Chapter 102: Heavenly Demon Tomb

Another Demonic Cult member exploded.

The cultists kneeling nearby flinched violently as hot, chunky liquid splattered their cheeks. Maybe it was because this was some uncivilized ancient era where people pathologically hated cold water, but even the gore felt scalding hot.

At this point, even the most fanatically devout (or ruthlessly ambitious) followers of the Divine Cult had to feel their faith wavering. This was the Supreme, the Heavenly Demon who had promised eternal wealth and power, the liberation of the Central Plains, and the cult's dominion over all under heaven.

Instead, she was handing out death via finger lasers.

The cultists closest to the center, in the innermost circle, began to subtly, nervously inch backward, eyes darting around, trying desperately not to draw attention.

The Heavenly Demon gritted her teeth and lifted a foot.

It was said that the Master of Demons, the Destroyer of Worlds, could set the very earth ablaze simply by walking upon it, reducing everything to ash until only a void of darkness remained.

The Heavenly Demon Overlord Step—the first step of annihilation, meant to trample the world and destroy all physical forms.

A colossal energy, potent enough to shatter stars, gathered beneath the Heavenly Demon’s descending foot. Since the original owner’s stubborn will was still trying to protect that blasphemous old man, Choi Leeong, the Heavenly Demon’s vicious plan was simply to annihilate the entire space they occupied.

It was a good attempt.

Except, just nanoseconds before her foot struck the ground, the gathered energy abruptly dispersed, turning the apocalyptic stomp into nothing more than an ordinary step.

If it hadn’t dissipated, Choi Leeong would have been instantly reduced to a stain on the floor, flat as a squashed frog.

Then, a sudden, inexplicable movement. The Heavenly Demon’s foot didn’t step forward, but slid backward with the impossible grace of flowing rivers and oceans. The other foot followed suit. With the posture of a majestic advance, she was somehow smoothly retreating backward. [^😭Moonwalking].

It was the kind of miracle that defied sight, defied logic. The natural order dictated that pushing against the ground moved you forward. Yet the great Heavenly Demon demonstrated a power that casually shattered even that fundamental reality.

“…?”

It was an amazing technique, sure, but… why? Why now?

The solemn silence filling the tomb chamber curdled, thickening into an awkward, uncomfortable tension. It felt like that excruciatingly long moment when your friend introduces you to their friend and then immediately leaves you both standing there alone.

In this cringeworthy atmosphere, only the Heavenly Demon continued her bizarre, forward-facing backward shuffle, moving in a slow circle.

Is the will of the great Demon God truly beyond human comprehension? the kneeling cultists wondered desperately, eyes darting nervously, helpless.

RIIIIIP!

The blue duct tape patching the hole in the apartment wall tore away violently. Having phased right through it, the Heavenly Demon figure was now covered in sticky strips.

Flailing like he was swatting at invisible bugs, he finally managed to peel off the annoying tape, wad it into a ball, and fling it away.

“Ah. You’re back?”

Qing greeted the figure cheerfully, a half-eaten chicken drumstick clutched in each hand.

“Sorry,” Qing announced around a mouthful, “but the drumsticks are non-negotiable. Obviously, the wings and flats are mine too, same for that amazing chewy bit between the thigh and the body. The breast meat… well, I guess it has a texture. So, pick a side, dry-ass meat only: right or left? Your choice!”

Offering only the dry white meat? That was practically asking for a slap from any guest. But for an uninvited intruder who’d just smashed through her wall and likely vaporized her security deposit? It was practically excessive hospitality.

The Heavenly Demon figure sputtered, voice thick with rage. “How… How is this possible?! The very root of your existence… your soul itself should have been extinguished…!”

“Not tellin’ ya~,” Qing sang lightly. “Honestly though, getting my head exploded? Surprisingly not that bad. Kinda… liberating, you know?” She took another savage bite of chicken.

The Heavenly Demon frowned, raising a hand, finger extending menacingly—

“STOP! Finger DOWN!” Qing yelled frantically, spraying bits of chicken everywhere. “Hey! Rule number one: don’t mess with people while they’re eating! Even dogs will bite your ass if you interrupt their meal, right? I was born human, I can’t lose face by being less vicious than a dog. You keep this up, I might just go totally feral on you!”

The Heavenly Demon seemed momentarily stunned, processing this unique brand of bullshit. “…So, you’re claiming you will act worse than a dog?”

“How about I perform the Lustful Fairy Disrobing Dance right here in front of all your adoring followers? Pretty sure you’ll immediately regret not just shutting up and watching the mukbang then, huh?”

This was the same Heavenly Demon entity who had originally accepted the Bliss Palace into the cult. All Heavenly Demon incarnations shared the same core consciousness. He knew exactly what that dance entailed. The supreme leader of the faith, stripping down and performing a vulgar, seductive routine? That would be an eternal, unrecoverable loss of face. (Though, Heavenly Demons in other parallel worlds were known to do exactly that sort of thing sometimes.)

