The outline of a moon appears behind my owner, luminously bright yet black, filling with emptiness as it consumes the light falling upon its surface. Then it cracks, shattering right down the middle like a jagged scar in reality itself, and becoming darker still; the white outline of the moon turns a bright gold and shines so brightly as if to resemble the accretion disk of a black hole.

The deterioration of Lan Xiaohui’s core has progressed so far, even though I kept her asleep for two months. Her martial arts, her [Empty Moon Prana] is disappearing — tumbling away into nothingness — stable only for a brief while longer.

Dots of light appear in and around the blackening moon, unfolding into shapes that resemble swords — all reflections of my vessel from a higher law of space. This would be the technique Shattered Moonlight, but likewise tainted and affected by the overwhelming might of Lan Xiaohui’s current sword force.

Her gold core had shrunk to barely a quarter of its original size, and from the hole I created — and into which I poured the principles of [Fractured Sword] — now emits a constant stream of energy from the failing mechanism.

It is like that technique I used to extract the raw, vital essence from the motes of sword energy created by the [Fractured Sword] martial art.

Soon, it will burn away, but not before it unleashes its raw, latent potential.

Yu Shun must know that something is off because his expression looks frozen, even as his instinct kicks in and he draws his sword from its dimensional storage.

A moment later, those hundreds of swords — reflections — launch forward as Lan Xiaohui steps forward.

Yu Shun is strong — absurdly strong. Each sword that he swats away like it is nothing must weigh at least a thousand tons, and when they crash into the reinforced podium, it caves and buckles like it was made out of paper; and the hollow sound that rings out from the swords when they impact the hard rock is a like a bell made out of cast bronze, ringing so loud as to deafen everyone below the Foundation Establishment realm.

Even in these circumstances, Yu Shun does not hesitate to charge forward — perhaps recognizing the threat that Lan Xiaohui poses, despite the remarks he made about her cultivation being shattered.

His sword blurs in the light, shrouding into darkness and emerging from the dark fog of his technique. His vector of attack is uncertain until the very last moment when he reaches my owner and lashes out with a horizontal slash, with enough power to blow away even another Nascent Soul cultivator.

My actual vessel, the one in Lan Xiaohui’s hand, is crushed by Lan Xiaohui’s heavy sword force to the point that it is heating my blade where it glows red-hot, and purple threads of lightning fork across its surface. Yet, my owner lifts me so easily and swings me with equal ease into the path of the approaching sword, and blocks Yu Shun’s strike with an explosion of light and sound, followed by a shockwave that crushes the emerging ravines of debris around them.

Blown away? My owner doesn’t even take a step back.

Then, at the same moment, the shadow behind Yu Shun also swings its limb — holding a sword? — and though I don’t even have an opportunity to warn my owner, as I didn’t expect the shadow to be able to attack, my owner still swings her free arm into the path of the shadow’s sword and easily knocks it away, followed by yet another shockwave that peels off all the tiles around them in a thirty-step radius and crushes them to dust.

Yu Shun’s eyes widen; they almost turn completely white, as if he had seen a ghost or a devil.

The moon behind Lan Xiaohui cracks even further, the lensing of light producing such a dampening effect that the view behind her seems darker, and the golden halo that much brighter. Until the view completely flips upside down.

Yu Shun? Become a saint or a god? With meager laws like that? What a ridiculous notion. The illusion of greatness that this lowly creature harbors will never cease to amaze or surprise me. Dreaming of the heavens, while still stuck at the bottom of a well, unable to even comprehend how vast the sky is.

As Yu Shun leaps away, countless questions burning in his eyes, but too terrified to give voice to any of them, my owner lifts my vessel high into the air.

At this point, not only does the light bend around my vessel to the point that it conceals my actual form, but the entire view also flips and warps in ways that confuse some spectators and onlookers, and makes others sick.

A few even ask if something is wrong with the formation allowing them to observe the battle.

The warping is so severe that few even manage to see what happens.

“Star Burial.”

The sword that was now impossible to see could be felt; even through the protective formations and barriers. Its gravity was so oppressive that it made spectators below the Core Formation realm feel sick.

However, even though the extreme sword force curved space in my vicinity, it was not the phenomena I know as gravity; and what those onlookers felt was heaviness was something else that I could only describe as emptiness.

Perhaps the Fractured of [Fractured Sword] referred to the broken laws it left in its wake, or, even more accurately, the disconnected, broken laws that comprised the scripture and made it so incredibly difficult, if not impossible, for my owner to learn.

Like a broken sword that only still retained the memory of its original shape and meaning, while its broken corpse dragged all things to the afterlife.

Its meaning may be mysterious and profound, and its effort, while simple and easy to understand, confuses those few onlookers who manage to witness it through all the warping of light; the elders mostly.

Lan Xiaohui's motion is so instantaneous that the ravine that forms underneath her path opens several moments after she is finished traveling. It is so fast that Yu Shun doesn't even register the event. His gaze is still firmly locked, in anticipation, to the place where Lan Xiaohui just stood, his sword, held uselessly in front of him, ready to block whatever was coming.

