. It was neither Qi nor killing intent, but sothing older. It went past his skin, past his ridians, and brushed directly against his Soul in the Spiritual Realm.
His Soul flinched.
The creature’s mouth-slit pulled wider in recognition.
’It found .’
Then it moved.
Ye Jun had fought fast opponents before. But this was different. This was inevitable. The distance between them collapsed in a single breath, and his body reacted on training alone, Stone Step Footwork shifting him sideways while his sword ca up instinctively.
He didn’t see the strike. He felt it. A crushing weight slamd across his ribs, and his body went sideways through the air, hit a fossilized rib, and bounced violently off into the dirt. Three of his ribs were broken before he had even finished registering the blow.
"Damn you!"
He scrambled upright, blood filling his mouth.
The creature was already on him.
He died without ever managing a second swing.
...
He ca back kneeling on the red earth, whole once more. His breath caught as he blinked in shock.
’What...’
He looked down at himself. No signs of blood or broken ribs. His sword rested in his hand. The creature stood two hundred ters away exactly as before.
Watching.
’It revived ?’ Ye Jun wondered. ’Or was all of it just an illusion?’
The grooves on its head shifted again. The mouth-slit pulled into the sa horizontal expression of recognition.
And it ca again.
This ti Ye Jun was ready. He moved before it closed the distance, Ashen Phantom Steps carrying him in an unpredictable arc while Wind Step Footwork layered on top of it for additional speed. He cut at its flank as it passed, and his blade skipped off sothing harder than anything Ye Jun had ever seen before.
The creature pivoted on a single limb, faster than its massive body should have allowed, and its tail ca around in a brutal arc.
Ye Jun tried to block, but the block shattered instantly. His arm broke in three places and he was airborne again.
He died the second ti.
...
By the tenth death, he had stopped tracking them as individual events. The pattern of his attempts blurred together into one endless slaughter.
He tried hiding, but the creature found him easily. He tried digging into the earth and ambushing it from below. It knew exactly where to strike before he even erged. He tried using the fossilized skeletons as cover. It walked through them, breaking ribs the size of pillars without slowing down in the slightest.
He tried his Qi Suppression Field, hiding both his presence and his cultivation. The creature didn’t care. It wasn’t tracking his Qi. It wasn’t tracking his body either. It had marked his Soul, and the Soul couldn’t be hidden.
By the thirtieth death, the cold rage had started to settle into him.
By the fiftieth, he stopped thinking about strategy.
He started thinking about it.
How it moved. How it breathed before a strike. How its weight shifted slightly to its left side when it pivoted. How the grooves on its head deepened just half a heartbeat before it lunged.
It was learning him. He could feel that much clearly. Every ti it killed him, it killed him faster than the last ti, the kill landing in a slightly different place because he had already started defending against the previous pattern.
But he was learning it too.
Not consciously though. His mind had stopped being useful sowhere around the twentieth death. Assassin logic kept producing plans that the creature countered before he could even fully execute them.
Strategy was useless. Technique was useless. The thing he had spent his life building, the precise and efficient hunter’s mind, was being dismantled because sothing better at hunting than him was using it against him.
So he stopped using it.
By the hundredth death, sothing else had begun to take its place.
Around the two hundredth death, he stopped speaking, even within his own thoughts. The conscious narrator inside his head went quiet. What remained was watching. Just watching. The shape of the creature. The rhythm of its movents. The sll of the air before it shifted.
By the four hundredth death, he started to laugh.
"HAHAHAH!!! YOU DAMNED BASTARD!!"
It wasn’t a sane laugh. It ca up out of his chest along with the blood that spilled from his throat after one of the creature’s strikes, wet and helpless and far too long.
He was kneeling on the red earth with his sword in his hand and his chest caved inward, and he was laughing at the creature.
And the creature, for the first ti, paused.
Half a step. Barely anything at all.
But it paused.
’...There you are.’
The thought ca without words. Just an instinct opening its eyes inside him.
He stopped trying to escape after that.
By the six hundredth death, he was moving toward it instead of away. By the eight hundredth, he was setting his own ambushes, using the fossilized skeletons not as cover but as bait.
He died most of those tis, but sotis he made the creature bleed. Black ichor splattered across the red earth, just a few drops, but they were the first drops it had ever shed in front of him.
"If you can bleed, then you can die!"
It started to circle wider after that. It stopped charging imdiately.
By the thousandth death, the hunt had reversed in a way that had nothing to do with strength. He still wasn’t strong enough to kill it. He was sothing worse.
He was patient.
He had stopped being a cultivator with a sword and beco a thing that watched and waited and read the smallest shift in its enemy’s stance.
Around the twelve hundredth attempt, the creature hesitated mid-lunge.
Ye Jun took its left foreleg off at the joint.
The damned thing couldn’t scream, so it simply retreated.
For the first ti in this trial, it retreated.
Ye Jun stood there on the red earth with black ichor covering his arms, the laugh still stretched across his face, and he felt sothing settle behind his eyes. Not satisfaction.
Recognition.
"I see you now, bastard!" he laughed, a maddening smile plastered across his face.
The creature ca back twice more. The first ti he took its tail. The second ti, he was waiting for it in a place it had not yet thought to search, and his sword pierced through the soft groove where its eyes should have been.
It died over a long stretch of breaths, its body finally collapsing sideways into the dirt. The mouth-slit relaxed into sothing almost peaceful.
Then its head split open along the grooves.
A single eye opened inside.
It wasn’t a physical eye, because he didn’t see it with his actual eyes. He felt it looking at him from sowhere behind his own face.
And then it moved.
It crossed the space between them without crossing it at all. He felt it settle inside his Soul within the Spiritual Realm, finding a place there as if it had always belonged.
It opened.
And it began to watch.
Ye Jun stood on the red earth, swaying slightly on his feet, and slowly the laugh faded from his face. The madness retreated, but the watcher remained.
He could feel it as a quiet presence now, woven into his Soul, woven into his Spirit. When he turned his attention toward the dead creature, the eye turned with him.
When he thought of an enemy he had once faced, the eye sharpened its focus, and he felt sothing stir. Weaknesses he hadn’t consciously noticed surfaced within his mory, patterns of movent he had forgotten resolving themselves into perfect clarity.
A na arrived in his mind automatically.
’Heaven Hunting Eye.’
Ye Jun closed his actual eyes for a long mont, breathing slow and deep while letting the trembling in his hands finally settle.
The world dissolved around him.
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