The Heavenly Demon’s mouth worked silently for a moment, utterly flabbergasted. Finally, with a deep, exasperated sigh, he lowered his hand.

“Fine. I will not harm your ‘father’ further. Is that sufficient? Tch. Like father, like daughter, indeed. Clinging to such trivial human sentiment. How can you, born a daughter of the Divine Cult, dare to interfere with our sacred destiny—the liberation of the Central Plains?”

This revealed the Heavenly Demon’s massive misunderstanding. And perhaps, it was an unavoidable one. From his perspective, Choi Leeong’s daughter’s body was a 'living corpse'.

He naturally assumed the cultists had prepared it as a vessel. When the old man interfered, he figured he’d developed an attachment after caring for the soulless body for those crucial 49 days, mistaking it for his lost child due to lingering grief.

And he further assumed that the soul fragment inside—Qing’s remnant—also saw the old man as a father and felt affection, thus resisting. A touching, tragic story of familial love defying death and duty… completely fabricated in the Heavenly Demon’s ancient mind.

A grand swing and a total miss.

“Huh?” Qing blinked. “My father? Daughter of the Divine Cult? What the hell are you yapping about?”

“That insolent old man outside,” the Heavenly Demon clarified impatiently.

“Ah. Gramps?” Qing laughed. “Gramps isn’t my father!”

It was said with such cheerful bluntness, it almost sounded like bragging about lacking filial piety.

The Heavenly Demon looked genuinely confused now. “What nonsense is this? Clearly…”

“That old man’s been seriously out of it lately, trust me,” Qing interrupted. “I saw him too—he’s completely lost his marbles. Look, I don’t have some weird hobby of playing substitute daughter for anyone, and I definitely have no intention of starting.”

Qing mentally recalled Choi Leeong's dramatic performance from her 'gamer' perspective. She hadn't appreciated it one bit. She’d only intervened out of a flicker of pity and maybe some lingering fondness. If not for the current insane circumstances, she’d have already administered some of her signature ‘radioactive physical therapy’ to snap him the hell out of it.

“Then why,” the Heavenly Demon demanded, “are you interfering?”

“Seriously? You really need to ask?” Qing shot back. “You think I’m just gonna stand by and watch you nutjobs invade the whole damn continent while spouting crazy bullshit about ‘liberation’?”

“Haaah. So it was merely your ignorance that fueled your resistance.”

“What? No! Why does everyone always—”

“Enough.” The Heavenly Demon cut her off again, raising a hand. “Once you see with your own eyes, you will understand.”

The four walls of Qing’s cramped apartment dissolved backward like falling curtains, revealing a vast, new landscape beyond.

Hey! You can’t just demolish someone else’s house whenever you feel like it! Asshole! Qing grumbled internally, but curiosity won out. Alright, let’s see this supposedly amazing sight you want to show me. She kept munching on her chicken leg as the vision unfolded.

It was somewhere in the Central Plains, depicted as a place ravaged by starvation. Emaciated figures, little more than skin and bone, lay sprawled everywhere, too weak to move, their eyes empty, devoid of life. A veritable slum of the dying.

Men moved among the bodies, checking for signs of life—speaking to them, waving hands before unresponsive eyes. Finding a confirmed corpse, they’d poke it, shake it, maybe slap it once or twice. No reaction. A faint, chilling smile would appear on their faces, and they’d lift the body. Following them revealed their destination… giant, steaming cauldrons—

“STOP!” Qing yelled, shoving the horrific image away mentally. “What the hell is this while I’m eating?! If you think showing me this crap will make me back down, you’re dead wrong! This is obviously just sick propaganda cooked up by you Demon Cult psychos!”

“I saw this with my own eyes,” the Heavenly Demon’s voice echoed, cold and distant. “For more than a decade, the summers were cold, the rains stopped. Crops failed. Animals were consumed long ago. People stripped bark from trees and boiled it, until even the trees died. It was an era when survival meant eating the corpses of your neighbors, your family.”

“Ah.” Qing swallowed. “So… it’s real?”

“However,” the Heavenly Demon continued, “not everyone starved. Look.”

The scene blurred like watercolor, then resolved into a new image: the opulent hall of a grand palace. A massive table, easily large enough for twenty men to lie down upon, groaned under the weight of a lavish feast—every imaginable delicacy from land and sea.

At the head sat a portly man, and everyone around the table mirrored his prosperity—bulging bellies, multiple chins, faces flushed with excess.

“That man,” the Heavenly Demon identified, “is the prefect of the city you just saw. Rather than aid his starving people, he bled them drier to fund extravagant banquets like this for every single meal. The Daoist beside him is an elder from Mount Hua. Everyone else seated here? They are either so-called ‘heroes’ of the Righteous Faction, or the wealthy merchants protected by their swords.”