Star Burial, the words sounded sinister enough to put even Yu Shun, a practitioner of demonic arts, on guard; but neither those profane arts nor his sword would save him.

My vessel, concealed in the swirling, warping light of broken laws of space dragging behind my annihilating edge, is glowing white-hot from both the acceleration and the pressure; it is so extreme, that some of the lighter elements that make up my vessel begin to fuse into heavier elements; and though this is not an admission of satisfaction that I have discovered nuclear fusion in a world as technologically lacking as this one, but merely an observation of an anomaly. It is not the pressure and temperature that fuses these elements, but the fact that caught in these intersecting, broken chunks of space, they have no choice but to fuse.

It occurs to me that the Fractured part of the name may literally refer to the fact that this martial art will, inevitably, ruin every sword it is used with.

Unless those swords are divine-grade treasures, like myself, of course.

Yu Shun undergoes a similar process as those lighter elements. As my edge cleaves through his sword, first, not so much cutting as blasting with heat and crushing with heaviness and gravity. The metal melts, blasting away from the point of impact that sparks as it comes into contact with oxygen.

The flesh fares no better, and Yu Shun would die without ever feeling even an iota of pain, or knowing what struck him, because the blade that cleaves right down the middle would finish its cut before the soundwave informed the useless meat around it that it should react mechanically, by absorbing the force.

And the moment the flesh did react, recoiling away from the blow, the broken laws of space would drag it back in, and the meat would collapse into itself, to the point of even attempting to form a sphere, akin to the formation of planetary bodies, before erupting once more and showering gore and scraps of meat over the arena.

Yu Shun was so dead not even the Gods of the Underworld would bother with him; he was not a living thing anymore, but neither could he be considered a dead thing anymore. He was a pile of useless scrap.

Star Burial — the technique lived up to its name. To be struck by it was to truly be buried in the vast void of nothingness among the distant glimmers of stars. To be buried among the stars was to be removed from existence.

And those stars the technique names itself after spin into existence a moment after the biological scrap of remains hits the ground with a wet sound, and the ravine underneath the path Lan Xiaohui took fully opens, appearing for a brief moment from those broken laws of space left in her wake, swirling once madly and dragging the light into a spiral of confusion-inducing glimmer, before they erupt with crushing sword force that eradicates the arena around them.

Everything is silent. For a moment, I question my chronometer functions, because the world I observe in those few seconds is completely still. Frozen, shocked expressions, everywhere; not a sound or a twitch of muscle.

The moon behind Lan Xiaohui cracks again, followed by another crack, until the fault lines crawl even through the gold halo — and her gold core that none can see — shattering and falling away to pieces. The strange warping surrounding my vessel, and the extremeness of the sword force dissipates, disappearing not at once, but rather in large chunks as Lan Xiaohui’s cultivation plummets, hitting the very bottom of the Core Formation realm.

Lan Xiaohui falls to her knees, turning her palms up, trying to arrest the fall of her tears that turn to crystals in her hands.

“Ashes don’t weep,” Lan Xiaohui whispers. “So why…? Why won’t my tears stop?”

“Because you are finally free,” I tell her. “Zhu Xuelian“

As I call her new name, my owner smiles at me, and then her eyes widen.

A spark of lightning runs across her palms, obliterating her crystallized tears. The surge of lightning crawls up her palms,  turning into golden motes that float up to a point above her head, where a disc of pure black is beginning to form.

This is the end of Lan Xiaohui. Judging by her expression, she knows it too. She draws in one more breath and raises her face toward the sky.

The shattered moon behind her cracks one more time, before even the now dull, gold glow turns completely black. The countless traceries of the myriad scriptures my owner cultivated slowly begin to unravel and disappear into the growing blackness of what is becoming of her gold core.

The moment Lan Xiaohui’s gold core completely fails and disappears, her body suddenly bursts with hundreds of black crystals and becomes completely encased, made of the same extreme sword force that she wielded until a moment ago.

This is… unexpected.

Of course, I don't know what losing a gold core, or one's cultivation is supposed to look like, but I am almost certain it is not supposed to look like this. And this sword force; why is it even sharper than before? The fact that it is made of the same principles as [Fractured Sword] does not surprise me; of all the martial arts, only that one should remain, unusable until my owner cultivates a new gold core, or reaches Nascent Soul Ascension.

I conclude that it must be a recoil, of some sort. Either way, my owner being encased in crystals like this is not disadvantageous. It will make the next part much easier.

“Zhu Xuelian!!” several shouts rain from above, as half a dozen Seven Killing Swords elders land on the platform, including Grand Elder Zhuo.

I focus my attention on the approaching elders and unleash my hold over [Avarice] and [Tyranny]. I cannot spare the mental strength to suppress them or afford their dulling of my own sword force.

My sword intent forms from one simple, intense wish.

Die.

Above my floating vessel, a bright star blinks into existence and rotates once. The few remaining tiles of the platform beneath are ripped out and plummet into the point of light, ripped to shreds as it approaches. Then the rest of the platform seems to curve, or fall, depending on the perspective, as I generate the sword force and prepare to unleash it.

Just as I am about to unleash the technique, a bright, jagged white line appears across the approaching elders, and I sense yet another extreme, but familiar sword force.