“Mount Hua?” Qing repeated, surprised. “As in, the Mount Hua Sect?”

“Was it only Mount Hua? Shaolin monks, Wudang Daoists—all those prestigious sects of the so-called Nine Factions and One Union—they all clung to the powerful and spearheaded the exploitation.”

Wait, the ‘good guys’ of the martial world have this kind of fucked-up history? Qing’s eyes widened.

“In that era,” the Heavenly Demon explained, “there was no distinct ‘Righteous Faction.’ It was always like this. Which makes the later division into ‘Righteous’ and ‘Unorthodox’ factions by the very same kind of people utterly laughable, doesn’t it?” For a Righteous Faction to define itself, it needed the contrast of Unorthodox and Demonic groups. Without them, there was no need to separate the more 'polite' sword-wielding thugs from the others. Back then, there were essentially only two powers: the government officials, and the martial world—and the government largely treated martial artists as unpaid, disposable volunteers.

“What the…” Qing muttered. “So this is just ancient history?”

“Keep watching,” the Heavenly Demon commanded. “See how they crushed those who merely begged for their lives.”

The scene shifted again. An old man, pleading for just a handful of grain to survive, was met only with brutal clubbing. He died trying to beg for scraps to make thin porridge for his sick child. His body was immediately seized—not as a corpse to be buried, but as meat—by the desperate, starving survivors who had become like hungry ghouls.

One martial artist, unable to bear witness any longer, rose up. The figure standing before Qing now—the original Heavenly Demon. He raised a red flag, symbolizing the sacred fire of the Fire Worship Cult, and the common people rallied to him with fervent hope— [^The Yellow Turban Rebellion was a major peasant revolt in China during the late Han Dynasty.]

“Hang on,” Qing interrupted sharply. “Can we maybe not wave the red flag? Why’d it have to be red? [^In modern contexts, a red flag is often associated with left-wing ideologies.] Besides, doesn’t this basically make you the Yellow Turban Bandits?” Seriously, wasn’t this some shitty Chinese-made game? How could they get away with waving red flags and talking about building a ‘people’s nation’ without getting censored into oblivion? (This ignorance stemmed from Qing never actually playing the game; this backstory was deeply hidden, not even appearing as a single line in the main quest.)

“Yes. I admit it,” the Heavenly Demon conceded. “Some of my followers did indeed speak of a second Yellow Turban uprising. And the outcome was… similar.”

Spears and swords descended upon the common folk who had risen up simply asking for the right to live. The spears came from the imperial army; the swords, from the martial artists of the established sects.

The vision shifted again, depicting the brutal suppression and the desperate flight of the survivors. Across mountains, rivers, and deserts, suffering countless deaths along the way, they finally reached sanctuary in a vast, remote mountain range.

This was the genesis of the Heavenly Demon Divine Cult.

“And so,” the scarred figure concluded, voice resonating with ancient pain and burning hatred, “what remains is revenge. For me, and for all the descendants who carry the legacy of the Divine Cult, there remains a vengeance that must be exacted.” This was the man whose body was a map of loss, each scar representing the grave of a friend, a comrade, a family member buried deep within his heart. A self-proclaimed destroyer of worlds, a vengeful spirit clinging to existence, refusing even death, fueled solely by this all-consuming grudge.

Facing this inferno of pure hatred, Qing simply said:

“What a load of absolute bullshit.”

“What?” the Heavenly Demon figure snapped, startled.

“That revenge bullshit is your personal baggage, dude. Those Demon Cult psychos back in the tomb? Trust me, they don’t give a single flying fuck about your ancient revenge quest.” Qing thought back on her less-than-short time living among the cultists. A dysfunctional asylum of lunatics where finding even one normal person was impossible. Given that this psycho was their founder and god, maybe it wasn’t so surprising.

“Seriously, if you’re that old, you should just die gracefully already. What’s with this creepy body-snatching, mind-parasite routine? Just keep trying over and over until you finally win? How pathetic can you get?”

It was Qing’s ultimate technique: Yapping HellMouth.

“And you know what? People who fail using the same method are just gonna keep failing, no matter how many times they try. When normal people fail, they think, ‘Okay, why did I fail? What strategy should I try next time?’ They don’t blame external factors like ‘Oh, this body was too weak,’ or ‘Damn, needed more troops last time.’ You’ve already tried and failed, what, four times straight? If that were me, I’d be so fucking embarrassed I’d just bite my tongue and—”

Thwump.

The fatal weakness of the Yapping Hellmouth technique. You can’t keep running your mouth after your head explodes.

The Heavenly Demon figure roared, face flushed crimson with fury. “VERY WELL, THEN! LET’S SEE! How long can the pathetic spirit of a mere Peak Realm worm like you possibly last if I keep killing you, again and again, until you finally stay dead?! I WILL MAKE YOU REGRET EVER OPENING THAT INSOLENT MOUTH!”